Here's how I tell the difference between a serious skeptic and a "pop" skeptic: I ask them if acupuncture is "woo". One question, that's all. The question works just as well with tai chi chuan.
And what if this was my answer; a vast majority of the claims relating to acupuncture are woo, though there are some areas that demand further research. I would use chiropracty as a test, personally, since 90% of the claims, and supposed reasons, are pure, unadulterated woo, but 10% of it is actually helpful (if if the reasons for its effectiveness is often pure hokum). The same would go for acupuncture and tai chi, there might be some useful bits in there, but the stated mode of operation (chi, spiritual energy, invisible whatnots) is probably 100% woo. Also, with acupuncture and chiropracty the woo is firmly bundled with the real bits, making it very hard to distinguish where one begins and the other ends.
So.. with acupuncture, at least, we can say some functional aspects of it are non-woo, but if you accept it as it stands with it's traditional rational, then you are a follower of woo. If you toss out the idiotic bits, and accept an actual accepted scientific explanation for it, then you can join the woo-less camp.
It doesn't help that there are tons of fake, woo-speading, "naturalpathic"/alt-medicine journals that spread self-aggrandizing quasi-studies.
You not getting new technology and trends anymore doesn't necessarily mean that you are jaded. It just means that you've gotten old enough not to understand new technology and trends anymore.
I think you missed the point. Yeah, the technology and appearance changed, but its filling the exact same role as something else.
Facebook is the MySpace of the late 00's. MySpace was the Livejournal of the early 00's. Livejournal was the Geocities of late 90's. Where Geocities was BBS of the mid 90s. and the BBS was the... of the 80-90s. Conclusion: Facebook is just another silly trend, something will replace it in a couple years. Generally the amount of time it takes the college crowd to refresh their population.
Actually, what the hell is the difference between Facebook and Myspace? Qualitatively?
Not being polite should not be the basis of laws. Nor should offense, especially.
Politeness and offense are largely subjective, so regulating them is impossible. I'm not offended by porn, I have no problem with it whatsoever (as long as it consists of freely consenting parties). I actually find it odd that some people are.
You might as well wonder why people object when you grab their junk without asking, but they don't usually mind if you stop them to ask for directions to the train station.
You seeing me look at porn is VERY different than an actual physical action. For the latter your actually assaulting someone, forcing yourself on them, there is no escape. For the former, if you don't like it you can just turn your head and walk away, it isn't being forced on you.
But then again I think most sexual harresment laws are stupid too. In high school I was almost a sex offender because me and a girlfriend (not sexually) liked to whisper completely nonsensical lewd things to each other as a stupid joke/game. A teacher overhead one of these, and pretty much threatened legal action against me, even if the girl wasn't offended one bit (having instigated the game by saying something lewd to me, just previous to the teacher walking by).
Oh no! Someone likes sex, a completely natural biological function that over 90% of the human race will experience at some point, and of which 99% of the human race is a product of! The horror. The horror!
Our society is moving inexorably toward greater acceptance of sexuality in the public square.
Sort of. On one hand children are being sexualized earlier and earlier, and we're more accepting of revealing clothing and such. On the other hand movies that would have been PG or PG-13 in the 80's would be R today, and some might even have a hard time hitting that mark. We completely can't handle sex in video games, period, no matter what age group its marketed to. We're deathly afraid of the gay. Boobs still scare us half to death.
America is as sexually schizophrenic as ever. On one hand we can handle seeing a females ankle more than ever, but on the other hand we have a growing contingent of wacko religious extremists who have no problem with regulating other people's behavior, and enforcing their limited sense of decency on others. They own congress, and other vast chunks of America's power establishment. The rest of the population is getting more liberal in their views though.
Seriously, we had to listen to constant blathering, and watch tons of money fly around furiously over a little bit of some old pop stars NIPPLE showing for a fraction of a second. Janet Jackson's nipple causes a larger commotion than a natural disaster in a far off land which killed 1000s of people. To me this is a good statement of where we stand.
I still generally build my own computers with only AMD CPUs. I know Intel is a bit better right now, but the difference is less in the high-middle, than at the very high end. AMD generally always wins at cost/performance though. I never, EVER, build for the high end since the price is always inflated (the bleeding edge tax). Price increases exponentially, where performance increases incrementally.
My last computer I settled for an AMD Phenom II x4 965BE, over whichever i7 I was looking at. Sure, the i7 was much better, but it also cost (with the price of a new mobo, and DDR3, around $500 more). Oddly, I could buy a premade Dell with the same specs cheaper than I could build an i7 box.
I still wouldn't get a SSD yet, though, they are too cramped for being even my OS/applications drive, and to get a roomier one (over 100GB) you end up paying far more money than the performance increase is worth.
There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story) who say that changing from a magnetic hard drive to an SSD is about the biggest single upgrade you could make to a reasonable system today.
I very rarely notice HDD based slow down on my current computer. I don't find myself tapping my thumbs and sighing at waiting for something to load (okay, outside of Photoshop, and the dramatically bloated and archaic iTunes).
I'm sure, like all things, though, the second I upgrade; computers without a SSD will feel slow, and that couple ms will make me very impatient.
I booted up my old C64 the other day, and realized that I had infinitely more patience than I have today. At the time, though, it didn't seem that bad waiting 2 minutes to load something. Same thing with going back to dial-up, 56k was BLAZING fast awhile back, and now it damn slow feeling.
Of course, you wouldn't do this; you'd come up with some split between what should be on fast SSD and what should be on a slow magnetic media, and have one drive for each.
I've been trying to efficiently split my data between drives for years, but most software doesn't play nicely enough yet to actually make this possible. My goal has always been a perfect split between relatively static data on a small, fast, drive, and dynamic data and media on a larger, slower, drive. Haven't managed to actually get this to work yet (with Windows at least). I agree though, SSDs would be perfect for this, when they drop in price a bit.
Games are the worst, they really don't allow you to tell them where to plunk down anything outside of Windows default (which is generally actually pathed, and not just targeted to %USERDATA% or such).
Not as much of a problem on Linux machines, obviously. And I have no clue how viable it is on OS X.
When I can get a 200-300GB SSD for around $200, I'll grab it fast. Until then, the performance advantage isn't worth the cost.
My Steam directory is almost that big, all by itself!
My primary HDD is nothing but Windows, applications, and games, and it clocks in at 111GB. All of the cache, pagefiles, and other crap are on a second drive, so I'm not counting those even.
That's right, because dick [sic] size is the only metric there is! Let's ignore seek time, streaming read/write performance, MTBF [wikipedia.org], power efficiency, shock resistance or any other number of characteristics that might be weighted in different levels of importance between laptop users, desktop users and server architects.
Real people, and not just people of the "my computer is faster than your's, so NYAH!" mentality, also look at cost versus value. It is nice that I can shave off a couple ms of seek/read/write time, and it is nice that it eats less power, but these benefits cost several times more. If the benefits don't outweigh the cost difference, then there is no point.
A quick scan of Newegg shows that a SDD costs ~$2.21/GB, where a comparable traditional HDD costs only ~0.33, thats quite a difference, I'm not sure if 15 minutes of battery life, and perhaps (very generously) a second a day in seek/read/write time is worth that much. Granted this is a quick comparison between a 2.5" 120GB SSD, and a 2.5" 120GB HDD. Both being at, or towards, the bottom of their price point. Granted this gap decreases with lower capacities (but remains very considerable), I picked 120 since that is more usable than a 50GB drive with todays amount of bloat.
Not saying that SSDs are pointless, just that their real world applications are rather limited right now, and most of them find use only with the same crowd that would cough up $600 for a graphics card that does 10% more than a $150 one. Some people find incremental improvement worth exponential price increases, these people are a minority. Yes, SSDs are also useful for netbooks, laptops with very limited use, and other people need fast access to limited amounts of data. They are not set to replace HDDs in desktops quite yet.
I recently bought a 1TB drive for a bit under $100, and a SSD thats around a sixth as big costs three times as much. Not nearly competitive yet. Of this drive, around 111Gb are used already, not counting another ~100GB on my data drive. To cover all of this with an SSD would cost significantly more than my full computer (which isn't a slouch hardware wise). I'm sure I could find better things to do with the money. Life build another computer completely.
If you are running Windows, you're not a true nerd anyway.:-)
I'd say that your not a true nerd if your running any single OS. Granted, in a OS monoculture Windows might be the least nerdy (though OS X might be, depending on how you look at it), but a true nerd should be playing the field, using the strengths of each OS.
I have an OS X media box, a Windows gaming rig, and an Ubuntu (for now, trying to find the time to find a better distro) work horse laptop.
To make this even sillier (it is an OS pissing contest, silly is the name of the game): Lets say Linux has a nerd value (NV) of 1*, OS X has a NV.5, and Windows has one of.3. Thus a person only running Linux can only ever achieve an NV of 1, where someone multi-OSing can achieve a value of 1.8, which is nerdier than a mere 1.
*Though I'd say more esoteric OSs are worth more, so perhaps a person only using an old Amiga for all their computing needs might beat someone using using all three OSs.
Your comes rather close. Though there have been many other moves that have frustrated me. I was an ardent Mac user (not quite a fan boy, but I did recommend them to everyone), and now I am not. The switch to Intel plays a roll, it didn't seem to be as well thought out as it could have been. Rosetta was the bane of my existence for a time, and the Intel processors on the low and mid ends were vastly inferior to a PPC with equal specs. The software seems to have recovered a bit, but the transition was a bit nasty. Their focus on mobile technology over traditional desktops is also somewhat noticeable, OS seems a bit rougher than it did previously (that may just be me, though). iTunes has changed from a "damn good" bit of software, to something that makes Firefox look mean and lean, and worse, it is weighted down by features that 90% of its users will never ever use (iphone, and tablet support). OS X has seen the same bloat trend as well, my Window's 7 install is leaner on resource usage, then my stripped down Mac (my Ubuntu laptop obviously wins).
Their rapid upgrade cycle also drove me away. Needing to shell out $50 every year for marginal improvements was annoying (Tiger was the last update that actually did anything that I wanted, Leopard was just rehashing features that already existed in 3rd party apps, often better than Apple's implementation). You still pretty much need to upgrade, since they include arbitrary code changes that 3rd party developers latch on to, so their previous software stops being supported.
I still have no clue why they sell their low-end computers without enough RAM to actually run OS X at any acceptable level.
Yes, I'm venting. Its early, I'm helping someone move, and I haven't had my coffee.
What other features would you want in an MP3 player?
Its not so much a question of features, as variety. If there were more big players in the market, there would be more innovation. Through this would arise more features. Look at the smart phone market right now, there are tons of players, and at last 4 big ones (Apple, Google, RIM, and Palm), this market is exploding with features and innovations, and a constantly decreasing price-point thanks to the competition.
I also get sick of iPod clones, I was recently shopping for a decent MP3 player, with over 60GB of storage, and my choice was pretty much limited to dubious chinese manufactures, Apple or Microsoft. Both Apple and Microsoft has a limited selection to cater to people like me, who wanted something that held a lot of music, and pretty much just played it (I don't know why Apple decided that people should be able to store less music, the reason I loved my iPod was the fact that my whole CD collection could be with me, so I didn't have to play the "music management" game every morning).
It isn't specific features, but the features that MAY come from greater diversity in the market.
Though one feature I would like, specifically, would be better sound quality, and perhaps better connectivity with 3rd party equipment. On device media management would also be nice.
Sorry for sounding so negative. I am not completely opposed to Apple, and I realize that, outside of MP3 players, I am not in their market. I just think that people are prone to giving Apple more "gloss" than they necessarily warrant.
. I never could figure out the basis of inclusion - maybe payola or maybe something else but it certainly wasn't *relevance*. That's one difference between Google and Yahoo.
You had to submit your site to them, or they had to discover it. Your site had to have merit to their team of editors (or whatever they were called). I remember being very happy that Yahoo decided to index my site, back in the mid-90's.
On one hand I rather miss Yahoo, and other indexers, which would hand sort through all the crap, and just keep the relevant information. General search is better, for most things, but having a small, limited, index is also nice for when you really don't feel like digging through 800 pages of SEO crap, and idiotic clones of popular pages (Ask.com, I'm looking at you).
Google has become pretty much worthless, of late. Too much crap. I was looking for ceiling fan reviews the other day, and most of the results page was the same, single, review posted over and over on various aggregator sites, which just grab product reviews from other sites. Also, the rise of "advice" sites have killed Google's usefulness. If I wanted some idiots advice, I wouldn't be searching for people smarter than me online.
Yes, like a history of thoughtful design and a slew of devices that work much better than their competitors for normal usage patterns, despite having fewer "and the kitchen sink" features.
Your veering a bit into the fan-boy neighborhood there. Apple has had its share of failures, and often falls below expectations. You also ignore the fact that at least some (I'd say most, but its arguable) of the people who purchase Apple products don't do so for logical reason, and also, for some of these people, the device doesn't do what they may want, or do it in the best way, they cater their wants to their device.
Its like saying that Windows must be the greatest OS ever, since more people use it. Windows is 90% greater than any OS Apple has put out at least.
See the flaw?
A lot of Apple's designs are about as flawed as they can be. May I mention the cliche example of leaving off a mouse button for years? The "mighty mouse" might also be considered a design flaw in-itself. Selling every computer without enough RAM might also be a flaw (and, in the early-mid 2000's charging $400 to upgrade your ram...).
Also... WTF is a normal usage pattern? I'm typing this on a Window 7 computer, it works fine with my normal usage patterns. Earlier this morning I was doing work on my Linux notebook, it worked fine with my normal usage patterns. Tonight I'll be watching some movies on my Mac, which also works fine with my normal usage patterns (less fine, since I did relegate to a media box, I suppose). Currently I have a Barnes & Nobel Nook as an ebook reader, which is far superior to my normal usage patterns than an iPad would ever be. I'm also buying an Android phone in the near future, which is better for my normal usage patterns than Apple's walled, puritanical, garden.
I do admit that the iPod is a damn good product though (the HDD versions, the rest don't have nearly enough storage). Though I suspect that is it didn't come out, or at least become as popular, the MP3 player market would be healthier and more advanced since less people would be trying to merely emulate the iPod,
Often times, with most of the population, the optimal workflow is based off of what they haven't imagined, and the limitations of their hardware and software,
I wasn't really making your point. On a personal, subjective, level I somewhat agree with you about hip-hop/rap, but on a broader level I'm not sure since we enter the "do definitions guide terms, or does use guide definitions" debate. I lean towards the latter, so rap can be music since it seems to be popularly accepted as music.
There really isn't an objective answer to the definition problem though, so my opinion is pretty much worthless.
Hip-hop/rap, also, is closer to the roots of music than most more modern approaches (I'm using "modern" as pretty much a broad brush, meaning all music that isn't played on animal skin drums around a fire, generally for ritual purposes). It's beat driven and repetitive with simple vocal schemes. Neoprimitive, perhaps.
In theory, yes. But I don't know if this means anything though. If 90% of the people call hip-hop/rap music, is it music? If people accept it as music, listen to it like music, and call it music, how can it not be music?
Personally I find most of it as musical as the Gregorian chant trend of the 90's.
Your taking it a bit far. Copyright laws are not as important, or useful, as laws against murder, actual theft, or sex crimes. In theft you deprive someone of real property, and not just potential profit, in murder your depriving someone of their life as opposed to potential profit, and sex crimes your depriving people of bodily freedom as opposed to potential profit. Copyright downright inconsequential compared to your slippery slope examples.
You aren't depriving anyone of anything except the MERE potential to make money off of you.
I'm not arguing for rampant piracy, or that we should do away with copyright, just that your perspective is a bit off. Anyone with half a brain (and who is not a shill for Disney) will agree that copyright is deeply flawed, and will remain so because congress is looking out for corporate interests above the interests of the people. Copyright, as it stands, has become absurd. With the issue in TFA, we're dealing with a copyright that outlasts the creators own children (and perhaps grandchildren), if a creator can even be found anymore. This is the epitome of a broken law. Copyright should exist, but the way it exists now is almost evil, and getting worse all the time. The consequences vastly outweigh the actual effects of the crime (which are arguable, and minimal at best).
Also, civil disobedience is an accepted practice, and not one bit controversial. If there is an unjust, and hurtful, law, then people SHOULD break it. Modern copyright is both. Though people who use this as an excuse to download the latest Britanny Spears CD are wholly in the wrong, and using it as an ad hoc self-serving justification for their own petty greed.
I have nothing against people who download older music, whose artists are dead, or whose artists receive no money from their works. I have nothing against people who pirate to format switch. I have nothing against people who pirate to test the waters and see if they like the music (especially with radio being dead). Personally I have nothing against people who exclusively pirate from RIAA members, since the RIAA declared war on us, the consumers, there is no issue with fighting back. They will do everything in their power to screw us, so how is it really wrong to play the same game? I do have something against people who pirate from independent labels and bands (outside of the "test drive" piracy, where you buy it if you like it). I have no problem with people pirating things that they otherwise would not have bought (which means it is completely victim-less).
If the only reason you follow a law is because it is the law there is a problem. Laws need, and should have, deeper justifications. I can tell you why theft is wrong 100% of the time, I can also tell you why murder is wrong 100% of the time (well less, but we call murder by different names when the motivations change). I can't really tell you why 100% of piracy is wrong, though.
Also, following laws just because it is the law generally means someone has conflicted morality with legality, when the two are at a disjunct, even if ideally they wouldn't be.
On a more serious note, Hip-Hop/Rap is an example, depending on whether or whether not you want to call it music (I kid... sort of). On a smaller scale, in 60 years things have changed HUGELY. Rock has splintered into 100s of subgenres (where it didn't really exist 60 years ago), jazz has changed, the blues turned into rock and hip-hop. In 60 years the guitar became the defining instrument in most forms of music. Music 60 years ago is VERY different than music now.
Though, more seriously, there has been tons of innovation within individual genres, though the genre's themselves still owe a lot to their lineages. It is as absurd to claim that music exists independent of its roots, as to claim that there is no innovation. Modern music owes everything to previous innovations, and to claim that there will be no more innovations is just groundless and dumb.
Also top-40 pop music is a minority of the music out there. Even subtracting the full Billboard charts, you still have a HUGE body of music being made. Judging a whole thing by its popular bits is a little silly.
I love it because it is a casual game for people who generally hate casual games. Its like Diablo II lite, DiabloII required a decent time commitment, and was pretty hard to just play for a couple minutes while your waiting for something else to happen, Diablo II also required spreadsheets for even causal play. Torchlight can be played for 10 minutes and quickly forgotten.
Its lack of a story doesn't hurt it too much, there is enough of one to make it somewhat interesting, but not enough to make it compelling and attention grabbing. It is like Peggle: Diablo 1.5.
My install of it recently went wonky (strange graphics artifacts), so I installed Sacred 2 to scratch my Diablo itch. It somehow didn't hitt he mark. It is almost "hardcore", except it has no story whatsoever (AFAICT). I think you have a winner if you have a complex story and complex gameplay, or a simple story and simple gameplay, but completely die when you mix simple with complex. Sacred 2 is a better game on pretty much all counts, but really doesn't hold my interest. Torchlight is like taking a small hit of crack whenever the desire hits you. (As opposed to Diablo I/II's fullblown heroin addiction).
There are people who really depended on Wave, who were trained on wave, and have to move to other platforms. The goodwill to Google has been lost.
Huh? It was a very young beta, not an old chunk of finished software. You should NEVER depend on beta software, and whoever is training people to use beta software shouldn't.
How, also, can you lose goodwill against Google for canceling an underperforming beta?
Doubtful. All of the ports that Blizzard have ever used are open, and I tried with my firewall completely off, to no avail. I also have no connection problems with any other game or service, including WoW, and Blizzard's various updaters. And while Bnet is crapping on things, my internet still works for other applications.
So... If the problem only exists for one piece of software, and everything else is completely fine, then I'd say that the one thing afflicted with the problems is probably... problematic.
Most bugs, also, are not universal or they would have been caught in any decent beta program (which Blizzard generally has). So I really can't stand (and don't take this is being confrontational) people saying "all is fine here, it is your rig".
That said, it has been getting better (I can complete a single player mission without being kicked 50% of the time now), and the login screen actually does something in a timely manner, mostly. All of this without me touching a single setting. Conclusion? Blizzard wasn't completely aware of how much load Bnet would sustain, and also didn't quite understand that requiring a constant connection to do anything whatsoever was a REALLY stupid move. When I got the game I couldn't even play offline, since you need to actually log on to do that.
Not to sound nasty, though. SCII is brilliant, the game itself, once you get past all the crap, is very well done, and exactly what you would expect from Blizzard. The online/DRM aspect, as expected, is evil. I hope that this serves as a good Bnet 2.0 beta/stress test for when Diablo 3 comes out, since D3 is far more exciting, to me, than SCII.
No clue. But, actual productions costs willing, I'd say at least 50% of the profits, with the rest divided between the various other parties (publisher, retailer, and whoever latches on). The author should get more than anyone else, since without them the rest would languish and die.
I really have no clue though, since I'm not involved in the industry, and don't know the full break down of the costs of publishing various versions of media.
In short: more.
I do find it odd that digital copies cost less to produce, cost as much as a trade, but authors get far less (generally) per copy. Which mirrors the music industry pretty well, sadly.
Higher than a dollar yes, lower than $14.99 though. And with digital publishing the cost should diminish over time, since the constant costs are pretty much non-existent.
My main problem with the publishers (I almost mistakenly typed "punishers") is the fact that most of the price goes to them, and not the only person that really matters; the author. This is an issue I have with pretty much all of digital media, be it books or music, it seems to be nothing more than an excuse to hurt authors/musicians more. At least that seems the common theme. Well it often seems to be an excuse to gouge customers more, as well, but that goes without saying.
I really wish monolithic publishers would die, in all industries except maybe movies, where they may still be a necessity due to the costs and complications. It has gotten to the point where publishers hinder the industry more than help it. Books especially piss me off. For some reason everyone cut out paperbacks, so the best we can expect is a silly trade paperback which sells for around twice as much as a paperback used to (despite costing almost the same amount to manufacture). Quality has completely died, I have old trashy pulp science-fiction paperbacks from the 60s that are still doing rather well for themselves (i.e. the covers are attached, the spine is attacked, and there was been no breakage of the binding), but pretty much every trade-paperback I have purchased in the last couple of years is lucky to survive two readings. Purchase prices go up, price of manufacturing goes down, portion of cost to the author goes down. This seems to be the theme of everything these days (the modern economy could be defined as the practice of flipping off consumers, and Econ101 classes). Digital distribution is an excuse to continue this trend, authors get even less for it, the cost of production is even lower still, but the price remains irrationally high.
On the bright side, they are probably slowly killing themselves, and feeding the growing piracy channels. Eventually books will reach parity with MP3s, and be extremely cheap (still to expensive, but still...), and almost ubiquitous by extra-legal means. Also, like MP3s, publishers will get very pissed that side channels become more and more available and popular, relegating Daniel Steele and Dan Brown into the land of vastly pirated pop-music, where smaller authors who are self-published, or publish through independent houses rise in popularity and profit.
And then the law suits begin, and the customer and author suffers even more.
Starcraft 2 has a pretty wide audience, by the standards of a PC/Mac game, and while it's certainly not a Crysis-style hardware-hog, it does have higher requirements than a lot of the usual mass-market PC games (eg. The Sims and its sequels).
But it doesn't. I think PC gamer ran it on different set ups, and it ran pretty well on all of them except a very low end ATOM netbook. The highest graphics setting have higher requirements than most casual games, but they generally do.
For example I have no problem running it on a computer with a mere ATI HD 4670. Yes the rest of my computer is a bit more ballsy (Phenom II 965 BE* 6Gb of RAM) but I have had no problems running it on High settings (Ultra makes it chug a bit on big battles, but it is still playable). I hear it can handle low/medium settings with crappy Intel integrated graphics, even.
My main gripe is Battle.net. For some reason it doesn't like to connect, and once connected it really doesn't like to stay connected. Making multi-player impossible (or at least highly annoying). The rest of the game is what one would expect from Blizzard, the connectivity aspect (meaning the whole front-end) sucks, and should have been shot before being allowed to leave the shed.
*Not that anything above 2 cores matters, being that SCII will only use 2 cores, ignoring everything over.
As an Arizonan: Have you even read the damn law? I am getting so sick of people from other places sticking their nose in our business, especially doing so ignorantly.
This is as true for the East Coast liberals and the damn Tea Party folk. Bugger off until you know what your talking about, understand the circumstances, and read the actual law. And then, still bugger off and mind your own damn locality.
Yes, the police will be able to ask for your papers (if the court allows) if there is reasonable suspicion that your are hear illegally, and if you have already been stopped for another reason. And no, that is not "racial profiling". Or tyranny, or acting like Hitler, or fighting for the freedom of whatnot so more Republicans can be elected.
I find it very amusing that a large portion of the protesters against the law were from California, or speaking Spanish and waving Mexican flags. I find it even more amusing that the vocal supporters of the law are basically all racist morons (watch some clips of Jan Brewer).
As a not, I am a liberal and a lower-case "L" libertarian. I am not racist, I have nothing against Mexicans (living in Arizona it is really hard to have something against them, as all of my neighbors when I was growing up spoke Spanish, most of my friends are some flavor of Mexican descent, and 90% of the people you deal with in this state have at least one Mexican ancestor) I, also, support the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's how I tell the difference between a serious skeptic and a "pop" skeptic: I ask them if acupuncture is "woo". One question, that's all. The question works just as well with tai chi chuan.
And what if this was my answer; a vast majority of the claims relating to acupuncture are woo, though there are some areas that demand further research. I would use chiropracty as a test, personally, since 90% of the claims, and supposed reasons, are pure, unadulterated woo, but 10% of it is actually helpful (if if the reasons for its effectiveness is often pure hokum). The same would go for acupuncture and tai chi, there might be some useful bits in there, but the stated mode of operation (chi, spiritual energy, invisible whatnots) is probably 100% woo. Also, with acupuncture and chiropracty the woo is firmly bundled with the real bits, making it very hard to distinguish where one begins and the other ends.
So.. with acupuncture, at least, we can say some functional aspects of it are non-woo, but if you accept it as it stands with it's traditional rational, then you are a follower of woo. If you toss out the idiotic bits, and accept an actual accepted scientific explanation for it, then you can join the woo-less camp.
It doesn't help that there are tons of fake, woo-speading, "naturalpathic"/alt-medicine journals that spread self-aggrandizing quasi-studies.
BTW, I really enjoy saying "woo".
Personally I love spewing "I don't even have the internet!" at my TV.
You not getting new technology and trends anymore doesn't necessarily mean that you are jaded. It just means that you've gotten old enough not to understand new technology and trends anymore.
I think you missed the point. Yeah, the technology and appearance changed, but its filling the exact same role as something else.
Facebook is the MySpace of the late 00's. MySpace was the Livejournal of the early 00's. Livejournal was the Geocities of late 90's. Where Geocities was BBS of the mid 90s. and the BBS was the ... of the 80-90s. Conclusion: Facebook is just another silly trend, something will replace it in a couple years. Generally the amount of time it takes the college crowd to refresh their population.
Actually, what the hell is the difference between Facebook and Myspace? Qualitatively?
It's just plain fucking IMPOLITE.
Not being polite should not be the basis of laws. Nor should offense, especially.
Politeness and offense are largely subjective, so regulating them is impossible. I'm not offended by porn, I have no problem with it whatsoever (as long as it consists of freely consenting parties). I actually find it odd that some people are.
You might as well wonder why people object when you grab their junk without asking, but they don't usually mind if you stop them to ask for directions to the train station.
You seeing me look at porn is VERY different than an actual physical action. For the latter your actually assaulting someone, forcing yourself on them, there is no escape. For the former, if you don't like it you can just turn your head and walk away, it isn't being forced on you.
But then again I think most sexual harresment laws are stupid too. In high school I was almost a sex offender because me and a girlfriend (not sexually) liked to whisper completely nonsensical lewd things to each other as a stupid joke/game. A teacher overhead one of these, and pretty much threatened legal action against me, even if the girl wasn't offended one bit (having instigated the game by saying something lewd to me, just previous to the teacher walking by).
Oh no! Someone likes sex, a completely natural biological function that over 90% of the human race will experience at some point, and of which 99% of the human race is a product of! The horror. The horror!
Our society is moving inexorably toward greater acceptance of sexuality in the public square.
Sort of. On one hand children are being sexualized earlier and earlier, and we're more accepting of revealing clothing and such. On the other hand movies that would have been PG or PG-13 in the 80's would be R today, and some might even have a hard time hitting that mark. We completely can't handle sex in video games, period, no matter what age group its marketed to. We're deathly afraid of the gay. Boobs still scare us half to death.
America is as sexually schizophrenic as ever. On one hand we can handle seeing a females ankle more than ever, but on the other hand we have a growing contingent of wacko religious extremists who have no problem with regulating other people's behavior, and enforcing their limited sense of decency on others. They own congress, and other vast chunks of America's power establishment. The rest of the population is getting more liberal in their views though.
Seriously, we had to listen to constant blathering, and watch tons of money fly around furiously over a little bit of some old pop stars NIPPLE showing for a fraction of a second. Janet Jackson's nipple causes a larger commotion than a natural disaster in a far off land which killed 1000s of people. To me this is a good statement of where we stand.
I still generally build my own computers with only AMD CPUs. I know Intel is a bit better right now, but the difference is less in the high-middle, than at the very high end. AMD generally always wins at cost/performance though. I never, EVER, build for the high end since the price is always inflated (the bleeding edge tax). Price increases exponentially, where performance increases incrementally.
My last computer I settled for an AMD Phenom II x4 965BE, over whichever i7 I was looking at. Sure, the i7 was much better, but it also cost (with the price of a new mobo, and DDR3, around $500 more). Oddly, I could buy a premade Dell with the same specs cheaper than I could build an i7 box.
I still wouldn't get a SSD yet, though, they are too cramped for being even my OS/applications drive, and to get a roomier one (over 100GB) you end up paying far more money than the performance increase is worth.
There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story) who say that changing from a magnetic hard drive to an SSD is about the biggest single upgrade you could make to a reasonable system today.
I very rarely notice HDD based slow down on my current computer. I don't find myself tapping my thumbs and sighing at waiting for something to load (okay, outside of Photoshop, and the dramatically bloated and archaic iTunes).
I'm sure, like all things, though, the second I upgrade; computers without a SSD will feel slow, and that couple ms will make me very impatient.
I booted up my old C64 the other day, and realized that I had infinitely more patience than I have today. At the time, though, it didn't seem that bad waiting 2 minutes to load something. Same thing with going back to dial-up, 56k was BLAZING fast awhile back, and now it damn slow feeling.
Of course, you wouldn't do this; you'd come up with some split between what should be on fast SSD and what should be on a slow magnetic media, and have one drive for each.
I've been trying to efficiently split my data between drives for years, but most software doesn't play nicely enough yet to actually make this possible. My goal has always been a perfect split between relatively static data on a small, fast, drive, and dynamic data and media on a larger, slower, drive. Haven't managed to actually get this to work yet (with Windows at least). I agree though, SSDs would be perfect for this, when they drop in price a bit.
Games are the worst, they really don't allow you to tell them where to plunk down anything outside of Windows default (which is generally actually pathed, and not just targeted to %USERDATA% or such).
Not as much of a problem on Linux machines, obviously. And I have no clue how viable it is on OS X.
When I can get a 200-300GB SSD for around $200, I'll grab it fast. Until then, the performance advantage isn't worth the cost.
My Steam directory is almost that big, all by itself!
My primary HDD is nothing but Windows, applications, and games, and it clocks in at 111GB. All of the cache, pagefiles, and other crap are on a second drive, so I'm not counting those even.
That's right, because dick [sic] size is the only metric there is! Let's ignore seek time, streaming read/write performance, MTBF [wikipedia.org], power efficiency, shock resistance or any other number of characteristics that might be weighted in different levels of importance between laptop users, desktop users and server architects.
Real people, and not just people of the "my computer is faster than your's, so NYAH!" mentality, also look at cost versus value. It is nice that I can shave off a couple ms of seek/read/write time, and it is nice that it eats less power, but these benefits cost several times more. If the benefits don't outweigh the cost difference, then there is no point.
A quick scan of Newegg shows that a SDD costs ~$2.21/GB, where a comparable traditional HDD costs only ~0.33, thats quite a difference, I'm not sure if 15 minutes of battery life, and perhaps (very generously) a second a day in seek/read/write time is worth that much. Granted this is a quick comparison between a 2.5" 120GB SSD, and a 2.5" 120GB HDD. Both being at, or towards, the bottom of their price point. Granted this gap decreases with lower capacities (but remains very considerable), I picked 120 since that is more usable than a 50GB drive with todays amount of bloat.
Not saying that SSDs are pointless, just that their real world applications are rather limited right now, and most of them find use only with the same crowd that would cough up $600 for a graphics card that does 10% more than a $150 one. Some people find incremental improvement worth exponential price increases, these people are a minority. Yes, SSDs are also useful for netbooks, laptops with very limited use, and other people need fast access to limited amounts of data. They are not set to replace HDDs in desktops quite yet.
I recently bought a 1TB drive for a bit under $100, and a SSD thats around a sixth as big costs three times as much. Not nearly competitive yet. Of this drive, around 111Gb are used already, not counting another ~100GB on my data drive. To cover all of this with an SSD would cost significantly more than my full computer (which isn't a slouch hardware wise). I'm sure I could find better things to do with the money. Life build another computer completely.
If you are running Windows, you're not a true nerd anyway. :-)
I'd say that your not a true nerd if your running any single OS. Granted, in a OS monoculture Windows might be the least nerdy (though OS X might be, depending on how you look at it), but a true nerd should be playing the field, using the strengths of each OS.
I have an OS X media box, a Windows gaming rig, and an Ubuntu (for now, trying to find the time to find a better distro) work horse laptop.
To make this even sillier (it is an OS pissing contest, silly is the name of the game): Lets say Linux has a nerd value (NV) of 1*, OS X has a NV .5, and Windows has one of .3. Thus a person only running Linux can only ever achieve an NV of 1, where someone multi-OSing can achieve a value of 1.8, which is nerdier than a mere 1.
*Though I'd say more esoteric OSs are worth more, so perhaps a person only using an old Amiga for all their computing needs might beat someone using using all three OSs.
What's your list?
Your comes rather close. Though there have been many other moves that have frustrated me. I was an ardent Mac user (not quite a fan boy, but I did recommend them to everyone), and now I am not. The switch to Intel plays a roll, it didn't seem to be as well thought out as it could have been. Rosetta was the bane of my existence for a time, and the Intel processors on the low and mid ends were vastly inferior to a PPC with equal specs. The software seems to have recovered a bit, but the transition was a bit nasty. Their focus on mobile technology over traditional desktops is also somewhat noticeable, OS seems a bit rougher than it did previously (that may just be me, though). iTunes has changed from a "damn good" bit of software, to something that makes Firefox look mean and lean, and worse, it is weighted down by features that 90% of its users will never ever use (iphone, and tablet support). OS X has seen the same bloat trend as well, my Window's 7 install is leaner on resource usage, then my stripped down Mac (my Ubuntu laptop obviously wins).
Their rapid upgrade cycle also drove me away. Needing to shell out $50 every year for marginal improvements was annoying (Tiger was the last update that actually did anything that I wanted, Leopard was just rehashing features that already existed in 3rd party apps, often better than Apple's implementation). You still pretty much need to upgrade, since they include arbitrary code changes that 3rd party developers latch on to, so their previous software stops being supported.
I still have no clue why they sell their low-end computers without enough RAM to actually run OS X at any acceptable level.
Yes, I'm venting. Its early, I'm helping someone move, and I haven't had my coffee.
What other features would you want in an MP3 player?
Its not so much a question of features, as variety. If there were more big players in the market, there would be more innovation. Through this would arise more features. Look at the smart phone market right now, there are tons of players, and at last 4 big ones (Apple, Google, RIM, and Palm), this market is exploding with features and innovations, and a constantly decreasing price-point thanks to the competition.
I also get sick of iPod clones, I was recently shopping for a decent MP3 player, with over 60GB of storage, and my choice was pretty much limited to dubious chinese manufactures, Apple or Microsoft. Both Apple and Microsoft has a limited selection to cater to people like me, who wanted something that held a lot of music, and pretty much just played it (I don't know why Apple decided that people should be able to store less music, the reason I loved my iPod was the fact that my whole CD collection could be with me, so I didn't have to play the "music management" game every morning).
It isn't specific features, but the features that MAY come from greater diversity in the market.
Though one feature I would like, specifically, would be better sound quality, and perhaps better connectivity with 3rd party equipment. On device media management would also be nice.
Sorry for sounding so negative. I am not completely opposed to Apple, and I realize that, outside of MP3 players, I am not in their market. I just think that people are prone to giving Apple more "gloss" than they necessarily warrant.
. I never could figure out the basis of inclusion - maybe payola or maybe something else but it certainly wasn't *relevance*. That's one difference between Google and Yahoo.
You had to submit your site to them, or they had to discover it. Your site had to have merit to their team of editors (or whatever they were called). I remember being very happy that Yahoo decided to index my site, back in the mid-90's.
On one hand I rather miss Yahoo, and other indexers, which would hand sort through all the crap, and just keep the relevant information. General search is better, for most things, but having a small, limited, index is also nice for when you really don't feel like digging through 800 pages of SEO crap, and idiotic clones of popular pages (Ask.com, I'm looking at you).
Google has become pretty much worthless, of late. Too much crap. I was looking for ceiling fan reviews the other day, and most of the results page was the same, single, review posted over and over on various aggregator sites, which just grab product reviews from other sites. Also, the rise of "advice" sites have killed Google's usefulness. If I wanted some idiots advice, I wouldn't be searching for people smarter than me online.
Yes, like a history of thoughtful design and a slew of devices that work much better than their competitors for normal usage patterns, despite having fewer "and the kitchen sink" features.
Your veering a bit into the fan-boy neighborhood there. Apple has had its share of failures, and often falls below expectations. You also ignore the fact that at least some (I'd say most, but its arguable) of the people who purchase Apple products don't do so for logical reason, and also, for some of these people, the device doesn't do what they may want, or do it in the best way, they cater their wants to their device.
Its like saying that Windows must be the greatest OS ever, since more people use it. Windows is 90% greater than any OS Apple has put out at least.
See the flaw?
A lot of Apple's designs are about as flawed as they can be. May I mention the cliche example of leaving off a mouse button for years? The "mighty mouse" might also be considered a design flaw in-itself. Selling every computer without enough RAM might also be a flaw (and, in the early-mid 2000's charging $400 to upgrade your ram...).
Also... WTF is a normal usage pattern? I'm typing this on a Window 7 computer, it works fine with my normal usage patterns. Earlier this morning I was doing work on my Linux notebook, it worked fine with my normal usage patterns. Tonight I'll be watching some movies on my Mac, which also works fine with my normal usage patterns (less fine, since I did relegate to a media box, I suppose). Currently I have a Barnes & Nobel Nook as an ebook reader, which is far superior to my normal usage patterns than an iPad would ever be. I'm also buying an Android phone in the near future, which is better for my normal usage patterns than Apple's walled, puritanical, garden.
I do admit that the iPod is a damn good product though (the HDD versions, the rest don't have nearly enough storage). Though I suspect that is it didn't come out, or at least become as popular, the MP3 player market would be healthier and more advanced since less people would be trying to merely emulate the iPod,
Often times, with most of the population, the optimal workflow is based off of what they haven't imagined, and the limitations of their hardware and software,
You're making my point for me
I wasn't really making your point. On a personal, subjective, level I somewhat agree with you about hip-hop/rap, but on a broader level I'm not sure since we enter the "do definitions guide terms, or does use guide definitions" debate. I lean towards the latter, so rap can be music since it seems to be popularly accepted as music.
There really isn't an objective answer to the definition problem though, so my opinion is pretty much worthless.
Hip-hop/rap, also, is closer to the roots of music than most more modern approaches (I'm using "modern" as pretty much a broad brush, meaning all music that isn't played on animal skin drums around a fire, generally for ritual purposes). It's beat driven and repetitive with simple vocal schemes. Neoprimitive, perhaps.
Real music has counterpoint.
In theory, yes. But I don't know if this means anything though. If 90% of the people call hip-hop/rap music, is it music? If people accept it as music, listen to it like music, and call it music, how can it not be music?
Personally I find most of it as musical as the Gregorian chant trend of the 90's.
Sorry for the double post, there is something I forgot to say:
Copyright is about protecting authors and creators, not corporations. When it no longer benefits the former it serves no purpose.
Your taking it a bit far. Copyright laws are not as important, or useful, as laws against murder, actual theft, or sex crimes. In theft you deprive someone of real property, and not just potential profit, in murder your depriving someone of their life as opposed to potential profit, and sex crimes your depriving people of bodily freedom as opposed to potential profit. Copyright downright inconsequential compared to your slippery slope examples.
You aren't depriving anyone of anything except the MERE potential to make money off of you.
I'm not arguing for rampant piracy, or that we should do away with copyright, just that your perspective is a bit off. Anyone with half a brain (and who is not a shill for Disney) will agree that copyright is deeply flawed, and will remain so because congress is looking out for corporate interests above the interests of the people. Copyright, as it stands, has become absurd. With the issue in TFA, we're dealing with a copyright that outlasts the creators own children (and perhaps grandchildren), if a creator can even be found anymore. This is the epitome of a broken law. Copyright should exist, but the way it exists now is almost evil, and getting worse all the time. The consequences vastly outweigh the actual effects of the crime (which are arguable, and minimal at best).
Also, civil disobedience is an accepted practice, and not one bit controversial. If there is an unjust, and hurtful, law, then people SHOULD break it. Modern copyright is both. Though people who use this as an excuse to download the latest Britanny Spears CD are wholly in the wrong, and using it as an ad hoc self-serving justification for their own petty greed.
I have nothing against people who download older music, whose artists are dead, or whose artists receive no money from their works. I have nothing against people who pirate to format switch. I have nothing against people who pirate to test the waters and see if they like the music (especially with radio being dead). Personally I have nothing against people who exclusively pirate from RIAA members, since the RIAA declared war on us, the consumers, there is no issue with fighting back. They will do everything in their power to screw us, so how is it really wrong to play the same game? I do have something against people who pirate from independent labels and bands (outside of the "test drive" piracy, where you buy it if you like it). I have no problem with people pirating things that they otherwise would not have bought (which means it is completely victim-less).
If the only reason you follow a law is because it is the law there is a problem. Laws need, and should have, deeper justifications. I can tell you why theft is wrong 100% of the time, I can also tell you why murder is wrong 100% of the time (well less, but we call murder by different names when the motivations change). I can't really tell you why 100% of piracy is wrong, though.
Also, following laws just because it is the law generally means someone has conflicted morality with legality, when the two are at a disjunct, even if ideally they wouldn't be.
John Cage.
QED.
On a more serious note, Hip-Hop/Rap is an example, depending on whether or whether not you want to call it music (I kid... sort of). On a smaller scale, in 60 years things have changed HUGELY. Rock has splintered into 100s of subgenres (where it didn't really exist 60 years ago), jazz has changed, the blues turned into rock and hip-hop. In 60 years the guitar became the defining instrument in most forms of music. Music 60 years ago is VERY different than music now.
Though, more seriously, there has been tons of innovation within individual genres, though the genre's themselves still owe a lot to their lineages. It is as absurd to claim that music exists independent of its roots, as to claim that there is no innovation. Modern music owes everything to previous innovations, and to claim that there will be no more innovations is just groundless and dumb.
Also top-40 pop music is a minority of the music out there. Even subtracting the full Billboard charts, you still have a HUGE body of music being made. Judging a whole thing by its popular bits is a little silly.
I love it because it is a casual game for people who generally hate casual games. Its like Diablo II lite, DiabloII required a decent time commitment, and was pretty hard to just play for a couple minutes while your waiting for something else to happen, Diablo II also required spreadsheets for even causal play. Torchlight can be played for 10 minutes and quickly forgotten.
Its lack of a story doesn't hurt it too much, there is enough of one to make it somewhat interesting, but not enough to make it compelling and attention grabbing. It is like Peggle: Diablo 1.5.
My install of it recently went wonky (strange graphics artifacts), so I installed Sacred 2 to scratch my Diablo itch. It somehow didn't hitt he mark. It is almost "hardcore", except it has no story whatsoever (AFAICT). I think you have a winner if you have a complex story and complex gameplay, or a simple story and simple gameplay, but completely die when you mix simple with complex. Sacred 2 is a better game on pretty much all counts, but really doesn't hold my interest. Torchlight is like taking a small hit of crack whenever the desire hits you. (As opposed to Diablo I/II's fullblown heroin addiction).
There are people who really depended on Wave, who were trained on wave, and have to move to other platforms. The goodwill to Google has been lost.
Huh? It was a very young beta, not an old chunk of finished software. You should NEVER depend on beta software, and whoever is training people to use beta software shouldn't.
How, also, can you lose goodwill against Google for canceling an underperforming beta?
Doubtful. All of the ports that Blizzard have ever used are open, and I tried with my firewall completely off, to no avail. I also have no connection problems with any other game or service, including WoW, and Blizzard's various updaters. And while Bnet is crapping on things, my internet still works for other applications.
So... If the problem only exists for one piece of software, and everything else is completely fine, then I'd say that the one thing afflicted with the problems is probably... problematic.
Most bugs, also, are not universal or they would have been caught in any decent beta program (which Blizzard generally has). So I really can't stand (and don't take this is being confrontational) people saying "all is fine here, it is your rig".
That said, it has been getting better (I can complete a single player mission without being kicked 50% of the time now), and the login screen actually does something in a timely manner, mostly. All of this without me touching a single setting. Conclusion? Blizzard wasn't completely aware of how much load Bnet would sustain, and also didn't quite understand that requiring a constant connection to do anything whatsoever was a REALLY stupid move. When I got the game I couldn't even play offline, since you need to actually log on to do that.
Not to sound nasty, though. SCII is brilliant, the game itself, once you get past all the crap, is very well done, and exactly what you would expect from Blizzard. The online/DRM aspect, as expected, is evil. I hope that this serves as a good Bnet 2.0 beta/stress test for when Diablo 3 comes out, since D3 is far more exciting, to me, than SCII.
No clue. But, actual productions costs willing, I'd say at least 50% of the profits, with the rest divided between the various other parties (publisher, retailer, and whoever latches on). The author should get more than anyone else, since without them the rest would languish and die.
I really have no clue though, since I'm not involved in the industry, and don't know the full break down of the costs of publishing various versions of media.
In short: more.
I do find it odd that digital copies cost less to produce, cost as much as a trade, but authors get far less (generally) per copy. Which mirrors the music industry pretty well, sadly.
Higher than a dollar yes, lower than $14.99 though. And with digital publishing the cost should diminish over time, since the constant costs are pretty much non-existent.
My main problem with the publishers (I almost mistakenly typed "punishers") is the fact that most of the price goes to them, and not the only person that really matters; the author. This is an issue I have with pretty much all of digital media, be it books or music, it seems to be nothing more than an excuse to hurt authors/musicians more. At least that seems the common theme. Well it often seems to be an excuse to gouge customers more, as well, but that goes without saying.
I really wish monolithic publishers would die, in all industries except maybe movies, where they may still be a necessity due to the costs and complications. It has gotten to the point where publishers hinder the industry more than help it. Books especially piss me off. For some reason everyone cut out paperbacks, so the best we can expect is a silly trade paperback which sells for around twice as much as a paperback used to (despite costing almost the same amount to manufacture). Quality has completely died, I have old trashy pulp science-fiction paperbacks from the 60s that are still doing rather well for themselves (i.e. the covers are attached, the spine is attacked, and there was been no breakage of the binding), but pretty much every trade-paperback I have purchased in the last couple of years is lucky to survive two readings. Purchase prices go up, price of manufacturing goes down, portion of cost to the author goes down. This seems to be the theme of everything these days (the modern economy could be defined as the practice of flipping off consumers, and Econ101 classes). Digital distribution is an excuse to continue this trend, authors get even less for it, the cost of production is even lower still, but the price remains irrationally high.
On the bright side, they are probably slowly killing themselves, and feeding the growing piracy channels. Eventually books will reach parity with MP3s, and be extremely cheap (still to expensive, but still...), and almost ubiquitous by extra-legal means. Also, like MP3s, publishers will get very pissed that side channels become more and more available and popular, relegating Daniel Steele and Dan Brown into the land of vastly pirated pop-music, where smaller authors who are self-published, or publish through independent houses rise in popularity and profit.
And then the law suits begin, and the customer and author suffers even more.
Starcraft 2 has a pretty wide audience, by the standards of a PC/Mac game, and while it's certainly not a Crysis-style hardware-hog, it does have higher requirements than a lot of the usual mass-market PC games (eg. The Sims and its sequels).
But it doesn't. I think PC gamer ran it on different set ups, and it ran pretty well on all of them except a very low end ATOM netbook. The highest graphics setting have higher requirements than most casual games, but they generally do.
For example I have no problem running it on a computer with a mere ATI HD 4670. Yes the rest of my computer is a bit more ballsy (Phenom II 965 BE* 6Gb of RAM) but I have had no problems running it on High settings (Ultra makes it chug a bit on big battles, but it is still playable). I hear it can handle low/medium settings with crappy Intel integrated graphics, even.
My main gripe is Battle.net. For some reason it doesn't like to connect, and once connected it really doesn't like to stay connected. Making multi-player impossible (or at least highly annoying). The rest of the game is what one would expect from Blizzard, the connectivity aspect (meaning the whole front-end) sucks, and should have been shot before being allowed to leave the shed.
*Not that anything above 2 cores matters, being that SCII will only use 2 cores, ignoring everything over.
As an Arizonan: Have you even read the damn law? I am getting so sick of people from other places sticking their nose in our business, especially doing so ignorantly.
This is as true for the East Coast liberals and the damn Tea Party folk. Bugger off until you know what your talking about, understand the circumstances, and read the actual law. And then, still bugger off and mind your own damn locality.
Yes, the police will be able to ask for your papers (if the court allows) if there is reasonable suspicion that your are hear illegally, and if you have already been stopped for another reason. And no, that is not "racial profiling". Or tyranny, or acting like Hitler, or fighting for the freedom of whatnot so more Republicans can be elected.
I find it very amusing that a large portion of the protesters against the law were from California, or speaking Spanish and waving Mexican flags. I find it even more amusing that the vocal supporters of the law are basically all racist morons (watch some clips of Jan Brewer).
As a not, I am a liberal and a lower-case "L" libertarian. I am not racist, I have nothing against Mexicans (living in Arizona it is really hard to have something against them, as all of my neighbors when I was growing up spoke Spanish, most of my friends are some flavor of Mexican descent, and 90% of the people you deal with in this state have at least one Mexican ancestor) I, also, support the law.