we're not commanded to "strike the necks" of unbelievers.
we're not given 72 virgins for ensuring that the infidels die.
we see the destruction of world historical artifacts, no matter what religion they are related to, as a TRAVESTY rather than a religious duty.
we don't insist that women be covered, and beheaded if they happen to show a few strands of hair from beneath the veil.
we don't believe that women are property to be collected like pokemon; we certainly don't go with the 'four wives and as many female slaves as you want' approach.
But you tell me - what would you call a religion in which the principle command is to "hate what allah hates"??? Here's a hint: it begins with I and ends with slam.
I stand up to our "elected" politicians every day on behalf of FRIENDS AND FAMILY CURRENTLY SERVING, because they have to deal with the fucked-up bullshit of our "rules of engagement" that get more American military killed than anything else.
I gather care packages for the troops, whatever they ask for that they need, to make things more bearable for them. I'm there to welcome them home, and make sure they hear back frequently how they ARE APPRECIATED - maybe not by cunts like GW Shrub, maybe not by bitches like Sheila Jerkson Lee and John LIAR Kerry, but by the AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Now crawl back into the hole you came from, you commie terrorist-loving faggot.
A company with a long history of bad behavior finally gives one ounce of respect to the troops, and a left-wing nut who's got editor controls tags it "whining, whiners, insane".
Meanwhile, it celebrates the Religion of Hate's "eid" festival at the end of ramalamadingdong, but won't so much as put up a christmas tree.
Google has some SERIOUS issues. And that's not even counting the number of times they've flagged anti-terrorism videos and film expose's of terrorists as "hate speech" and other bullshit stuff on their google video and youtube sites, while allowing pro-jihadist propaganda to stay around.
Hell, they allowed an islamic death threat against a UK politician to stay up for a week.
I have seen so many otherwise workable items about to be thrown out because of a minor, easily fixed issue (sometimes even just needing some superglue!)
I have a collection of about 6 DVD players, a few audio tape players, VCR's, etc that people have handed me when I said "it's probably an easy fix"; their response was "if you can get it working it's yours." Invariably the repair was simple, in the case of the DVD players just needed a lens cleaning (not one of those crappy sale unit lens cleaners, a real opening up and swabbing with some rubbing alcohol).
Basic principles of home electronics: NOTHING is all that complicated. If it were that complicated, it would cost $20,000 or more. Even a DVD recorder sold 5 years ago for $1000 is still frighteningly similar to the one you got for $30 last week, and probably even easier to trace loose connections and items since it's not been subjected to 5 years of component consolidation and micro-sizing.
VCR repair, DVD repair, most anything else is just a matter of having a few basic tools. Well, that and using the grey matter between your ears. You can tell if there's a broken belt, you can visually tell if a capacitor has blown, you can smell if something has shorted out and you can usually see the scorch. Sometimes it's repairable, sometimes you just learn more about the standard innards (and if you think Company #1's VCR or DVD player is that much different from Company #2's or Company #3's, you're delusional).
You wouldn't believe how many times a "dead" PS2 can be revived just by cleaning the firking lens.
And if you kill it... parent point #2 is dead-on correct. You have nothing to lose opening up something that's long out of warranty and broken; the worst that can happen is that it's still broken when you're done with it.
Of course, when I've mentioned this to some of the people out there, they're terrified of the "warning, voltage" and "warranty void if removed" stickers plastered all over their stuff. We really need to teach people that they can do this stuff safely and without a lot of worry; I'm starting to be convinced most of these "warnings" are just there to scare people into not getting perfectly serviceable products repaired.
I sent one back for "red ring of death" - which they still won't admit is their own fucking fault for not putting in enough cooling for the original processors (multiple sites have opened up the new ones and photographed the enlarged heatsinks they're putting in now compared to the original).
What do I get back? A "replacement" unit that dies a month later because the fucking DVD drive motor is defective.
So for this year, I've actually had my 360 for 10 of the 12 months (a full 1/6 of the year) because the fucking morons won't do a proper "advance replacement" (you guarantee w/ credit card that you'll send the defective unit back in the box they shop your replacement) and insist it goes to the factory where their techs will go "yup, it's defective" and ship another out.
Indeed, that's part of the entire point of the slavery rite of Islam (known as dhimmi, sometimes referred to as "dhimmitude") towards those nonbelievers they "allow" to live in Islamic states.
Can't practice your religion openly, can't tell others about it, can't expand your places of worship, can't even rebuild if they "happen" to be destroyed by an "accidental" fire...
Oh, but if you tell Muslims they aren't allowed to practice in your lands? SAVAGERY! WE MUST MAKE JIHAD ON YOU!
The wiki is written by those who got in first, sucked Jimbo's cock the most, and got adminned.
Everything else flows from that point - the immense left-wing pressure for articles, the ridiculous whitewashing and removal of anything that is provably factual but 'looks bad' for certain religions...
I mean, come on. The page for the so-called "Oxford Capacity Analysis" doesn't even list properly the fact that it is in NO WAY connected to Oxford (despite the lies of $cientology scam recruiters when they use this blatantly false "test" on unwary victims).
And on the disambiguation page for OCA it's listed as "Technical" with the connection to $camintology not even mentioned.
And of course they completely ignore the destruction of Jewish archaeological relics by Palestinian "scientists"; undeniably proven when temple-era artifacts were unearthed from THE GARBAGE DUMP that the Muslims had shipped the items they were breaking to.
Seriously now: a nonfunctional "password protect" bit that could be bypassed with near "hold the shift key" ease, a "program installer" that never worked for anything nontrivial, AND you had to find an arcane little page on their website just to get the uninstaller to make your "U3" device behave like a normal fucking memory stick.
Yeah, it was "interesting" in the same way that a colonoscopy is.
Oh well. It could be worse - their competitors (Sony) put rootkits into everything.
In Houston, 2 of the main four AM stations and the only major newspaper are owned by Clear Channel.
The day after the head of CC had a "meeting" with Shrub, suddenly all their talk hosts stopped talking about his treasonous Illegal Immigration Amnesty plans and his treasonous plan to sell the US down the "North American Union" river.
Coincidence? I think not. Multiple callers have been cut off since then. I think the head of CC got marching orders from Shrub to squelch it, and the talk hosts were given their marching orders and threats of firing if they didn't obey.
the "contributions" of an anonymous person on wikipedia these days, no matter how good they are, are instantly reverted by any number of so-called "anti-vandalism" bots and tools.
Face it - the number of times this would actually be useful, let alone enforceable, is going to be less than the number of lottery winners in a given year.
#1 - most of the ID theft going on today is done by illegal immigrants. There are at least 10 million "duplicated" social security numbers on the IRS's rolls right now, in business returns and student loan filings and such. Why are they not going after the employers? Why are they not checking all the illegal mooches stealing money from our kids' schools? Why are they not taking on those who steal billions of dollars using our emergency care facilities as a health care plan?
Because businesses and racist mexshitcan groups like La Raza and LULAC and the mexshitcan gov't spend plenty of money making sure Shrub and various congresscritters get their weekly mexshitcan hooker delivery.
After all, Laura doesn't swallow.
#2 - Even if you do get ahold of the culprit and get a judgement, what assets are you going to take that the gov't hasn't already taken in the criminal case, or that they haven't already paid to their lawyer? The law doesn't give you the "right to restitution", it gives you the right to sue civilly for restitution - meaning you have to get your own lawyer or file paperwork yourself, and go through the civil court system all through the appeals and anything else - to see a dime of your deserved money, all the while paying court filing costs and everything else.
Face it. This is a pointless change to the law up until the rest of the legal system and mess gets fixed.
That gets to most of it. You can look at the various accused accounts easily enough.
And as usual, the administrator response: "Unless you have been blocked, I'm not getting into it."
Isn't it nice how all the administrators protect the abusive core?
Seriously, look at the case - the initial part starts with a couple definite abusers, and account responsible for zero abuse being called a "sockpuppet" of them so that someone can push rampant propaganda.
Then, every few months, you get another crop of supposed "sockpuppet" calls in order to extend the block. Even users who have been exonerated by their vaunted "CheckUser" stuff (which has always been bullshit since nobody is allowed to see the data except a privileged few, even if the user demands to see their own CU data, and they allow the "Possible" and "Likely" hedge-categories now for administrators who know it's cleared someone but who are in on the fix) are banned anyways as "sockpuppets."
Also - Just curious, what is your relation to Wikipedia?
Ironically, the items I brought were regarding users who were making demonstrably good edits, even if they got into disagreements with other users.
What happens on Wikipedia when one user has an asshole admin buddy and the other doesn't? The asshole admin finds a way to get them railroaded. It's easy enough to do. In one case, a good user has been tarred and feathered, was falsely accused of being the same person as a demonstrably different troll, and since then a group of asshats has claimed to have found "sockpuppets" every few months, so that they can keep bumping the ban time back.
Bottom line is that the 1-year "ban" given to the user on false pretenses was already bad enough; during the time the user was still making useful edits, a group of known trolls and asshats were harassing them and slandering their user page. One even went so far as to abuse his admin powers by tagging the user page after another admin had PROTECTED it.
The end result? An illegitimate "ban" that was supposed to expire in 2006 is now extended halfway through 2008, thanks to the continued abuse and lies of the asshats and their cronies.
That's all too common of wikipedia. Administrators abuse someone, harass them, drop a spurious "block", and then abuse them more and lock userpages / talk pages in order to prevent them from exercising their right to a legitimate review.
Parker Peters called it "Scarlet Letter" harassment. I've seen the same term used from time to time on WP:ANI to describe it.
Admins on Wikipedia lie all the time. They lie about what they're doing. They lie about their edits. They purposefully abuse their powers to harass people, trying to get a reaction that they can then "block" for. And the worst part is they do it for the reason of control: it's the easiest way to drive away anyone who disagrees with the POV/propaganda they and their friends want to push.
It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.
In other words - the abusive administrators and longstanding POV groups are finally driving so many people off of the project that they get to make it what they want to make it, nothing but a propaganda disaster.
Then again, they've shown how it goes time and again. I even had an experience in a Wiki administrator on Slashdot claiming he'd "look into" any reasonable issues - instead, he did exactly jack crap, kept whining about how the issues I brought were "old" or "nobody else would look at them." He eventually bailed from wikipedia completely because of all the stupid bullshit that's involved in wikipedia.
If you look at the history of railroaded users who tried to fix wikipedia from within the system, and instead were tarred as "trolls" and worse by the established assholes and POV pushers of the admin "community", you get an idea of what wikipedia really is.
Best quote ever: Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
The reason NONE of them just take "real money" (even $ony makes you put predetermined amounts into your "wallet") is that it costs them money every time they want to access Mastercard/VISA's system. Blame the Credit Cartels for that one. I can see in a heartbeat why they'd rather have you access that system once to buy $25/50/75/whatever worth of "points", and only have to pay Mastercard/VISA their extortion once, rather than have a $2 Mastercard/VISA access charge every time someone made a purchase.
As for the rest:
- The Wii interface for purchasing is quite simple. Yes, they have just old console rehashes, but you get the download fast and get right to playing. And I'm not upset at all about being able to get a few good N64 titles (original Paper Mario as an example, and F-Zero X) for a decent price given that I never owned an N64.
- Xbox Live is smart enough to be able to run your download in the background; they have a LOT of vintage arcade titles, a good number of PC ports (I love getting people together for 4 player co-op DOOM), and plenty of independent items as well. The only gripe I have is that I can't rename the teams and members in Worms.
Meanwhile, Sony's crap store requires four confirm dialogs just to download one fucking thing, and the only thing I've seen in the time I've owned my (launch edition) PS3 that's been worth getting was Lemmings.
In all, as long as they can deliver on good games, I think Sony has made good bets with the PS3 as well as the PSN.
Yeah. *coughahemOutAWholeYearNotAGoddamnGameWorthBuyingYetahemcough* Good luck with that.
that Sony doesn't seem to give a rat's ass - or much less even have something remotely resembling a clue - as to what the gaming public actually wants instead of the crap they seem to want to feed them?
Seriously now:
PSP gamers want the open platform to be able to extend it. They want a ported version of Opera or some DECENT browser (which would be easy enough to program, and the memory wouldn't be an issue if you used the memory stick as swap space). And they want decent games.
What does Sony do? Constantly push "updates" that break compatibility and try to fuck over the homebrewers who are making the killer apps, and try to push "sales" of PSX titles that require buying a fucking $600 access-box (PS3) to even get to.
Look at the PS3. Compare the shitty "Sony Online Store" to the ease-of-use in Wii or Xbox Live. Compare the crappy "games" (if you can call them that) offered by Sony to the games available on the other two consoles. Look at the half-assed "motion sensing" they threw in at the last minute to try to compete with the Wii.
Anybody else remember "people will be taking second jobs just to buy our console-aru!"?
Sony is the new Daily Radar - they have their heads so far up their asses they can probably smell their own tonsils.
The real joke is that neither DX9 nor DX10 are inherently "better" any more than the original Glide API was inherently "better" than DirectX or OpenGL. Hardware has been changed constantly, to give "better" responses to this call or that call, but inevitably you have to write a driver that converts the OpenGL or DX9/DX10 or whatever into something your card understands.
In the really old days, you had people actually coding for the card on hand. This is why there's a gazillion different releases of Mechwarrior 2, each of which varies greatly in image quality and features - each had to be hand tuned to the card.
If Bioshock had been intended for DX9, it would probably look the same as that DX10 shot on DX9. They'd have figured out what they needed to do, perhaps coded a few "If ATI, do this, if NVidia, do this, if Intel Extreme fail 'your video card is too crappy to play this game'" decisions for specific hardware, and that would have been that. Since it was backported (and MS would have thrown a fit to have "no difference") they had to just do a more slappy job of it.
Then again, if not for the emphasis on ridiculous graphics, think about how many games would be able to use their processing power for some seriously wicked AI. Even Bioshock only has half-decent AI that can be twigged to and predicted fairly easily - you know that a wrench guy is going to rush you, you know that the spider slicers will hang from the ceiling and lob stuff all day till you burn or freeze them, you know where the houdinis are going to land long before the animation starts merely because you can figure out what the AI tree says for them to do in what radius... it's sad.
Hell, you can predict the precise spot on the health bar where they'll run for the health station, and if you're smart you trapped that thing half an hour ago. Now you get to watch as four of them all kill themselves on the same damn one, never paying attention to the 3 dead bodies on the floor that obviously just gassed themselve using a booby-trapped station.
But nevermind. I know the reason they want graphics over AI - the same fucking morons that could never defeat a decently programmed AI (hell, they have trouble getting through Halo on NORMAL), drool over thinking that they can see the shoelaces on Madden's boot.
It is perfectly possible to analyze Islam without needing to "compare" any other of the religions of the world.
Then again, the first defense of the immature asswipe is "but he started it", which has been repeated many times elsewhere in this particular discussion as "oh but look at the evil things X religion did too." It's typical apologist garbage, nothing more and nothing less.
Either you're a moron or clueless, AC: reread what you wrote and what I said.
MALE muslims are allowed to take non-muslim wives. FEMALE muslims are not allowed to marry non-muslim husbands.
Then again, what else do you expect of a religion whose men are so barbaric and ill-mannered that the sight of a naked ankle is grounds for raping a woman?
Slashdot Mirror
we're not commanded to "strike the necks" of unbelievers.
we're not given 72 virgins for ensuring that the infidels die.
we see the destruction of world historical artifacts, no matter what religion they are related to, as a TRAVESTY rather than a religious duty.
we don't insist that women be covered, and beheaded if they happen to show a few strands of hair from beneath the veil.
we don't believe that women are property to be collected like pokemon; we certainly don't go with the 'four wives and as many female slaves as you want' approach.
But you tell me - what would you call a religion in which the principle command is to "hate what allah hates"??? Here's a hint: it begins with I and ends with slam.
then I'm Mary, Queen of Scots.
I stand up to our "elected" politicians every day on behalf of FRIENDS AND FAMILY CURRENTLY SERVING, because they have to deal with the fucked-up bullshit of our "rules of engagement" that get more American military killed than anything else.
I gather care packages for the troops, whatever they ask for that they need, to make things more bearable for them. I'm there to welcome them home, and make sure they hear back frequently how they ARE APPRECIATED - maybe not by cunts like GW Shrub, maybe not by bitches like Sheila Jerkson Lee and John LIAR Kerry, but by the AMERICAN PEOPLE.
Now crawl back into the hole you came from, you commie terrorist-loving faggot.
A company with a long history of bad behavior finally gives one ounce of respect to the troops, and a left-wing nut who's got editor controls tags it "whining, whiners, insane".
Meanwhile, it celebrates the Religion of Hate's "eid" festival at the end of ramalamadingdong, but won't so much as put up a christmas tree.
Google has some SERIOUS issues. And that's not even counting the number of times they've flagged anti-terrorism videos and film expose's of terrorists as "hate speech" and other bullshit stuff on their google video and youtube sites, while allowing pro-jihadist propaganda to stay around.
Hell, they allowed an islamic death threat against a UK politician to stay up for a week.
I have seen so many otherwise workable items about to be thrown out because of a minor, easily fixed issue (sometimes even just needing some superglue!)
I have a collection of about 6 DVD players, a few audio tape players, VCR's, etc that people have handed me when I said "it's probably an easy fix"; their response was "if you can get it working it's yours." Invariably the repair was simple, in the case of the DVD players just needed a lens cleaning (not one of those crappy sale unit lens cleaners, a real opening up and swabbing with some rubbing alcohol).
Basic principles of home electronics:
NOTHING is all that complicated. If it were that complicated, it would cost $20,000 or more. Even a DVD recorder sold 5 years ago for $1000 is still frighteningly similar to the one you got for $30 last week, and probably even easier to trace loose connections and items since it's not been subjected to 5 years of component consolidation and micro-sizing.
VCR repair, DVD repair, most anything else is just a matter of having a few basic tools. Well, that and using the grey matter between your ears. You can tell if there's a broken belt, you can visually tell if a capacitor has blown, you can smell if something has shorted out and you can usually see the scorch. Sometimes it's repairable, sometimes you just learn more about the standard innards (and if you think Company #1's VCR or DVD player is that much different from Company #2's or Company #3's, you're delusional).
You wouldn't believe how many times a "dead" PS2 can be revived just by cleaning the firking lens.
And if you kill it... parent point #2 is dead-on correct. You have nothing to lose opening up something that's long out of warranty and broken; the worst that can happen is that it's still broken when you're done with it.
Of course, when I've mentioned this to some of the people out there, they're terrified of the "warning, voltage" and "warranty void if removed" stickers plastered all over their stuff. We really need to teach people that they can do this stuff safely and without a lot of worry; I'm starting to be convinced most of these "warnings" are just there to scare people into not getting perfectly serviceable products repaired.
SW: Battlefront for PSP is virtually unplayably bad.
I don't expect much for GoW either.
Some of the best titles for the PSP are the PSX rebuilds, as long as you don't need to juggle L1/L2/R1/R2.
Sony's biggest problem for the PSP? They didn't think harder on their button layout.
if the console actually lasted that long.
I sent one back for "red ring of death" - which they still won't admit is their own fucking fault for not putting in enough cooling for the original processors (multiple sites have opened up the new ones and photographed the enlarged heatsinks they're putting in now compared to the original).
What do I get back? A "replacement" unit that dies a month later because the fucking DVD drive motor is defective.
So for this year, I've actually had my 360 for 10 of the 12 months (a full 1/6 of the year) because the fucking morons won't do a proper "advance replacement" (you guarantee w/ credit card that you'll send the defective unit back in the box they shop your replacement) and insist it goes to the factory where their techs will go "yup, it's defective" and ship another out.
Indeed, that's part of the entire point of the slavery rite of Islam (known as dhimmi, sometimes referred to as "dhimmitude") towards those nonbelievers they "allow" to live in Islamic states.
Can't practice your religion openly, can't tell others about it, can't expand your places of worship, can't even rebuild if they "happen" to be destroyed by an "accidental" fire...
Oh, but if you tell Muslims they aren't allowed to practice in your lands? SAVAGERY! WE MUST MAKE JIHAD ON YOU!
The wiki is written by those who got in first, sucked Jimbo's cock the most, and got adminned.
Everything else flows from that point - the immense left-wing pressure for articles, the ridiculous whitewashing and removal of anything that is provably factual but 'looks bad' for certain religions...
I mean, come on. The page for the so-called "Oxford Capacity Analysis" doesn't even list properly the fact that it is in NO WAY connected to Oxford (despite the lies of $cientology scam recruiters when they use this blatantly false "test" on unwary victims).
And on the disambiguation page for OCA it's listed as "Technical" with the connection to $camintology not even mentioned.
And of course they completely ignore the destruction of Jewish archaeological relics by Palestinian "scientists"; undeniably proven when temple-era artifacts were unearthed from THE GARBAGE DUMP that the Muslims had shipped the items they were breaking to.
Seriously now: a nonfunctional "password protect" bit that could be bypassed with near "hold the shift key" ease, a "program installer" that never worked for anything nontrivial, AND you had to find an arcane little page on their website just to get the uninstaller to make your "U3" device behave like a normal fucking memory stick.
Yeah, it was "interesting" in the same way that a colonoscopy is.
Oh well. It could be worse - their competitors (Sony) put rootkits into everything.
Print out the Pac-Man screen 9 times, each time through a different color filter.
Arrange them on canvas.
Sell it to a museum for $millions as an "authentic warhol tribute."
Movie posters are considered "art." Movie boxes are considered "art." So are the movies inside.
How many video games have to come with posters and boxes before the thing inside is viewed as art as well?
In Houston, 2 of the main four AM stations and the only major newspaper are owned by Clear Channel.
The day after the head of CC had a "meeting" with Shrub, suddenly all their talk hosts stopped talking about his treasonous Illegal Immigration Amnesty plans and his treasonous plan to sell the US down the "North American Union" river.
Coincidence? I think not. Multiple callers have been cut off since then. I think the head of CC got marching orders from Shrub to squelch it, and the talk hosts were given their marching orders and threats of firing if they didn't obey.
Gee, what a surprise.
the "contributions" of an anonymous person on wikipedia these days, no matter how good they are, are instantly reverted by any number of so-called "anti-vandalism" bots and tools.
Face it - the number of times this would actually be useful, let alone enforceable, is going to be less than the number of lottery winners in a given year.
#1 - most of the ID theft going on today is done by illegal immigrants. There are at least 10 million "duplicated" social security numbers on the IRS's rolls right now, in business returns and student loan filings and such. Why are they not going after the employers? Why are they not checking all the illegal mooches stealing money from our kids' schools? Why are they not taking on those who steal billions of dollars using our emergency care facilities as a health care plan?
Because businesses and racist mexshitcan groups like La Raza and LULAC and the mexshitcan gov't spend plenty of money making sure Shrub and various congresscritters get their weekly mexshitcan hooker delivery.
After all, Laura doesn't swallow.
#2 - Even if you do get ahold of the culprit and get a judgement, what assets are you going to take that the gov't hasn't already taken in the criminal case, or that they haven't already paid to their lawyer? The law doesn't give you the "right to restitution", it gives you the right to sue civilly for restitution - meaning you have to get your own lawyer or file paperwork yourself, and go through the civil court system all through the appeals and anything else - to see a dime of your deserved money, all the while paying court filing costs and everything else.
Face it. This is a pointless change to the law up until the rest of the legal system and mess gets fixed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ta_bu_shi_da_yu#Regarding_Slashdot
That gets to most of it. You can look at the various accused accounts easily enough.
And as usual, the administrator response: "Unless you have been blocked, I'm not getting into it."
Isn't it nice how all the administrators protect the abusive core?
Seriously, look at the case - the initial part starts with a couple definite abusers, and account responsible for zero abuse being called a "sockpuppet" of them so that someone can push rampant propaganda.
Then, every few months, you get another crop of supposed "sockpuppet" calls in order to extend the block. Even users who have been exonerated by their vaunted "CheckUser" stuff (which has always been bullshit since nobody is allowed to see the data except a privileged few, even if the user demands to see their own CU data, and they allow the "Possible" and "Likely" hedge-categories now for administrators who know it's cleared someone but who are in on the fix) are banned anyways as "sockpuppets."
Also - Just curious, what is your relation to Wikipedia?
Ironically, the items I brought were regarding users who were making demonstrably good edits, even if they got into disagreements with other users.
What happens on Wikipedia when one user has an asshole admin buddy and the other doesn't? The asshole admin finds a way to get them railroaded. It's easy enough to do. In one case, a good user has been tarred and feathered, was falsely accused of being the same person as a demonstrably different troll, and since then a group of asshats has claimed to have found "sockpuppets" every few months, so that they can keep bumping the ban time back.
Bottom line is that the 1-year "ban" given to the user on false pretenses was already bad enough; during the time the user was still making useful edits, a group of known trolls and asshats were harassing them and slandering their user page. One even went so far as to abuse his admin powers by tagging the user page after another admin had PROTECTED it.
The end result? An illegitimate "ban" that was supposed to expire in 2006 is now extended halfway through 2008, thanks to the continued abuse and lies of the asshats and their cronies.
That's all too common of wikipedia. Administrators abuse someone, harass them, drop a spurious "block", and then abuse them more and lock userpages / talk pages in order to prevent them from exercising their right to a legitimate review.
Parker Peters called it "Scarlet Letter" harassment. I've seen the same term used from time to time on WP:ANI to describe it.
Admins on Wikipedia lie all the time. They lie about what they're doing. They lie about their edits. They purposefully abuse their powers to harass people, trying to get a reaction that they can then "block" for. And the worst part is they do it for the reason of control: it's the easiest way to drive away anyone who disagrees with the POV/propaganda they and their friends want to push.
It's the internal conflicts, navel-gazing and meta editing that is killing Wikipedia.
In other words - the abusive administrators and longstanding POV groups are finally driving so many people off of the project that they get to make it what they want to make it, nothing but a propaganda disaster.
Then again, they've shown how it goes time and again. I even had an experience in a Wiki administrator on Slashdot claiming he'd "look into" any reasonable issues - instead, he did exactly jack crap, kept whining about how the issues I brought were "old" or "nobody else would look at them." He eventually bailed from wikipedia completely because of all the stupid bullshit that's involved in wikipedia.
If you look at the history of railroaded users who tried to fix wikipedia from within the system, and instead were tarred as "trolls" and worse by the established assholes and POV pushers of the admin "community", you get an idea of what wikipedia really is.
Best quote ever:
Because this is precisely the goal of the abusive administrators. They want, no, need, to drive away anyone new who disagrees with them, because if they did not, then ultimately they bear the risk of enough new users coming in to overturn their bogus "consensus" on the articles they control.
"Why don't they just use real money"??
The reason NONE of them just take "real money" (even $ony makes you put predetermined amounts into your "wallet") is that it costs them money every time they want to access Mastercard/VISA's system. Blame the Credit Cartels for that one. I can see in a heartbeat why they'd rather have you access that system once to buy $25/50/75/whatever worth of "points", and only have to pay Mastercard/VISA their extortion once, rather than have a $2 Mastercard/VISA access charge every time someone made a purchase.
As for the rest:
- The Wii interface for purchasing is quite simple. Yes, they have just old console rehashes, but you get the download fast and get right to playing. And I'm not upset at all about being able to get a few good N64 titles (original Paper Mario as an example, and F-Zero X) for a decent price given that I never owned an N64.
- Xbox Live is smart enough to be able to run your download in the background; they have a LOT of vintage arcade titles, a good number of PC ports (I love getting people together for 4 player co-op DOOM), and plenty of independent items as well. The only gripe I have is that I can't rename the teams and members in Worms.
Meanwhile, Sony's crap store requires four confirm dialogs just to download one fucking thing, and the only thing I've seen in the time I've owned my (launch edition) PS3 that's been worth getting was Lemmings.
In all, as long as they can deliver on good games, I think Sony has made good bets with the PS3 as well as the PSN.
Yeah. *coughahemOutAWholeYearNotAGoddamnGameWorthBuyingYetahemcough* Good luck with that.
that Sony doesn't seem to give a rat's ass - or much less even have something remotely resembling a clue - as to what the gaming public actually wants instead of the crap they seem to want to feed them?
Seriously now:
PSP gamers want the open platform to be able to extend it. They want a ported version of Opera or some DECENT browser (which would be easy enough to program, and the memory wouldn't be an issue if you used the memory stick as swap space). And they want decent games.
What does Sony do? Constantly push "updates" that break compatibility and try to fuck over the homebrewers who are making the killer apps, and try to push "sales" of PSX titles that require buying a fucking $600 access-box (PS3) to even get to.
Look at the PS3. Compare the shitty "Sony Online Store" to the ease-of-use in Wii or Xbox Live. Compare the crappy "games" (if you can call them that) offered by Sony to the games available on the other two consoles. Look at the half-assed "motion sensing" they threw in at the last minute to try to compete with the Wii.
Anybody else remember "people will be taking second jobs just to buy our console-aru!"?
Sony is the new Daily Radar - they have their heads so far up their asses they can probably smell their own tonsils.
The real joke is that neither DX9 nor DX10 are inherently "better" any more than the original Glide API was inherently "better" than DirectX or OpenGL. Hardware has been changed constantly, to give "better" responses to this call or that call, but inevitably you have to write a driver that converts the OpenGL or DX9/DX10 or whatever into something your card understands.
In the really old days, you had people actually coding for the card on hand. This is why there's a gazillion different releases of Mechwarrior 2, each of which varies greatly in image quality and features - each had to be hand tuned to the card.
If Bioshock had been intended for DX9, it would probably look the same as that DX10 shot on DX9. They'd have figured out what they needed to do, perhaps coded a few "If ATI, do this, if NVidia, do this, if Intel Extreme fail 'your video card is too crappy to play this game'" decisions for specific hardware, and that would have been that. Since it was backported (and MS would have thrown a fit to have "no difference") they had to just do a more slappy job of it.
Then again, if not for the emphasis on ridiculous graphics, think about how many games would be able to use their processing power for some seriously wicked AI. Even Bioshock only has half-decent AI that can be twigged to and predicted fairly easily - you know that a wrench guy is going to rush you, you know that the spider slicers will hang from the ceiling and lob stuff all day till you burn or freeze them, you know where the houdinis are going to land long before the animation starts merely because you can figure out what the AI tree says for them to do in what radius... it's sad.
Hell, you can predict the precise spot on the health bar where they'll run for the health station, and if you're smart you trapped that thing half an hour ago. Now you get to watch as four of them all kill themselves on the same damn one, never paying attention to the 3 dead bodies on the floor that obviously just gassed themselve using a booby-trapped station.
But nevermind. I know the reason they want graphics over AI - the same fucking morons that could never defeat a decently programmed AI (hell, they have trouble getting through Halo on NORMAL), drool over thinking that they can see the shoelaces on Madden's boot.
It is perfectly possible to analyze Islam without needing to "compare" any other of the religions of the world.
Then again, the first defense of the immature asswipe is "but he started it", which has been repeated many times elsewhere in this particular discussion as "oh but look at the evil things X religion did too." It's typical apologist garbage, nothing more and nothing less.
Seriously. You obviously know nothing about Islam.
They translate FROM arabic so others can read it.
You fucking nitwit.
Either you're a moron or clueless, AC: reread what you wrote and what I said.
MALE muslims are allowed to take non-muslim wives.
FEMALE muslims are not allowed to marry non-muslim husbands.
Then again, what else do you expect of a religion whose men are so barbaric and ill-mannered that the sight of a naked ankle is grounds for raping a woman?
Pity you don't speak Arabic.
Then again, if you did, you'd be shocked to see what they say that they think you don't understand.
Try reading up from Memri.org in the meantime.