I'm guessing that cost is why Fallout III and New Vegas were bug riddled And Skyrim seems to be a bugfest as well.
You probably haven't played many Bethesda games then. Bethesda in general release incredibly buggy titles. 90% of the bugs fixed in the PC versions of Fallout:NV, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, and earlier Bethesda titles have only been patched because people in the mod community got so fucking fed up with Bethesda's incompetent patch division that they did the patching themselves and released it to the community at large.
I'm all for pointing out that Microsoft gouges developers on the cost to issue patches over Xbox Live, but blaming Microsoft for Bethesda's shitty coding is just being blatantly ignorant of history.
In case you think I'm joking... out of the last 10 disc games I bought for the Xbox360, 9 had a 0-day patch already sitting on Xbox Live. Out of the last 10 games I bought on Xbox Live, 7 of 10 had a patch the day I bought it. NONE of the games I currently own for the 360 has gone unpatched. Not one. And to top it off, their "interface updates" made half the dashboard themes pointless and unusable, since most of the visuals wind up hidden behind that stupid bottom-half "grey shadow" area.
The Wii games aren't patchable (which got them into a bit of trouble when Metroid: Other M turned out to have a game-breaking bug) but how often have they pushed out console updates? And what have they done with them really? Except for the one that allowed for larger SD storage and the swap-trick to "play games" off of storage (really, just leaving internal storage blank and swapping the chosen item from SD into it on the fly), what have they actually patched? It doesn't seem they've done much of anything, certainly the interface never improved.
And let's not even get started with the garbage updates on the PS3, that actually REMOVED features...
Hell, in this generation the consoles THEMSELVES are "ship now, patch later" bullshit... Xbox360, PS3, Wii, all of them constantly need "updates." And rarely do they ever improve functionality.
I'm sad to see the parent poster marked down - this comment was dead-on accurate. Far too many Texans are far too filled with hubris regarding their own state, and very little regard for their fellow states in the USA or the nations of the rest of the world.
Hell, their own brain-damaged governor actually started up secession talk when he was pandering to the Tea Party fringe.
as it starts off with "even if israel had tried to stop the islamists" suggesting that they supported rather than opposed.
And I pointed out to you, Israel was basically being NEUTRAL towards internal Palestinian politics.
The fact that Israel didn't rain down bombs on the heads of each and every islamist group that may or may not be called a "predecessor to Hamas" does not show they were "supporting" them. There are a lot of different "charity groups" involved in the Palestinian society, including - as someone else pointed out - the charity wing of Fatah, too. And Israel recognizes most of them as charitable groups.
I'm done. You can have the last word because I'm pretty sure that no mater what you write all it will do is demonstrate your personal lack of objectivity rather than an interest in uncovering the truth.
Yawn. And I've seen so far that YOU have a startling personal lack of objectivity.
In turn, take a look at Google who is outright buying companies to make their patent war-chest larger and larger. They're somewhat new company so they're only been preparing their chest now.
Meanwhile, how many companies have already filed patent lawsuits at Google already? I don't like it, and I definitely see it as a sign of how broken the patent system is, but Google's doing the same thing that most other big corporations do - they're trying to make sure they have a large enough patent war-chest that when the next group sues them, they can force it into a "well this guy says we're violating patent X, but they're violating our patent Y themselves" settlement scenario, the same sort of thing that happens all the time between big companies (look at the "patent-sharing access" agreements between, say, Intel and AMD).
It sucks, because it makes the patent system about fucking over the smaller companies and ensuring the big semi-monopolies are the only ones who can play on a level playing field. But that's how it works and WHY the patent system needs drastic reform.
Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.
Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda."
Single quotes taken out of context is all you have? That ALSO is from the article. Also, as mentioned by Jackbird, Israel recognizes a lot of charities. That doesn't mean they recognized, nor encouraged, Hamas.
Misleading headline aside, it details an Israeli decision not to interfere in internal Palestinian politics (gee, I wonder what would happen if the "evil joos" wandered in to break up the fighting?). It details times when Israel tried to find a partner for peace negotiations, only to find out that, whoops, Hamas had no intention of peace.
Citations are worthless if they don't say what you claim they say.
from 10 years ago, the same areas look like wastelands for net access in general.
Telecommunications companies simply don't want to build out. Either the government makes them do it, or they drag their feet on it. The more they drag their feet, the more isolated the communities out there become. Some communities out there - like the FLDS compounds - actually thrive on that level of isolation.
It's not a matter of carriers not being able to "afford" building out - previous telecommunications acts requiring them to build out telephone infrastructure proved that not to be the case. They just don't "want" to.
"Free Market" at work, apparently. It doesn't fix shit.
The US government DID fund the Taliban (rather than see the USSR take over Afghanistan). However, the whole "Israel funded Hamas" bullshit is just that, bullshit. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which was Egypt-centered and got (still gets) most of its funding and material through Iranian connections (similar to other MB offshoots such as the Lebanese Hizb'Allah and the current Syrian government).
The reason for this was that Iran has a tendency to fund Twelver Shi'a uprisings and groups in mostly-Sunni countries.
Do a little research next time before parroting bullshit.
- Never sleeps - Never needs air - Has no conscience - Has enough funding to run a team of lawyers 24/7 - Cannot be imprisoned or arrested, even for a single hour
I'll believe a corporation is a person when one can be given the death penalty for murder. Oh, wait, they just fine the corporation lots of money and the people responsible for the murderous decisions get off scot free with a golden stock parachute...
If you look at Newegg's RMA FAQ, they're draconian.
For instance, they want you to remove all passwords from laptops or notebook computers if you RMA one. Interesting question - how do you do that if it's a HDD failure on the laptop? What happens if you RMA it because it was a faulty motherboard and now won't boot? A lot of their laptops/notebooks you can't remove the HDD to perform a wipe prior to returning it; a dead motherboard = returned laptop with data on HDD.
As for data privacy, it appears they have no policy whatsoever. RMA the drive direct to manufacturer and you may have some recourse... of course, I've also found that Seagate are assholes about packaging (in order to get an RMA from them once, I had to to two levels up for a supervisor who'd agree to send me a shipping box, as the Fedex and UPS offices in my area only provided packing peanuts and bubble wrap, and Seagate insists on "foam" or those weird plastic endpiece things).
I haven't had to return a consumer hard drive (yet), do they have to be returned in working order? If not, then I'd open it up and physically scrape a screwdriver across the platters.
Ever read the standard warranty terms?
To open the drive you have to break the "warranty void if removed" sticker/foil. Either it's covering a screw to prevent opening the drive, or there's enough stickers you can't just open it without making it obvious you did.
Return it to them in that condition, and they'll either say "no coverage" and refuse to ship it back, or they'll insist you can only have a replacement at full retail cost.
- They yank you out of your home/business/wherever, rough you up. - Put you through the humiliation of arreest - Put you through the stress of sitting waiting for a lawyer or being interrogated wondering what the hell is going to happen to your kids, if you ever get to go back home, and use the usual thug cop tactics and sleep deprivation techniques that they're not supposed to use but nod and wink at anyways. - Then drag you around further before a judge demanding you cough up a random, long-length line of gibberish.
And you're saying it's NOT reasonable that a person put through that kind of stress could have trouble remembering it?
Thanks for the defense - but I doubt any facts will budge his mind. The fact that someone marked him "insightful" just proves how annoyingly uninformed much of the Slashdot audience is.
Maybe sandboxing the damn flash player will stop it from periodically causing Firefox to hang for 30 seconds or so thanks to some damn ugly "full motion video" ad that's trying to load up?
I'd love to see a ban on FMV ads. Double for FMV ads that start themselves automatically, and quadruple for those fucking ads that blast audio after doing so.
Sad that this got modded troll. For the cost of just one of the military's insanely expensive, never used "next generation" airplanes that get crashed by trainees more often than they see battle, entire NASA projects could be funded for a decade...
Especially since in MH's case, the Supreme Court upheld jurisdiction shopping as a way to get convictions on someone, even if they'd already been tried and acquitted or the charges thrown out in other states.
- Government attacks on journalists. - Government attacks on citizens who take video recordings of police in public, often because those citizens posted to sites like Youtube the evidence of police committing abuse and brutality. - Government shutdowns of entire websites based not on convictions under the law, but of "indictments" based on one-sided presentation of carefully chosen and misrepresented lists of evidence, complete with fabricated and delusional accusations of "mass conspiracy" spun out of whole cloth with inserted accusations of "terrorism" and other things designed not to have any factual basis but merely to constitute an emotional appeal (read: "oh but think of the children", which always comes behind some censorship law or other).
Hell, you don't even have to be that recent. The "USA PATRIOT ACT" (what an Orwellian name!) has plenty to be worried about already. And then we have the DMCA and all the other chilling effects laws the USA has enacted...
So now we've had: -India -China -Saudi Arabia -Turkey -France -USA
Of course, that's just the "official state reactions" trying to force some sort of speech off the internet. Then there's MafiAA goon tactics, and of course the Mohammed Cartoons stuff which was "officially stateless" (though Iran, and a few of the other terrorist groups, had a bounty on the head of cartoonists for a while if I remember right).
The one I find most disheartening is the USA. Remember when they actually believed in their whole First Amendment thing? Yeah, that hasn't been the case since Nixon apparently.
After I'm dead, both are equivalent to each other (in a system which doesn't punish descendants for their parents crimes; in a system which did, there would remain a substantive difference, but that's more a problem with punishing descendants for the crimes of their ancestors than with the form of corrective measure for the original conviction.)
And you really think that if you want to go into government work, or get a security clearance, the government or business won't look at your family's history for lists of crimes/convictions as one way to judge whether you get clearance or not?
If Turing were alive today, the pardon would actually have a substantive effect.
And you think that an official government statement, with the force of ALL the government behind it rather than just Gordon Brown blathering with no legal impact, wouldn't have an immense symbolic impact regarding the progress of, and importance of, ensuring that ALL human beings enjoy equal human rights?
A lot of people have been pointing to Gordon Brown's "apology" as being enough. Brown's "apology" had no force of law and no force of government behind it. A pardon would have both: that's a HUGE difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing that cost is why Fallout III and New Vegas were bug riddled And Skyrim seems to be a bugfest as well.
You probably haven't played many Bethesda games then. Bethesda in general release incredibly buggy titles. 90% of the bugs fixed in the PC versions of Fallout:NV, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Morrowind, and earlier Bethesda titles have only been patched because people in the mod community got so fucking fed up with Bethesda's incompetent patch division that they did the patching themselves and released it to the community at large.
I'm all for pointing out that Microsoft gouges developers on the cost to issue patches over Xbox Live, but blaming Microsoft for Bethesda's shitty coding is just being blatantly ignorant of history.
In case you think I'm joking... out of the last 10 disc games I bought for the Xbox360, 9 had a 0-day patch already sitting on Xbox Live. Out of the last 10 games I bought on Xbox Live, 7 of 10 had a patch the day I bought it. NONE of the games I currently own for the 360 has gone unpatched. Not one. And to top it off, their "interface updates" made half the dashboard themes pointless and unusable, since most of the visuals wind up hidden behind that stupid bottom-half "grey shadow" area.
The Wii games aren't patchable (which got them into a bit of trouble when Metroid: Other M turned out to have a game-breaking bug) but how often have they pushed out console updates? And what have they done with them really? Except for the one that allowed for larger SD storage and the swap-trick to "play games" off of storage (really, just leaving internal storage blank and swapping the chosen item from SD into it on the fly), what have they actually patched? It doesn't seem they've done much of anything, certainly the interface never improved.
And let's not even get started with the garbage updates on the PS3, that actually REMOVED features...
Hell, in this generation the consoles THEMSELVES are "ship now, patch later" bullshit... Xbox360, PS3, Wii, all of them constantly need "updates." And rarely do they ever improve functionality.
I'm sad to see the parent poster marked down - this comment was dead-on accurate. Far too many Texans are far too filled with hubris regarding their own state, and very little regard for their fellow states in the USA or the nations of the rest of the world.
Hell, their own brain-damaged governor actually started up secession talk when he was pandering to the Tea Party fringe.
The number of wack-job falsehoods that get tossed around by Texans - including that "they're the only state allowed to fly their flag at equal height to the US flag", that they somehow reserved the right to secede, or that Texas somehow had an economic miracle based on "conservatism" that sheltered it from the recent recession (that third one being more full of manure than your average rancher's livestock pens) - are absolutely insane. And yet they keep on believing them and not realizing that maybe Texas isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread... sigh.
It's like visiting Kentucky then - 5 million people, 5 last names.
as it starts off with "even if israel had tried to stop the islamists" suggesting that they supported rather than opposed.
And I pointed out to you, Israel was basically being NEUTRAL towards internal Palestinian politics.
The fact that Israel didn't rain down bombs on the heads of each and every islamist group that may or may not be called a "predecessor to Hamas" does not show they were "supporting" them. There are a lot of different "charity groups" involved in the Palestinian society, including - as someone else pointed out - the charity wing of Fatah, too. And Israel recognizes most of them as charitable groups.
I'm done. You can have the last word because I'm pretty sure that no mater what you write all it will do is demonstrate your personal lack of objectivity rather than an interest in uncovering the truth.
Yawn. And I've seen so far that YOU have a startling personal lack of objectivity.
In turn, take a look at Google who is outright buying companies to make their patent war-chest larger and larger. They're somewhat new company so they're only been preparing their chest now.
Meanwhile, how many companies have already filed patent lawsuits at Google already? I don't like it, and I definitely see it as a sign of how broken the patent system is, but Google's doing the same thing that most other big corporations do - they're trying to make sure they have a large enough patent war-chest that when the next group sues them, they can force it into a "well this guy says we're violating patent X, but they're violating our patent Y themselves" settlement scenario, the same sort of thing that happens all the time between big companies (look at the "patent-sharing access" agreements between, say, Intel and AMD).
It sucks, because it makes the patent system about fucking over the smaller companies and ensuring the big semi-monopolies are the only ones who can play on a level playing field. But that's how it works and WHY the patent system needs drastic reform.
Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group's recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. "Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons," Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.
Arieh Spitzen, the former head of the Israeli military's Department of Palestinian Affairs, says that even if Israel had tried to stop the Islamists sooner, he doubts it could have done much to curb political Islam, a movement that was spreading across the Muslim world. He says attempts to stop it are akin to trying to change the internal rhythms of nature: "It is like saying: 'I will kill all the mosquitoes.' But then you get even worse insects that will kill you...You break the balance. You kill Hamas you might get al Qaeda."
Single quotes taken out of context is all you have? That ALSO is from the article. Also, as mentioned by Jackbird, Israel recognizes a lot of charities. That doesn't mean they recognized, nor encouraged, Hamas.
Did you actually read the article in question?
Misleading headline aside, it details an Israeli decision not to interfere in internal Palestinian politics (gee, I wonder what would happen if the "evil joos" wandered in to break up the fighting?). It details times when Israel tried to find a partner for peace negotiations, only to find out that, whoops, Hamas had no intention of peace.
Citations are worthless if they don't say what you claim they say.
from 10 years ago, the same areas look like wastelands for net access in general.
Telecommunications companies simply don't want to build out. Either the government makes them do it, or they drag their feet on it. The more they drag their feet, the more isolated the communities out there become. Some communities out there - like the FLDS compounds - actually thrive on that level of isolation.
It's not a matter of carriers not being able to "afford" building out - previous telecommunications acts requiring them to build out telephone infrastructure proved that not to be the case. They just don't "want" to.
"Free Market" at work, apparently. It doesn't fix shit.
You've got your history partially wrong.
The US government DID fund the Taliban (rather than see the USSR take over Afghanistan). However, the whole "Israel funded Hamas" bullshit is just that, bullshit. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which was Egypt-centered and got (still gets) most of its funding and material through Iranian connections (similar to other MB offshoots such as the Lebanese Hizb'Allah and the current Syrian government).
The reason for this was that Iran has a tendency to fund Twelver Shi'a uprisings and groups in mostly-Sunni countries.
Do a little research next time before parroting bullshit.
Corporations are what you'd get with a human who:
- Never sleeps
- Never needs air
- Has no conscience
- Has enough funding to run a team of lawyers 24/7
- Cannot be imprisoned or arrested, even for a single hour
I'll believe a corporation is a person when one can be given the death penalty for murder. Oh, wait, they just fine the corporation lots of money and the people responsible for the murderous decisions get off scot free with a golden stock parachute...
This show would SO be more popular than their show.
If you look at Newegg's RMA FAQ, they're draconian.
For instance, they want you to remove all passwords from laptops or notebook computers if you RMA one. Interesting question - how do you do that if it's a HDD failure on the laptop? What happens if you RMA it because it was a faulty motherboard and now won't boot? A lot of their laptops/notebooks you can't remove the HDD to perform a wipe prior to returning it; a dead motherboard = returned laptop with data on HDD.
As for data privacy, it appears they have no policy whatsoever. RMA the drive direct to manufacturer and you may have some recourse... of course, I've also found that Seagate are assholes about packaging (in order to get an RMA from them once, I had to to two levels up for a supervisor who'd agree to send me a shipping box, as the Fedex and UPS offices in my area only provided packing peanuts and bubble wrap, and Seagate insists on "foam" or those weird plastic endpiece things).
I haven't had to return a consumer hard drive (yet), do they have to be returned in working order? If not, then I'd open it up and physically scrape a screwdriver across the platters.
Ever read the standard warranty terms?
To open the drive you have to break the "warranty void if removed" sticker/foil. Either it's covering a screw to prevent opening the drive, or there's enough stickers you can't just open it without making it obvious you did.
Return it to them in that condition, and they'll either say "no coverage" and refuse to ship it back, or they'll insist you can only have a replacement at full retail cost.
So lemme get this straight:
- They yank you out of your home/business/wherever, rough you up.
- Put you through the humiliation of arreest
- Put you through the stress of sitting waiting for a lawyer or being interrogated wondering what the hell is going to happen to your kids, if you ever get to go back home, and use the usual thug cop tactics and sleep deprivation techniques that they're not supposed to use but nod and wink at anyways.
- Then drag you around further before a judge demanding you cough up a random, long-length line of gibberish.
And you're saying it's NOT reasonable that a person put through that kind of stress could have trouble remembering it?
Thanks for the defense - but I doubt any facts will budge his mind. The fact that someone marked him "insightful" just proves how annoyingly uninformed much of the Slashdot audience is.
Maybe sandboxing the damn flash player will stop it from periodically causing Firefox to hang for 30 seconds or so thanks to some damn ugly "full motion video" ad that's trying to load up?
I'd love to see a ban on FMV ads. Double for FMV ads that start themselves automatically, and quadruple for those fucking ads that blast audio after doing so.
Ok, how about actual numbers?
Total spending, 2012: $1.030-1.415 Trillion. Depending on a number of factors.
Anyone else think that's completely fucking insane?
Sad that this got modded troll. For the cost of just one of the military's insanely expensive, never used "next generation" airplanes that get crashed by trainees more often than they see battle, entire NASA projects could be funded for a decade...
Especially since in MH's case, the Supreme Court upheld jurisdiction shopping as a way to get convictions on someone, even if they'd already been tried and acquitted or the charges thrown out in other states.
Let's see. USA has had:
- Government attacks on journalists.
- Government attacks on citizens who take video recordings of police in public, often because those citizens posted to sites like Youtube the evidence of police committing abuse and brutality.
- Government shutdowns of entire websites based not on convictions under the law, but of "indictments" based on one-sided presentation of carefully chosen and misrepresented lists of evidence, complete with fabricated and delusional accusations of "mass conspiracy" spun out of whole cloth with inserted accusations of "terrorism" and other things designed not to have any factual basis but merely to constitute an emotional appeal (read: "oh but think of the children", which always comes behind some censorship law or other).
Hell, you don't even have to be that recent. The "USA PATRIOT ACT" (what an Orwellian name!) has plenty to be worried about already. And then we have the DMCA and all the other chilling effects laws the USA has enacted...
Meanwhile, was it really over a decade ago that the cult of scientology was forcing comments off of slashdot?
Let's see.
So now we've had:
-India
-China
-Saudi Arabia
-Turkey
-France
-USA
Of course, that's just the "official state reactions" trying to force some sort of speech off the internet. Then there's MafiAA goon tactics, and of course the Mohammed Cartoons stuff which was "officially stateless" (though Iran, and a few of the other terrorist groups, had a bounty on the head of cartoonists for a while if I remember right).
The one I find most disheartening is the USA. Remember when they actually believed in their whole First Amendment thing? Yeah, that hasn't been the case since Nixon apparently.
After I'm dead, both are equivalent to each other (in a system which doesn't punish descendants for their parents crimes; in a system which did, there would remain a substantive difference, but that's more a problem with punishing descendants for the crimes of their ancestors than with the form of corrective measure for the original conviction.)
And you really think that if you want to go into government work, or get a security clearance, the government or business won't look at your family's history for lists of crimes/convictions as one way to judge whether you get clearance or not?
If Turing were alive today, the pardon would actually have a substantive effect.
And you think that an official government statement, with the force of ALL the government behind it rather than just Gordon Brown blathering with no legal impact, wouldn't have an immense symbolic impact regarding the progress of, and importance of, ensuring that ALL human beings enjoy equal human rights?
A lot of people have been pointing to Gordon Brown's "apology" as being enough. Brown's "apology" had no force of law and no force of government behind it. A pardon would have both: that's a HUGE difference.