Just when you think you have idiot-proofed something, Nature will design a better idiot just to spite you.
Thus the reason we have to have instructions printed on a package of toothpicks, and my clothes iron has a tag on the power cord saying "warning: do not iron clothes while wearing them."
Here's the hard truth that most people don't want to admit. You can't teach IQ.
Or apparently reading comprehension. Or didn't I mention the part about needing to split the smarter kids up rather than consign them to "class moves at the pace of the slowest retard" hell courtesy of the "no child left behind" (read: EVERY child left behind) law?
They must be the only one. I know a number of people who work, or have worked, in D&B's across the country. None of the ones at 10 different locations had anything resembling maintenance at any time. They were instructed basically to lie to the customers and just say "yes, we know, the repair guy is coming tomorrow" when it was reported, even though they KNEW it would never fucking get repaired.
The only things that ever got repair were the pseudogambling machines - the skeeball, coin-drop, and other ones that passed out the tickets that you redeem for crappy-ass "prizes" at the ticket booth.
If you can ever find a D&B with a properly working machine that's not a fakie-gambling device, my hat's off to you.
There's a reason nobody goes there any more. None of the shit is EVER repaired. The local one by me had a wall of 16 of the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade units and not a single one had anywhere close to a working joystick. They left the guns on their House of the Dead machine broken for more than a year - not "broken" as in "sights a bit off" mind you, broken as in not a single shot registered onscreen ever.
Luck you. The "Computer Science" teacher in my high school was actually a math teacher. She actually had the gumption to BAN any kid in the labs who knew more than she did.
Her justification to the principal - and I am not making this up - was that she was afraid "one of them will change something and I won't know how to change it back."
I eventually wound up being a TA for one of my other teachers, helping run one of the educational programs for a foreign language class (Stupid Math Bitch couldn't read the program's text to know how to start it).
"Education" in the US is generally retarded. It doesn't help first that we have a "teach to the level of the slowest retard" (thanks, "no child left behind" laws) mentality, and it REALLY doesn't help that our teachers are paid such shitty wages and required to endure such useless ongoing certification and "continuing education" crap that the vast majority of intelligent people won't go anywhere near the field.
I don't blame the intelligent people for staying out of the field. Being a teacher in America is like signing your own death sentence, you get to work incredibly shitty hours, good luck scheduling a vacation, NO support when you have to deal with troublemaker brats whose parents haven't taught them manners, NO support for removing said troublemakers from the classroom so the rest of the kids can learn, and no support in managing to get the slowest of the slow into their own classes so that the rest of the class isn't spending all day asleep waiting as you spend the 12th straight day trying to get the retards to catch on to what the rest picked up in five minutes.
I wish I was exaggerating but I'm not.
The status of teachers in the US is simple: how do you educate kids when the only teachers you can get have to somehow be smart enough to be able to impart not just knowledge but the concept of learning to the kids, and at the same time, they have to be dumb-shit insane enough to sign up to be teachers in the US with all that comes with it?
Add to this: god damn it, what the fuck is with trying to bolt on meaningless multiplayer into every fucking game these days?
Seriously. Bolted-on multiplayer IS NOT A HELP. If you're going to design a multiplayer game, do so. But if you're designing a single-player game, then you need to spend your resources designing an honest, full, rich experience.
Too many goddamn times I've been hosed picking up a game only to find out that the single-player game takes all of maybe 6 hours to play through before you're supposed to "join the online experience." Only, the "online experience" is running around getting shot by little 16-year-olds who have their headset on "robot" mode, scream a lot, call everyone "faggot", and drop the game at the first sign that they might lose.
Want to know why 3 months after most games are released these days, you can get them for $10-15 tops at Gamestop? Because NOBODY IS PLAYING THE DAMN MULTIPLAYER ANYMORE and thus the disc is pretty much fucking worthless, since the single-player mode is pure crap.
All it takes is one fucktard in a dump truck straddling the line a bit too close, and the entire bus collapses. Cute.
Of course, this is China. They'll shoot the fucktard, repair the bus, and the next day none of the state-run newspapers will dare carry the story because it embarasses The Party.
Yet another of those "well it seems like a good idea until we really think about it" concepts, kind of like the Segway (only useful/practical in some really, really niche markets) and moving walkways (useful in airports sometimes, not really practical for city streets).
I don't see why they don't do this anyways. And they don't need the BIOS to do it.
You have your serial number on the sticker on the box. The OEM license discs won't take the non-OEM serial.
Just publish the ISO image to their FTP site, say "here it is, download/burn it wherever", and be done with it.
The real answer is that their "built-in burn your own backup" software is a ruse: first they fuck you over not including a real recovery disc separate from the hard drive, then the OEMs (Dell especially) spam ads all over the fucking screen about buying the "upgraded backup software which will back up your personal documents" while you wait for it to burn the fucking DVD at 0.5x speeds.
We get some deranged loonies out here. Net Neutrality isn't a partisan issue but it sure seems like a lot of people think "their side" is uniformly supportive of it for some reason, and they get into the same "waah republicats/demicans bad" insanity that infects all their brain-dead "thinking".
Discuss in reality. There's no reason for anyone to vote this on political lines, and the whole "pleasuring their corporate masters" thing is just fucking stupid. The question is whether a certain few Content Cartels - Cox(sucker) Cable, Comcrap, TW, AOHell, etc - can try to run an extortion scam on content providers like Hulu and Youtube.
The deals your ISP makes aren't limited to just inside your city or state. The product they sell (access to websites from anywhere, not just in-state) isn't just in-state. Therefore your ISP is covered by the IC clause.
Sigh back. Anonymous cowards who don't know the first thing about law should go away.
Government: We're taking your farm under the commerce clause. Farmer: But the fifth amendment! Government: Commerce clause trumps. Your farm affects interstate commerce. You lose, haha!
Obviously you didn't see the eminent-domain cases a few years back where the Supreme Court ruled, under "interstate commerce", that a state taking people's homes away to build a "business park" for a stripmall and factory in order enlarge their tax base was legit thanks to the IC clause.
According to current SC precedents, just about NOTHING trumps the IC Clause.
Even easier. The 5th amendment is still subject to the Interstate Commerce clause and nobody in their right mind can claim the Internet isn't integrated just about fully with interstate commerce these days.
Go anywhere NEAR the level of the Supreme Court and their response will be "5th amendment? Sorry, Interstate Commerce. Buh-bye now." Even the 9th Circus couldn't manage to mess that ruling up.
I'm having retail titles - as old as FF13, as new as the new Transformers that came out a couple weeks ago.
Official response from $ony "tech support" both by phone and online: "oh just turn off 5.1 sound in the dashboard and go down to stereo and it'll be fine." Well WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF MY HAVING A 5.1 SURROUND SYSTEM THEN?
They know about this. They're just too fucking lazy to fix it properly. Seems to be connected to one of the boneheaded ass-tastic new DRM schemes they added in 2-3 updates ago.
For actual suburban driving - where you're 60% freeway and either in steady-state or "parking lot" traffic - hybrids turned out to be terrible. You got less benefit from them than just from having a standard transmission and learning to use it correctly.
That soured a lot of people on the notion of electric/hybrid in general.
See also: the reason that Mac/Linuxheads were able to claim their systems "didn't have viruses" for so long - they weren't a sizable enough portion of the market for anyone trying to make a botnet to bother with them.
If you don't have a critical mass, you won't get targeted. Don't rely on it being a selling point.
What's really pissy is where it's a "multiplayer" mode that's completely limited to only one player per box.
If I can't do 4-player, head-to-head at home, then I can't gather friends and have it as a party game. And therefore it's pointless, because I don't want to spend that much time online with random people.
Completely agreed on Bioshock 2. All the time they wasted on multiplayer mode could have been spent making the single-player game that much stronger.
the vast majority of Japanese indie games that get localized for US release are pornographic.
To be fair, calling them "games" is overstating the case. They're basically click-through porno slideshows with maybe 2-3 "storyline decision points" along the way.
Sadly, we'll never see anything of the sort in the USA, because the MafiAA and ISP-Mafia ensure that 90% or more of our people don't even have two rival choices for their ISP - just whatever the fuck shitty company like Cocks or Comcrap paid off the local county board for the right to run "exclusive" cable or phone lines back in the day.
FiOS is 2 miles from my house, but I can't buy it because Verizon doesn't own the fucking PHONE LINES on my side of the interstate and therefore isn't allowed to service fiber to my house either. For fuck's sake.
Factual, accurate news broadcasts are important to the well-being of a country. They are the cornerstone of democracy.
The problem is now that we've had tilted propaganda, rather than honest fact, masquerading as "the evening news" for so long that people's instinctive reaction is to reject it.
It's also not hard to believe when CNN is (for instance from today) parroting Iranian propaganda and calling the terrorist front "Gadhafi Foundation Charity" as if it were gospel. The fact that newsmedia regularly parrot obvious lies has destroyed their credibility to the point that even when they tell the truth, nobody really believes them anyways.
Maybe the US can deploy these to our own southern border, so we don't have to have our border patrol agents and citizens constantly getting killed by the narco-smuggler terrorists from that shitty little rat-infested scumhole to our south.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember the fundamental law of the universe.
Just when you think you have idiot-proofed something, Nature will design a better idiot just to spite you.
Thus the reason we have to have instructions printed on a package of toothpicks, and my clothes iron has a tag on the power cord saying "warning: do not iron clothes while wearing them."
Pretty much anything on this list.
I'm waiting for Idiocracy to occur. After all, we already have "Ow, My Balls" on TV - ABC just calls it "Wipeout."
Here's the hard truth that most people don't want to admit. You can't teach IQ.
Or apparently reading comprehension. Or didn't I mention the part about needing to split the smarter kids up rather than consign them to "class moves at the pace of the slowest retard" hell courtesy of the "no child left behind" (read: EVERY child left behind) law?
They must be the only one. I know a number of people who work, or have worked, in D&B's across the country. None of the ones at 10 different locations had anything resembling maintenance at any time. They were instructed basically to lie to the customers and just say "yes, we know, the repair guy is coming tomorrow" when it was reported, even though they KNEW it would never fucking get repaired.
The only things that ever got repair were the pseudogambling machines - the skeeball, coin-drop, and other ones that passed out the tickets that you redeem for crappy-ass "prizes" at the ticket booth.
If you can ever find a D&B with a properly working machine that's not a fakie-gambling device, my hat's off to you.
There's a reason nobody goes there any more. None of the shit is EVER repaired. The local one by me had a wall of 16 of the Star Wars Trilogy Arcade units and not a single one had anywhere close to a working joystick. They left the guns on their House of the Dead machine broken for more than a year - not "broken" as in "sights a bit off" mind you, broken as in not a single shot registered onscreen ever.
Luck you. The "Computer Science" teacher in my high school was actually a math teacher. She actually had the gumption to BAN any kid in the labs who knew more than she did.
Her justification to the principal - and I am not making this up - was that she was afraid "one of them will change something and I won't know how to change it back."
I eventually wound up being a TA for one of my other teachers, helping run one of the educational programs for a foreign language class (Stupid Math Bitch couldn't read the program's text to know how to start it).
"Education" in the US is generally retarded. It doesn't help first that we have a "teach to the level of the slowest retard" (thanks, "no child left behind" laws) mentality, and it REALLY doesn't help that our teachers are paid such shitty wages and required to endure such useless ongoing certification and "continuing education" crap that the vast majority of intelligent people won't go anywhere near the field.
I don't blame the intelligent people for staying out of the field. Being a teacher in America is like signing your own death sentence, you get to work incredibly shitty hours, good luck scheduling a vacation, NO support when you have to deal with troublemaker brats whose parents haven't taught them manners, NO support for removing said troublemakers from the classroom so the rest of the kids can learn, and no support in managing to get the slowest of the slow into their own classes so that the rest of the class isn't spending all day asleep waiting as you spend the 12th straight day trying to get the retards to catch on to what the rest picked up in five minutes.
I wish I was exaggerating but I'm not.
The status of teachers in the US is simple: how do you educate kids when the only teachers you can get have to somehow be smart enough to be able to impart not just knowledge but the concept of learning to the kids, and at the same time, they have to be dumb-shit insane enough to sign up to be teachers in the US with all that comes with it?
Add to this: god damn it, what the fuck is with trying to bolt on meaningless multiplayer into every fucking game these days?
Seriously. Bolted-on multiplayer IS NOT A HELP. If you're going to design a multiplayer game, do so. But if you're designing a single-player game, then you need to spend your resources designing an honest, full, rich experience.
Too many goddamn times I've been hosed picking up a game only to find out that the single-player game takes all of maybe 6 hours to play through before you're supposed to "join the online experience." Only, the "online experience" is running around getting shot by little 16-year-olds who have their headset on "robot" mode, scream a lot, call everyone "faggot", and drop the game at the first sign that they might lose.
Want to know why 3 months after most games are released these days, you can get them for $10-15 tops at Gamestop? Because NOBODY IS PLAYING THE DAMN MULTIPLAYER ANYMORE and thus the disc is pretty much fucking worthless, since the single-player mode is pure crap.
Enough with "obligatory multiplayer."
All it takes is one fucktard in a dump truck straddling the line a bit too close, and the entire bus collapses. Cute.
Of course, this is China. They'll shoot the fucktard, repair the bus, and the next day none of the state-run newspapers will dare carry the story because it embarasses The Party.
Yet another of those "well it seems like a good idea until we really think about it" concepts, kind of like the Segway (only useful/practical in some really, really niche markets) and moving walkways (useful in airports sometimes, not really practical for city streets).
I don't see why they don't do this anyways. And they don't need the BIOS to do it.
You have your serial number on the sticker on the box. The OEM license discs won't take the non-OEM serial.
Just publish the ISO image to their FTP site, say "here it is, download/burn it wherever", and be done with it.
The real answer is that their "built-in burn your own backup" software is a ruse: first they fuck you over not including a real recovery disc separate from the hard drive, then the OEMs (Dell especially) spam ads all over the fucking screen about buying the "upgraded backup software which will back up your personal documents" while you wait for it to burn the fucking DVD at 0.5x speeds.
We get some deranged loonies out here. Net Neutrality isn't a partisan issue but it sure seems like a lot of people think "their side" is uniformly supportive of it for some reason, and they get into the same "waah republicats/demicans bad" insanity that infects all their brain-dead "thinking".
Oh really?
You realize some of the biggest "corporate masters" pushing for Net Neutrality are Microsoft, Google, etc - right?
And that just as many Democrats - Joe LIEberman, these 73 asstard bastards, Jay Rockefeller who recently put forth the "emergency censorship for Da Prezzy" bill - hate Net Neutrality?
Discuss in reality. There's no reason for anyone to vote this on political lines, and the whole "pleasuring their corporate masters" thing is just fucking stupid. The question is whether a certain few Content Cartels - Cox(sucker) Cable, Comcrap, TW, AOHell, etc - can try to run an extortion scam on content providers like Hulu and Youtube.
The deals your ISP makes aren't limited to just inside your city or state. The product they sell (access to websites from anywhere, not just in-state) isn't just in-state. Therefore your ISP is covered by the IC clause.
YOU may not be buying anything. But someone out of state bought advertising space somewhere you went.
Sigh back. Anonymous cowards who don't know the first thing about law should go away.
Government: We're taking your farm under the commerce clause.
Farmer: But the fifth amendment!
Government: Commerce clause trumps. Your farm affects interstate commerce. You lose, haha!
Obviously you didn't see the eminent-domain cases a few years back where the Supreme Court ruled, under "interstate commerce", that a state taking people's homes away to build a "business park" for a stripmall and factory in order enlarge their tax base was legit thanks to the IC clause.
According to current SC precedents, just about NOTHING trumps the IC Clause.
Even easier. The 5th amendment is still subject to the Interstate Commerce clause and nobody in their right mind can claim the Internet isn't integrated just about fully with interstate commerce these days.
Go anywhere NEAR the level of the Supreme Court and their response will be "5th amendment? Sorry, Interstate Commerce. Buh-bye now." Even the 9th Circus couldn't manage to mess that ruling up.
I'm having retail titles - as old as FF13, as new as the new Transformers that came out a couple weeks ago.
Official response from $ony "tech support" both by phone and online: "oh just turn off 5.1 sound in the dashboard and go down to stereo and it'll be fine." Well WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF MY HAVING A 5.1 SURROUND SYSTEM THEN?
They know about this. They're just too fucking lazy to fix it properly. Seems to be connected to one of the boneheaded ass-tastic new DRM schemes they added in 2-3 updates ago.
For actual suburban driving - where you're 60% freeway and either in steady-state or "parking lot" traffic - hybrids turned out to be terrible. You got less benefit from them than just from having a standard transmission and learning to use it correctly.
That soured a lot of people on the notion of electric/hybrid in general.
Wouldn't surprise me.
They still haven't bothered to fix all the audio glitch/skipping hell that the last couple firmware updates unleashed too.
Typical $ony. They rushed around to fuck over homebrew, and broke half the machine in the process. It's the PSP all over again.
See also: the reason that Mac/Linuxheads were able to claim their systems "didn't have viruses" for so long - they weren't a sizable enough portion of the market for anyone trying to make a botnet to bother with them.
If you don't have a critical mass, you won't get targeted. Don't rely on it being a selling point.
What's really pissy is where it's a "multiplayer" mode that's completely limited to only one player per box.
If I can't do 4-player, head-to-head at home, then I can't gather friends and have it as a party game. And therefore it's pointless, because I don't want to spend that much time online with random people.
Completely agreed on Bioshock 2. All the time they wasted on multiplayer mode could have been spent making the single-player game that much stronger.
But you have to turn off aim correction. And most console gamers wouldn't know what to do with themselves once that crutch is gone.
I want to know something.
Why are we all worried over 7 republicraps when yesterday it was 73 paid-off democraps doing precisely the same thing?
The problem is ALL OF THEM, corrupt boobs on both sides of the aisle, not one side or the other. Sheesh.
the vast majority of Japanese indie games that get localized for US release are pornographic.
To be fair, calling them "games" is overstating the case. They're basically click-through porno slideshows with maybe 2-3 "storyline decision points" along the way.
Sadly, we'll never see anything of the sort in the USA, because the MafiAA and ISP-Mafia ensure that 90% or more of our people don't even have two rival choices for their ISP - just whatever the fuck shitty company like Cocks or Comcrap paid off the local county board for the right to run "exclusive" cable or phone lines back in the day.
FiOS is 2 miles from my house, but I can't buy it because Verizon doesn't own the fucking PHONE LINES on my side of the interstate and therefore isn't allowed to service fiber to my house either. For fuck's sake.
Factual, accurate news broadcasts are important to the well-being of a country. They are the cornerstone of democracy.
The problem is now that we've had tilted propaganda, rather than honest fact, masquerading as "the evening news" for so long that people's instinctive reaction is to reject it.
It's also not hard to believe when CNN is (for instance from today) parroting Iranian propaganda and calling the terrorist front "Gadhafi Foundation Charity" as if it were gospel. The fact that newsmedia regularly parrot obvious lies has destroyed their credibility to the point that even when they tell the truth, nobody really believes them anyways.
Maybe the US can deploy these to our own southern border, so we don't have to have our border patrol agents and citizens constantly getting killed by the narco-smuggler terrorists from that shitty little rat-infested scumhole to our south.