No, I don't complain when movie stars start giving interviews about their movies. I do complain when news channels talk about them as if they were actual news, rather than interviews about movies. More relevantly to this, though, I would get annoyed if the newspaper posted an article that started with "this movie is the greatest movie ever! Everyone should go see it!", and it wasn't in the reviews section.
Why? I don't get it. Yes, slashvertisements have always existed, but at least they've always been of the form "here is a neat thing I found." This is one very, *very* small step removed from just posting actual ad videos. Cut it out.
Then you must not have found very many classes interesting... I would've had to have one of those time turner thingies from Harry Potter in order to show up to all the classes. (That and the fact that my school wouldn't let a person enroll in dozens of units in a semester, for several reasons that should be pretty obvious.)
If you could start a semester at college by signing up for every class that looked remotely interesting, show up to the first lecture or two, decide whether it was, then only take the classes you wanted, you'd probably see rates more like that. If you could do that and also college was *free*, then you'd really see rates like that. I'm not seeing why either of those things are bad.
Now, you can argue that an online-only approach is inherently not going to be as good for a lot of subjects as an approach that involves some hands-on work under the direct supervision with a professor you can talk to directly, and I would agree with that argument. But then again, in a lot of (larger) schools, a lot of classes that would benefit from that sort of approach wouldn't get it anyway - they'd get mostly large classroom lectures taught by TAs, in which case, you could hardly argue that's terribly different from a Coursera course, other than in the relative difficulty and cost of signing up for the class.
I'd give you mod points if I had them: +1 for singular they. Using a gendered word for a person of unknown gender is dumb, and singular they is a perfectly reasonable workaround.
They should just pass a law that they can issue a huge fine to anyone who has an accident in an intersection. And then have cops occasionally shoot out peoples' tires as they're driving by. They'd make millions!
Only a day after the last installment! Though this article only has 3 possible candidates, to that article's 4... those candidates are 3/5s of all the words in the headline, to that other article's 4/7.
Every game has jargon. Every big game has a lot of jargon. At least WoW's jargon sounds fantasy-esque. Listen to Kingdom of Loathing speedsters sometime, the jargon sounds like they're on some powerful drugs. Yellow-raying, puttying ghosts, faxing lobsters, sewerleveling, the nun trick...
It's always fun when you play a game a lot, to listen to what you just said (which made total sense to you and the people you said it to, who also play the game), and repeat it back to yourself thinking as someone who doesn't play the game. I'd say at least 75% of any given sentence would be total gibberish. Regardless of the game.
If they made another series of Firefly and you could only watch it legally on tv, by paying for Cable and getting a buttload of garbage you didn't want, then yes, I would probably torrent it. If, on the other hand, you could purchase it legally either by streaming it or by just buying the dvds? I would buy the crap out of it.
And Arrested Development is amazing. I recommend that you go watch it. It's pretty big news in the geek world that netflix is bringing it back - because it was a fantastic show, not because of any sort of stupid groupthink.
As someone who only started midway through BC, and who was not by any means in any kind of well-known or prestigious guild... yeah, I basically agree with all of that (except vanilla, which I wasn't around for, but I'm not sure I would've been that happy with the "you will be in an uber-leet 40m raid guild, or you don't get to see most of the interesting parts of the game" philosophy at that time.) BC seemed alright, Wrath was... well, half of it was amazing, it got off to kind of a weak start, raid-wise, and ToC was obvious filler, but Ulduar was probably the best thing they ever made. Cataclysm just couldn't live up to it (though I did like the old-world revamp).
If they had rethought their "every couple months everyone must do a bunch of boring grinds every day if they want to progress" philosophy instead of just keeping piling on more of them all throughout Cataclysm, I might still be playing. But nope, I hear it's at least as bad for that now, on top of the idiocy of pokebattles and making an April Fools race into a real one.
Every once in a while I get nostalgic for the fun I had in WoW, but not enough to pay them.
Basically this exact thing happened to Kingdom of Loathing... like 9 years ago... at a time when that game was basically still in beta, and was basically the work of two people, neither of whom would actually have called themselves "programmers" at the time... as opposed to the work of a giant team of professionals releasing a triple-A title... that is mega hilarious.
(Black Sunday: August 8th, 2004, someone discovers that using a particular item, "meat vortex", which under normal circumstances subtracts a handful of the game's currency from your inventory, if you had 0 meat would instead wrap around and give you max meat minus a few, because the game was storing meat in an unsigned int. Fun times!)
This. This isn't at all similar to my password to anything, but the sort of thing I switched to doing a few years ago, after some other site I used my (at the time) "more secure" password got hacked - if, for instance, my old password I'd used for everything was asdf!!11, I might have changed it to gasdf!!11l for gmail, sasdf!!11t for slashdot, etc. Something like that. (That isn't the actual pattern I use, either.:p) Just as easy to remember, but a hacker would have to have a reason to specifically want *your* account info, rather than just hitting easy targets.
I had an account there, used it occasionally (when my primary private torrent site didn't have something). I'm curious how you "rarely" used it, if you didn't have an account... wouldn't that be "never"?
Relying primarily or entirely on invites for new members is pretty common for sites like that. Demonoid was just a lot more *famous* than most of them. Which explains why it got axed, and a bunch of other, smaller, less famous (but still highly active) torrent sites are still up.
No, it's mainly because the writing is genuinely great. Secondly because Ender is an interesting character, thirdly because it's a great take on the kids-as-soldiers genre that *doesn't* try to pull punches... I did *like* that the bullies actually died, but only because that sort of thing doesn't usually happen in books, and it made him a more flawed, more realistic character. It certainly isn't a fantasy of mine... more like a nightmare.
(That said, when I first read it, I *will* admit there was an element of wish fulfillment associated with "kid gets to go to the most super-high-tech school for geniuses and play combat games in 0g". Can you deny, that would be a pretty kickass education for a 3rd grader? Or at least, it would have been for someone else in the school who the teachers weren't trying to torture in an attempt to make him the best.)
I agree one can't read everything, so one shouldn't read books that aren't good. I just don't agree that one should care whether the author is a bigoted ass as far as whether one should read their books. Perhaps get the books from the library or borrow them from a friend or buy them used or just torrent them, rather than giving the guy more money... but still read them. If they're good. Which Ender's Game is.
I knew OSC was a horrible piece of work for ages. Didn't stop me loving Ender's Game. Still doesn't. Ender's Game is brilliant, as is most of the stuff he's written.
More the fact that, while I feel Ender's Game *could* have been made into a brilliant movie, *most* movies made from books are not so much with the good... and most movies made after being in development hell for seriously like 20 years, are also not usually very good. I was excited about this movie back in junior high. I graduated college years ago. So, movies based on books that sat around in development hell for 20 years, almost certainly not going to be good.
If bands used it and their management company got 99% of the profit and gave them the other 1%, then screw it, I'll continue torrenting (or actually, just continue downloading legitimately free music and/or giving money to indie musicians that are set up to actually receive money from me in a more legitimate setup. Often not 100%, if they're going through bandcamp or equivalent, but still, 80-90% of it.)
One: how many people actually purchase Photoshop *now*? Aren't like 99.999% of all photoshop installs pirated?
Two: to those rare people who do actually purchase Photoshop, how many of them would have any need for whatever would be in hypothetical new versions, as opposed to just using the one they already have a copy of?
Normally that would just be obvious trolling, but here it's actually relevant, so I will comment: it's not the "Jews" that are the problem, merely the hardline Israeli nationalists, anymore than all "Muslims" are a problem, rather than just the extremist terrorist groups. Both sides are a problem; both sides *claim* to be representing a much larger, much more diverse, and generally much more moderate population, but don't actually represent them very well.
On the other hand, I had an HP computer, I *did* buy a 3 year warranty, it completely died about a year and a half in, I called them, they said they had no record that I had ever bought either the warranty, or in fact even the computer.
Eventually they did "discover" their records of the purchase, but only after me and my mom yelled at various people for a total of about 5 hours. I'm sure this was intentional; most people wouldn't have had the patience.
In any case, I certainly wouldn't buy extended warranties on anything worth less than about $1500; it just wouldn't be worth the hassle trying to get them to honor their promises below that.
Yep, this makes perfect sense. Reminds me of one time I was bored after school in 7th grade while waiting for my mom to pick me up, and there were these plants growing next to one of the walls of the school... I decided it would be fun to see if I could write on the wall with the flowers of the plants. Why? Cause I was bored, and like probably most people here, my intelligence was way higher than my wisdom. Turns out, yes, they wrote extremely well. Too well: they wouldn't wash off. They could tell I was just a dumb, bored kid and not actively trying to hurt the school, because in my stupidity, one of the things I wrote on the wall was my name. So, that Saturday, I spent all morning with a soap-water bucket and a sponge, scraping the plant matter back off the wall. No fun, but I certainly learned a good lesson.
In this case, though, there would be some caution involved... watching the kids to make sure they don't take advantage of presumably needing root to clean the computers, since it'd be a great opportunity to put a rootkit onto the image being ghosted or something...
Sometimes you don't have a choice. Except, granted, the choice to give your boss the finger and quit, which is great if you don't mind starving to death on the street because you can't afford food or rent... everyone else, if they accept a job that appears on the surface to be entirely sane, and then 3 weeks after they accept it their boss hands them a phone and says "you are responsible for jumping every time this phone tells you to, even in the middle of the night on a Saturday, and no of course you won't be compensated for it", you pretty much just have to ask "how high?" if you want your job to still exist.
I'm so glad I don't have a job like that. I know very second-hand how that works, though. (She's looking for a new job, now. It's gotten increasingly bad.:p)
We have a phrase for that, "works as coded", and it is a sarcastic phrase that we make fun of mercilessly. The fact that the rules were clearly printed on the machine as to how it was supposed to behave, and it was clearly behaving differently than that (and in a way that was obviously not intended behavior) makes it a malfunction. It was a software malfunction rather than hardware, but clearly still a malfunction.
Going to jail for it? That'd be a bit of an overreaction. But he should definitely have to give back his unearned winnings.
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No, I don't complain when movie stars start giving interviews about their movies. I do complain when news channels talk about them as if they were actual news, rather than interviews about movies. More relevantly to this, though, I would get annoyed if the newspaper posted an article that started with "this movie is the greatest movie ever! Everyone should go see it!", and it wasn't in the reviews section.
Why? I don't get it. Yes, slashvertisements have always existed, but at least they've always been of the form "here is a neat thing I found." This is one very, *very* small step removed from just posting actual ad videos. Cut it out.
Then you must not have found very many classes interesting... I would've had to have one of those time turner thingies from Harry Potter in order to show up to all the classes. (That and the fact that my school wouldn't let a person enroll in dozens of units in a semester, for several reasons that should be pretty obvious.)
If you could start a semester at college by signing up for every class that looked remotely interesting, show up to the first lecture or two, decide whether it was, then only take the classes you wanted, you'd probably see rates more like that. If you could do that and also college was *free*, then you'd really see rates like that. I'm not seeing why either of those things are bad.
Now, you can argue that an online-only approach is inherently not going to be as good for a lot of subjects as an approach that involves some hands-on work under the direct supervision with a professor you can talk to directly, and I would agree with that argument. But then again, in a lot of (larger) schools, a lot of classes that would benefit from that sort of approach wouldn't get it anyway - they'd get mostly large classroom lectures taught by TAs, in which case, you could hardly argue that's terribly different from a Coursera course, other than in the relative difficulty and cost of signing up for the class.
I'd give you mod points if I had them: +1 for singular they. Using a gendered word for a person of unknown gender is dumb, and singular they is a perfectly reasonable workaround.
They should just pass a law that they can issue a huge fine to anyone who has an accident in an intersection. And then have cops occasionally shoot out peoples' tires as they're driving by. They'd make millions!
Only a day after the last installment! Though this article only has 3 possible candidates, to that article's 4... those candidates are 3/5s of all the words in the headline, to that other article's 4/7.
I found 4! Do I win 4 times the prize?
Every game has jargon. Every big game has a lot of jargon. At least WoW's jargon sounds fantasy-esque. Listen to Kingdom of Loathing speedsters sometime, the jargon sounds like they're on some powerful drugs. Yellow-raying, puttying ghosts, faxing lobsters, sewerleveling, the nun trick...
It's always fun when you play a game a lot, to listen to what you just said (which made total sense to you and the people you said it to, who also play the game), and repeat it back to yourself thinking as someone who doesn't play the game. I'd say at least 75% of any given sentence would be total gibberish. Regardless of the game.
If they made another series of Firefly and you could only watch it legally on tv, by paying for Cable and getting a buttload of garbage you didn't want, then yes, I would probably torrent it. If, on the other hand, you could purchase it legally either by streaming it or by just buying the dvds? I would buy the crap out of it.
And Arrested Development is amazing. I recommend that you go watch it. It's pretty big news in the geek world that netflix is bringing it back - because it was a fantastic show, not because of any sort of stupid groupthink.
As someone who only started midway through BC, and who was not by any means in any kind of well-known or prestigious guild... yeah, I basically agree with all of that (except vanilla, which I wasn't around for, but I'm not sure I would've been that happy with the "you will be in an uber-leet 40m raid guild, or you don't get to see most of the interesting parts of the game" philosophy at that time.) BC seemed alright, Wrath was... well, half of it was amazing, it got off to kind of a weak start, raid-wise, and ToC was obvious filler, but Ulduar was probably the best thing they ever made. Cataclysm just couldn't live up to it (though I did like the old-world revamp).
If they had rethought their "every couple months everyone must do a bunch of boring grinds every day if they want to progress" philosophy instead of just keeping piling on more of them all throughout Cataclysm, I might still be playing. But nope, I hear it's at least as bad for that now, on top of the idiocy of pokebattles and making an April Fools race into a real one.
Every once in a while I get nostalgic for the fun I had in WoW, but not enough to pay them.
My favorite response was Onion Twitter Password Changed To OnionMan77 ('That Ought To Do It,' Company Sources Confirm). Your link wasn't bad either, though. I love The Onion.
No they didn't? Tons of people said "this won't work" to OnLive.
Basically this exact thing happened to Kingdom of Loathing... like 9 years ago... at a time when that game was basically still in beta, and was basically the work of two people, neither of whom would actually have called themselves "programmers" at the time... as opposed to the work of a giant team of professionals releasing a triple-A title... that is mega hilarious.
(Black Sunday: August 8th, 2004, someone discovers that using a particular item, "meat vortex", which under normal circumstances subtracts a handful of the game's currency from your inventory, if you had 0 meat would instead wrap around and give you max meat minus a few, because the game was storing meat in an unsigned int. Fun times!)
This. This isn't at all similar to my password to anything, but the sort of thing I switched to doing a few years ago, after some other site I used my (at the time) "more secure" password got hacked - if, for instance, my old password I'd used for everything was asdf!!11, I might have changed it to gasdf!!11l for gmail, sasdf!!11t for slashdot, etc. Something like that. (That isn't the actual pattern I use, either. :p) Just as easy to remember, but a hacker would have to have a reason to specifically want *your* account info, rather than just hitting easy targets.
I had an account there, used it occasionally (when my primary private torrent site didn't have something). I'm curious how you "rarely" used it, if you didn't have an account... wouldn't that be "never"?
Relying primarily or entirely on invites for new members is pretty common for sites like that. Demonoid was just a lot more *famous* than most of them. Which explains why it got axed, and a bunch of other, smaller, less famous (but still highly active) torrent sites are still up.
No, it's mainly because the writing is genuinely great. Secondly because Ender is an interesting character, thirdly because it's a great take on the kids-as-soldiers genre that *doesn't* try to pull punches... I did *like* that the bullies actually died, but only because that sort of thing doesn't usually happen in books, and it made him a more flawed, more realistic character. It certainly isn't a fantasy of mine... more like a nightmare.
(That said, when I first read it, I *will* admit there was an element of wish fulfillment associated with "kid gets to go to the most super-high-tech school for geniuses and play combat games in 0g". Can you deny, that would be a pretty kickass education for a 3rd grader? Or at least, it would have been for someone else in the school who the teachers weren't trying to torture in an attempt to make him the best.)
I agree one can't read everything, so one shouldn't read books that aren't good. I just don't agree that one should care whether the author is a bigoted ass as far as whether one should read their books. Perhaps get the books from the library or borrow them from a friend or buy them used or just torrent them, rather than giving the guy more money... but still read them. If they're good. Which Ender's Game is.
I knew OSC was a horrible piece of work for ages. Didn't stop me loving Ender's Game. Still doesn't. Ender's Game is brilliant, as is most of the stuff he's written.
More the fact that, while I feel Ender's Game *could* have been made into a brilliant movie, *most* movies made from books are not so much with the good... and most movies made after being in development hell for seriously like 20 years, are also not usually very good. I was excited about this movie back in junior high. I graduated college years ago. So, movies based on books that sat around in development hell for 20 years, almost certainly not going to be good.
I would probably use it and pay them.
If bands used it and their management company got 99% of the profit and gave them the other 1%, then screw it, I'll continue torrenting (or actually, just continue downloading legitimately free music and/or giving money to indie musicians that are set up to actually receive money from me in a more legitimate setup. Often not 100%, if they're going through bandcamp or equivalent, but still, 80-90% of it.)
One: how many people actually purchase Photoshop *now*? Aren't like 99.999% of all photoshop installs pirated?
Two: to those rare people who do actually purchase Photoshop, how many of them would have any need for whatever would be in hypothetical new versions, as opposed to just using the one they already have a copy of?
Normally that would just be obvious trolling, but here it's actually relevant, so I will comment: it's not the "Jews" that are the problem, merely the hardline Israeli nationalists, anymore than all "Muslims" are a problem, rather than just the extremist terrorist groups. Both sides are a problem; both sides *claim* to be representing a much larger, much more diverse, and generally much more moderate population, but don't actually represent them very well.
On the other hand, I had an HP computer, I *did* buy a 3 year warranty, it completely died about a year and a half in, I called them, they said they had no record that I had ever bought either the warranty, or in fact even the computer.
Eventually they did "discover" their records of the purchase, but only after me and my mom yelled at various people for a total of about 5 hours. I'm sure this was intentional; most people wouldn't have had the patience.
In any case, I certainly wouldn't buy extended warranties on anything worth less than about $1500; it just wouldn't be worth the hassle trying to get them to honor their promises below that.
Yep, this makes perfect sense. Reminds me of one time I was bored after school in 7th grade while waiting for my mom to pick me up, and there were these plants growing next to one of the walls of the school... I decided it would be fun to see if I could write on the wall with the flowers of the plants. Why? Cause I was bored, and like probably most people here, my intelligence was way higher than my wisdom. Turns out, yes, they wrote extremely well. Too well: they wouldn't wash off. They could tell I was just a dumb, bored kid and not actively trying to hurt the school, because in my stupidity, one of the things I wrote on the wall was my name. So, that Saturday, I spent all morning with a soap-water bucket and a sponge, scraping the plant matter back off the wall. No fun, but I certainly learned a good lesson.
In this case, though, there would be some caution involved... watching the kids to make sure they don't take advantage of presumably needing root to clean the computers, since it'd be a great opportunity to put a rootkit onto the image being ghosted or something...
Sometimes you don't have a choice. Except, granted, the choice to give your boss the finger and quit, which is great if you don't mind starving to death on the street because you can't afford food or rent... everyone else, if they accept a job that appears on the surface to be entirely sane, and then 3 weeks after they accept it their boss hands them a phone and says "you are responsible for jumping every time this phone tells you to, even in the middle of the night on a Saturday, and no of course you won't be compensated for it", you pretty much just have to ask "how high?" if you want your job to still exist.
I'm so glad I don't have a job like that. I know very second-hand how that works, though. (She's looking for a new job, now. It's gotten increasingly bad. :p)
We have a phrase for that, "works as coded", and it is a sarcastic phrase that we make fun of mercilessly. The fact that the rules were clearly printed on the machine as to how it was supposed to behave, and it was clearly behaving differently than that (and in a way that was obviously not intended behavior) makes it a malfunction. It was a software malfunction rather than hardware, but clearly still a malfunction.
Going to jail for it? That'd be a bit of an overreaction. But he should definitely have to give back his unearned winnings.