Well I would agree that neither of us has hard, fast numbers. Unless we sat in on the financials of both organizations, we'd be unlikely to get them either. However, my premise still holds a lot of water. Sony has built a device that welcomes different kinds of media which they will also make a profit on.
The 4 vs. 2 software you mention isn't just 4 games vs. 2 games. It's 2 games plus 2 movies vs. 2 games. There is evidence to support that PSP owners view buying movies differently then they view buying games (Best Buy now puts them in a seperate section) and there is every reason to believe that movies will be bought in addition to games. The 4 vs. 2 was intentionally done in order to point out that this is an additional revenue stream that the DS is not able to take part in.
Memory sticks have a similar role. Sony gets a cut of every MS made, even if its a Sandisk brand (licensing). Almost every PSP owner will buy some additional memory for some additional cost. The DS doesn't have anything equivilent. This is a revenue stream exlusive to Sony.
When you add that all up, including the price of the console, Sony has a bigger potential pie. Since Sony has the movies, the memory and presumably larger licensing fees for the games, they have the potential to make more total dollars out of each console sold. Provided they dont' squander this potential too badly (exactly how big is that loss on each console? How bad is that games per console ratio?), they're going to win if each company sells the same number of units.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo could still beat Sony on dollars per unit if they are very efficient and sell lots more games. But Sony starts out with a much better potential and I'd be very suprised to see them not win on this measure.
They were fairly well accepted and it was quite a good tradeoff: Receiving new content or a way to modify previous content in exchange for corporate branding.
Good practice: Trade Off. Allow the user to decide if he wants something extra at the expense of getting an ad.
Bad practice: Being forced to click "no" on the ad for the European expansion pack for Battlefield 2 before I can play the game online. I have no way to avoid the ad other than to give up the most important functionality of the game.
Worse practice: The BF2 ad wasn't there when I bought the game, but was added later. I did not have the choice to not buy the game because of EAs advertising practices.
Other considerations about the BF2 ad:
-Is the ad a natural part of the story? No, it's within the scope of the menu structure.
-Is it unobtrusive? No, it shows up in the middle of the screen and must be clicked through in order to use the menu.
-After I choose to not see the ad, will it not be offered again? No, it comes up every time I go online.
-Is it relevant? This it is. It's an expansion pack for the game I'm playing. I don't think this excuses everything else.
Sorry to insert rant, but it's relevant. If game companies want to avoid pissing off their customers, they should follow the tactics you mentioned with the Sims rather than the tactics they're using with BF2
But The Sims is different. This is a game where people have pixelated parts when they're naked, swoosh around to get dressed, talk in something that kind of, sort of, sounds like a language and have speach bubbles that are just symbols. It would have been out of character, in this particular game, to have very distinct, recognizable brands.
In some other games I agree with you. Not haveing billboards in a driving game set in San Francisco would almost be creepy. The city is chock full o' ads, so why shouldn't the game be full of 'em too?
Unfortunately (for Sony fans) Sony is demonstrating an understanding of the market on a much worse level than they had with either the Playstation or PS2; at the same time Nintendo is demonstrating an understanding of the market at a much higher level than they have since the SNES.
Here are some prices as of 5 min ago from EB games. This is an ansorment of goods that a buyer of either console might actually purchase. "But people would buy more/less games at the outset!" you may say. Maybe, but if we assume the number is the same for each the point still holds out. "But nobody buys UMDs!" you may say. You are wrong. Visiting any Best buy will school you on this one. "But some people won't buy that much memory!" You're right. I don't know what the breakdown is so I guessed.
The point is that Sony has a cut in some fashion or another from a pie more than twice as big as the Nintendo pie. Not only is the console twice as expensive, but so are most of the games. Add on UMDs and memory and it's pretty easy to see that Sony makes a lot more from each customer than Nintendo does.
Ok, now for the quiz of the day: If Sony sells slightly less units of the PSP than Nintendo does of the DS, which boardroom is full of happier people? Saying Sony doesn't understand it's market is just silly.
Source = EB Games
DS 129.99 = console 69.98 = 2 games 199.97 - Total
But isn't Yahoo working on being able to talk to MSN? If so, does that make MSN compatibility moot?
Microsoft Live Communication Server and its Public IM Connectivity should do this. It links LCS with Yahoo, AOL and MSN Messenger. We're about to do a pilot so I'll have more details the next time the subject comes up, but as of now it sure looks like it unifies all the biggest players with your corporate IM and a single account.
Cost, $1-$2 per user, per month, plus servers, server licenses etc. Not free, and maybe not cheap, depending on your view of things, but definately something to consider if you want it all in one place.
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
See, that's the problem. I can understand why P2P amounts to republishig a work, regardless of price. I can understand why the origional publishers would object to that.
But if I share a copy with my best friend, daughter, a guy in the office, etc, it falls in a different moral class. Although I can understand why publishers would prefer my daughter to buy her own copy (they make more money), I think you'd have to be a raging moron to consider me sharing with her to be morally "dirty."
In the real world, we have this thing called community. Community can be seen as extending to a rather large space. Some people would claim to be part of the world community, the American community, etc. and this would be true, but as the community gets smaller, the moral imperitive to aid the community grows stronger.
I think most people don't mind the government telling them they shouldn't "share" with a huge community because it ammounts to publishing and infringes on the rights of the community of artists. I think most people, despite the fact that the artists are often in virtual servitude to money-grubbers, understand that this kind of "sharing" is not really moraly defensible. But when you start to tell people they shouldn't "share" (in this case, it really is "sharing") with their family or their friends, it starts to feal very wrong. As businesses more and more end up restricting things like mix-tapes or adding your favorite song to a vacation video, they're going to end up pissing off the general public who feel it is their moral right to do these things.
It took me a minute to catch on as well. He wasn't saying that the your ass is covered _while_ you're using the toilet. He meant that the ass is routinely covered during the day thus does not have much of a chance to pick up bacteria before you use the toilet. Therefore, since your ass (think cheeks, not hole) is relatively bacteria free when it touches the toilet seat, the toilet seat doesn't have much of an opportunity to pick up germs.
I would think much of this would be negated if:
a) people pee and miss b) the toilet flush mechanism is powerful enough to kick up spray onto the seat.
a) is common everywere, but less so at a home populated by adults, especially if one of them is a wife. b) is common on comercial toilets, but less so at home. I would be willing to bet that public and private toilets have dramatically different bacteria levels, on average.
How are we supposed to trust CNET's ratings now? Shouldn't they review and change their ratings to reflect its true/overall quality?
In CNET's defense, they didn't do a long-term reliability test, just a test of the features and obvious initial quality. We bought a bunch of 6100s based on our own internal testing which, like the CNET review, showed that it was a nice laptop. Only later did we notice that the suckers were always in the shop.
As far as changing the review is concerned, unless CNET decided to do an independent analysis of the data, I wouldn't expect them to change their reviews at all. Since the 6100s aren't even on the market anymore, I wouldn't expect them to waste manpower or energy on that type of work. I'd expect them to focus more on what they traditionally review; new equipment that's commonly available.
They have an official demo unit in the EB Games near where I live. Since I actually own a PSP, I've never felt a need to try it out, but it looks like it's a pretty good demo.
I'd like to leave a comment on the PSP vs DS/fanboy vs. fanboy fight to the finish thing going on here on Slashdot. From _my_ anecdotal evidence, it doesn't appear to exist in the real world. My daughter is an officer in her high school's anime club. Many of the members of the club are constantly over at our house. The members of the club are some of the most console crazy people you can imagine. It seems every one of them owns a PS2 and a Gamecube.
Virtually all of these folks own an SP and a couple of them own a DS. Not a single one of them owns a PSP. "Great," you may be saying, "Total_Wimp is proving the point that DSs are more popular." Well, no, not exactly. Even though they all own Nintendo gear, every single one of them lusts after my PSP and a couple of them ask to play it every time they come over. They own the DS, but they absolutely don't dislike the PSP.
My amature evaluation of the situation is that it's a pure cost issue. The DS outsells the PSP not because the PSP sucks, but because the DS is good enough and the PSP costs so much more. It's the same reason there are more Hondas on the road than Mercedes. Hondas are good cars and they're within the reach of far more people. But most all of those people would be driving a Mercedes if they felt they could afford it.
You can see that happening with the PSP now. The PSP was outselling the DS initially - at least according to Sony's "shipment" reports. But now, it's the other way around, and the disparity is growing. Nintendo has sold 4 million DS's in the US, and while Sony has basically stopped putting out releases, NPD says they've sold 2.5 million PSP's. 600,000 of those - nearly 25% - were during the launch week (compared to 400,000 DS's - or 10% of that system's US total).
This is misleading. The numbers for the PSP in the US reported in the Gamespot article are as of Dec 1 and they're either 2.7 or 3 million depending on your source. Dec 1 sales basically don't count a huge chunk of the holiday sales period. The Nintendo numbers, on the other hand, do count this holiday sales period plus last years holiday sales period. It's quite conceivable that after Sony gets its numbers in for Dec, that it will actually be ahead of Nintendo in North America.
Although I don't trust Sony's claim that they'll double their units sold during the holiday period, I do know that holiday periods are huge for video games. Getting a quarter of your sales in December is well within the realm of possibility.
Online gaming is about gaming getting back to it's roots - "me vs. you". Playing against a console is essentially a souped-up version of solitaire. Fun, distracting, but nothing like the rush of defeating an opponent with the same chance of victory as defeat.
The problem lies in the skill level of "me" and "you". Battlefield2 not only had a steep learning curve for the game itself, but I got on a couple of months after launch and I was faced with guys that were very difficult to beat. I got creamed left and right.
Now I love a challenge, so I kept playing, but I know a lot of people who would've given up after they got killed a couple of dozen times without killing hardly any of the enemy in return. You'd never consider pitting little leaguers against an MLB team, or even a minor league team, but it happens all the time on BF2 servers. In order for online gaming to take off, there's going to have to be the equivilent of different leagues or divisions where newbies can start off playing other newbies then advance to moderate play and then on to expert. Until this happens, many people will be too embarrased, afraid, or bored (respawn again!?!?!) to play online.
In addition to pitting the propper players against each other, you also need to let them get to know each other. Here again, BF2 falls short. When waiting between maps in Counter Strike, it was easy to keep up a conversation about the good, bad and ugly of the last round. In BF2, all communication ceases. Isn't online play supposed to be a social activity?
And here's the most important reason why online play is superior to single-player play (at least for me): I love playing against other people. People do increadibly smart and increadibly stupid things. People will laugh with you when you do something funny and laugh at you when you do something stupid. If you come around a corner alone only to face 7 guys on the other team, everyone is gonna laugh their ass off while they blow you away. You'll laugh too. In a single player game, you're just going to load the last save. No one cares if you blast 500 bad guys in five minutes in Serious Sam, but if you shoot your best friend in the back while he's ever so slowly trying to sneak up on his girlfriend, well, you might just get a kiss on the cheek and a sock on the shoulder the next time you see them. That's far more what life is all about.
#2: He saw it and didn't get it. (But how oblivious can you get?)
A)Guys do forget/don't notice. A beatiful woman in our HR department was recently complaining about one of our temps asking her out to lunch. She said, "didnt' he notice my wedding ring?" My reply was a surprised, "when did you get married?" She got married more than a year ago and I hadn't realized it despite the fact that I had been working with her on hiring for a couple of months. Mistakes do happen and I sure would hope the woman would accept an "oops!" and let me get on with my day. (BTW, ignoring the chest comment, is it just possible the guy was so awestruck by your beauty that he forgot to look? Was he too charmed to notice the rest of the world? When a man is in the presence of a charming/beautiful woman, details like the current month, the english language and sometimes the existance of night and day have been known to escape him. I hope you would see that as the compliment that it is.)
B)Expecting that a creepy/ugly/smelly guy _wouldn't_ also be oblivious is kind of a stretch. Anyone who has a pony tail with a gotee and superhero t-shirt should also get a pass. High waters. Pass. I think you get the point. It's not a personal affront to you that the guy is too socially inept to notice your ring.
C)I've know several women to wear rings on their ring finger even though they're not married. There are a variety of reasons, but it usually just turns out that they like that ring on that finger. My current girlfriend is one of them. This subject was even featured on an epsisode of MASH where Hawkeye liked a woman but didn't want to be a home wrecker. He found out later that the ring was a family heirloom and they, ehem, got along just fine after that. Once again, it's not a personal afront to you if they ask and don't know.
I appreciate that you're not on the market and don't want to spend all your days fending off would-be suiters. I also understand that your husband got you a rock that should be blinding and emasculating to any man who would dare look at you. I even acknowledge that you probably shouldn't be spending a great deal of time with guys who've asked you out. Your husband would likely frown on this method of gaining new friends. But the real reason most of these guys asked you out is because they liked you and didn't notice the ring. It's a compliment.
At a bar? Sure. At work? Check your HR manual, it will probably help you understand the difference.
HR manuals rarely say people can't date. If they don't say that, they almost never say person "A" can't ask person "B" out. The notable exceptions are where bosses and subordinates are involved or sometimes when people work in the same department.
Ask yourself this: If you liked they guy, would there be a problem? If the answer is "no", then that should also be the answer if you don't like him. If you're honestly telling my that you'd say no to that great guy in accounting that you've been talking to at lunch then you get a total pass (assuming both of you are "on the market"). But if you'd say yes to him, then you at least owe everyone else the courtesy of saying "no" before you make a federal case out of it. It's not fun, but it's the right thing to do.
The problem is, they don't ask. They stalk you. They hang around drooling, mumbling into their smelly tshirts. They pester you. You ask them to go away because you are trying to get work done, and they don't.
It's repulsive, harassing, and beyond irritating.
Yeah, stalking and harrasment suck. I appologize for my gender and peer group. My comment was just meant to point out that I've seen many women interpret plain ol' interest by a guy as harrasment and not even have the guts to tell the guy to go away.
Sure, it sucks for the dude to be told to back off by the girl. It sucks far worse if his boss has to tell him the same thing and he never even knew there was a problem. But if you already told him to take a hike and he didn't, maybe he needs to learn the hard way. Speaking as a boss myself, if I knew someone was told "no" and they persisted, I'd have no problem showing him the door.
As a geek girl myself, I'd put it a bit above half. sucks.
So how many, after you politely say no, persist in their pursute? I can understand why a woman would be upset by persistant unwanted attention, but I've never understood why women so often are upset by unwanted attention that goes away as soon as a negative answer is given.
Yeah, the guy is creepy/ugly/smelly/whatever. But what on earth is wrong with him asking, "will you go out with me," even if he does so ineptly while looking at his shoes the whole time? Unless women want to turn things around so they do all the asking, they're going to have to put up with saying "no" evey now and then to someone they don't like. They should get a grip and not act like it's their right to not be asked in the first place.
Put another way, if a good woman wants to get the attention of a good man, why would she be surprised when every one else pays attention to her as well?
For a few years, my daughter put a microphone in front of the radio to record the songs she liked. A huge chunck of the the movie pirating market is done by bringing a cam-corder into a movie theater. Neither of these methods produce content of especially high quality but, as it turns out, many consumers don't really mind.
I like my fairly nice audio and video gear, but I don't pirate content either. I imagine that most of the purchasers of nicer equipment don't buy much pirated content. Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
I predict this will do very little to solve the issue of piracy because too many people doing the pirating will be plenty happy with content that ignores these roadblocks altogether. The real losers will be people like me who'll be forced to re-buy ephemeral content that disapears with time.
I'm hoping this will provide all sorts of benefits for not only Mac users, but also the web community as a whole.
The IE on the Mac was so significantly different than the current version of Windows IE that it gave a false sense of security to the Mac using community. They thought that since they had IE, their web experience would be the same as their Windows-using friends. They were wrong.
Now that they're being forced to use one of the other browsers, it will become very apparent that a)the other browsers have some nice features and b) the other browsers are ignored by a certain subset of the web community.
Once the Mac Faithful have a better understanding of just how much they've been marginalized over the last few years, hopefully they'll use their vocalness to aid the fight for web content providers to provide standards-compliant, works-on-any-browser web sites. They'll crow about Safari passing the Acid Test and they'll point out that all browsers should pass this test.
Since the Safari-using community will grow overnight and its percentage of users will be added to the likes of Firefox as a large alternate web browsing community, the content providers will (hopefully) increasingly start writing standars-compliant web sites so all of their customers will be able to use their content. After all, it's a lot harder to ignore 20% than 10% of your potential audience.
One more great thing. Mac users love Apple products so they'll use Safari way more than Firefox. This will help keep web browser usage diversified. If we could get as much as 20% web usage as one of these two and 10% of web usage as non-IE mobile browsing then content providers will increasingly find it silly to support IE only, while also finding it silly to support only one of the other browsers. Diversity is a very good thing for everyone.
Safari (and possibly other OS X browsers) do what the GP is suggesting, and it looks good up to about 400%.
Good for Safari. That's a nice touch. Now, back to the topic at hand, making pages that will work well on a variety of OSs, web browsers and devices at a variety of resoultions.
Just wondering. Did you get any decent amount of money for that huge ad? I sure hope you did since this probably sent more traffic their way then anything else has in the past.
I don't understand how this got modded +5 "Insightful." I mean, were all the XBOX 360 articles somehow enlightening to geeks, but this one is all of a sudden an "advertisement" because some dude will (gasp!) make money off of the product?
I just checked the front page (3:35 am EST) and found that 4 of the 10 articles are about either for-profit companies or the products they sell. Until geeks stop liking to buy stuff, maybe you should save this kind of comment for Mother Jones magazine or something.
I don't mean to crack on you so hard but, damn, the product is nerdy ("news for nerds"). I might buy into your logic if the article was about scrub brushes or something.
The mind boggles doesn't it? I expect this from the telcos because their function is to make lots of money. But what function do regulators and lawmakers have? I think if this flys it will say more about the regulators and lawmakers than the telcos.
Right now, the little guy can compete with the big guy like never before. Hosting your own site that sells music, post reviews, reports news stories, ect, is cheap and easy. If the structure of the Internet changes so only the folks with the big bucks can get a reasonable pipe, then I hope everyone is enjoying the choices offered by major companies. I personally love Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA, the New York Times and Fox deciding my life for me. Don't you?
BTW, if your lawmaker points out that big companies bring big dollars to our economy, point out to him/her that lots of little companies can (and do) bring as much as much money as one big one. While you're at it, you can also point out that you're aware of the fact that small companies can not really compete as well when it comes to bribes... er... I mean campaign contributions, but you expect him/her to do the right thing anyway.
That approach will probably serve them quite well within their own borders, but I don't see how they can hope to impose their own standards on the rest of the world.
They have more than 20% of the worlds population. Serving them "quite weel within their own borders," is saying a lot. Executives of large international corporations will pay a lot of attention to any market segment that hits those numbers and you can be sure that they'll make special products just for the Chinese market, if necessary, to be able to sell there.
Let me put it another way. Japan has cars that drive on the left hand side of the street and have completely different emissions and safety standards than the US. They make all of the consesions they do, including moving the steering wheel to the other side of the car, because a lot of money can be made selling to the U.S. The U.S. only has about a quarter of the population of China. What would Japan be willing to change to sell cars to the Chinese?
Makers of computing equipment would easily make the same concensions. Nokia sold plenty of CDMA phones into the US marker, despite the fact that Europe was all GSM, because the U.S. was big enough to make a some serious money off of. It didn't matter to them that the U.S. technology was a generation behind, only that they could sell phones.
This was correctly modded insightful. Assuming the government acted only as a hinderance to the current progress is ignoring the obvious. Ther government has done quite a lot positive to thet things to the point they are today.
The Chinese government has some very big problems, but it also has two really important things going for it.
1)The Chinese government has shown itself to be adaptable. The level of free enterprise that exists today in China was unthinkable 50 years ago. The level of general freedom as well. The government correctly saw that the country could not compete economically without change, so it changed.
2) Change is coming relatively slowly. This has allowed the Chinese people to become comfortable with their new rights and responsiblities and therefore use them more wisely. In the Soviet Union, where change came quickly, the people and government could not effectively make use of their newfound freedoms. The countries suffered as a result. Perhaps if they had had more time things might have turned out differently for them.
More change must come to China. My guess is that it will come, but it will take a few more decades to get close enough to the west that we feel comfortatble.
I haven't gotten a threat in a long time, but "flaming me silly" seems like a risk I can live with.
There are plenty of things worse than death. I count going along with the religious views of a religion I don't believe in to be potentially one of them. No, looking at a manger scene is not worse than death, but the implication that it's ok to threaten or beat people who don't want to do so is also an implication that it's ok to beat me if I don't kneel before your god. Living my life as a born again Christian to avoid such beetings would be, esentially, a sale of my soul in exchange for my health. Such a thing would certainly be worse than death.
Why on earth do Christians think it's ok to force their views on others? I was raised a Christian and know that to be contrary to the teachings of the new testament. Evangelizing=good. Force=bad. Jesus died, in part, to prove this point. I know you're not going to listen to an atheist preaching to you about your religion so I ask you instead to look in your own heart and in the words of your own Good Book (no, not the old testament. Study the New Covenant; the teachings of Jesus Christ). If you force someone to follow the teachings of the bible, is god served the same way he is served if they come to Christ of their own free will?
Keep preaching, but lay off the force. Violence in the name of Jesus Christ is spitting in his face as he utters the phrase, "forgive them father, for they know not what they do." He took a spear in the side and nails in his hands so you would understand this. I can't help wondering how non-christians like Ghandi got this message, but so many Christians did not.
Flame away. It'll only serve to highlight the differences between us.
"The Holidays" is a fairly common term, though less so in the US, for basically the Christmas holiday season. Read a few English novels and you'll get the gist pretty quickly.
I only want to comment back on one thing. Don't have enough time for everything else.
"It's the CHristians who have to fight extra hard to get their rights and religious expression allowed in public again when the rights shouldn't have been removed to begin with."
Christians never, ever lost the right to express their religion however they want on their own time with their own money on their own land. The number of churches in this country is proof enough of that. What they lost, approximately 200 years ago when the constitution was created, was the right to shove it down my throat by force of law. And yes, useing government money and government land for a manger, is very, very clearly using law to shove it down my throat.
Buy land. Build a manger the size of the Empire State Building on it. Buy giant neon sings ala Las Vegas on every street corner. Say Merry Christmas to everyone you meet. BUT LEAVE OUR GOVERNMENT OUT OF IT.
Our country was not created for you. It was created for us. The Bill of Rights, especially the right to be free from the government respecting an establishment of religion, spells it out rather clearly. We never took anything away from you. We're just telling you to stop stealing something you never had the right to to begin with.
It looks like this is your first post ever on Slashdot. Welcome aboard. If you change "HTML Formatted" to "Plain Old Text" (next to the "preview" button) the next time you post, your post will probably come out more formatted like you meant it to (I doubt you meant to have one long paragraph).
First, I'm an atheist. Second, I meant what I said about not having anything against Christians. One of my best friends is a member of the LDS church and very devout. I'm devout to his right to practice his religion.
But this isn't a Christian country. I appreciate the fact that for many years it acted very much like one, but we are a pluralistic society now and we _must_ respect the viewpoints of many people.
Do you want to be called names for being a Christian? Do you want to be treated like you have no morals because of your religion? Well, atheists don't want those kinds of things to happen to them either. Neither do Hindus, Muslims or Buddhists. Homosexuals do not want to be called "fags" or be told that they're immoral.
Christians probably don't really want to be wished a happy Ramadan and invited to fast for a month and Muslims probably don't want to be wished a Merry Christmas and invited to give gifts or go to church. They probably don't really care to sing songs to your messiah.
When Christians accept that they live in this society of many people and many faiths and they decide they don't wish to offend their fellow citizens, then they'll naturally take these things into account. I, as an atheist, have no intention whatsoever of trying to offend you, so I won't invite you to stop being a Christian and I won't say negative things about your religion. And since the government should remain neutral, we'll leave it completely out of the religion business at all so no one is offended by our nation itself.
But if you take the position that we're a Christian nation, as you said, and that it's actually offensive to not teach creationism in schools, well we're all screwed. You're saying that your beliefs are more important than mine, you're saying homosexuals are immoral and you're, in general, pissing on anyone that's not like you. If compromise crumbles, I'll be forced to take a stand and, guess what? That stand will end up being on a side other than yours.
I implore you; don't come looking for a fight. I don't want to fight. I don't think we have to have a fight. But if you say that your side gets to win, that we're a Christian society with Christian ideals, well, then that's a fight.
So maybe instead we can shake on it and you can go to church (on your own time and not with taxpayer dollars) and I can go have sex with my girlfriend out of wedlock (also in private) and we can live our lives a little more happily when all is said and done.
I really want to be your friend, not your enemy. I love my Christian friends. Can you find it in your hear to love me?
TW
P.S. I totally support the teaching of creationism in the public schools... but in social studies and NOT in science class. The vast majority of scientists agree. Since creationism is not science, it's a damn good compromise. I highly suggest you promote it, because everyone compromising a little is just about the only way we'll get through this thing.
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Well I would agree that neither of us has hard, fast numbers. Unless we sat in on the financials of both organizations, we'd be unlikely to get them either. However, my premise still holds a lot of water. Sony has built a device that welcomes different kinds of media which they will also make a profit on.
The 4 vs. 2 software you mention isn't just 4 games vs. 2 games. It's 2 games plus 2 movies vs. 2 games. There is evidence to support that PSP owners view buying movies differently then they view buying games (Best Buy now puts them in a seperate section) and there is every reason to believe that movies will be bought in addition to games. The 4 vs. 2 was intentionally done in order to point out that this is an additional revenue stream that the DS is not able to take part in.
Memory sticks have a similar role. Sony gets a cut of every MS made, even if its a Sandisk brand (licensing). Almost every PSP owner will buy some additional memory for some additional cost. The DS doesn't have anything equivilent. This is a revenue stream exlusive to Sony.
When you add that all up, including the price of the console, Sony has a bigger potential pie. Since Sony has the movies, the memory and presumably larger licensing fees for the games, they have the potential to make more total dollars out of each console sold. Provided they dont' squander this potential too badly (exactly how big is that loss on each console? How bad is that games per console ratio?), they're going to win if each company sells the same number of units.
Don't get me wrong, Nintendo could still beat Sony on dollars per unit if they are very efficient and sell lots more games. But Sony starts out with a much better potential and I'd be very suprised to see them not win on this measure.
TW
They were fairly well accepted and it was quite a good tradeoff: Receiving new content or a way to modify previous content in exchange for corporate branding.
Good practice: Trade Off. Allow the user to decide if he wants something extra at the expense of getting an ad.
Bad practice: Being forced to click "no" on the ad for the European expansion pack for Battlefield 2 before I can play the game online. I have no way to avoid the ad other than to give up the most important functionality of the game.
Worse practice: The BF2 ad wasn't there when I bought the game, but was added later. I did not have the choice to not buy the game because of EAs advertising practices.
Other considerations about the BF2 ad:
-Is the ad a natural part of the story? No, it's within the scope of the menu structure.
-Is it unobtrusive? No, it shows up in the middle of the screen and must be clicked through in order to use the menu.
-After I choose to not see the ad, will it not be offered again? No, it comes up every time I go online.
-Is it relevant? This it is. It's an expansion pack for the game I'm playing. I don't think this excuses everything else.
Sorry to insert rant, but it's relevant. If game companies want to avoid pissing off their customers, they should follow the tactics you mentioned with the Sims rather than the tactics they're using with BF2
TW
But The Sims is different. This is a game where people have pixelated parts when they're naked, swoosh around to get dressed, talk in something that kind of, sort of, sounds like a language and have speach bubbles that are just symbols. It would have been out of character, in this particular game, to have very distinct, recognizable brands.
In some other games I agree with you. Not haveing billboards in a driving game set in San Francisco would almost be creepy. The city is chock full o' ads, so why shouldn't the game be full of 'em too?
Just my $.02
TW
Unfortunately (for Sony fans) Sony is demonstrating an understanding of the market on a much worse level than they had with either the Playstation or PS2; at the same time Nintendo is demonstrating an understanding of the market at a much higher level than they have since the SNES.
Unfortunately, Slashdotters don't understand math.
Here are some prices as of 5 min ago from EB games. This is an ansorment of goods that a buyer of either console might actually purchase. "But people would buy more/less games at the outset!" you may say. Maybe, but if we assume the number is the same for each the point still holds out. "But nobody buys UMDs!" you may say. You are wrong. Visiting any Best buy will school you on this one. "But some people won't buy that much memory!" You're right. I don't know what the breakdown is so I guessed.
The point is that Sony has a cut in some fashion or another from a pie more than twice as big as the Nintendo pie. Not only is the console twice as expensive, but so are most of the games. Add on UMDs and memory and it's pretty easy to see that Sony makes a lot more from each customer than Nintendo does.
Ok, now for the quiz of the day: If Sony sells slightly less units of the PSP than Nintendo does of the DS, which boardroom is full of happier people? Saying Sony doesn't understand it's market is just silly.
Source = EB Games
DS
129.99 = console
69.98 = 2 games
199.97 - Total
PSP
249.99 = Console
79.98 = 2 games
39.98 = 2 UMDs
79.99 = 512 MB Memory Stick
449.94 - Total
But isn't Yahoo working on being able to talk to MSN? If so, does that make MSN compatibility moot?
Microsoft Live Communication Server and its Public IM Connectivity should do this. It links LCS with Yahoo, AOL and MSN Messenger. We're about to do a pilot so I'll have more details the next time the subject comes up, but as of now it sure looks like it unifies all the biggest players with your corporate IM and a single account.
Cost, $1-$2 per user, per month, plus servers, server licenses etc. Not free, and maybe not cheap, depending on your view of things, but definately something to consider if you want it all in one place.
TW
P.S. Not a shill or fan-boy, just a customer.
Free as in speech, or free as in beer? If it's the latter, it's copyright infringement - meaning taht, yes, "Sharing with your friends" is, indeed, "dirty."
See, that's the problem. I can understand why P2P amounts to republishig a work, regardless of price. I can understand why the origional publishers would object to that.
But if I share a copy with my best friend, daughter, a guy in the office, etc, it falls in a different moral class. Although I can understand why publishers would prefer my daughter to buy her own copy (they make more money), I think you'd have to be a raging moron to consider me sharing with her to be morally "dirty."
In the real world, we have this thing called community. Community can be seen as extending to a rather large space. Some people would claim to be part of the world community, the American community, etc. and this would be true, but as the community gets smaller, the moral imperitive to aid the community grows stronger.
I think most people don't mind the government telling them they shouldn't "share" with a huge community because it ammounts to publishing and infringes on the rights of the community of artists. I think most people, despite the fact that the artists are often in virtual servitude to money-grubbers, understand that this kind of "sharing" is not really moraly defensible. But when you start to tell people they shouldn't "share" (in this case, it really is "sharing") with their family or their friends, it starts to feal very wrong. As businesses more and more end up restricting things like mix-tapes or adding your favorite song to a vacation video, they're going to end up pissing off the general public who feel it is their moral right to do these things.
Be careful what you call "dirty".
TW
It took me a minute to catch on as well. He wasn't saying that the your ass is covered _while_ you're using the toilet. He meant that the ass is routinely covered during the day thus does not have much of a chance to pick up bacteria before you use the toilet. Therefore, since your ass (think cheeks, not hole) is relatively bacteria free when it touches the toilet seat, the toilet seat doesn't have much of an opportunity to pick up germs.
I would think much of this would be negated if:
a) people pee and miss
b) the toilet flush mechanism is powerful enough to kick up spray onto the seat.
a) is common everywere, but less so at a home populated by adults, especially if one of them is a wife. b) is common on comercial toilets, but less so at home. I would be willing to bet that public and private toilets have dramatically different bacteria levels, on average.
TW
How are we supposed to trust CNET's ratings now? Shouldn't they review and change their ratings to reflect its true/overall quality?
In CNET's defense, they didn't do a long-term reliability test, just a test of the features and obvious initial quality. We bought a bunch of 6100s based on our own internal testing which, like the CNET review, showed that it was a nice laptop. Only later did we notice that the suckers were always in the shop.
As far as changing the review is concerned, unless CNET decided to do an independent analysis of the data, I wouldn't expect them to change their reviews at all. Since the 6100s aren't even on the market anymore, I wouldn't expect them to waste manpower or energy on that type of work. I'd expect them to focus more on what they traditionally review; new equipment that's commonly available.
TW
They have an official demo unit in the EB Games near where I live. Since I actually own a PSP, I've never felt a need to try it out, but it looks like it's a pretty good demo.
I'd like to leave a comment on the PSP vs DS/fanboy vs. fanboy fight to the finish thing going on here on Slashdot. From _my_ anecdotal evidence, it doesn't appear to exist in the real world. My daughter is an officer in her high school's anime club. Many of the members of the club are constantly over at our house. The members of the club are some of the most console crazy people you can imagine. It seems every one of them owns a PS2 and a Gamecube.
Virtually all of these folks own an SP and a couple of them own a DS. Not a single one of them owns a PSP. "Great," you may be saying, "Total_Wimp is proving the point that DSs are more popular." Well, no, not exactly. Even though they all own Nintendo gear, every single one of them lusts after my PSP and a couple of them ask to play it every time they come over. They own the DS, but they absolutely don't dislike the PSP.
My amature evaluation of the situation is that it's a pure cost issue. The DS outsells the PSP not because the PSP sucks, but because the DS is good enough and the PSP costs so much more. It's the same reason there are more Hondas on the road than Mercedes. Hondas are good cars and they're within the reach of far more people. But most all of those people would be driving a Mercedes if they felt they could afford it.
TW
You can see that happening with the PSP now. The PSP was outselling the DS initially - at least according to Sony's "shipment" reports. But now, it's the other way around, and the disparity is growing. Nintendo has sold 4 million DS's in the US, and while Sony has basically stopped putting out releases, NPD says they've sold 2.5 million PSP's. 600,000 of those - nearly 25% - were during the launch week (compared to 400,000 DS's - or 10% of that system's US total).
This is misleading. The numbers for the PSP in the US reported in the Gamespot article are as of Dec 1 and they're either 2.7 or 3 million depending on your source. Dec 1 sales basically don't count a huge chunk of the holiday sales period. The Nintendo numbers, on the other hand, do count this holiday sales period plus last years holiday sales period. It's quite conceivable that after Sony gets its numbers in for Dec, that it will actually be ahead of Nintendo in North America.
Although I don't trust Sony's claim that they'll double their units sold during the holiday period, I do know that holiday periods are huge for video games. Getting a quarter of your sales in December is well within the realm of possibility.
TW
The problem lies in the skill level of "me" and "you". Battlefield2 not only had a steep learning curve for the game itself, but I got on a couple of months after launch and I was faced with guys that were very difficult to beat. I got creamed left and right.
Now I love a challenge, so I kept playing, but I know a lot of people who would've given up after they got killed a couple of dozen times without killing hardly any of the enemy in return. You'd never consider pitting little leaguers against an MLB team, or even a minor league team, but it happens all the time on BF2 servers. In order for online gaming to take off, there's going to have to be the equivilent of different leagues or divisions where newbies can start off playing other newbies then advance to moderate play and then on to expert. Until this happens, many people will be too embarrased, afraid, or bored (respawn again!?!?!) to play online.
In addition to pitting the propper players against each other, you also need to let them get to know each other. Here again, BF2 falls short. When waiting between maps in Counter Strike, it was easy to keep up a conversation about the good, bad and ugly of the last round. In BF2, all communication ceases. Isn't online play supposed to be a social activity?
And here's the most important reason why online play is superior to single-player play (at least for me): I love playing against other people. People do increadibly smart and increadibly stupid things. People will laugh with you when you do something funny and laugh at you when you do something stupid. If you come around a corner alone only to face 7 guys on the other team, everyone is gonna laugh their ass off while they blow you away. You'll laugh too. In a single player game, you're just going to load the last save. No one cares if you blast 500 bad guys in five minutes in Serious Sam, but if you shoot your best friend in the back while he's ever so slowly trying to sneak up on his girlfriend, well, you might just get a kiss on the cheek and a sock on the shoulder the next time you see them. That's far more what life is all about.
TW
#2: He saw it and didn't get it. (But how oblivious can you get?)
A)Guys do forget/don't notice. A beatiful woman in our HR department was recently complaining about one of our temps asking her out to lunch. She said, "didnt' he notice my wedding ring?" My reply was a surprised, "when did you get married?" She got married more than a year ago and I hadn't realized it despite the fact that I had been working with her on hiring for a couple of months. Mistakes do happen and I sure would hope the woman would accept an "oops!" and let me get on with my day. (BTW, ignoring the chest comment, is it just possible the guy was so awestruck by your beauty that he forgot to look? Was he too charmed to notice the rest of the world? When a man is in the presence of a charming/beautiful woman, details like the current month, the english language and sometimes the existance of night and day have been known to escape him. I hope you would see that as the compliment that it is.)
B)Expecting that a creepy/ugly/smelly guy _wouldn't_ also be oblivious is kind of a stretch. Anyone who has a pony tail with a gotee and superhero t-shirt should also get a pass. High waters. Pass. I think you get the point. It's not a personal affront to you that the guy is too socially inept to notice your ring.
C)I've know several women to wear rings on their ring finger even though they're not married. There are a variety of reasons, but it usually just turns out that they like that ring on that finger. My current girlfriend is one of them. This subject was even featured on an epsisode of MASH where Hawkeye liked a woman but didn't want to be a home wrecker. He found out later that the ring was a family heirloom and they, ehem, got along just fine after that. Once again, it's not a personal afront to you if they ask and don't know.
I appreciate that you're not on the market and don't want to spend all your days fending off would-be suiters. I also understand that your husband got you a rock that should be blinding and emasculating to any man who would dare look at you. I even acknowledge that you probably shouldn't be spending a great deal of time with guys who've asked you out. Your husband would likely frown on this method of gaining new friends. But the real reason most of these guys asked you out is because they liked you and didn't notice the ring. It's a compliment.
TW
At a bar? Sure. At work? Check your HR manual, it will probably help you understand the difference.
HR manuals rarely say people can't date. If they don't say that, they almost never say person "A" can't ask person "B" out. The notable exceptions are where bosses and subordinates are involved or sometimes when people work in the same department.
Ask yourself this: If you liked they guy, would there be a problem? If the answer is "no", then that should also be the answer if you don't like him. If you're honestly telling my that you'd say no to that great guy in accounting that you've been talking to at lunch then you get a total pass (assuming both of you are "on the market"). But if you'd say yes to him, then you at least owe everyone else the courtesy of saying "no" before you make a federal case out of it. It's not fun, but it's the right thing to do.
TW
The problem is, they don't ask. They stalk you. They hang around drooling, mumbling into their smelly tshirts. They pester you. You ask them to go away because you are trying to get work done, and they don't.
It's repulsive, harassing, and beyond irritating.
Yeah, stalking and harrasment suck. I appologize for my gender and peer group. My comment was just meant to point out that I've seen many women interpret plain ol' interest by a guy as harrasment and not even have the guts to tell the guy to go away.
Sure, it sucks for the dude to be told to back off by the girl. It sucks far worse if his boss has to tell him the same thing and he never even knew there was a problem. But if you already told him to take a hike and he didn't, maybe he needs to learn the hard way. Speaking as a boss myself, if I knew someone was told "no" and they persisted, I'd have no problem showing him the door.
TW
As a geek girl myself, I'd put it a bit above half. sucks.
So how many, after you politely say no, persist in their pursute? I can understand why a woman would be upset by persistant unwanted attention, but I've never understood why women so often are upset by unwanted attention that goes away as soon as a negative answer is given.
Yeah, the guy is creepy/ugly/smelly/whatever. But what on earth is wrong with him asking, "will you go out with me," even if he does so ineptly while looking at his shoes the whole time? Unless women want to turn things around so they do all the asking, they're going to have to put up with saying "no" evey now and then to someone they don't like. They should get a grip and not act like it's their right to not be asked in the first place.
Put another way, if a good woman wants to get the attention of a good man, why would she be surprised when every one else pays attention to her as well?
TW
For a few years, my daughter put a microphone in front of the radio to record the songs she liked. A huge chunck of the the movie pirating market is done by bringing a cam-corder into a movie theater. Neither of these methods produce content of especially high quality but, as it turns out, many consumers don't really mind.
I like my fairly nice audio and video gear, but I don't pirate content either. I imagine that most of the purchasers of nicer equipment don't buy much pirated content. Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
I predict this will do very little to solve the issue of piracy because too many people doing the pirating will be plenty happy with content that ignores these roadblocks altogether. The real losers will be people like me who'll be forced to re-buy ephemeral content that disapears with time.
TW
But the less I.E. the better.
I'm hoping this will provide all sorts of benefits for not only Mac users, but also the web community as a whole.
The IE on the Mac was so significantly different than the current version of Windows IE that it gave a false sense of security to the Mac using community. They thought that since they had IE, their web experience would be the same as their Windows-using friends. They were wrong.
Now that they're being forced to use one of the other browsers, it will become very apparent that a)the other browsers have some nice features and b) the other browsers are ignored by a certain subset of the web community.
Once the Mac Faithful have a better understanding of just how much they've been marginalized over the last few years, hopefully they'll use their vocalness to aid the fight for web content providers to provide standards-compliant, works-on-any-browser web sites. They'll crow about Safari passing the Acid Test and they'll point out that all browsers should pass this test.
Since the Safari-using community will grow overnight and its percentage of users will be added to the likes of Firefox as a large alternate web browsing community, the content providers will (hopefully) increasingly start writing standars-compliant web sites so all of their customers will be able to use their content. After all, it's a lot harder to ignore 20% than 10% of your potential audience.
One more great thing. Mac users love Apple products so they'll use Safari way more than Firefox. This will help keep web browser usage diversified. If we could get as much as 20% web usage as one of these two and 10% of web usage as non-IE mobile browsing then content providers will increasingly find it silly to support IE only, while also finding it silly to support only one of the other browsers. Diversity is a very good thing for everyone.
TW
Safari (and possibly other OS X browsers) do what the GP is suggesting, and it looks good up to about 400%.
Good for Safari. That's a nice touch. Now, back to the topic at hand, making pages that will work well on a variety of OSs, web browsers and devices at a variety of resoultions.
TW
Just wondering. Did you get any decent amount of money for that huge ad? I sure hope you did since this probably sent more traffic their way then anything else has in the past.
I don't understand how this got modded +5 "Insightful." I mean, were all the XBOX 360 articles somehow enlightening to geeks, but this one is all of a sudden an "advertisement" because some dude will (gasp!) make money off of the product?
I just checked the front page (3:35 am EST) and found that 4 of the 10 articles are about either for-profit companies or the products they sell. Until geeks stop liking to buy stuff, maybe you should save this kind of comment for Mother Jones magazine or something.
I don't mean to crack on you so hard but, damn, the product is nerdy ("news for nerds"). I might buy into your logic if the article was about scrub brushes or something.
TW
Will anyone actually go for this?
The mind boggles doesn't it? I expect this from the telcos because their function is to make lots of money. But what function do regulators and lawmakers have? I think if this flys it will say more about the regulators and lawmakers than the telcos.
Right now, the little guy can compete with the big guy like never before. Hosting your own site that sells music, post reviews, reports news stories, ect, is cheap and easy. If the structure of the Internet changes so only the folks with the big bucks can get a reasonable pipe, then I hope everyone is enjoying the choices offered by major companies. I personally love Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA, the New York Times and Fox deciding my life for me. Don't you?
BTW, if your lawmaker points out that big companies bring big dollars to our economy, point out to him/her that lots of little companies can (and do) bring as much as much money as one big one. While you're at it, you can also point out that you're aware of the fact that small companies can not really compete as well when it comes to bribes... er... I mean campaign contributions, but you expect him/her to do the right thing anyway.
TW
That approach will probably serve them quite well within their own borders, but I don't see how they can hope to impose their own standards on the rest of the world.
They have more than 20% of the worlds population. Serving them "quite weel within their own borders," is saying a lot. Executives of large international corporations will pay a lot of attention to any market segment that hits those numbers and you can be sure that they'll make special products just for the Chinese market, if necessary, to be able to sell there.
Let me put it another way. Japan has cars that drive on the left hand side of the street and have completely different emissions and safety standards than the US. They make all of the consesions they do, including moving the steering wheel to the other side of the car, because a lot of money can be made selling to the U.S. The U.S. only has about a quarter of the population of China. What would Japan be willing to change to sell cars to the Chinese?
Makers of computing equipment would easily make the same concensions. Nokia sold plenty of CDMA phones into the US marker, despite the fact that Europe was all GSM, because the U.S. was big enough to make a some serious money off of. It didn't matter to them that the U.S. technology was a generation behind, only that they could sell phones.
TW
This was correctly modded insightful. Assuming the government acted only as a hinderance to the current progress is ignoring the obvious. Ther government has done quite a lot positive to thet things to the point they are today.
The Chinese government has some very big problems, but it also has two really important things going for it.
1)The Chinese government has shown itself to be adaptable. The level of free enterprise that exists today in China was unthinkable 50 years ago. The level of general freedom as well. The government correctly saw that the country could not compete economically without change, so it changed.
2) Change is coming relatively slowly. This has allowed the Chinese people to become comfortable with their new rights and responsiblities and therefore use them more wisely. In the Soviet Union, where change came quickly, the people and government could not effectively make use of their newfound freedoms. The countries suffered as a result. Perhaps if they had had more time things might have turned out differently for them.
More change must come to China. My guess is that it will come, but it will take a few more decades to get close enough to the west that we feel comfortatble.
TW
I haven't gotten a threat in a long time, but "flaming me silly" seems like a risk I can live with.
There are plenty of things worse than death. I count going along with the religious views of a religion I don't believe in to be potentially one of them. No, looking at a manger scene is not worse than death, but the implication that it's ok to threaten or beat people who don't want to do so is also an implication that it's ok to beat me if I don't kneel before your god. Living my life as a born again Christian to avoid such beetings would be, esentially, a sale of my soul in exchange for my health. Such a thing would certainly be worse than death.
Why on earth do Christians think it's ok to force their views on others? I was raised a Christian and know that to be contrary to the teachings of the new testament. Evangelizing=good. Force=bad. Jesus died, in part, to prove this point. I know you're not going to listen to an atheist preaching to you about your religion so I ask you instead to look in your own heart and in the words of your own Good Book (no, not the old testament. Study the New Covenant; the teachings of Jesus Christ). If you force someone to follow the teachings of the bible, is god served the same way he is served if they come to Christ of their own free will?
Keep preaching, but lay off the force. Violence in the name of Jesus Christ is spitting in his face as he utters the phrase, "forgive them father, for they know not what they do." He took a spear in the side and nails in his hands so you would understand this. I can't help wondering how non-christians like Ghandi got this message, but so many Christians did not.
Flame away. It'll only serve to highlight the differences between us.
TW
I only want to comment back on one thing. Don't have enough time for everything else.
Christians never, ever lost the right to express their religion however they want on their own time with their own money on their own land. The number of churches in this country is proof enough of that. What they lost, approximately 200 years ago when the constitution was created, was the right to shove it down my throat by force of law. And yes, useing government money and government land for a manger, is very, very clearly using law to shove it down my throat.
Buy land. Build a manger the size of the Empire State Building on it. Buy giant neon sings ala Las Vegas on every street corner. Say Merry Christmas to everyone you meet. BUT LEAVE OUR GOVERNMENT OUT OF IT.
Our country was not created for you. It was created for us. The Bill of Rights, especially the right to be free from the government respecting an establishment of religion, spells it out rather clearly. We never took anything away from you. We're just telling you to stop stealing something you never had the right to to begin with.
TW
It looks like this is your first post ever on Slashdot. Welcome aboard. If you change "HTML Formatted" to "Plain Old Text" (next to the "preview" button) the next time you post, your post will probably come out more formatted like you meant it to (I doubt you meant to have one long paragraph).
First, I'm an atheist. Second, I meant what I said about not having anything against Christians. One of my best friends is a member of the LDS church and very devout. I'm devout to his right to practice his religion.
But this isn't a Christian country. I appreciate the fact that for many years it acted very much like one, but we are a pluralistic society now and we _must_ respect the viewpoints of many people.
Do you want to be called names for being a Christian? Do you want to be treated like you have no morals because of your religion? Well, atheists don't want those kinds of things to happen to them either. Neither do Hindus, Muslims or Buddhists. Homosexuals do not want to be called "fags" or be told that they're immoral.
Christians probably don't really want to be wished a happy Ramadan and invited to fast for a month and Muslims probably don't want to be wished a Merry Christmas and invited to give gifts or go to church. They probably don't really care to sing songs to your messiah.
When Christians accept that they live in this society of many people and many faiths and they decide they don't wish to offend their fellow citizens, then they'll naturally take these things into account. I, as an atheist, have no intention whatsoever of trying to offend you, so I won't invite you to stop being a Christian and I won't say negative things about your religion. And since the government should remain neutral, we'll leave it completely out of the religion business at all so no one is offended by our nation itself.
But if you take the position that we're a Christian nation, as you said, and that it's actually offensive to not teach creationism in schools, well we're all screwed. You're saying that your beliefs are more important than mine, you're saying homosexuals are immoral and you're, in general, pissing on anyone that's not like you. If compromise crumbles, I'll be forced to take a stand and, guess what? That stand will end up being on a side other than yours.
I implore you; don't come looking for a fight. I don't want to fight. I don't think we have to have a fight. But if you say that your side gets to win, that we're a Christian society with Christian ideals, well, then that's a fight.
So maybe instead we can shake on it and you can go to church (on your own time and not with taxpayer dollars) and I can go have sex with my girlfriend out of wedlock (also in private) and we can live our lives a little more happily when all is said and done.
I really want to be your friend, not your enemy. I love my Christian friends. Can you find it in your hear to love me?
TW
P.S. I totally support the teaching of creationism in the public schools... but in social studies and NOT in science class. The vast majority of scientists agree. Since creationism is not science, it's a damn good compromise. I highly suggest you promote it, because everyone compromising a little is just about the only way we'll get through this thing.