These were just picked quickly of the top of my head, but I think you are being a bit arbitrary in your judgment of the games.
The only "simple niche" game in the list is IWBTG. Mega Man was defined by its difficulty, this isn't a criticism and does not mean it wasn't a mainstream success.
Nethack is brutally difficult, extremely deep, and with decades of development is at a level of polish commercial publishers can only dream of.
Dwarf Fortress fits because there is no way to beat it. You are supposed to lose every time.
I guess I don't understand why you are drawing a line under Mega Man here. It may not be the same genre, but it fits the class of games discussed perfectly.
Come up with a task you think the iPhone cannot perform and Android can
* Emulators. I play SNES and Genesis games.
* Third party software for core functionality - I have 3 browsers, 2 dialers, 2 text messaging apps
* Shell access - I can ssh into my G1, I also run an ftp server on it.
These are just a few of the things I do everyday, but I'm sure there are many others. There isn't any reason the iPhone hardware couldn't do these things, it all boils down to open vs. closed platform.
If you want to look it up, the LSPA (UK) puts the average age between 25-34. The ESA (US) puts it at 33. These numbers have been reasonably consistent since the mid 90's so no surprises there.
Lets break this down:
1. The big money isn't in vaccines, its in things like AIDS treatment drugs. The sort of stuff that cost pennies to make and is sold for thousands. This is possible thanks to patents.
2. There is increasing pressure to do something about this - many (probably communists) consider this immoral and beneath the limits of a healthy society, especially with regards to countries like Africa, who could never afford the drugs anyway
3. Bill, (who makes a fuckton off medicine patents) personally lobbies to protect them, against the best interests of the world's poor
4. This makes him look Very Bad. Worse than he ever did at Microsoft in fact. His Capitol Hill buddies get nervous
5. He makes a grand gesture, reducing pressure on himself and his pet congress critters. This ensures that the bulk of the high profit market is unaffected.
6. Do it all again next year when some irresponsible journalist writes an op-ed on the whole scandal.
7. Profit!
/facepalm. Okay, maybe if I included more information in my original post it wouldn't have been modded into oblivion - but the thing is I'm SURE we have discussed this extensively before.
You've got to look at the big picture. If he really wanted to make a difference he would spend the money on researching the drugs and give away the formula for free.
Gate's motivation is profit. He is a heavy supporter of and investor in medicine patents, and has actively fought against allowing struggling countries patent exemptions so they could produce their own vital and life-saving drugs at a locally affordable rate.
By giving away millions of vaccines he is locking the country into dependence on the expensive US market rather then giving them what they really need, cheap medicine.
I'm not getting personal when I call you a liar. I simply do not believe that you could possibly have read every document. You're just name calling when you call me a douche.
I'm here to tell you that when you call someone a liar it is deeply offensive. You are claiming (without any well founded reason for doing so) that I am dishonest, directly impinging my character. This is such a dangerous thing to do that people often end up in court for it.
On the other hand, by calling you a douche I was invoking a common term for somebody behaving in unpleasant and abrasive fashion, and since that is what you were doing by calling me a liar in a public forum, was entirely warranted.
The oddest thing about this whole exchange is that I have never said or believed any of the things you seem to be attacking me for. These ideas sprung forth fully formed from your own brain. Further discussion seems futile at this point. Have a nice day, Sir!
You have quite plainly demonstrated that you are a douche, but not why I must be a liar. I can't think of any software I use that came with an EULA, although I usually read the license it comes with if it is new to me. For example, the GPL took me 3/4 of an hour to read 8 years ago. I don't have to re-read it every time I install a new package.
But the rest of your rant makes no sense. Where did you get the idea I was for abolishing the protections that exist? How does suggesting that people be responsible for what they sign mean that I believe companies are free to write whatever conditions they like? What kind of logic are you using?
Whatever was going through your mind, the fact is that in THIS case we are talking about a straight up contract - there was no adhesion or exploitation.
Yes, because I'm sure you've read and fully understood all the fine print on every contract you've signed.
Yes I do. Reading and understanding the document is a prerequisite of signing it. Can't be much plainer then that.
Tell me, if one of your contracts insisted that your family was to be sold into slavery, would you have no sympathy for yourself?
Now THAT is a moronic thing to say. Firstly - If I had read the contract I would not have signed it. Secondly such a contract would be illegal even if I WAS dumb enough to sign it.
People like you enable companies to screw people.
No, people who don't read contracts allow companies to screw them. Common sense says a corporation is not giving away expensive gadgets because they want to be your friend. Before you even look at the contract you should know that something akin to an early termination fee will be in there. Don't be a sucker.
Good points, but you seem to be conflating the appreciation of "large and pronounced" breasts (which has changed over time and culture) with appreciation of breasts as part of the female form (which has NEVER been out of fashion).
I think you would be VERY hard pressed to find a heterosexual male who does not appreciate breasts in this more general sense.
At the Consumer electronics show in Las Vegas this year the upcoming Apple tablet was a bigger topic of excitement than any device that actually existed at the time
No it wasn't. CES was dominated by Android, and the blog sphere hyped the Nexus 1 much more then this device. The Apple hype machine was surprisingly lacklustre for the iPad.
Much like DVD before it, the law may have been sufficiently designed to prevent distribution of an open source player, but Blu-Ray encryption is not an obstacle to developing one.
Requirement #1 : use the iTunes store. Surely you should have specified access to a music store. iTunes can only be accessed by iTunes - Translation "must be iTunes"
Requirement #2 : seamlessly work with all the variations of *iPods*. Not media players in general? Why specify the devices set up to only work with iTunes - Translation "must be iTunes"
Requirement #3 : Get the benefits of being in the mainstream - I suspect what you are getting at is the acceptance that comes from owning cool toys ("must be apple"), but I'll accept that I don't know what you are talking about. I'd rather the benefit of not being locked into Requirements 1 & 2 thankyou.
You see, there is nothing you can do with iTunes + iPhone that you couldn't to with, say Amazon + Android, so there are valid alternatives. Your requirements are rather poorly defined as "must be iTunes".
NBR has less in common with Ubuntu then say, Ubuntu and Xubuntu. An engineer might say "well lets have do base install and let the user choose the environment after that" but that is EXACTLY what Canonical are trying to avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
These were just picked quickly of the top of my head, but I think you are being a bit arbitrary in your judgment of the games.
The only "simple niche" game in the list is IWBTG. Mega Man was defined by its difficulty, this isn't a criticism and does not mean it wasn't a mainstream success.
Nethack is brutally difficult, extremely deep, and with decades of development is at a level of polish commercial publishers can only dream of.
Dwarf Fortress fits because there is no way to beat it. You are supposed to lose every time.
I guess I don't understand why you are drawing a line under Mega Man here. It may not be the same genre, but it fits the class of games discussed perfectly.
Come up with a task you think the iPhone cannot perform and Android can
* Emulators. I play SNES and Genesis games.
* Third party software for core functionality - I have 3 browsers, 2 dialers, 2 text messaging apps
* Shell access - I can ssh into my G1, I also run an ftp server on it.
These are just a few of the things I do everyday, but I'm sure there are many others. There isn't any reason the iPhone hardware couldn't do these things, it all boils down to open vs. closed platform.
None of us can prove it, you would need a court for that. But they were granted the patents, so you can't just wave them off as "potentially invalid".
Or designers making the games to be a struggle in the misconceived idea that people will play it more because of all the retrying and struggle.
Sometimes they are dead right. Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Mega Man, I Wanna be that Guy etc are all games of this type.
ineffective government best government imo
If you want to look it up, the LSPA (UK) puts the average age between 25-34. The ESA (US) puts it at 33. These numbers have been reasonably consistent since the mid 90's so no surprises there.
I think the point is that you are SUPPOSED to be able to get a temporary unverified cert. They are just not supposed to be trusted by the client.
The problem is the iPhone accepts unverified certs as verified, which really sounds like Apple's screw up.
HA! I'd mod you up, but I've already posted!
Lets break this down:
1. The big money isn't in vaccines, its in things like AIDS treatment drugs. The sort of stuff that cost pennies to make and is sold for thousands. This is possible thanks to patents.
2. There is increasing pressure to do something about this - many (probably communists) consider this immoral and beneath the limits of a healthy society, especially with regards to countries like Africa, who could never afford the drugs anyway
3. Bill, (who makes a fuckton off medicine patents) personally lobbies to protect them, against the best interests of the world's poor
4. This makes him look Very Bad. Worse than he ever did at Microsoft in fact. His Capitol Hill buddies get nervous
5. He makes a grand gesture, reducing pressure on himself and his pet congress critters. This ensures that the bulk of the high profit market is unaffected.
6. Do it all again next year when some irresponsible journalist writes an op-ed on the whole scandal.
7. Profit!
I am humbled by your superior intellect. Thank you very much for sharing of your wisdom and making this site a better place.
/facepalm. Okay, maybe if I included more information in my original post it wouldn't have been modded into oblivion - but the thing is I'm SURE we have discussed this extensively before.
Anyway, see my other post.
Congratulations AC, you really don't have a clue do you?
I'll just direct you to my response to Monkeedude1212 below.
You've got to look at the big picture. If he really wanted to make a difference he would spend the money on researching the drugs and give away the formula for free.
Gate's motivation is profit. He is a heavy supporter of and investor in medicine patents, and has actively fought against allowing struggling countries patent exemptions so they could produce their own vital and life-saving drugs at a locally affordable rate.
By giving away millions of vaccines he is locking the country into dependence on the expensive US market rather then giving them what they really need, cheap medicine.
this is just more of the same sort of "charity" that saw Microsoft giving away "millions" worth of their own software to under-privileged schools
I'm not getting personal when I call you a liar. I simply do not believe that you could possibly have read every document. You're just name calling when you call me a douche.
I'm here to tell you that when you call someone a liar it is deeply offensive. You are claiming (without any well founded reason for doing so) that I am dishonest, directly impinging my character. This is such a dangerous thing to do that people often end up in court for it.
On the other hand, by calling you a douche I was invoking a common term for somebody behaving in unpleasant and abrasive fashion, and since that is what you were doing by calling me a liar in a public forum, was entirely warranted.
The oddest thing about this whole exchange is that I have never said or believed any of the things you seem to be attacking me for. These ideas sprung forth fully formed from your own brain. Further discussion seems futile at this point. Have a nice day, Sir!
You are quite simply and plainly a liar.
You have quite plainly demonstrated that you are a douche, but not why I must be a liar. I can't think of any software I use that came with an EULA, although I usually read the license it comes with if it is new to me. For example, the GPL took me 3/4 of an hour to read 8 years ago. I don't have to re-read it every time I install a new package.
But the rest of your rant makes no sense. Where did you get the idea I was for abolishing the protections that exist? How does suggesting that people be responsible for what they sign mean that I believe companies are free to write whatever conditions they like? What kind of logic are you using?
Whatever was going through your mind, the fact is that in THIS case we are talking about a straight up contract - there was no adhesion or exploitation.
Yes, because I'm sure you've read and fully understood all the fine print on every contract you've signed.
Yes I do. Reading and understanding the document is a prerequisite of signing it. Can't be much plainer then that.
Tell me, if one of your contracts insisted that your family was to be sold into slavery, would you have no sympathy for yourself?
Now THAT is a moronic thing to say. Firstly - If I had read the contract I would not have signed it. Secondly such a contract would be illegal even if I WAS dumb enough to sign it.
People like you enable companies to screw people.
No, people who don't read contracts allow companies to screw them. Common sense says a corporation is not giving away expensive gadgets because they want to be your friend. Before you even look at the contract you should know that something akin to an early termination fee will be in there. Don't be a sucker.
These days I know what the licenses are without needing to read them. GPL, BSD, Apache.
I'm sorry, but I've got no sympathy for people who sign up for a subsidized service and don't read the conditions.
The time to complain about a contract is BEFORE you sign it, not after you decide you want to back out of it.
Good points, but you seem to be conflating the appreciation of "large and pronounced" breasts (which has changed over time and culture) with appreciation of breasts as part of the female form (which has NEVER been out of fashion).
I think you would be VERY hard pressed to find a heterosexual male who does not appreciate breasts in this more general sense.
I don't get this obsession that people have about breasts.
Could it be you are not a heterosexual male?
At the Consumer electronics show in Las Vegas this year the upcoming Apple tablet was a bigger topic of excitement than any device that actually existed at the time
No it wasn't. CES was dominated by Android, and the blog sphere hyped the Nexus 1 much more then this device. The Apple hype machine was surprisingly lacklustre for the iPad.
Much like DVD before it, the law may have been sufficiently designed to prevent distribution of an open source player, but Blu-Ray encryption is not an obstacle to developing one.
Wut? you just did it again. Lookit -
Requirement #1 : use the iTunes store. Surely you should have specified access to a music store. iTunes can only be accessed by iTunes - Translation "must be iTunes"
Requirement #2 : seamlessly work with all the variations of *iPods*. Not media players in general? Why specify the devices set up to only work with iTunes - Translation "must be iTunes"
Requirement #3 : Get the benefits of being in the mainstream - I suspect what you are getting at is the acceptance that comes from owning cool toys ("must be apple"), but I'll accept that I don't know what you are talking about. I'd rather the benefit of not being locked into Requirements 1 & 2 thankyou.
You see, there is nothing you can do with iTunes + iPhone that you couldn't to with, say Amazon + Android, so there are valid alternatives. Your requirements are rather poorly defined as "must be iTunes".
NBR has less in common with Ubuntu then say, Ubuntu and Xubuntu. An engineer might say "well lets have do base install and let the user choose the environment after that" but that is EXACTLY what Canonical are trying to avoid.