Who is this ace economist? Sadly there isn't a candidate in the running who can even claim to be a hack economist. Ron Paul understands more economics than most of the others, but he's still far from being deemed an economist of any level.
It's a measure of life expectancy, education (consisting of measures of literacy and enrollment), and GDP. While all of these are nice things to have more of in life, they don't encompass everything one could want in life. The HDI is an index of some elements of a society, but its importance is subjective. Freedom of expression, civil rights, economic rights, those are all things among many others that affect quality of life yet aren't represented by the HDI.
Ron Paul fans largely don't agree with him on every issue, but they agree with him on several important issues that are ignored by almost every other candidate. Ron Paul is actually for increasing quotas and reducing barriers to immigration, but he sticks to his belief that the law must be obeyed and there be disincentives to breaking it.
Personally I'm for much more liberal immigration laws and some form of amnesty, but I'm not going to allow that to overshadow my agreement that we must stop American Imperialism and protect economic and civil liberties. I'm also pro-NAFTA and WTO where RP is against both, but when faced with a choice of other protectionist candidates, I'm going to go with Ron Paul.
Unfortunately one area the Ron Paul campaign fails miserably is communicating the fact that he will not be able to do a fraction of the things he wants to do as President. It's not that he doesn't understand this, he's been in Congress long enough and knows the role of the President is not that of a lawmaker, but he's got too many big ideas to expound on and never gets down to the nitty gritty when speaking. I think this hurts him a great deal with your average voter because people want to see practical steps. When people are confronted with the idea of abolishing behemoths like the IRS and the Fed, even if it was possible, they see it as too monumental of a task to believe it's possible.
If he talked about these grand ideas and gave concrete steps towards their realization, he wouldn't be regarded as such a whacko, because these ideas do have a lot of traction when they're put in a practical context.
I've listened to an ipod on GOOD headphones and it tends to sound like crap, not because of the mp3's (which are all --alt-preset extreme), but because the ipod tends to put out a really crappy signal. My ipod and iphone sound much worse than my 5 year old dell dj or those same headphones hooked up to my computer.
There was a big fear (in some quarters) that the cost of some foods related to/around corn/corn oils/etc would skyrocket.
There already has been a significant increase in the price of such foods. A lot of cattle feed tends to incorporate corn waste and somehow even the use of the waste has driven up the price of beef and dairy products. I buy bulk quantities of whey and the price has definitely taken a jump upwards with the combined increase in corn prices and transportation costs.
As a user of Windows XP on a Macbook Pro through both Boot Camp and VMWare, I can confirm that it does indeed carry over to Windows provided you install the Apple Boot Camp software and its associated drivers.
We're never going to get rid of advertising, but it can become better. I'm generally conditioned to ignore any and all advertising, but there have been occasions where unobtrusive, targeted advertising has caught my eye because it was actually useful to me.
If someone is making money on providing me with information that might actually benefit me, what's the harm? As long as I have control over my privacy, I would much prefer that to blinking banner ads and billboards.
If cheap or free ad-supported cell phone service becomes available, you know what you're getting into when you sign up for that service. You always have the option of paying more not to see ads on your phone.
How about having to snap a million pictures of enemies/bots/turrets/cameras in order to gain skills or damage bonuses. And finally after taking so many pictures of those bots and turrets you can avoid that hacking game. But not with cameras... you always have to hack cameras. The hacking minigame was cute the first dozen or so times, but god did it get old fast.
One of my favorite things to do was use my autohack tool on a u-invent machine just to make 2 more.
Why does offering affordable players "reek of desperation?" I have been committed for quite some time to not purchase any new movies until the format war is good and settled, but recently I caught myself considering buying an HD-DVD player just because it was so cheap. Fortunately I was able to suppress my irrational urge to consume, but Toshiba's "desperation" was nearly a successful strategy.
The differences in technology are not enough to distinguish the winner in this race. It's going to come down to which one is cheapest, and it is still very early.
I enjoyed the game the first time through, and recommended it to several friends, but afterwards had absolutely no desire to play it again on hard. I also felt guilty for telling people to go drop 60 bucks on it for a one-play-through experience. I forced myself to finish it on hard a month later, but it wasn't really enjoyable. I've heard plenty of people say the same thing, so why did it get such high reviews and still has people raving about it? Other games have been panned for much less, so what gives?
Wii play isn't bundled with the Wii, I should have clarified. It is bundled with a Wii remote however, so gamers looking to purchase a second Wiimote (a pretty common occurrence) will pick up the combo package. Regardless, the point I was trying to make wasn't really which system is #1 and which is #2 in sales. I only picked the most recent week's data which is just one point in time and gives a limited view of sales by itself.
The point is that both a cheap system with cheaper games and an expensive system with expensive games are coexisting and selling games at roughly the same pace. There will be overlap between each system's "fanbase" and there will be those that gravitate towards one or the other since they serve distinctly different purposes. At the rate the industry is growing, this is obviously a good thing for both the consumers and producers.
People need to stop using hardware sales as the sole metric for determining success. Nintendo's business plan is fundamentally different than that of MS and Sony because they're actually turning a profit on each console sold. The other two rely on game sales for profits, which seems to be working at the moment for the 360, perhaps slowly followed by the PS3.
Scroll down to where software sales by system are compared, then subtract out the number of Wii Sports and Wii Play sales from the Wii total to find out the non-bundled sales number. You would end up with software sales as follows (of this generation):
Nintendo's really moving their systems, but with the exception of Super Mario Galaxy and the two bundled games, has a relative dearth of top 10 titles for the Wii. Xbox360 in terms of hardware sales, while trailing the Wii, and depending on the week selling on par with the PS3, is doing quite strongly in software sales. More expensive system, more expensive games, and still sells a lot.
So if you're MS, why cut prices just because the Wii is cheaper? They're going to keep on chugging along until their costs come down enough that the increase in game sales from a price cut outweighs the foregone income on hardware sales.
Nintendo isn't dominating the market but expanding the market, which is exactly what they set out to do. In succeeding at this goal they've shown that there is room for more than one console and discussion of a 'winner' is generally unproductive.
I believe it was the default behavior in FF 1.5 and previous versions, so anyone upgrading to FF 2 kept the behavior since it's based on existing bookmarks. However, those bookmarks are not included by default in FF 2, so fresh installs will not have this as the default behavior.
What I don't get is how incompatibility with Vista is going to make people/companies switch to an alternative operating system. Is Linux, OS X, or any other alternative really going to support more critical applications than Vista? Why not just stick with XP if it's still working?
I own a Cube, an Xbox, a PS2, a DS, a PC whose primary use is gaming, and I just got a Wii for my birthday a few months ago. I spend about $100 a month on games, maybe $750 on average for PC hardware... I spend about three hours a day, more on weekends, playing video games.
It should be noted that in many of those countries the unemployment rate of young people is disproportionately high, so traveling the world is merely a preferable alternative to living with your parents.
Although it's quite convenient that the 3 examples you gave were all from Republican senators, it should be noted that Arlen Specter is considered a Republican in Name Only by many Republicans and was in fact opposed to Clinton's impeachment. He was critical of his own party throughout the proceedings and argued for a verdict of "not proven."
He has also been quite critical of the Bush administration, so throwing his name out in a list with the likes of John Ashcroft, pointing to the fact that they're both Republicans and critics of Clinton's military action grossly mis-portrays the man's actual political leanings. God forbid our representatives question the possibility of military action for political motives, if more had done the same during the Bush administration things might not be so awful.
This ridiculous notion really needs to stop being perpetuated. There's an assload of money in cures because patents guarantee a monopoly for a limited time. No competent pharmaceutical company is going base their business on selling only treatments for symptoms when their competitor could come along and eliminate all of their business with a cure. If a pharma company came up with the cure for the common cold, how ridiculously rich would they get?
As long as patents are guaranteeing that monopoly, someone's looking to take advantage of it. The cases where that might not be true are such heavy hitting diseases as HIV and AIDS where pharmaceutical companies don't believe their patents will be honored, so therefore do not commit R&D that they might not make back because of government intervention.
It was novel the first 10 times... but after the 200th hacked turret/bot/vending machine it was a little tired. Although part of that is my fault for being OCD about completing everything in the game and feeling the need to hack every machine I came across whether I was going to use it or not.
Well the people who really ARE poor don't own the ridiculous sized TVs. It's usually just that the declared income of the resident is 10k, but there's always someone living there not on the lease who is paying for the big screen and the chrysler 300, or in one case 2 mercedes...
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Who is this ace economist? Sadly there isn't a candidate in the running who can even claim to be a hack economist. Ron Paul understands more economics than most of the others, but he's still far from being deemed an economist of any level.
They're only sewing the seeds of their own destruction by introducing more restrictions to developers.
Uh... sometimes I want to keep my right hand on the mouse because my left hand is otherwise occupied.
It's a measure of life expectancy, education (consisting of measures of literacy and enrollment), and GDP. While all of these are nice things to have more of in life, they don't encompass everything one could want in life. The HDI is an index of some elements of a society, but its importance is subjective. Freedom of expression, civil rights, economic rights, those are all things among many others that affect quality of life yet aren't represented by the HDI.
Ron Paul fans largely don't agree with him on every issue, but they agree with him on several important issues that are ignored by almost every other candidate. Ron Paul is actually for increasing quotas and reducing barriers to immigration, but he sticks to his belief that the law must be obeyed and there be disincentives to breaking it.
Personally I'm for much more liberal immigration laws and some form of amnesty, but I'm not going to allow that to overshadow my agreement that we must stop American Imperialism and protect economic and civil liberties. I'm also pro-NAFTA and WTO where RP is against both, but when faced with a choice of other protectionist candidates, I'm going to go with Ron Paul.
Unfortunately one area the Ron Paul campaign fails miserably is communicating the fact that he will not be able to do a fraction of the things he wants to do as President. It's not that he doesn't understand this, he's been in Congress long enough and knows the role of the President is not that of a lawmaker, but he's got too many big ideas to expound on and never gets down to the nitty gritty when speaking. I think this hurts him a great deal with your average voter because people want to see practical steps. When people are confronted with the idea of abolishing behemoths like the IRS and the Fed, even if it was possible, they see it as too monumental of a task to believe it's possible.
If he talked about these grand ideas and gave concrete steps towards their realization, he wouldn't be regarded as such a whacko, because these ideas do have a lot of traction when they're put in a practical context.
I've listened to an ipod on GOOD headphones and it tends to sound like crap, not because of the mp3's (which are all --alt-preset extreme), but because the ipod tends to put out a really crappy signal. My ipod and iphone sound much worse than my 5 year old dell dj or those same headphones hooked up to my computer.
As a user of Windows XP on a Macbook Pro through both Boot Camp and VMWare, I can confirm that it does indeed carry over to Windows provided you install the Apple Boot Camp software and its associated drivers.
We're never going to get rid of advertising, but it can become better. I'm generally conditioned to ignore any and all advertising, but there have been occasions where unobtrusive, targeted advertising has caught my eye because it was actually useful to me.
If someone is making money on providing me with information that might actually benefit me, what's the harm? As long as I have control over my privacy, I would much prefer that to blinking banner ads and billboards.
If cheap or free ad-supported cell phone service becomes available, you know what you're getting into when you sign up for that service. You always have the option of paying more not to see ads on your phone.
How about having to snap a million pictures of enemies/bots/turrets/cameras in order to gain skills or damage bonuses. And finally after taking so many pictures of those bots and turrets you can avoid that hacking game. But not with cameras... you always have to hack cameras. The hacking minigame was cute the first dozen or so times, but god did it get old fast.
One of my favorite things to do was use my autohack tool on a u-invent machine just to make 2 more.
Why does offering affordable players "reek of desperation?" I have been committed for quite some time to not purchase any new movies until the format war is good and settled, but recently I caught myself considering buying an HD-DVD player just because it was so cheap. Fortunately I was able to suppress my irrational urge to consume, but Toshiba's "desperation" was nearly a successful strategy.
The differences in technology are not enough to distinguish the winner in this race. It's going to come down to which one is cheapest, and it is still very early.
I enjoyed the game the first time through, and recommended it to several friends, but afterwards had absolutely no desire to play it again on hard. I also felt guilty for telling people to go drop 60 bucks on it for a one-play-through experience. I forced myself to finish it on hard a month later, but it wasn't really enjoyable. I've heard plenty of people say the same thing, so why did it get such high reviews and still has people raving about it? Other games have been panned for much less, so what gives?
Wii play isn't bundled with the Wii, I should have clarified. It is bundled with a Wii remote however, so gamers looking to purchase a second Wiimote (a pretty common occurrence) will pick up the combo package. Regardless, the point I was trying to make wasn't really which system is #1 and which is #2 in sales. I only picked the most recent week's data which is just one point in time and gives a limited view of sales by itself.
The point is that both a cheap system with cheaper games and an expensive system with expensive games are coexisting and selling games at roughly the same pace. There will be overlap between each system's "fanbase" and there will be those that gravitate towards one or the other since they serve distinctly different purposes. At the rate the industry is growing, this is obviously a good thing for both the consumers and producers.
People need to stop using hardware sales as the sole metric for determining success. Nintendo's business plan is fundamentally different than that of MS and Sony because they're actually turning a profit on each console sold. The other two rely on game sales for profits, which seems to be working at the moment for the 360, perhaps slowly followed by the PS3.
Take a look at recent sales numbers: http://www.vgchartz.com/aweekly.php
Scroll down to where software sales by system are compared, then subtract out the number of Wii Sports and Wii Play sales from the Wii total to find out the non-bundled sales number. You would end up with software sales as follows (of this generation):
1. 2,369,203 - Xbox360
2. 1,944,527 - Wii
3: 943,709 - PS3
Nintendo's really moving their systems, but with the exception of Super Mario Galaxy and the two bundled games, has a relative dearth of top 10 titles for the Wii. Xbox360 in terms of hardware sales, while trailing the Wii, and depending on the week selling on par with the PS3, is doing quite strongly in software sales. More expensive system, more expensive games, and still sells a lot.
So if you're MS, why cut prices just because the Wii is cheaper? They're going to keep on chugging along until their costs come down enough that the increase in game sales from a price cut outweighs the foregone income on hardware sales.
Nintendo isn't dominating the market but expanding the market, which is exactly what they set out to do. In succeeding at this goal they've shown that there is room for more than one console and discussion of a 'winner' is generally unproductive.
I believe it was the default behavior in FF 1.5 and previous versions, so anyone upgrading to FF 2 kept the behavior since it's based on existing bookmarks. However, those bookmarks are not included by default in FF 2, so fresh installs will not have this as the default behavior.
Yeah, a year ago would've been nice.
What I don't get is how incompatibility with Vista is going to make people/companies switch to an alternative operating system. Is Linux, OS X, or any other alternative really going to support more critical applications than Vista? Why not just stick with XP if it's still working?
Yeah I'd call you a hardcore gamer.
It should be noted that in many of those countries the unemployment rate of young people is disproportionately high, so traveling the world is merely a preferable alternative to living with your parents.
Although it's quite convenient that the 3 examples you gave were all from Republican senators, it should be noted that Arlen Specter is considered a Republican in Name Only by many Republicans and was in fact opposed to Clinton's impeachment. He was critical of his own party throughout the proceedings and argued for a verdict of "not proven."
He has also been quite critical of the Bush administration, so throwing his name out in a list with the likes of John Ashcroft, pointing to the fact that they're both Republicans and critics of Clinton's military action grossly mis-portrays the man's actual political leanings. God forbid our representatives question the possibility of military action for political motives, if more had done the same during the Bush administration things might not be so awful.
Good luck getting the game on the release date from Amazon... there are no guarantees there.
This ridiculous notion really needs to stop being perpetuated. There's an assload of money in cures because patents guarantee a monopoly for a limited time. No competent pharmaceutical company is going base their business on selling only treatments for symptoms when their competitor could come along and eliminate all of their business with a cure. If a pharma company came up with the cure for the common cold, how ridiculously rich would they get?
As long as patents are guaranteeing that monopoly, someone's looking to take advantage of it. The cases where that might not be true are such heavy hitting diseases as HIV and AIDS where pharmaceutical companies don't believe their patents will be honored, so therefore do not commit R&D that they might not make back because of government intervention.
It was novel the first 10 times... but after the 200th hacked turret/bot/vending machine it was a little tired. Although part of that is my fault for being OCD about completing everything in the game and feeling the need to hack every machine I came across whether I was going to use it or not.
Well the people who really ARE poor don't own the ridiculous sized TVs. It's usually just that the declared income of the resident is 10k, but there's always someone living there not on the lease who is paying for the big screen and the chrysler 300, or in one case 2 mercedes...
I had to read over that first one a few times before I got it. I was thinking, "People really eat boiled chicken shit? I've never heard of that."