Has anyone heard of this sort of thing commonly occurring outside of US schools? I don't want to sound like a self-righteous Canadian, but I've worked in three school districts and I really don't see that kind of fear-of-technology/intelligence happening here. I do see teachers that aren't great with technology, but I haven't met anyone that is outright paranoid like those in these type of stories (which seem to be rather frequent over the last few years).
So does anyone in Canada/Europe/Australia/Asia/etc have similar stories, or is there something really, really weird with the US Education system?
In terms of profitability, an MMO etc makes more case because it requires continual investment. However a game with an ending also makes cash because what do you do when it's done... well, buy another game. Look at the Final Fantasy series. Some very basic relation between them all, but - ignoring the MMO - they all for the most-part had stories, fixed endings, and successors that sell very nicely.
As a general fan of the series, I can attest that those that have been long-term players of the series *salivate* at a new title, and certainly don't mind when one reaches the ending. That a given plot is done and is no longer to be milked is NOT a bad thing. Yes, there are crappy spinoffs like FFX-2 or "Revenant Wings," but even if they never occurred you'd still have a fairly defined ending to the originals.
Yes, I'm sure that monthly payments of $9.99 and a few shots of $30+ for addons is nice in MMO-land. But having a veritable army of geeks salivating over your next RPG (non-MMO) release with pre-orders starting at $60 is probably a pretty good sell as well.
There's also STILL a good market for remakes, for example the older NES/SNES Final Fantasy series updated for the Nintendo DS, or a good many other games that have received facelifts. I know there were a lot of people rather ticked at the unfulfilled tech demo of the PS3 (a clip from Final Fantasy VI that never actually became a full game remake), which if actually produced into a game would like have been another big money-maker.
Yes, I'm concentrating on games like Final Fantasy in particular, mainly because RPG's tend to have more in plot-land, but there are plenty of others like Zelda (heck, they sell well even though often enough the essential plot was the same), Dragon Warrior, and even Mario Bros.
An MMO that creates a continual system of revenue is a good cash-cow. It does require some maintenance (hosting, etc, see especially the issues with EVE) though and can eventually die as new MMOs come out. A solid play-through game (or movie) is a one-time investment that can still rake in a whole lot of cash, though, and a definitive ending doesn't mean that the game as a concept dies, or even that a series with a different "spin" can't evolve from it.
One of the things that was perhaps best for the Stargate Atlantis and SG-1 series was that they were fairly faithful to their "meme" throughout the series, and then came to a fairly definitive conclusion. OK, well actually in the case of Atlantis the wraith are still out there etc - which might leave room for a movie - but the series was "completed" rather than be allowed to trail off until it was just a murmuring gurgle as it was pulled off life support. IMHO, Atlantis was a fairly successful way to "conclude" one series (SG-1) and start another. There's a definitive relation between the two, and even cameos and intersecting plot-arcs, but the overall focus of the two series was different enough to lend it some uniqueness, and the characters were different between the two.
Unfortunately SG-U seems to break-down because, while having a new setting and characters, it also tries was too hard to focus on some fairly tired memes and doesn't seem to have nearly as strong a plot base as its predecessors.
Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care.
A good portion of my friends are Chinese. The ones that come here generally know what's going on, but from what I've been told, a large portion of the rest of the populace DOES NOT. It often takes something really big for bad news to hit the general populace (tainted milk and dead babies, for example), but otherwise it seems they might catch the odd case here and there but not the overall picture.
Hell, there are plenty of people in North America or Europe that don't know WTF is going on right under their noses, or aren't able to process/acknowledge it. Look at how many people voted for Bush.
Along those lines though, I've found that one of the reasons a good portion of my friends are Asian/foreign is that they don't have a lot of the bad habits/traits that us westerners have here. For Chinese, gambling is a fairly big one, but most people I met weren't huge drinkers/partiers/tokers or willing to screw everyone in site (or at least until being here for awhile). It was a lot easier to have a party that just involved good food, card games, and perhaps a few drinks without everyone getting completely wasted. My Korean friends were bigger drinkers but also seemed to hold it fairly well without getting stupid.
Just because China's government has a rather bad track record doesn't mean that the people are so. Part of the issue we have is that us westerners tend to see/deal more with those that have enough money to do business or take education over here, and thus tend more towards corruption (money and corruption seem to follow together whatever your nationality) or being a bit spoiled.
That's the real question, isn't it. Is the number of incidences actually up, or simply the number of diagnoses (or hell, "syndromes" that a person can be diagnosed with) up?
Are people of lesser mental health now, or is it just more acceptable to complain of and/or diagnose as such?
That's not to say that in some cases it isn't a good thing. If "person X" comes in to see a doctor because of major personal/emotional issues and gets some counselling or possibly medication, when he/she would have ended up on a rooftop with a high-powered rifle otherwise, that's a good thing. If that person gets a measured and monitored dosage of pills that actually works, rather than "drinking away the pain" with several liters of booze every night (and beating his wife/kids), the pills may be a better solution. If "Mike Hardcore" goes to the hospital after accidentally shooting himself in the skull with a nail gun, rather than "manning up" by pulling it out himself, sticking on a bandaid, and applying some iodine... probably better.
However, if Joe Usual has to go see the shrink every time he gets dumped by a girlfriend, passed up for a promotion, or doesn't win the lottery and a ticket to all-play-and-no-work for the rest of eternity, because he's an spoiled ass with an expanded sense of entitlement, that's worse. If Jane Usual won't let her son play on the school playground for fear of any little injury, or worse, sues the school when he falls from the monkey bars and skins his knee, that's worse. When Jane takes her daughter to the emergency room (also overfilled with other Jane Usuals) every time she has a coughs, cries for more than two minutes, or "her poop was a funny color" (after having eating a stomach-full of food-colouring filled candies), that's bad.
So yeah, good for some people, bad for others. There are definitely a lot of whiny, lazy people out there who would do anything to get out of working and/or dealing with life. There are also a lot of people who genuinely just need a little help.
I know one person who definitely had some major depression issues going. She got some temporarily chill-pills, which gave her time to reorganize her life, and things came out OK. It's not that uncommon. I also know of plenty of people who are perfectly capable of working and leading normal lives, but would rather be hand-held through everything, live off welfare, and generally do nothing to contribute to society other than bearing multiple children who are ignored, mistreated, and will otherwise be good candidates for seeing a shrink in the future themselves.
Actually, this sounds about right. After having recently moved from Toronto, I'd have to say that it does in fact take comparatively near forever to get anywhere and get anything done.
By car, it tended to take hours out of my weekend to do a few errands. Usually: go to the grocery store, grab a bite en-route, stop by the hardware store or whatever, and come home. Between the drive there, traffic, store-line-ups, complete shit customer service because they f**cked up your purchase, etc... it was hell.
And by transit... even worse. And just try to actually bring heavily laden bags of groceries or hardware on the subway or streetcar/bus.
If you need to do anything else (say, hit the book store or something speciality) then you're going to be out all day, and there's half your weekend gone. This is not - of course - to even consider the hours of time wasted in transit going to/from work in the average day.
Of course there are those who can afford the $800,000 for a 800sq-ft 2bdrm apartment downtown, in which case they may be close enough to some of the amenities to save time, or at least not have far to get to work. They look at people with an actual vehicle like they're baby-seal clubbers, nevermind how efficient it is, it's a terrible polluter, and as they sip their triple-mocha non-fat whip extra-special venti latte they'll never even consider that perhaps some people actually consider having children and need a bit more space than a downtown studio.
So yeah. People who drive cars are crazy, and people who drive cars and live outside of major metropoluses (metropoli?) are even crazier. Never mind that in a smaller city it too me under an hour to do all the things that in the "big city" it took me three or four, and a fraction of the gas etc. Being able to actually drive at a freeway speed of 110km/h, highways at 80km+/h, or through town at 50km/h on a weekend or when heading to work would be unheard of.
Apparently we're all nuts, but having lived in a few big cities (Toronto/Vancouver) I'd say that I'm happier that way. I may need my car to get around or during shopping/visiting trips to Vancouver, but I make much better use of it than I ever did in the "big city.
I think you would have a quite different opinion of this issue if you were blinded/killed by your shampoo.
Actually, if I were killed by my shampoo, I doubt I'd have much opinion at all. That is, unless you expect me to come back and haunt the makers of "Head and Shoulders" or some other corp.
Well, we've already seen that parents pass immunity/resistance to various viruses on to their offspring, hence Natives dying from smallpox when European settlers showed up (the Europeans were mostly immune presumably because they'd already encountered the virus, the Natives had never been exposed prior).
So in that case, you must have a whole bunch of DNA dedicated to keeping track of viruses and the countermeasures to fighting them, otherwise you wouldn't be able to have hereditary immunity.
I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of most sports (unless it's a live game), but I used to be a fair fan of the NHL XX series.
I guess it's that $60 seems fairly steep to me because it's often just a "roster update" and a few other small changes. Being in IT I know how minimal the work likely involved was, so the price-tag seems like those that buy it are really getting hosed.
Actually, there's a good question in that. A lot of popular science fiction characters or meme's have pretty much become part of culture, and are referred to elsewhere in said culture.
Star Trek and Star Wars are pretty common ones. Lots of movies make reference to them. In particular I remember Stargate SG-1 where Jack (after travelling to the past) uses a false alias of "Captain James T Kirk" and then later corrects "No, I lied, my real name is Luke Skywalker." There are fairly humorous moments in SG-Atlantis when McKay compares Sheppard to Kirk.
In terms of spoofs, I've seen plenty of movies, video games, and even music which play or Trek/SW memes, as well as plenty of things that aren't outright spoofs but are still fairly obvious. In the past these were often seen as a "tip of the hat", or paying kudos to something that was part of the culture. Heck, even "3D Realms" had one "Doomed Space Marine" as a hidden artifact in "Duke Nukum"
So where does the line get drawn? I've read the Do Androids Dream, seen BladeRunner, and still didn't catch the reference between the phone and the book. Now that it's been mentioned I can see that there may be some relation, but it seems to me like much more of a "hat tip" rather than an attempt to capitalize on Dick.
Is greed going to mean that you can't even make a remark or a comment in complimentary reference to some fictional material?
I've never really understood the whole "government employee" concept. Yes, there are a certain echelons of government that people with rather dubious usefulness may rather exceptional amounts of cash. In other areas, especially in the IT sectors of those areas, the pay is less than the private sector, the holidays often about par (unless you're a long-term employee, which often works in private as well), and there's nothing like a performance bonus, etc.
Special dinners (Christmas etc) are paid for by money collected off the paycheque or union dues, there are pretty much NO taken-out-to-lunch-by-the-boss, etc etc
The biggest difference is that the gov't employees that I know generally aren't getting completely buttf*cked with unpaid OT or other such things, and the gov't pension/medical is pretty decent (but again, most decent-sized companies offer the same).
The big money isn't in the government union, it's in contracting to the government, which over times seems to be increasing as government looks to cut visible costs and help out buddies by canning permanent employees and hiring contractors (even though it costs more the visible budgeting is different).
Even job-security isn't that good because of the above. Yeah, some people may be able to slack off and get away with it for awhile, but then the whole damn department or even sector gets canned and privatized.
I've owned every Madden since 06 on the Xbox360 and a few on the GameCube
One question, WHY? Are the new releases *that* different from the old? Shelling out money to EA like that is what has encouraged then to keep shovelling out essentially the same crap - often even worse because of the corners cut to do so for cheap - year after year.
I'm glad to hear you've broken the cycle, but I do have to wonder why you bought into it in the first place? Note that I'm not much of a "madden" fan so perhaps it's just something beyond my understanding, the various releases haven't seemed that different to me overall with the exception of better graphics over time.
Nevermind HP. How about Xerox. A lot of computing history originated in Xerox Parc, but nowadays you don't hear much from them. Heck, more places I know don't even by photocopiers from them.
A huge source of innovation now essentially peddles middling printers and copier machines...
Whether or not such a system is beneficial really depends on the developers. In the case where the developer is knowledgeable and - even more importantly - respectful of the systems he's entering (and those that maintain then), having a higher-privileged account for devs is great.
On the other hand, having a situation where devs are making changes to settings (of live systems), or pushing major code updates without a review process and/or using a repository (for rollback purposes) can be terrible.
It really, really sucks when you're an admin and servers suddenly start going berserk without you knowing WTF is going on, only to find that *somebody* made key changes without checking them in or having them reviewed, especially as you're the one likely to take the heat when it's "the server is screwing up again," when in reality it's "somebody uploaded bad code to the server and/or mangled a bunch of settings."
So for the devs out there, please be kind to your sysadmins and use a repository. The ability to roll-back will save you headaches as well as your admins. Also, if you're going to make changes to system config, check with the admins first, or at the very least let them know what's going on so if something going *boink* they can trace it down.
But there are *PLENTY* of people who work under the radar. For example, I've met a number of immigrants who worked within their own ethnic group on a cash-basis. The pay was less than you might get for a legit job, but the work itself wasn't necessarily bad or illegal. In many cases it was students working, prior to a more recent law change that allowed you to work part-time when in on a student visa.
Then you get into the illegal work. I'd imagine that there's plenty of jobs had for those that are willing to work in or beyond the "grey" area of legality. From what I've heard, once somebody has a criminal record one of the main reasons he/she will end up back in crime is that it's pretty damn hard to get a legitimate job.
Money a problem? Work for cash under the table. He can steal the ID of somebody who looks like him, and use that to open a bank account in a different state. Or just get a fake ID.
We're not talking about law-abiding citizens here, we're talking about criminals. I doubt that it often comes to a tent in the woods and showering in gas stations, especially if he makes it to a big city where he can blend in.
PS after the initial escape, authorities don't really pursue fugitives that hard.
Actually, the whole situation is rather sad. There's an individual that AFAIK now has two warrants out for his arrest for breaching no-contact orders, harassment, etc, but despite the fact that everyone is rather sure he's just holed up at home 90% of the time, the police can't enter to nab him. I'd imagine that with two warrants getting some paperwork to enter and seize him wouldn't be too bloody hard, but all they do at the moment is pop by his house randomly and hope to actually sight him or catch him outside.
I have no citations but I do have experience. I wouldn't say that they add "lag", but they definitely seem to do something weird with connections. For example, on a couple family members that have it, I can't get two pages browsing at the same time. If I use a VPN then it works just fine, and the speed seems to be faster too.
I don't believe that actual issue is that the pages are hitting the speed limit, even running a couple of curl's seems to be blocked.
Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, but I don't see where it says they run locally? When I click the "Google Docs" link it says specifically (right bar) that they're "hosted by google"
What I would *REALLY* like to see open-sourced and/or available for private use would be the Google-Docs API's. I'm sure many companies are in the same boat as ours where we aren't willing to trust an external entity with our private information, but would *REALLY* like to have something like docs for online document collaboration.
I know that google sells advertising, but I don't see any reason they couldn't package and sell versions of "Google Docs" to easily be used on private servers. If they would, I know many companies that would jump on this. I've certainly be watching for something comparable that will run on apache etc, but haven't found it yet. I think that some of their model is flawed in that even open-source API's generally need to hook into google's servers. Information may want to be free, but our private records don't!
Your analogy is a bit off but it definitely made me laugh. I'm not sure how putting a pork-chop around an ugly person's neck would get them a date (unless it's with an equally ugly redneck), but the one I heard was:
"She was such an ugly kid we had to hang a porkchop around her next just to get the dog to play with her"
I've got an NES, SNES, an old gameboy in a drawer somewhere that still works (though nobody wants it), old PC's, a gamecube, a PS2, etc etc. The first ever truely dead console I've had was the 360 (I don't count the NES where the power brick got pulled on too much, besides that was easy to fix with solder and heat-shrink). With a failure rate of over 50%, I'd say it's not just a matter of taking care of the consoles. Other than needing a little bit of "blow-on-the-pins" magic, the old game carts tended to weather better than current-gen discs as well.
Similarly, I've heard of elevated failure rates behind various models of PS3, though not nearly that of the 360. An honorable mention goes to older DS's with scratched screens, but nowadays screen-protectors are easily available and I believe the screens are a bit more resilient.
I wish this were the case, but it seems that what we actually end up with is a lot of : NFL/NHL/etc 2006 NFL/NHL/etc 2009 NFL/NHL/etc 2156 (TBA)
We also end up with games shipping too early, way too late, and generally full of bugs or other bullsh*t. Why? Because people will buy them. Yes, they will bitch and whine, but they will still buy them.
Now maybe I have rose-coloured-glasses, but it seems to me that when gamers were fairly "hardcore" or at least a smaller group, releasing stinkers such as these would get you blacklisted. When your market is fairly select, this can be fairly profit-destructive as those that actually give a damn would a pretty big chunk of your target-market.
A good thing is that the advent of internet gaming seems to offer a fair bit more in the way of players etc, so *finding* competition isn't so bad, and you don't have to wait until you actually have 3-4 friends to play with. On the other hand, finding decent competition and a not a bunch of 12-year-old aimbotting I've-got-a-map-hack your-mama-is-fat lamers is not so easy.
Maybe it's rose-colored glasses on my part, but while it might be good for the *industry* in terms of sales, it's not necessarily good for the people.
Actually, this reminds me of a point sometime ago. The right to "bear arms" basically means you can keep 'em if you've got 'em, and buy 'em if you can afford 'em.
It seems that one trick in the bygone days was to put a fairly hefty tax on gun-related items. The common people may have had a right to have them, but only the aristocracy could actually afford them. I can no longer cite the source or it's validity, but such varieties of "sin taxes" would seem to allow the government to effectively ban things they didn't like without actually making a law banning them...
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Has anyone heard of this sort of thing commonly occurring outside of US schools?
I don't want to sound like a self-righteous Canadian, but I've worked in three school districts and I really don't see that kind of fear-of-technology/intelligence happening here. I do see teachers that aren't great with technology, but I haven't met anyone that is outright paranoid like those in these type of stories (which seem to be rather frequent over the last few years).
So does anyone in Canada/Europe/Australia/Asia/etc have similar stories, or is there something really, really weird with the US Education system?
In terms of profitability, an MMO etc makes more case because it requires continual investment. However a game with an ending also makes cash because what do you do when it's done... well, buy another game. Look at the Final Fantasy series. Some very basic relation between them all, but - ignoring the MMO - they all for the most-part had stories, fixed endings, and successors that sell very nicely.
As a general fan of the series, I can attest that those that have been long-term players of the series *salivate* at a new title, and certainly don't mind when one reaches the ending. That a given plot is done and is no longer to be milked is NOT a bad thing. Yes, there are crappy spinoffs like FFX-2 or "Revenant Wings," but even if they never occurred you'd still have a fairly defined ending to the originals.
Yes, I'm sure that monthly payments of $9.99 and a few shots of $30+ for addons is nice in MMO-land. But having a veritable army of geeks salivating over your next RPG (non-MMO) release with pre-orders starting at $60 is probably a pretty good sell as well.
There's also STILL a good market for remakes, for example the older NES/SNES Final Fantasy series updated for the Nintendo DS, or a good many other games that have received facelifts. I know there were a lot of people rather ticked at the unfulfilled tech demo of the PS3 (a clip from Final Fantasy VI that never actually became a full game remake), which if actually produced into a game would like have been another big money-maker.
Yes, I'm concentrating on games like Final Fantasy in particular, mainly because RPG's tend to have more in plot-land, but there are plenty of others like Zelda (heck, they sell well even though often enough the essential plot was the same), Dragon Warrior, and even Mario Bros.
An MMO that creates a continual system of revenue is a good cash-cow. It does require some maintenance (hosting, etc, see especially the issues with EVE) though and can eventually die as new MMOs come out. A solid play-through game (or movie) is a one-time investment that can still rake in a whole lot of cash, though, and a definitive ending doesn't mean that the game as a concept dies, or even that a series with a different "spin" can't evolve from it.
One of the things that was perhaps best for the Stargate Atlantis and SG-1 series was that they were fairly faithful to their "meme" throughout the series, and then came to a fairly definitive conclusion.
OK, well actually in the case of Atlantis the wraith are still out there etc - which might leave room for a movie - but the series was "completed" rather than be allowed to trail off until it was just a murmuring gurgle as it was pulled off life support.
IMHO, Atlantis was a fairly successful way to "conclude" one series (SG-1) and start another. There's a definitive relation between the two, and even cameos and intersecting plot-arcs, but the overall focus of the two series was different enough to lend it some uniqueness, and the characters were different between the two.
Unfortunately SG-U seems to break-down because, while having a new setting and characters, it also tries was too hard to focus on some fairly tired memes and doesn't seem to have nearly as strong a plot base as its predecessors.
Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care.
A good portion of my friends are Chinese. The ones that come here generally know what's going on, but from what I've been told, a large portion of the rest of the populace DOES NOT. It often takes something really big for bad news to hit the general populace (tainted milk and dead babies, for example), but otherwise it seems they might catch the odd case here and there but not the overall picture.
Hell, there are plenty of people in North America or Europe that don't know WTF is going on right under their noses, or aren't able to process/acknowledge it. Look at how many people voted for Bush.
Along those lines though, I've found that one of the reasons a good portion of my friends are Asian/foreign is that they don't have a lot of the bad habits/traits that us westerners have here. For Chinese, gambling is a fairly big one, but most people I met weren't huge drinkers/partiers/tokers or willing to screw everyone in site (or at least until being here for awhile). It was a lot easier to have a party that just involved good food, card games, and perhaps a few drinks without everyone getting completely wasted. My Korean friends were bigger drinkers but also seemed to hold it fairly well without getting stupid.
Just because China's government has a rather bad track record doesn't mean that the people are so. Part of the issue we have is that us westerners tend to see/deal more with those that have enough money to do business or take education over here, and thus tend more towards corruption (money and corruption seem to follow together whatever your nationality) or being a bit spoiled.
That's the real question, isn't it. Is the number of incidences actually up, or simply the number of diagnoses (or hell, "syndromes" that a person can be diagnosed with) up?
Are people of lesser mental health now, or is it just more acceptable to complain of and/or diagnose as such?
That's not to say that in some cases it isn't a good thing. If "person X" comes in to see a doctor because of major personal/emotional issues and gets some counselling or possibly medication, when he/she would have ended up on a rooftop with a high-powered rifle otherwise, that's a good thing.
If that person gets a measured and monitored dosage of pills that actually works, rather than "drinking away the pain" with several liters of booze every night (and beating his wife/kids), the pills may be a better solution.
If "Mike Hardcore" goes to the hospital after accidentally shooting himself in the skull with a nail gun, rather than "manning up" by pulling it out himself, sticking on a bandaid, and applying some iodine... probably better.
However, if Joe Usual has to go see the shrink every time he gets dumped by a girlfriend, passed up for a promotion, or doesn't win the lottery and a ticket to all-play-and-no-work for the rest of eternity, because he's an spoiled ass with an expanded sense of entitlement, that's worse. If Jane Usual won't let her son play on the school playground for fear of any little injury, or worse, sues the school when he falls from the monkey bars and skins his knee, that's worse.
When Jane takes her daughter to the emergency room (also overfilled with other Jane Usuals) every time she has a coughs, cries for more than two minutes, or "her poop was a funny color" (after having eating a stomach-full of food-colouring filled candies), that's bad.
So yeah, good for some people, bad for others. There are definitely a lot of whiny, lazy people out there who would do anything to get out of working and/or dealing with life. There are also a lot of people who genuinely just need a little help.
I know one person who definitely had some major depression issues going. She got some temporarily chill-pills, which gave her time to reorganize her life, and things came out OK. It's not that uncommon.
I also know of plenty of people who are perfectly capable of working and leading normal lives, but would rather be hand-held through everything, live off welfare, and generally do nothing to contribute to society other than bearing multiple children who are ignored, mistreated, and will otherwise be good candidates for seeing a shrink in the future themselves.
Actually, this sounds about right. After having recently moved from Toronto, I'd have to say that it does in fact take comparatively near forever to get anywhere and get anything done.
By car, it tended to take hours out of my weekend to do a few errands. Usually: go to the grocery store, grab a bite en-route, stop by the hardware store or whatever, and come home. Between the drive there, traffic, store-line-ups, complete shit customer service because they f**cked up your purchase, etc... it was hell.
And by transit... even worse. And just try to actually bring heavily laden bags of groceries or hardware on the subway or streetcar/bus.
If you need to do anything else (say, hit the book store or something speciality) then you're going to be out all day, and there's half your weekend gone. This is not - of course - to even consider the hours of time wasted in transit going to/from work in the average day.
Of course there are those who can afford the $800,000 for a 800sq-ft 2bdrm apartment downtown, in which case they may be close enough to some of the amenities to save time, or at least not have far to get to work. They look at people with an actual vehicle like they're baby-seal clubbers, nevermind how efficient it is, it's a terrible polluter, and as they sip their triple-mocha non-fat whip extra-special venti latte they'll never even consider that perhaps some people actually consider having children and need a bit more space than a downtown studio.
So yeah. People who drive cars are crazy, and people who drive cars and live outside of major metropoluses (metropoli?) are even crazier. Never mind that in a smaller city it too me under an hour to do all the things that in the "big city" it took me three or four, and a fraction of the gas etc. Being able to actually drive at a freeway speed of 110km/h, highways at 80km+/h, or through town at 50km/h on a weekend or when heading to work would be unheard of.
Apparently we're all nuts, but having lived in a few big cities (Toronto/Vancouver) I'd say that I'm happier that way. I may need my car to get around or during shopping/visiting trips to Vancouver, but I make much better use of it than I ever did in the "big city.
The movie plotline would need to be dropped (or the series done in prequel), since it killed off several main characters.
I think you would have a quite different opinion of this issue if you were blinded/killed by your shampoo.
Actually, if I were killed by my shampoo, I doubt I'd have much opinion at all. That is, unless you expect me to come back and haunt the makers of "Head and Shoulders" or some other corp.
Well, we've already seen that parents pass immunity/resistance to various viruses on to their offspring, hence Natives dying from smallpox when European settlers showed up (the Europeans were mostly immune presumably because they'd already encountered the virus, the Natives had never been exposed prior).
So in that case, you must have a whole bunch of DNA dedicated to keeping track of viruses and the countermeasures to fighting them, otherwise you wouldn't be able to have hereditary immunity.
I'll admit I'm not a huge fan of most sports (unless it's a live game), but I used to be a fair fan of the NHL XX series.
I guess it's that $60 seems fairly steep to me because it's often just a "roster update" and a few other small changes. Being in IT I know how minimal the work likely involved was, so the price-tag seems like those that buy it are really getting hosed.
Actually, there's a good question in that. A lot of popular science fiction characters or meme's have pretty much become part of culture, and are referred to elsewhere in said culture.
Star Trek and Star Wars are pretty common ones. Lots of movies make reference to them. In particular I remember Stargate SG-1 where Jack (after travelling to the past) uses a false alias of "Captain James T Kirk" and then later corrects "No, I lied, my real name is Luke Skywalker." There are fairly humorous moments in SG-Atlantis when McKay compares Sheppard to Kirk.
In terms of spoofs, I've seen plenty of movies, video games, and even music which play or Trek/SW memes, as well as plenty of things that aren't outright spoofs but are still fairly obvious. In the past these were often seen as a "tip of the hat", or paying kudos to something that was part of the culture. Heck, even "3D Realms" had one "Doomed Space Marine" as a hidden artifact in "Duke Nukum"
So where does the line get drawn? I've read the Do Androids Dream, seen BladeRunner, and still didn't catch the reference between the phone and the book. Now that it's been mentioned I can see that there may be some relation, but it seems to me like much more of a "hat tip" rather than an attempt to capitalize on Dick.
Is greed going to mean that you can't even make a remark or a comment in complimentary reference to some fictional material?
I've never really understood the whole "government employee" concept. Yes, there are a certain echelons of government that people with rather dubious usefulness may rather exceptional amounts of cash. In other areas, especially in the IT sectors of those areas, the pay is less than the private sector, the holidays often about par (unless you're a long-term employee, which often works in private as well), and there's nothing like a performance bonus, etc.
Special dinners (Christmas etc) are paid for by money collected off the paycheque or union dues, there are pretty much NO taken-out-to-lunch-by-the-boss, etc etc
The biggest difference is that the gov't employees that I know generally aren't getting completely buttf*cked with unpaid OT or other such things, and the gov't pension/medical is pretty decent (but again, most decent-sized companies offer the same).
The big money isn't in the government union, it's in contracting to the government, which over times seems to be increasing as government looks to cut visible costs and help out buddies by canning permanent employees and hiring contractors (even though it costs more the visible budgeting is different).
Even job-security isn't that good because of the above. Yeah, some people may be able to slack off and get away with it for awhile, but then the whole damn department or even sector gets canned and privatized.
I've owned every Madden since 06 on the Xbox360 and a few on the GameCube
One question, WHY? Are the new releases *that* different from the old? Shelling out money to EA like that is what has encouraged then to keep shovelling out essentially the same crap - often even worse because of the corners cut to do so for cheap - year after year.
I'm glad to hear you've broken the cycle, but I do have to wonder why you bought into it in the first place? Note that I'm not much of a "madden" fan so perhaps it's just something beyond my understanding, the various releases haven't seemed that different to me overall with the exception of better graphics over time.
Nevermind HP. How about Xerox. A lot of computing history originated in Xerox Parc, but nowadays you don't hear much from them. Heck, more places I know don't even by photocopiers from them.
A huge source of innovation now essentially peddles middling printers and copier machines...
Whether or not such a system is beneficial really depends on the developers. In the case where the developer is knowledgeable and - even more importantly - respectful of the systems he's entering (and those that maintain then), having a higher-privileged account for devs is great.
On the other hand, having a situation where devs are making changes to settings (of live systems), or pushing major code updates without a review process and/or using a repository (for rollback purposes) can be terrible.
It really, really sucks when you're an admin and servers suddenly start going berserk without you knowing WTF is going on, only to find that *somebody* made key changes without checking them in or having them reviewed, especially as you're the one likely to take the heat when it's "the server is screwing up again," when in reality it's "somebody uploaded bad code to the server and/or mangled a bunch of settings."
So for the devs out there, please be kind to your sysadmins and use a repository. The ability to roll-back will save you headaches as well as your admins. Also, if you're going to make changes to system config, check with the admins first, or at the very least let them know what's going on so if something going *boink* they can trace it down.
But there are *PLENTY* of people who work under the radar. For example, I've met a number of immigrants who worked within their own ethnic group on a cash-basis. The pay was less than you might get for a legit job, but the work itself wasn't necessarily bad or illegal. In many cases it was students working, prior to a more recent law change that allowed you to work part-time when in on a student visa.
Then you get into the illegal work. I'd imagine that there's plenty of jobs had for those that are willing to work in or beyond the "grey" area of legality. From what I've heard, once somebody has a criminal record one of the main reasons he/she will end up back in crime is that it's pretty damn hard to get a legitimate job.
Money a problem? Work for cash under the table. He can steal the ID of somebody who looks like him, and use that to open a bank account in a different state. Or just get a fake ID.
We're not talking about law-abiding citizens here, we're talking about criminals. I doubt that it often comes to a tent in the woods and showering in gas stations, especially if he makes it to a big city where he can blend in.
PS after the initial escape, authorities don't really pursue fugitives that hard.
Actually, the whole situation is rather sad. There's an individual that AFAIK now has two warrants out for his arrest for breaching no-contact orders, harassment, etc, but despite the fact that everyone is rather sure he's just holed up at home 90% of the time, the police can't enter to nab him. I'd imagine that with two warrants getting some paperwork to enter and seize him wouldn't be too bloody hard, but all they do at the moment is pop by his house randomly and hope to actually sight him or catch him outside.
Lame.
I have no citations but I do have experience. I wouldn't say that they add "lag", but they definitely seem to do something weird with connections. For example, on a couple family members that have it, I can't get two pages browsing at the same time. If I use a VPN then it works just fine, and the speed seems to be faster too.
I don't believe that actual issue is that the pages are hitting the speed limit, even running a couple of curl's seems to be blocked.
Maybe I'm just not looking in the right place, but I don't see where it says they run locally? When I click the "Google Docs" link it says specifically (right bar) that they're "hosted by google"
What I would *REALLY* like to see open-sourced and/or available for private use would be the Google-Docs API's. I'm sure many companies are in the same boat as ours where we aren't willing to trust an external entity with our private information, but would *REALLY* like to have something like docs for online document collaboration.
I know that google sells advertising, but I don't see any reason they couldn't package and sell versions of "Google Docs" to easily be used on private servers. If they would, I know many companies that would jump on this. I've certainly be watching for something comparable that will run on apache etc, but haven't found it yet. I think that some of their model is flawed in that even open-source API's generally need to hook into google's servers. Information may want to be free, but our private records don't!
Your analogy is a bit off but it definitely made me laugh. I'm not sure how putting a pork-chop around an ugly person's neck would get them a date (unless it's with an equally ugly redneck), but the one I heard was:
"She was such an ugly kid we had to hang a porkchop around her next just to get the dog to play with her"
Makes a bit more sense IMHO :-)
I've got an NES, SNES, an old gameboy in a drawer somewhere that still works (though nobody wants it), old PC's, a gamecube, a PS2, etc etc. The first ever truely dead console I've had was the 360 (I don't count the NES where the power brick got pulled on too much, besides that was easy to fix with solder and heat-shrink). With a failure rate of over 50%, I'd say it's not just a matter of taking care of the consoles. Other than needing a little bit of "blow-on-the-pins" magic, the old game carts tended to weather better than current-gen discs as well.
Similarly, I've heard of elevated failure rates behind various models of PS3, though not nearly that of the 360. An honorable mention goes to older DS's with scratched screens, but nowadays screen-protectors are easily available and I believe the screens are a bit more resilient.
I wish this were the case, but it seems that what we actually end up with is a lot of :
NFL/NHL/etc 2006
NFL/NHL/etc 2009
NFL/NHL/etc 2156 (TBA)
We also end up with games shipping too early, way too late, and generally full of bugs or other bullsh*t. Why? Because people will buy them. Yes, they will bitch and whine, but they will still buy them.
Now maybe I have rose-coloured-glasses, but it seems to me that when gamers were fairly "hardcore" or at least a smaller group, releasing stinkers such as these would get you blacklisted. When your market is fairly select, this can be fairly profit-destructive as those that actually give a damn would a pretty big chunk of your target-market.
A good thing is that the advent of internet gaming seems to offer a fair bit more in the way of players etc, so *finding* competition isn't so bad, and you don't have to wait until you actually have 3-4 friends to play with. On the other hand, finding decent competition and a not a bunch of 12-year-old aimbotting I've-got-a-map-hack your-mama-is-fat lamers is not so easy.
Maybe it's rose-colored glasses on my part, but while it might be good for the *industry* in terms of sales, it's not necessarily good for the people.
My friend was simply reading the poem allowed
Perhaps if your friend had been allowed to choose a different poem, he might not have had such difficulties in reading it aloud :-)
Actually, this reminds me of a point sometime ago. The right to "bear arms" basically means you can keep 'em if you've got 'em, and buy 'em if you can afford 'em.
It seems that one trick in the bygone days was to put a fairly hefty tax on gun-related items. The common people may have had a right to have them, but only the aristocracy could actually afford them. I can no longer cite the source or it's validity, but such varieties of "sin taxes" would seem to allow the government to effectively ban things they didn't like without actually making a law banning them...