The iPhone looks nice. Overpriced and tied to a terrible service provider, but the gadget itself looks cool.
But where's the next-generation iPod? It's obvious that the technology is there; the iPhone has pretty much every feature that one could dream of in a next-generation iPod: it's widescreen, touch-controlled, and has much better screen resolution.
What about the vast majority of iPod customers who don't want an overfeatured, overpriced toy ($600 plus a two-year contract with the worst mobile service provider in the US--and they have a monopoly on it, by the way) with little storage capacity that won't be available until June? What about those of us who aren't interested in satellite images of the Washington Monument, or a simple way to voice-dial Starbucks, and just want a sexy gadget to play movies on the train? Why does Apple insist on shoving these extra features down our throats at an exorbitant price, offering no alternative? I thought they had more respect for their customers than that.
In this day and age, you're telling me that a dozen employees saw this thing, and even heard about it over a radio broadcast, but not one of them had both a camera phone and the presence of mind to use it?
Religious intolerance from the government is bad. Your First Amendment straw man ends there.
I don't see anything wrong with people being equally intolerant of religion as they are of communism, cannibalism or any other ideas they don't support.
Why is it so taboo to discuss the beliefs of other people? Why are they so untouchable?
Human knowledge is, generally, advanced through discussion. Someone presents a theory. Someone else finds a hole in it. They argue for a bit, and eventually one person modifies his broken theory to accommodate reality. Without that process, we'd all probably still be living in caves.
But for some reason, it's considered incredibly rude to talk about religion. Are religious beliefs so fragile that they can't stand up to scrutiny? And if they are, then why believe them in the first place?
Frankly, anyone who believes in Christianity at this point is either willfully ignorant of the facts, or just plain stupid. The Bible is absolutely rife with falsehoods and contradictions. Furthermore, for every Christian who just knows the Bible is the unmitigated word of God, I can find you a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu and a Taoist who all believe the same thing. What makes you right and them wrong?
A common response to this question is that people find comfort in religion, and if they're not hurting anybody, what's the big deal? Unfortunately, I don't see religious belief as an innocuous force in the world. In case you haven't noticed, the United States and the Middle East are on the brink of a holy war, and while no one (on this side) will explicitly say so, it's clear that religion plays a major part in our involvement over there.
There are other issues, too. There are an increasing number of ultraconservative Christian fundamentalists in the US, and they're gaining political power. Want to see something really scary? Google Christian Reconstructionism or Dominion Theology. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans believe in this stuff, and they all vote. When we can't even politely discuss these problems, how are we supposed to solve them? Moderates who consider religious discussion off-limits, in my opinion, will be every bit as culpable as the fundies when we end up with our own version of the Taliban in power.
No one voluntarily goes into slavery, regardless of how much debt they amass. You might be forced into slavery (or, in other eras, put in prison) to pay back debts, but I guarantee you that virtually no one in the history of the world has willingly waived all of their rights and become the property of another person.
Yeah, because God sure didn't hate the homosexuals in Sodom and Gomorrah...
The Bible is an ugly, bloodthirsty, and downright strange book. Christians who take a message of peace and love out of it may be good people, but they're just cherry-picking passages and ignoring the ones they don't agree with. If you're going to do that, why do you need some archaic forgery to shape your morals in the first place?
I don't consider myself to be afraid of change. I'm not an endangered species protectionist or anything like that. That said, temperature changes affect everything. Habitats, weather patterns, ocean currents, etc. There's no way to know the extent of what could happen. It seems intuitively obvious to me that playing with these variables entails an enormous risk, and offers very little in the way of return for anyone who's not an Exxon shareholder.
I'm not entirely sure where you're getting that one meter figure, but suffice it to say that it's definitely not a number that the scientific community agrees upon.
I view what you see as "protectionism" in the exact opposite light. The aforementioned fires occurred because people overstepped their boundaries, and attempted to intervene in the workings of nature without fully considering the consequences, which were drastic. It's not altogether dissimilar to global warming in that respect.
The bottom line is that it's a big risk to take. We're the product of millions of years of evolution that have finely tuned us to live on this planet in its current condition. I may be underestimating the resilience of the human race, but willfully running headfirst into something that may irrevocably alter the entire world is idiotic.
According to a link in the article that you linked to, the melting of Greenland's ice sheet alone would raise ocean levels by 7 meters.
Beyond that, ocean currents and weather patterns would be affected in ways that we flat-out can't predict. Not to mention that entire ecosystems could conceivably collapse. They're pretty fragile.
No one can prove that any of this will happen. But it's likely, and the stakes are pretty damned high. It's not a gamble most people are willing to take.
It looks like neither of us are experts in this field. But among those who are, a vast majority agree with the conclusion that a rise in temperature is a very big deal.
You say you don't mind change, but remember that the human race is, like all life on Earth, dependent on a strict set of circumstances for its very survival. The world's ecosystems are very complex, and it wouldn't take a whole lot to send them spiraling out of equilibrium. Further, the human race has become, by both natural and artificial selection, acclimated to the world as it is. The specific results of radical change are virtually unpredictable, but I think it's a near certainty that a changed world would be less accommodating to humanity.
You say we could erect levees to keep a hundred foot-tall wall of ocean from leveling New York. That's pretty much a textbook case of hubris. Ask the residents of New Orleans how that worked out. And besides, if your primary concern is financial, that sounds a hell of a lot more expensive in the long run than implementing pollution controls.
Yes, people are definitely overreacting and jumping to false conclusions. It's bound to happen when you put so much public focus on a very complicated scientific subject.
That doesn't mean global warming isn't a serious concern. Considering the age of the Earth, if temperatures are rising at the rate of one degree every thirty years, that's a significant change. One degree might not make that much of a difference (or it might; I'm not a climate scientist), but the effect is cumulative, and eventually, these proclamations of gloom and doom will come true. Not overnight or anything, but let's just say our great-grandchildren will probably miss the eastern seaboard.
The reason it's such a big deal now is that most scientists believe that the effect is currently reversible. If the status quo remains, however, that won't be the case for very long.
Red Steel is just what you'd expect from a launch title. Lame story, flawed gameplay, merely decent graphics, etc. If the game came out a year from now, it would be execrable. But for now, it's not bad.
Maybe. But someone's going to have to add user accounts and install software, and fix things when they break. It's not the users I'm concerned about, but rather the admins. It sounds like this school doesn't have an IT department, and I've found that foisting new technologies on people is not a good thing to do unless you're personally willing to support them when things go wrong. And if you're not going to do it, who else can they call?
The Boy Scouts are rapidly becoming obsolete, and thank god for that.
The whole organization has undergone a massive shift over the past thirty years, effectively becoming an arm of the Mormon church. All of this gay-bashing and atheist persecution is relatively new.
Not that it matters. Even ten years ago, only a few kids in my school were in Boy Scouts, and the rest of us just made fun of them. I'd be more worried about their crazy right-wing views if there were actually any Boy Scouts around anymore.
Not only is it not illegal, but the RIAA and MPAA have been paying companies to "poison" filesharing servers like this for a long time now. If you download and install Kazaa Lite and type in the name of any remotely popular song, you'll get hundreds of matches of all sizes and lengths, and a vast majority of them are fake. Kazaa themselves rendered their service almost unusable with all their adware, but the glut of false files did the rest of the job.
I'd agree with you if things were a bit different. When you do things like this on weekday mornings, it tends to favor the unemployed, and I don't think that's terribly fair. I'd be quite willing to line up outside a store on a Saturday morning, but I can't ask my boss if I can show up a few hours late (GameStop opens at 10:00) just so I can pre-order a new game system.
Further, this whole "buy-all-the-consoles-you-can-and-sell-them-for-ou trageous-prices-on-eBay" thing really sucks. If everyone who bought a system kept it, I think a majority of people who wanted one on day one would have access to it. That changes when multiple consoles are bought up by a single individual and stockpiled until right before Christmas, when they're sold to idiots willing to pay $600 to quell little Junior's kicking and screaming for a day or two.
The current arrangement basically injects a middleman into the process--someone who does nothing but buy the console from one source and sell to another, not even incurring retail or marketing costs--who makes a killing on the thing, while those who actually created the damn thing (i.e. Nintendo) get nothing. I'm not shedding any tears for Nintendo; they'll do fine. It just bothers me to be forced to give an extra $150 to some unemployed dude in Scranton, PA because he happens to be friends with the assistant manager at Best Buy. Ironically, Internet shopping was supposed to eliminate the need for an intermediary.
I don't really see what could be done to fix this, either. I'm sure eBay wouldn't want to give up its profits on every console they list. Nintendo could create a registry of names or something, I guess, or require a driver's license number and ensure that they're all unique, but that raises some privacy concerns and doesn't seem like a very elegant solution.
I'm a developer by trade, using almost exclusively Microsoft products. (Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm evil, greedy and stupid.) I know Windows fairly well.
I agree with the OP. It's very, very rare to see Microsoft stuff crash. I mean, it's not perfect by any means, but it has to have been at least a year since I last saw a BSOD. Same thing with Office. Don't get me wrong--it's bloated, overfeatured, and generally a pain in the ass to use--but I can't remember the last time an Office application outright died on me.
On the rare occasions that bad stuff does happen, it's seldom (directly) Microsoft's fault--bad hardware and bad third-party drivers are the most frequent culprits. You could argue that Microsoft should take a more proactive stance in keeping bad drivers from running and such, but they have their certification program, and anything more restrictive would be bad for those of us who like being able to run homebrew stuff without having to get it certified.
As for "quality" drivers, Microsoft doesn't make them directly, but I guarantee you that they stay in close contact with driver programmers at places like ATI and nVidia, and provide loads of developer support and source code access.
I don't know enough about security to say anything on that side of the issue, other than that Firefox appears to be just as vulnerable, and has mostly been protected thus far by a cloak of obscurity that is sure to fade as its marketshare grows. Unfortunately, Firefox sucks slightly less than IE, and we're all stuck with it for now. But I digress...
That's just because voice recognition technology sucks right now.
A hundred years ago, you'd look like an idiot for talking to a small lump of plastic attached to the wall by a curly cord. Once the technology matures, everyone will get used to it, and you'll use it without even thinking about it.
The first 20-25 levels are boring as hell, as there's not much to do other than fetch quests and farming. But once you get into instanced dungeons, the game picks up and becomes great fun, although there's certainly still a good deal of grinding to do. The five-man dungeons in WoW are an absolute blast, and there's always something new to see until right around the time you hit the level cap.
The endgame is terrible--40-man raids are horrible in oh-so-many ways--you can't get 40 people together without some degree of bullshit, be it guild drama, inept players, scheduling problems or terrible leadership, and once you do, you're spending dozens of hours a week doing the same thing over and over again for the chance to get a few pieces of virtual armor with higher numbers on them--but I had loads of fun on the journey to level 60.
Just to clarify, I don't think ESPN Mobile even offered its users a live ESPN feed. It was more a way to get scores, stats, and updates. (I'm reasonably sure that's correct; I've only heard the plugs seven freaking times during each SportsCenter broadcast for the past year.) I'm sure there were video clips and such, but I don't think you could watch a whole Monday Night Football broadcast on the thing.
I'm pretty sure it is the laser, and while I don't have a link handy, I'm sure I read that the cost of the things was in the hundreds of dollars.
There are other components as well, such as the motor and the moving apparatus on which the laser is mounted. I think I read something about spin velocity or proximity of the laser to the disc surface or something like that that was also causing them problems.
What do you suggest? If you want to have a say, you have to get involved in the process.
For a long time, many sensible people have scorned politics, laughed at the Christian right and stayed home on election day. Well, guess what? They control everything now. The process can be ugly at times, but you ignore it at your own peril.
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The iPhone looks nice. Overpriced and tied to a terrible service provider, but the gadget itself looks cool.
But where's the next-generation iPod? It's obvious that the technology is there; the iPhone has pretty much every feature that one could dream of in a next-generation iPod: it's widescreen, touch-controlled, and has much better screen resolution.
What about the vast majority of iPod customers who don't want an overfeatured, overpriced toy ($600 plus a two-year contract with the worst mobile service provider in the US--and they have a monopoly on it, by the way) with little storage capacity that won't be available until June? What about those of us who aren't interested in satellite images of the Washington Monument, or a simple way to voice-dial Starbucks, and just want a sexy gadget to play movies on the train? Why does Apple insist on shoving these extra features down our throats at an exorbitant price, offering no alternative? I thought they had more respect for their customers than that.
In this day and age, you're telling me that a dozen employees saw this thing, and even heard about it over a radio broadcast, but not one of them had both a camera phone and the presence of mind to use it?
It's not. But their target market intersects nicely with the mouth-breathers who are clamoring to get GTA banned. It's a nice little piece of irony.
Religious intolerance from the government is bad. Your First Amendment straw man ends there.
I don't see anything wrong with people being equally intolerant of religion as they are of communism, cannibalism or any other ideas they don't support.
Why is it so taboo to discuss the beliefs of other people? Why are they so untouchable?
Human knowledge is, generally, advanced through discussion. Someone presents a theory. Someone else finds a hole in it. They argue for a bit, and eventually one person modifies his broken theory to accommodate reality. Without that process, we'd all probably still be living in caves.
But for some reason, it's considered incredibly rude to talk about religion. Are religious beliefs so fragile that they can't stand up to scrutiny? And if they are, then why believe them in the first place?
Frankly, anyone who believes in Christianity at this point is either willfully ignorant of the facts, or just plain stupid. The Bible is absolutely rife with falsehoods and contradictions. Furthermore, for every Christian who just knows the Bible is the unmitigated word of God, I can find you a Muslim, a Jew, a Hindu and a Taoist who all believe the same thing. What makes you right and them wrong?
A common response to this question is that people find comfort in religion, and if they're not hurting anybody, what's the big deal? Unfortunately, I don't see religious belief as an innocuous force in the world. In case you haven't noticed, the United States and the Middle East are on the brink of a holy war, and while no one (on this side) will explicitly say so, it's clear that religion plays a major part in our involvement over there.
There are other issues, too. There are an increasing number of ultraconservative Christian fundamentalists in the US, and they're gaining political power. Want to see something really scary? Google Christian Reconstructionism or Dominion Theology. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans believe in this stuff, and they all vote. When we can't even politely discuss these problems, how are we supposed to solve them? Moderates who consider religious discussion off-limits, in my opinion, will be every bit as culpable as the fundies when we end up with our own version of the Taliban in power.
Bullshit.
No one voluntarily goes into slavery, regardless of how much debt they amass. You might be forced into slavery (or, in other eras, put in prison) to pay back debts, but I guarantee you that virtually no one in the history of the world has willingly waived all of their rights and become the property of another person.
Yeah, because God sure didn't hate the homosexuals in Sodom and Gomorrah...
The Bible is an ugly, bloodthirsty, and downright strange book. Christians who take a message of peace and love out of it may be good people, but they're just cherry-picking passages and ignoring the ones they don't agree with. If you're going to do that, why do you need some archaic forgery to shape your morals in the first place?
I don't consider myself to be afraid of change. I'm not an endangered species protectionist or anything like that. That said, temperature changes affect everything. Habitats, weather patterns, ocean currents, etc. There's no way to know the extent of what could happen. It seems intuitively obvious to me that playing with these variables entails an enormous risk, and offers very little in the way of return for anyone who's not an Exxon shareholder.
I'm not entirely sure where you're getting that one meter figure, but suffice it to say that it's definitely not a number that the scientific community agrees upon.
I view what you see as "protectionism" in the exact opposite light. The aforementioned fires occurred because people overstepped their boundaries, and attempted to intervene in the workings of nature without fully considering the consequences, which were drastic. It's not altogether dissimilar to global warming in that respect.
The bottom line is that it's a big risk to take. We're the product of millions of years of evolution that have finely tuned us to live on this planet in its current condition. I may be underestimating the resilience of the human race, but willfully running headfirst into something that may irrevocably alter the entire world is idiotic.
According to a link in the article that you linked to, the melting of Greenland's ice sheet alone would raise ocean levels by 7 meters.
Beyond that, ocean currents and weather patterns would be affected in ways that we flat-out can't predict. Not to mention that entire ecosystems could conceivably collapse. They're pretty fragile.
No one can prove that any of this will happen. But it's likely, and the stakes are pretty damned high. It's not a gamble most people are willing to take.
It looks like neither of us are experts in this field. But among those who are, a vast majority agree with the conclusion that a rise in temperature is a very big deal.
You say you don't mind change, but remember that the human race is, like all life on Earth, dependent on a strict set of circumstances for its very survival. The world's ecosystems are very complex, and it wouldn't take a whole lot to send them spiraling out of equilibrium. Further, the human race has become, by both natural and artificial selection, acclimated to the world as it is. The specific results of radical change are virtually unpredictable, but I think it's a near certainty that a changed world would be less accommodating to humanity.
You say we could erect levees to keep a hundred foot-tall wall of ocean from leveling New York. That's pretty much a textbook case of hubris. Ask the residents of New Orleans how that worked out. And besides, if your primary concern is financial, that sounds a hell of a lot more expensive in the long run than implementing pollution controls.
Yes, people are definitely overreacting and jumping to false conclusions. It's bound to happen when you put so much public focus on a very complicated scientific subject.
That doesn't mean global warming isn't a serious concern. Considering the age of the Earth, if temperatures are rising at the rate of one degree every thirty years, that's a significant change. One degree might not make that much of a difference (or it might; I'm not a climate scientist), but the effect is cumulative, and eventually, these proclamations of gloom and doom will come true. Not overnight or anything, but let's just say our great-grandchildren will probably miss the eastern seaboard.
The reason it's such a big deal now is that most scientists believe that the effect is currently reversible. If the status quo remains, however, that won't be the case for very long.
Red Steel is just what you'd expect from a launch title. Lame story, flawed gameplay, merely decent graphics, etc. If the game came out a year from now, it would be execrable. But for now, it's not bad.
Maybe. But someone's going to have to add user accounts and install software, and fix things when they break. It's not the users I'm concerned about, but rather the admins. It sounds like this school doesn't have an IT department, and I've found that foisting new technologies on people is not a good thing to do unless you're personally willing to support them when things go wrong. And if you're not going to do it, who else can they call?
OK. Do you want to teach dozens of teachers and hundreds of kids how to use Linux?
The Boy Scouts are rapidly becoming obsolete, and thank god for that.
The whole organization has undergone a massive shift over the past thirty years, effectively becoming an arm of the Mormon church. All of this gay-bashing and atheist persecution is relatively new.
Not that it matters. Even ten years ago, only a few kids in my school were in Boy Scouts, and the rest of us just made fun of them. I'd be more worried about their crazy right-wing views if there were actually any Boy Scouts around anymore.
Not only is it not illegal, but the RIAA and MPAA have been paying companies to "poison" filesharing servers like this for a long time now. If you download and install Kazaa Lite and type in the name of any remotely popular song, you'll get hundreds of matches of all sizes and lengths, and a vast majority of them are fake. Kazaa themselves rendered their service almost unusable with all their adware, but the glut of false files did the rest of the job.
If you're playing WoW, how do you have a job or wages for them tax you on?
I'd agree with you if things were a bit different. When you do things like this on weekday mornings, it tends to favor the unemployed, and I don't think that's terribly fair. I'd be quite willing to line up outside a store on a Saturday morning, but I can't ask my boss if I can show up a few hours late (GameStop opens at 10:00) just so I can pre-order a new game system.
Further, this whole "buy-all-the-consoles-you-can-and-sell-them-for-ou trageous-prices-on-eBay" thing really sucks. If everyone who bought a system kept it, I think a majority of people who wanted one on day one would have access to it. That changes when multiple consoles are bought up by a single individual and stockpiled until right before Christmas, when they're sold to idiots willing to pay $600 to quell little Junior's kicking and screaming for a day or two.
The current arrangement basically injects a middleman into the process--someone who does nothing but buy the console from one source and sell to another, not even incurring retail or marketing costs--who makes a killing on the thing, while those who actually created the damn thing (i.e. Nintendo) get nothing. I'm not shedding any tears for Nintendo; they'll do fine. It just bothers me to be forced to give an extra $150 to some unemployed dude in Scranton, PA because he happens to be friends with the assistant manager at Best Buy. Ironically, Internet shopping was supposed to eliminate the need for an intermediary.
I don't really see what could be done to fix this, either. I'm sure eBay wouldn't want to give up its profits on every console they list. Nintendo could create a registry of names or something, I guess, or require a driver's license number and ensure that they're all unique, but that raises some privacy concerns and doesn't seem like a very elegant solution.
I'm a developer by trade, using almost exclusively Microsoft products. (Yeah, yeah, I know. I'm evil, greedy and stupid.) I know Windows fairly well.
I agree with the OP. It's very, very rare to see Microsoft stuff crash. I mean, it's not perfect by any means, but it has to have been at least a year since I last saw a BSOD. Same thing with Office. Don't get me wrong--it's bloated, overfeatured, and generally a pain in the ass to use--but I can't remember the last time an Office application outright died on me.
On the rare occasions that bad stuff does happen, it's seldom (directly) Microsoft's fault--bad hardware and bad third-party drivers are the most frequent culprits. You could argue that Microsoft should take a more proactive stance in keeping bad drivers from running and such, but they have their certification program, and anything more restrictive would be bad for those of us who like being able to run homebrew stuff without having to get it certified.
As for "quality" drivers, Microsoft doesn't make them directly, but I guarantee you that they stay in close contact with driver programmers at places like ATI and nVidia, and provide loads of developer support and source code access.
I don't know enough about security to say anything on that side of the issue, other than that Firefox appears to be just as vulnerable, and has mostly been protected thus far by a cloak of obscurity that is sure to fade as its marketshare grows. Unfortunately, Firefox sucks slightly less than IE, and we're all stuck with it for now. But I digress...
That's just because voice recognition technology sucks right now.
A hundred years ago, you'd look like an idiot for talking to a small lump of plastic attached to the wall by a curly cord. Once the technology matures, everyone will get used to it, and you'll use it without even thinking about it.
It looks like you left right before it got good.
The first 20-25 levels are boring as hell, as there's not much to do other than fetch quests and farming. But once you get into instanced dungeons, the game picks up and becomes great fun, although there's certainly still a good deal of grinding to do. The five-man dungeons in WoW are an absolute blast, and there's always something new to see until right around the time you hit the level cap.
The endgame is terrible--40-man raids are horrible in oh-so-many ways--you can't get 40 people together without some degree of bullshit, be it guild drama, inept players, scheduling problems or terrible leadership, and once you do, you're spending dozens of hours a week doing the same thing over and over again for the chance to get a few pieces of virtual armor with higher numbers on them--but I had loads of fun on the journey to level 60.
Just to clarify, I don't think ESPN Mobile even offered its users a live ESPN feed. It was more a way to get scores, stats, and updates. (I'm reasonably sure that's correct; I've only heard the plugs seven freaking times during each SportsCenter broadcast for the past year.) I'm sure there were video clips and such, but I don't think you could watch a whole Monday Night Football broadcast on the thing.
I'm pretty sure it is the laser, and while I don't have a link handy, I'm sure I read that the cost of the things was in the hundreds of dollars.
There are other components as well, such as the motor and the moving apparatus on which the laser is mounted. I think I read something about spin velocity or proximity of the laser to the disc surface or something like that that was also causing them problems.
I agree. The ads were everywhere, and they were annoying as hell.
The service didn't look the least bit impressive, either. It was only a matter of time.
What do you suggest? If you want to have a say, you have to get involved in the process.
For a long time, many sensible people have scorned politics, laughed at the Christian right and stayed home on election day. Well, guess what? They control everything now. The process can be ugly at times, but you ignore it at your own peril.