I am not coming down on your idea. I in fact LIKE the idea but I have been playing MMO's and their predecessors mud's and even BBS games for too long to think anything is going to change soon.
The problem of A and B fighting together is very real. It was a big problem in SWG where towns/guilds could have military bases as part of PvP. These bases were only vulnerable at certain times (wich could be found out) so that the defender didn't have to maintain a 24/7 defence but even maintaining a defence for those times was hard.
Not to mention boring.
Even ad-hoc defence missions can be a pain. They always start JUST when you have arrived almost at your destination on a long journey and now you have to go all the way back again the help out. A war like game would be very hard to do. They are being tried in the guise of persistent WW2 games focusing mostly on aircraft. There the missions are generated based on each sides achievements and you can have a leader form an attack group to take on a mission.
Never heard of them? Well that is because they are not exactly WoW like in their success. Some are still running and so there is an audience and enough money to pay the bills but the games just lack common market appeal.
The main reason is that they are just to hard to get into. For one thing they are about real skill and don't really give a fuck about balance. Yes the stuka divebomber class is breakfast for the spitfire class. No we are not going to nerf the spitfire.
Could you imagine the WoW/EQ crowd playing this? The people who whine that class X does 1 DPS more and this is ruining the game?
Freedom too is a problem. SWG tried that. It really gave you the freedom to form your own class, none of this grinding to level XX and then playing the end-game till hell freezes over (or SOE fixes outstanding bugs, wichever comes first). So what did people do? Grind uber templates and then play the end game until hell frooze over (NGE).
But it sounds like you should give EVE a try, while I tried the free trial (14 days, no credit card asked for) and was utterly bored it does have a lot of what you suggest. That game is far more under the control of players. Find a guild, join up and you will find plenty of demand for you to do certain missions. Provide security, ferry goods, go mining etc etc.
Just be prepared to sit through the most boring tutorial ever put into a game.
But for now WoW is the game to rule the market. It ain't perfect but for all its simplicity and copy-cat gameplay it does simply work in a nice stylish way. If you want something different you are going to have to really work at it to come up with a system that will appeal as much and also be accesible enough to be commercially viable.
Why take risks when copying what everyone else has done works so well? Just look at WoW, they cloned Everquest, made it more simple, and proceeded to laugh all the way to the bank.
So the better PvP would get the best gear by looting it from the lesser player and since WoW PvP results are heavily based on gear that losing player has now even less of a chance of winning while the winner will have become even stronger?
That is called Forumle 1 racing and it is getting boring as hell with the organisation trying everything possible to level the playing field again before they loose their audience.
A slashdot example would be say MS vs oh say ah Novell. Because MS is the biggest, it gets the most money so it can spend the most to help it be the biggest. Novell on the other hand can't spend enough, therefore doesn't get as much and therefore can't spend anymore.
In the real world that is just life but this is a game and both players pay an equal fee.
Do you want to pay to be the looser? To get your one rare piece looted by a decked out player?
Perhaps you do, but blizzard caters to the crowd and I think most people do not want this model. Enough for one server? Perhaps but is it worth the extra development and support?
Your rant sounds like a small child fantasizing about how live should be. That is great but don't expect an adult to do anything but pat your head and ignore you.
A new type of MMO with a different core of gameplay then the current PvE grinds and PvP un-balanced balancing act would indeed be nice if for no other reason then the novelty value.
But it requires more then just a vague rant.
The problem with a promotion system is that there can only be one person at the top of an army, yet in this army all the soldiers are paying to be in it. So how are you going to sell peeling potatoes to a person paying 14.99 a month? This is the problem with any ranking system.
But okay, let other players create the missions you take. EVE does this in a way I believe with its bounty system but can you base a game on this? Would you really pay to follow my insane orders?
And how many order givers can there be versus order takers? If you ever been part of a guild you would know that there are plenty of generals but very few soldiers. Nobody wants to be the grunt send to charge that goblin tank and give it hell while the general goes for the loot chest.
Dynamic sounds nice but it is hell in real life. Unless you reset the world every so often how do you give new players starting on the loosing side a fair chance? Would you really want to spawn as say a japanese soldier in your hometown of hiroshima, report for your first mission on august 6, 1945 in World of War 2.0?
You say it yourself, every faction starts out equall, yet this would not last long in a dynamic world. Unless offcourse every player is a faction but then this is closer to one of those empire building games. They exist and have to deal with the problem of how to protect newbie players from the longer super powerfull players.
A lot of this has already been done in FPS games. Why do you think these maps reset after side X controls Y points or has made X kills? To maintain balance. Good now you got all the bases, start all over again.
In MMO land this is even harder. Already the simplest problem is how to deal with population inbalances. SWG, EQ1/2 and WoW all have larger "good" populations then "evil".
Just write your idea down on paper and then try to make it work in simple game logic.
You will quickly see why all the MMO games are so much alike. WoW and EQ2 could be twins, just one became popular and the other didn't.
It is not because nobody wants to do something different but because nobody yet has found a good way of doing it.
(Oh and please do not mention EVE. I played the free trial and fell asleep during the tutorial. God that game is boring)
What would you say to a society that allowed its citizens the true freedom to take a happy drug. Free because if it is too costly that is just another barrier. If all those who wanted it could spend all their time in a drug induced state of bliss.
Wich population would be easier to control. Drug free citizens or dopeheads?
In fact since drugs are addicting a goverment that dispenses these drugs freely would at the same time have an awfull lot of control. And just imagine any party trying to change this trying to get elected. Yes in order to outlaw your happy drug we are going to have raise taxes so we can pay for taking your happy drug away.
While the use of drugs is indeed a personal freedom issue the simple obstacle for me is that I would not exactly like a world were the majority of citizens are doped out.
You maybe never had to deal with drug users but I have. They are not free citizens excersing their liberty. They are slaves to a substance and slaves to whoever controls the substance. Now it is the pimps. If drugs are legal they will be slaves of companies or goverments. Neither do I consider an improvement.
This subject has already been examined plenty of times in Science Fiction.
It is the simple experiment were a rat with a wired brain is given the choice of directly stimulating his pleasure centers chooses this direct method rather then feeding, sleeping, mating until he dies.
Human beings are sadly not much better then rats. Some of us too will happily do drugs while we rot away. Yes this is freedom, but society as a whole for now has chosen too put restraints on personal freedom.
It is the simple thing of suicide being a crime. A truly free society would have no such ban. Yet again, do you totally trust a society that does not mind if say population group X killed itself? By making suicide a crime we also make the killing of the old or infirm a crime.
Read some good Sci-Fi, then come back and tell me how free you want to be.
Oh and if you truly believe everyone has the right to be free you should first be willing to grant that freedom to others right? Okay, grant me my freedom of killing you. If you are willing to grant me that freedom, I will grant you yours. But you first. Show through example okay? I promise I will keep my word. Honest.
But please in order to for this to take place as soon as possible it is neccesary for you to tranfer the amount of 2000 dollars to my account to help me pay the costs of contacting her. I will be awaiting your postal order.
The madrid bombings certainly worked. One attack and bam, spain instantly folds up and does everything the attackers want sending the rather clear message that next time you want them to do something all you need to is kill a few of their citizens.
So that is the reason terrorism usually is not obviously allowed to acomplish something. Well not that often anyway.
Israel was formed through terrorism against the brits who then controlled the region. That worked well enough and in 1948 Israel got its state (and 60 years of war but considering what they had before it can only be considered an improvement. 60 years of war vs another holocaust next time the germans are ready to start world war, wich would you pick?)
So terrorism is not allowed to achieve anything unless it suits everyones interest (america liked the idea of an ally in the middle east, britain just wanted to get the fuck out they had other problem and the USSR like the ideal of an ally in the middle east (yes really, history is really one big slapstick))
But even less obviously, would the current situation in ireland have been possible without terror? Would the protestants still supress the catholics like they had done before if the IRA had not fought its war of terror?
For that matter South Africa, the treat of the terror of civil war certainly helped the white rulers to accept loosing politcal power.
So terrorism direct or indirect does achieve results. It is a way of attracting attention to whatever cause you are fighting for and the other side will either have to destroy you (often impossible), live with the daily treath or in some way come to an agreement however indirect.
Terrorism works sometimes and that is enough. All it then takes is just enough people to carry it out. The oklahoma bombing apparently took just one person. Did it achieve anything? It did for him and ultimately that is all that matters.
Did the IRA "win" in northern ireland? They think so, perhaps the same current situation would have been achieved through other means. Perhaps the situation would be far better? But that is not what the guys with guns and the bombs think and in this world, he who holds the gun makes the rules.
Both the IRA and the terror organisation of the middle east are rather well known for coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone that dares to disagree from their own citizens. "Traitors" who question them are killed as example to anyone else that does not properly support their liberators.
You claim these acts of terror make crap rain down on their people. They do not care. It proofs the evil nature of the oppressor, makes anyone questioning them seem a traitor supporting the killing of his own people and gets the bleeding hearts on their side.
Drunk driving is bad right? Well a few years ago in england the whole of the bleeding heart PC crowd wept tears about a poor single mother who lost her license because of drink driving. Criminals are only bad if you cannot turn it into a sob story.
No, terrorism works. If it didn't it would still be around.
So you compare indian raids to terrorists attacks. Hmm okay. So how did america deal with Indian raids. Oh I know. By exterminating them, offering a bounty on the scalps of men, women and childeren and putting the few survivors into concentration camps unsuitable for living.
Translate that to the modern world and you would have us wipe out all muslims (or in the case of britain muslims and catholics?)
They shot him on purpose. The accident was mistaking him for someone he was not. An accidental shooting would be if a gun goes of unintended or you miss your intended target and hit a bystander.
Oh and he wasn't innocent. An illegal alien is a criminal under british law. So far most people would not agree that they should be shot on sight but if you want the truth you need to be able to face the whole of the truth.
I both buy and pirate. Fact was that in the old days (pre-broadband since before in holland we paid by the minute wich means downloading a game would actually cost you more) I bought far to many games to be healthy.
Nowadays I don't even pirate a fraction of it and the number of games I consider MUST have and that I pay for (Oblivion being the most recent) are far and few between.
I blame FPS. Not that I don't like them myself. I played doom and quake to dead. That is the problem Quake 2 3 and 4 I just don't give a shit about and the numerous clones even less. Deus EX I payed for, Deus EX 2 not. Give me back the games of yesteryear, the ones with story and gameplay that ain't suffering from consolites. Give me adventures pure and straight, I bought nearly every single one ever released. Except "I have no mouth and I must scream" wich for some reason only seems to have been available in holland in the french version.
And that really is one major obstacle for me. The most excellent "The Longest Journey" was dubbed into dutch. Yuck. I have something against dutch dubs because every single dubber in holland seems to believe that quality dubbing == funny voice. I got my english version via the ABC but they stopped carrying games.
Usually that means I got to put up with some extremely bad translations into dutch wich make me cringe as well wait several months for the game to be actually rereleased. Sometimes it just gets old you know to only be able to play games after 99% of the rest of the internet.
and thenyou got companies that just seem to want to alienate their customers. Valve with their credit card only steam system. You only want credit card owners? Fine, I just pirate my stuff. Happy now?
Same with Oblivion, that was the last money Bethseda ever got from me. I bought every damn one of their games and then they pull their credit card only horse armor crap on me? Nice way to treath a loyal customer.
But wait a minute, didn't we have a story just a few weeks ago about how games sales riding on the back of oblivion were on the up?
Doesn't that just prove that gamers are willing to buy games? Just not the endless tired rehashes that make up most of the market.
The perfect example is Lucasarts. I used to follow them like it was a religion, nowadays I haven't visited their site in ages. Nothing they have come up with in a long time came even close to stirring an interest.
Where is my X-wing, my Ufo: Enemy unknown (if you know this game as X-com you are a heathen), my Monkey Island (the proper point and click versions), my B-17 Flying Fortress (let alone F-16 Fighting Falcon). Give me them and you can get my cash.
For now blizzard gets my cash as I finally caved in and bought WoW last week (well built, stylish but unambitious EQ ripoff) until I get fed up with it. The true horror? Nintendo has been getting a lot of my money recently with the DS. Yes a pc gamer turned to consoles for some good old fun. Be afraid, be very afraid. If Nintendo ever releases a true sim on the DS I fear I must bring about armageddon
Shakespeare is consider high brow, even cultural, but if you believe some english language students many of the names in his plays are nothing but plays on the then slang names for toilets. Oh yeah, very classy.
Rembrandt is a famous dutch artist and his "Nachtwacht" (nightwatch) is a classic. It is also a 100% commercial piece, made to order. So is the Mona Lisa and many other famous pieces of arts.
So what do we got in culture? Knob jokes and made to order artworks. Woopee! Most of the composers composed to the taste of the crowd being little different then say a current commercial rap artist. Art for the sake of money.
Yes there have been artists who worked for the sake of art. They usually died poor and early and miserable. By that standard EA should be producing future classics if only they made working conditions even worse.
There have been games wich have touched my emotion, the simplest is perhaps Planescape Torment but another game was a godsim game where you controlled the evolution of clay animation represented creatures. Ones that didn't meet your standards were mass killed with a nasty zap. At the same time I played it a tv docyu played on WW2 killing camps. That made me think. I don't think the game designers had it in mind but the game made a connect in my mind and that counts in my book.
Will in a 100 years time games like Planescape Torment or others still be remembered. Don't know. The point about classic art is that it still survives in roughly the same form. Music especially we can still listen to 1000 years later as long as someone keeps the notes save. But can we even today play games made a mere decade ago?
Games age badly. While pong survives because new versions are allowed with uptodate graphics a planescape torment just sits there with graphics that today just hurt the eyes.
No this isn't juse being shallow, nowadays shakespeare plays are no longer played with candlelight, we use modern stages, modern instruments and artworks have been cleaned up and restored.
But I agree with you, this guy is just pretentious. Merchant Ivory movies as high art? Then I got the game for you. Myst. Thanks for playing.
You are saying that someone who knows solaris AND FreeBSD (or for that matter anyone who knows TWO operating systems (and no not windows 98 and XP)) has trouble when being shown a third that is based on the same ideas?
Yes there are various different ways to handle the startup of the various unix like systems out there but anyone who has already learned about TWO different ones will have learned a very important lesson. Things differ, so what.
I sometimes think it is a modern ailment because of windows click and play attitude. In the old days even if you used dos you had to learn stuff. You could just slide in a cd and play, you had to acess the A: drive then dir and find the install/startup file. You might have to edit your bootup files. In short you had to learn a fair bit about the system before you had any hope of using it.
Not handy and easy but when you landed in shit creek you at least had a paddle.
Windows has increasingly made it easy to just use the OS (or rather the desktop) without every learning about just what makes it all tick. Very good for endusers but when windows drops them in shit creek they instantly go under and often make the mistake of breathing in in suprise.
For us older folks we had to learn the hardway. The trick to learning an OS is realizing/accepting that you have to learn it.
If you drive a new car do you complain the gears work differently, are in a odd place or just don't respond like the car you are used too or do you just note the differences and adapt?
Your statement could work for a person who knows just one OS, wichever that may be, but never for a person who knows two.
OS'es are like learning languages. Once you got over the hardship off learning your fist foreign language and learned to accept that a different language is just different, just because they want to humiliate foreign devils (yes I learned japanese how did you know?), a third and fourth etc etc will be increasinly easy to learn.
How do I know? Well I am learning my fifth language and recently took up opensolaris after a dose of DOS/AIX/OS2/Windows/Linux(more distros then is healthy) and found it to be a breeze. RTFM, accept that things do not have to be the exact same way you expect them to be and adapt.
It is only a mess if you are unable to learn, to just accept that X does things in Y way. RTFM and a large brain should do the trick. In fact for me I think it is easier if things differ greatly then if they are almost 100% the same but not exactly. Like I keep using LS in DOS and DIR in unix. Never when I specify parameters, just the bare command. Exact same task, same looks, different commands. Different boot scripts. Easy peasy.
You are concerned about MS customers being confused. MS is concerned about people who are not their customer being confused. They don't give a shit about the former. They are already hooked. Same reason roughly you don't court your wive. She lost that privilege when she said yes, she is now yours and you expand your energy on the cute girl in the office.
What is that sopranos line "we are still right here" or something?
While MP3 players and especially the white buds of the iPod are very common more people I know when they have mobile music have it on their phone.
Yes they are seperate markets. They got a phone, that can also do music from time to time. They typically do not constantly walk with earphones on like me and other MP3 player owners. In fact often they do not even have earphones instead using the speaker option to blast the music. Wich is a nice option by the way as it means instant radio during your break when there is no radio.
Mp3 phones and MP3 players just cater to different crowds. My phone is old and simple and in fact I only upgraded it because it was cheaper then buying a new battery for my even older phone. Needless to say it can't play music. On the other hand I got a video iPod player.
My friends got the latest phones that not only play music but also video. While the tech in our pockets do the same, for the same prize (except I got two devices and they just one) we are using them totally differently. My friends just are not the walkman type persons. I am. I need more then 512mb of music. They do not.
So the answer is, what happened to the MP3 phones. They are an amazing hit and all around us.
Why the same hasn't happened to the media pc, well who says the media PC is an MP3 phone. I think it is closer to a video ipod. Does a media pc compete against the PC or against the tv? Is it too complex or too simple?
But more importantly, just what is it? (Oh I know but most don't) What does it DO for me that a device I already own does not.
This I think is the real killer. If you own a PC, you already got a PC and don't need another one. If you don't have a PC by now, well you probably don't want one.
MP3 phones are not a MP3player replacement. The MP3 part is a nice bonus. An extra. I don't know anyone who owned a real MP3 player that thinks a MP3 capable phone would make a decent replacement. In fact almost everyone I know that uses a MP3 player wants more storage, not less.
Price wise I agree. The media PC just doesn't fit. Too expensive yet not enough quality. It just doesn't have its place. Not because it is bad by itself but because other devices already fill the market, devices wich are better understood.
Arabs can't fight Israel in a traditional (read 20th century mechanized warfare) war. They tried it many times and got their asses spanked. Hell egypt had to settle for getting some honor back in the jonn kippur war wich basically ended with Israel halfway to their capital.
So we are seeing a shift. If you cannot stand up to the enemy you must find another way to fight back. The geneva convention has rules about were you are supposed to fight. You are not allowed to use for instance civilians as a human shield, neither are civilians allowed to provide a shield or even assistence.
Terrorists do not obey the geneva rules. So they "can" use civilians as a shield, that is their great power. They can mingle between them, attack from within them, get support from them, and then just become them when they want to flee/hide. In fact, they are civilians. They do not wear a proper uniform for one or carry papers to identify them as soldiers of an army.
But the entire idea of innocent civilians who shouldn't be a target in war is a myth. A candyfloss coating we hope can reduce the horror of war. In reality pretty much every war has always targetted the civilian population. Even in the medieval wars were armies would do their fighting in the countryside properly lined up the winning army would usually go on a rampage through the opponents cities.
It is just the way things were/are. You are at war with the enemy and that means its leaders, its armies and its citizens.
Only recently have some of use become unable to accept this and it ain't working. Look at the recent Hiroshima remebrance. Did these same people mourn the countless deaths of japanese bombings? Offcourse not. Hiroshima was not a simple tit for tat, an way of ending a brutal war started by the japanese, supported by the japanese and carried out by the japanese. When you see a war victim of the atom bomb that is not a child, ask yourselve if they cheered when they read about their brave country men bombing undefended cities.
Offcourse they did.
The real problem with the innocent civilian attitude is that it tries to make war less horrible. I think the bombing on gana (or however you spell it) is too little. Go for an allout middle eastern war. Fullscale bombing with casualties in their millions. Perhaps then just like we had to learn in europe these people will have to learn that war is to costly an option.
But by keeping the casualties as low as they are now (just compare them to traffic accident victims) war keeps being an option. Syria still is spouting war because they never truly felt the horror off full out open war with Israel, just limited military casualties, the lebanese haven't done shit to respect the Israeli withdrawal and curb Hezbollah still thinking that they can exist in peace when its neighbour cannot and the Israeli's think they can just go to war and win easily anytime it is needed rather then make sure peace exist for all.
If you walk across one of the western european war grave sites and you see nothing more white markers across the horizon you can feel nothing but the need to stop war forever.
If you see a single kid dead on the street you want revenge. To make the enemy hurt. In this conflict both sides are seeing single deaths asking for revenge. Let it escalate so both sides, all sides must accept that revenge just leads to more revenge and that in the end both sides need to make up.
The only other option is for a solution like that wich happened in south africa. There all sides agreed that there were just two options, a peacefull, non-revengefull end to apartheid or civil war. That this was achieved is a true miracle and speak very highly of south africas people. Sadly this doesn't look likely in the middle east.
I see no end to the conflict unless they either go the south african way OR all sides accept that war just no longer is an option. And it takes all sides. So far none of the sides are willing to wage peace. Not the Israeli, not hezbollah/syria and not the l
Ok, Microsoft doesn't get any money from IE, as far as I can tell.
Okay, just WTF?
Do you believe that you really get a FREE toy with your box of cereal? That you get free gifts if you pump gas at station X?
Offcourse not, anyone who is not a complete slave to advertising knows that these free items are paid for by you!
Same with IE. It comes with the OS wich you paid for. IE could only be free if you could somehow still use it without having paid for the OS wich it needs to run on. Since you can't (the old mac version of IE is an oddity) it can't be said to be free anymore then say windows notepad is, dos, or windows media player.
MS sells not an OS as such but a desktop, sorta like what you get when you use linux/gnu/(kde/gnome/whatever). This means they have to include basic tools. In the same way that a car dealer usually throws in a set of tires and even a tank of gas, for free!
Believing IE to be free really is a truly stupid mistake to make wich shows that you lack any true understanding of how the world works. It reminds me of especially young people who get taken in by mobile phone plans that offer free this and free that and thinking they are getting everything for free. Yeah right, offcourse not.
Just check how free IE is anyday. Call MS, say you aren't running any legal version of their OS and want your free copy in a usable form. Good luck.
Whenever I think consumer watchdogs want to create to much of a nanny state to protect retards from getting themselves killed someone like you comes along and shows just why we need so many fucking laws on truth in advertising. Yeah it makes the world more boring but sadly some people just can't see through the bullshit and we are not allowed to lock them up anymore.
with all or indeed any previous nintendo game console? Oh wait, it isn't. Neither is the Wii compatible with anything but the gamecube. Or is nintendo going to accept my catridges and give me a free download instead?
Hate Sony all you want but they are the only console maker to really make their next generation console capable of playing previous generations. Granted it is far fewer generations and they didn't have a media shift but still.
I think this time it is definitly Nintendo who is the one doing the looking. Looking at sony and realizing people don't like having their living room cluttered with consoles and expect the new one to play old games and looking towards MS and its live service and the option to download games as a way of getting money from games that do not warrant a full box price release.
Because everyone knows when it comes to really cheap computers Apple is right there as a market leader.
Sorry but no, Steve Jobs offering OS-X for free was nothing but a kind gesture. His product is so out of range of the audience who would have gotten these machines it would be very hard to imagine any generated sales. Unless the project is super succesfull and instantly gives these kids western style incomes. Upper western style incomes.
Windows is an entirely different matter. MS has near dominance of the computer OS and 4 million new users who use non-ms software is nasty. Not horribly nasty but MS is often claimed to keep its dominance because it is dominant. In short you have to use windows, because everyone else uses windows. If everyone else doesn't use windows. Neither do you have to use windows.
It is the reason MS doesn't come down all that hard on piracy and is so willing to offer cheap (by western standards) versions of its OS in high piracy areas. MS rather loose a billion in sales then loose its dominance. Munich showed that MS is basically willing to give its software and services not just away for free but actually offer money on top of it just to make sure some other OS is not used.
Apple competes on quality, MS competes by being the only game in town. Oh and don't forget that linux users will have little difficulty switching to OS-X wich is after all based on that linux wannabe BSD./me runs for it.
The first was Kyoke Date and others have followed. They are of course not completly virtual as they still need a real human to supply the voice but it is getting there.
She was apparently a moderate success, a typical idol. Not all idols are shortlived but she was and with so many real girls wanting to be idols who wants to create a virtual one? They are so hard to audition on the couch if you know what I mean.
But yeah, you can see the appeal of a virtual Han Solo or Indiana Jones. Just crank them movies out without having to deal with a grandpa actor.
http://www.japaninc.net/article.php?articleID=653 tells of a japanese person who claims to have invented the floppy disk as early as 1952, 4 years before this ramac machine. How true it is I can't determine but the story is repeated in several places
This ramac seems to be the first practical commericially available disk drive available. You can blame/. for sloppy language but aren't you just as guilty of sloppy research?
And how many million elected blair again? Well at least your claim for massive support against the war(s) is indeed based on a large number. Not like here in holland were a similar march barely had a few hundred protestors. On several occasions. Mostly muslims.
The goverment makes the laws you say. This is true but the public gets to elect them. Last time I checked your country had three major parties with at least some political differences. The conservatives (disgcraced but basically sorta of left to the americans), labour (used to be socialist but it is hard to tell these days) and the libdems (the eternal losers). There are smaller parties but not as many and certianly not as powerfull as in mainland europe.
Coalition goverment (were more then one party form the goverment) is unknown in england, winner takes all.
Correct so far?
While the conservatives are not much of a choice if you are anti-iraq/afghanistan (anti the war that is not the countries) the libdems I thought were. So why did they loose? Why did blair win? Although labour suffered losses this cannot be explained by the war. The conservatives were the ones who got more votes, not the anti-war parties.
So at least when it came to choosing their next leader your vast majority does not seem to be all that vast.
The simple fact is that it was not one million, a google return a BBC report claiming a figure somewhere between 700.00 and 2 million. In London.
London has about 7% muslims on a total population somewhere between 6 and 12 million depending on how you select the area. To keep the math simple lets make it ten million. 7% muslims that makes, oh say 700.000 muslims. What do you know, the exact number the police say walked in that march.
But not all the marches are muslims. Indeed, so not even all muslims give a shit about this war. After all for a londoner all it would take to march is to take a day off from school or work. Not exactly an a huge sacrifice.
The problem with such big protests is always that if you really start to count the numbers it just ain't that big a percentage. 7% of the london populatin, a fraction of the total english population.
The reason they are ignoring you is simple. You are just one tiny voice. As hard as it may be to accept the majority of britsh, indeed the world are not against the war in Iraq/Afghanistan. No you won't hear about them in the news because they are the SILENT majority who either just don't give a shit or are in support.
It is what democracy such a bitch for activists. To get public opinion to swing your way you have to overcome a gigantic mass of people who have completly different concerns. Even getting a million people to march is insignificant. Even if you got 10 million to march you would still only have a small portion of the people who can vote. And just because they take part in a march does not mean they will vote the way you want them too.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the masses. If england was a dictatorship of a minority were say the lords wanted to start this war you have would at least have a chance but what are you going to do against the masses telling you that they are not opposed to this war?
Well your answer is clear, deny this is the case.Hang on to your tiny march and ignore the evidence of the election. The goverment is not doing what you want so they must not be listening to the people. They did, at the last election, the people spoke. War is on.
The person you link to is claimed to be innocent yet the story admits that he was an illegal alien. That is a crime. So he was NOT innocent. Do illegal aliens deserve to be shot dead? No.
But he is not innocent, he was a willing criminal breaking british laws.
The word "innocent" always makes me uneasy. It is claimed so easily. You can only truly claim innocence if you have truly committed no crimes.
There is another element as well. We have heared from his friends and family that he was innocent. At one point they even claimed he was legally in england. He was not. He was, as is proven, an illegal alien in england. Wich is a crime. His family knew this. So they are lying. What other lies are they telling?
I am a very suspicious bastard and always suspect the worsed. I do believe the police made a really stupid mistake here but sadly that is what happens. In the same way we accept several thousand people killed because bad mistakes while driving we have to accept lethal mistakes when we have armed police.
A simple case of mistaken identity couple with extreme orders lead to a tragedy. YET we have to remember one thing. If this guy had not broken the law he would not have been in england at the time but in his own country, a well known safe heaven with perfect police and zero crime.
In reality this case is little different the a case from my own family, a distant aunt was hit on a zebra crossing by a police car with lights but not sirens. They do then not have right of way, only when both are one do they have right of way. She broke her hip and that probably lead to her premature death. Was the police at fault? Yes and no. They should have had sirens on BUT they are also under orders to use them as little as possible to keep the noise down (yes really). My aunt should probably have paid better attention, a flashing police car is hard to ignore, but do we all always pay attention when crossing the street?
In the end it is just a tragic accident.
In a way this person was just another victim of terrorism. True terror that lead to police being given orders to shoot to kill in a country were most cops don't even carry guns. This is what terrorists really want. For us to live in terror. They succeeded. The real victim is us all. Since we are the ones who create this world, we are not innocent.
As for your comments on peacefull protests. Yeah right. The middle east has seen a lot but peacefull protest is not one of them. Check the goals of the arab liberation arm formed by lebanon in 1947. What this is is just kiddies rebelling against the world and selecting the first anti-hero they can find. Earlier generations lashed onto to the USSR as their guiding beacon.
Who started what in the middle east is a silly discussion. The region has been in trouble for millenia. The current chapter sort of starts in 1948 when the british mandate of the region is about to expire and various groups seek to stake their claim. The jews win in a war in wich all sides commit terrible wrongs. War at its worsed but then this 1948, just 3 years after the end of WW2. What is a few wiped out jewish or arab settlements after a conflict that killed millions?
The jews in the fight are outnumbered and out equipped but bolstered by refugees from europe and arab countries, yes my dear onsided fried, jews were forced to flee from arabia long before palestinians fled, the jews nonetheless manage to hold their own. Although various arab countries send their armies they cannot win and slowly the jews carve in the british terreory the land that would become Israel and in 1948 pronounce its founding. This is quickly regonized by almost the entire world, for whole host of reasons almost all political.
The arab world suffers a massive defeat. Setout to wipe the jews from the face of the world they instead end up with military and political defeat. This tiny group of jews defeated their proffesional armies and politically they were forced to accept the creation of Israel, a jewish state on arab land, by the heathens of the world.
In a very real sense the 1948 Israel/Arab war never ends. It is a ceasefire. Not peace. Two more times almost the exact same nations will commit to open warfare. The six day war and the jonn kippur war. The last one at least bring open military conflict to an end for now as egypt regonizes Israel and slightly less known Jordinia warns Israel of the attack ending that conflict as well.
Only syria remains as a warlike neighbour. The other countries are at something less then peace but more then a ceasefire. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for in the region, a realistion that nobody has anything to gain by continued conflict.
One thing to remember that the so called occupied areas, palestine, are in fact areas that belong to jordania and egypt. Jordan especially is less then pleased with the idea that it has to sacrifce land to the palestines. Arab brothers, shared faith is nice but not when it halves your country. This is a common attitude. How many syrians crying over palestine cry over the koerds?
Lebanon is very much involved in this conflict. It was one the founders behind the Arab Liberation Army, the force send to destory Israel during the 1948 conflict. It was lebanon that attacked Israel, not the other way around.
But the current troubles are far simpler. Lebanon goverment has never, either because of lack of will or lack of capability, stopped arab forces from launching attacks against Israel from within its borders. After too many attacks by amonst others palestines from lebanon Israel attacked with the goal of making its northern border secure.
What you call the kidnapping of two soldiers is just one of the countless attacks from lebanon against israel that the lebanese have done nothing to stop. Perhaps even the opposite.
This creates an impossible situation. What can Israel do? The objective of hezbollah and similar groups like hamas is the destruction of Israel. This is not an option Israel can accept, you perhaps love to see all jews erased from the face of the world but the jews themselves do not. Odd but true.
In effect hezbollah and others hide behind a human shield. This is a problem in modern warfare. In more civilized times armies would just meet up somewhere in a field and do their fighting there leaving the civilians in peace. Well until the winning forces went on a rampage but what is a little bit of murder, looting and rape?
But how do you deal with an enemy who shoots at you from behind an "innocent". You can't. You either accept the shootings, the rocket attacks, the suicide bombs and the kidnappings OR you shoot back with the almost assured change of killing the "innocent".
First off, what is the proper procedure for arresting someone (physical process not legal), I always see on tv that people are grabbed, put against the police car, searched, cuffed, put in car, taken away. Not thrown in car, cuffed, taken away as claimed here.
Second, what was Cruz doing before. I have seen to many incidents of small incidents escaltating because of bystanders getting involved. Once the riot has started the police is blamed for letting things go out of control but if the police orders the crowd to disperse then they are fascists. A no-win scenario for the police.
This leads to the third question, does the (US) police have the right to tell people to go inside/disperse? I am not a lawyer but I think they do. If the public doesn't have to follow police instructions then things would quickly become impossible "STOP, or don't, whatever you feel like".
Fourth is that journalists have a right to photograph and this is usually accepted with press-photographers only being hit by riot squads say every other riot. In general it seems the police is all to aware that trying to supress the press only leads to more attention. But how does this translate to every citizen having a camera? What if under-cover agents are present? SWAT teams and similar typically wear camoflage not just to hide but to protect their indentity. This is offcourse not possible for under-cover agents. Even drug dealers would notice a customer with a face mask. Does the police have the right to stop photographing in these circumstances?
Fifth, where was cruz photographing, in his back yard or on the street. Furthermore if the police wanted to arrest him why shouldn't they have the right to come on to this yard. I smell rats when two sides seem to quote bogus laws. Imagine that it was true you could not be arrested on your own property. If photographing the police is illegal (I don't know) then surely it doesn't matter from where you do it?
Sixth, was cruz really just an observer? Offcourse he is just an innocent angel harmless standing in his own garden just taking a shot of some police cars. You wouldn't expect his parents to admit that he is a flunky for the drugs mafia and trying to photograph undercover agents to warn other dealers? To often I read stories like this and then when you dig a little bit deeper you learn that much more was going on. It just sets of an alarm in my mind not to take everything this guy says at face value.
No I don't blindly trust the police but so far we only got the neighbours of drug dealers confused and unlogical accounts of what went on. Just because your neighbours deal drugs don't mean you are a liar but when you can't keep your own accounts straight and claim non-existent law (the police has a right to arrest you no matter were you are) I don't trust you. Remember, we only got their word for it that he was just arrested for using a camera phone. It may be true, it may not be. Yet I find it typically of slashdot that very few question the account given. I too would like to use this as an example off out of control police powers BUT precisly because I want to believe this I have to skeptical. If a story confirms what you want to hear you must be extra doubtfull or risk falling in the yes-man trap.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem of A and B fighting together is very real. It was a big problem in SWG where towns/guilds could have military bases as part of PvP. These bases were only vulnerable at certain times (wich could be found out) so that the defender didn't have to maintain a 24/7 defence but even maintaining a defence for those times was hard.
Not to mention boring.
Even ad-hoc defence missions can be a pain. They always start JUST when you have arrived almost at your destination on a long journey and now you have to go all the way back again the help out. A war like game would be very hard to do. They are being tried in the guise of persistent WW2 games focusing mostly on aircraft. There the missions are generated based on each sides achievements and you can have a leader form an attack group to take on a mission.
Never heard of them? Well that is because they are not exactly WoW like in their success. Some are still running and so there is an audience and enough money to pay the bills but the games just lack common market appeal.
The main reason is that they are just to hard to get into. For one thing they are about real skill and don't really give a fuck about balance. Yes the stuka divebomber class is breakfast for the spitfire class. No we are not going to nerf the spitfire.
Could you imagine the WoW/EQ crowd playing this? The people who whine that class X does 1 DPS more and this is ruining the game?
Freedom too is a problem. SWG tried that. It really gave you the freedom to form your own class, none of this grinding to level XX and then playing the end-game till hell freezes over (or SOE fixes outstanding bugs, wichever comes first). So what did people do? Grind uber templates and then play the end game until hell frooze over (NGE).
But it sounds like you should give EVE a try, while I tried the free trial (14 days, no credit card asked for) and was utterly bored it does have a lot of what you suggest. That game is far more under the control of players. Find a guild, join up and you will find plenty of demand for you to do certain missions. Provide security, ferry goods, go mining etc etc.
Just be prepared to sit through the most boring tutorial ever put into a game.
But for now WoW is the game to rule the market. It ain't perfect but for all its simplicity and copy-cat gameplay it does simply work in a nice stylish way. If you want something different you are going to have to really work at it to come up with a system that will appeal as much and also be accesible enough to be commercially viable.
Why take risks when copying what everyone else has done works so well? Just look at WoW, they cloned Everquest, made it more simple, and proceeded to laugh all the way to the bank.
That is called Forumle 1 racing and it is getting boring as hell with the organisation trying everything possible to level the playing field again before they loose their audience.
A slashdot example would be say MS vs oh say ah Novell. Because MS is the biggest, it gets the most money so it can spend the most to help it be the biggest. Novell on the other hand can't spend enough, therefore doesn't get as much and therefore can't spend anymore.
In the real world that is just life but this is a game and both players pay an equal fee.
Do you want to pay to be the looser? To get your one rare piece looted by a decked out player?
Perhaps you do, but blizzard caters to the crowd and I think most people do not want this model. Enough for one server? Perhaps but is it worth the extra development and support?
A new type of MMO with a different core of gameplay then the current PvE grinds and PvP un-balanced balancing act would indeed be nice if for no other reason then the novelty value.
But it requires more then just a vague rant.
The problem with a promotion system is that there can only be one person at the top of an army, yet in this army all the soldiers are paying to be in it. So how are you going to sell peeling potatoes to a person paying 14.99 a month? This is the problem with any ranking system.
But okay, let other players create the missions you take. EVE does this in a way I believe with its bounty system but can you base a game on this? Would you really pay to follow my insane orders?
And how many order givers can there be versus order takers? If you ever been part of a guild you would know that there are plenty of generals but very few soldiers. Nobody wants to be the grunt send to charge that goblin tank and give it hell while the general goes for the loot chest.
Dynamic sounds nice but it is hell in real life. Unless you reset the world every so often how do you give new players starting on the loosing side a fair chance? Would you really want to spawn as say a japanese soldier in your hometown of hiroshima, report for your first mission on august 6, 1945 in World of War 2.0?
You say it yourself, every faction starts out equall, yet this would not last long in a dynamic world. Unless offcourse every player is a faction but then this is closer to one of those empire building games. They exist and have to deal with the problem of how to protect newbie players from the longer super powerfull players.
A lot of this has already been done in FPS games. Why do you think these maps reset after side X controls Y points or has made X kills? To maintain balance. Good now you got all the bases, start all over again.
In MMO land this is even harder. Already the simplest problem is how to deal with population inbalances. SWG, EQ1/2 and WoW all have larger "good" populations then "evil".
Just write your idea down on paper and then try to make it work in simple game logic.
You will quickly see why all the MMO games are so much alike. WoW and EQ2 could be twins, just one became popular and the other didn't.
It is not because nobody wants to do something different but because nobody yet has found a good way of doing it.
(Oh and please do not mention EVE. I played the free trial and fell asleep during the tutorial. God that game is boring)
Wich population would be easier to control. Drug free citizens or dopeheads?
In fact since drugs are addicting a goverment that dispenses these drugs freely would at the same time have an awfull lot of control. And just imagine any party trying to change this trying to get elected. Yes in order to outlaw your happy drug we are going to have raise taxes so we can pay for taking your happy drug away.
While the use of drugs is indeed a personal freedom issue the simple obstacle for me is that I would not exactly like a world were the majority of citizens are doped out.
You maybe never had to deal with drug users but I have. They are not free citizens excersing their liberty. They are slaves to a substance and slaves to whoever controls the substance. Now it is the pimps. If drugs are legal they will be slaves of companies or goverments. Neither do I consider an improvement.
This subject has already been examined plenty of times in Science Fiction.
It is the simple experiment were a rat with a wired brain is given the choice of directly stimulating his pleasure centers chooses this direct method rather then feeding, sleeping, mating until he dies.
Human beings are sadly not much better then rats. Some of us too will happily do drugs while we rot away. Yes this is freedom, but society as a whole for now has chosen too put restraints on personal freedom.
It is the simple thing of suicide being a crime. A truly free society would have no such ban. Yet again, do you totally trust a society that does not mind if say population group X killed itself? By making suicide a crime we also make the killing of the old or infirm a crime.
Read some good Sci-Fi, then come back and tell me how free you want to be.
Oh and if you truly believe everyone has the right to be free you should first be willing to grant that freedom to others right? Okay, grant me my freedom of killing you. If you are willing to grant me that freedom, I will grant you yours. But you first. Show through example okay? I promise I will keep my word. Honest.
But please in order to for this to take place as soon as possible it is neccesary for you to tranfer the amount of 2000 dollars to my account to help me pay the costs of contacting her. I will be awaiting your postal order.
So that is the reason terrorism usually is not obviously allowed to acomplish something. Well not that often anyway.
Israel was formed through terrorism against the brits who then controlled the region. That worked well enough and in 1948 Israel got its state (and 60 years of war but considering what they had before it can only be considered an improvement. 60 years of war vs another holocaust next time the germans are ready to start world war, wich would you pick?)
So terrorism is not allowed to achieve anything unless it suits everyones interest (america liked the idea of an ally in the middle east, britain just wanted to get the fuck out they had other problem and the USSR like the ideal of an ally in the middle east (yes really, history is really one big slapstick))
But even less obviously, would the current situation in ireland have been possible without terror? Would the protestants still supress the catholics like they had done before if the IRA had not fought its war of terror?
For that matter South Africa, the treat of the terror of civil war certainly helped the white rulers to accept loosing politcal power.
So terrorism direct or indirect does achieve results. It is a way of attracting attention to whatever cause you are fighting for and the other side will either have to destroy you (often impossible), live with the daily treath or in some way come to an agreement however indirect.
Terrorism works sometimes and that is enough. All it then takes is just enough people to carry it out. The oklahoma bombing apparently took just one person. Did it achieve anything? It did for him and ultimately that is all that matters.
Did the IRA "win" in northern ireland? They think so, perhaps the same current situation would have been achieved through other means. Perhaps the situation would be far better? But that is not what the guys with guns and the bombs think and in this world, he who holds the gun makes the rules.
Both the IRA and the terror organisation of the middle east are rather well known for coming down like a ton of bricks on anyone that dares to disagree from their own citizens. "Traitors" who question them are killed as example to anyone else that does not properly support their liberators.
You claim these acts of terror make crap rain down on their people. They do not care. It proofs the evil nature of the oppressor, makes anyone questioning them seem a traitor supporting the killing of his own people and gets the bleeding hearts on their side.
Drunk driving is bad right? Well a few years ago in england the whole of the bleeding heart PC crowd wept tears about a poor single mother who lost her license because of drink driving. Criminals are only bad if you cannot turn it into a sob story.
No, terrorism works. If it didn't it would still be around.
Translate that to the modern world and you would have us wipe out all muslims (or in the case of britain muslims and catholics?)
Cool. That would get us world peace.
What is the third world anyway? Is pakistan the third world? Most paki's I know would object strongly to that term.
Also these people were born in britain. Is britain the third world now?
Oh but you want simple platitudes. See the world in black and white. Don't let me disturb you.
Oh and he wasn't innocent. An illegal alien is a criminal under british law. So far most people would not agree that they should be shot on sight but if you want the truth you need to be able to face the whole of the truth.
Live is though, wear a bullet proof vest.
Nowadays I don't even pirate a fraction of it and the number of games I consider MUST have and that I pay for (Oblivion being the most recent) are far and few between.
I blame FPS. Not that I don't like them myself. I played doom and quake to dead. That is the problem Quake 2 3 and 4 I just don't give a shit about and the numerous clones even less. Deus EX I payed for, Deus EX 2 not. Give me back the games of yesteryear, the ones with story and gameplay that ain't suffering from consolites. Give me adventures pure and straight, I bought nearly every single one ever released. Except "I have no mouth and I must scream" wich for some reason only seems to have been available in holland in the french version.
And that really is one major obstacle for me. The most excellent "The Longest Journey" was dubbed into dutch. Yuck. I have something against dutch dubs because every single dubber in holland seems to believe that quality dubbing == funny voice. I got my english version via the ABC but they stopped carrying games.
Usually that means I got to put up with some extremely bad translations into dutch wich make me cringe as well wait several months for the game to be actually rereleased. Sometimes it just gets old you know to only be able to play games after 99% of the rest of the internet.
and thenyou got companies that just seem to want to alienate their customers. Valve with their credit card only steam system. You only want credit card owners? Fine, I just pirate my stuff. Happy now?
Same with Oblivion, that was the last money Bethseda ever got from me. I bought every damn one of their games and then they pull their credit card only horse armor crap on me? Nice way to treath a loyal customer.
But wait a minute, didn't we have a story just a few weeks ago about how games sales riding on the back of oblivion were on the up?
Doesn't that just prove that gamers are willing to buy games? Just not the endless tired rehashes that make up most of the market.
The perfect example is Lucasarts. I used to follow them like it was a religion, nowadays I haven't visited their site in ages. Nothing they have come up with in a long time came even close to stirring an interest.
Where is my X-wing, my Ufo: Enemy unknown (if you know this game as X-com you are a heathen), my Monkey Island (the proper point and click versions), my B-17 Flying Fortress (let alone F-16 Fighting Falcon). Give me them and you can get my cash.
For now blizzard gets my cash as I finally caved in and bought WoW last week (well built, stylish but unambitious EQ ripoff) until I get fed up with it. The true horror? Nintendo has been getting a lot of my money recently with the DS. Yes a pc gamer turned to consoles for some good old fun. Be afraid, be very afraid. If Nintendo ever releases a true sim on the DS I fear I must bring about armageddon
Rembrandt is a famous dutch artist and his "Nachtwacht" (nightwatch) is a classic. It is also a 100% commercial piece, made to order. So is the Mona Lisa and many other famous pieces of arts.
So what do we got in culture? Knob jokes and made to order artworks. Woopee! Most of the composers composed to the taste of the crowd being little different then say a current commercial rap artist. Art for the sake of money.
Yes there have been artists who worked for the sake of art. They usually died poor and early and miserable. By that standard EA should be producing future classics if only they made working conditions even worse.
There have been games wich have touched my emotion, the simplest is perhaps Planescape Torment but another game was a godsim game where you controlled the evolution of clay animation represented creatures. Ones that didn't meet your standards were mass killed with a nasty zap. At the same time I played it a tv docyu played on WW2 killing camps. That made me think. I don't think the game designers had it in mind but the game made a connect in my mind and that counts in my book.
Will in a 100 years time games like Planescape Torment or others still be remembered. Don't know. The point about classic art is that it still survives in roughly the same form. Music especially we can still listen to 1000 years later as long as someone keeps the notes save. But can we even today play games made a mere decade ago?
Games age badly. While pong survives because new versions are allowed with uptodate graphics a planescape torment just sits there with graphics that today just hurt the eyes.
No this isn't juse being shallow, nowadays shakespeare plays are no longer played with candlelight, we use modern stages, modern instruments and artworks have been cleaned up and restored.
But I agree with you, this guy is just pretentious. Merchant Ivory movies as high art? Then I got the game for you. Myst. Thanks for playing.
Yes there are various different ways to handle the startup of the various unix like systems out there but anyone who has already learned about TWO different ones will have learned a very important lesson. Things differ, so what.
I sometimes think it is a modern ailment because of windows click and play attitude. In the old days even if you used dos you had to learn stuff. You could just slide in a cd and play, you had to acess the A: drive then dir and find the install/startup file. You might have to edit your bootup files. In short you had to learn a fair bit about the system before you had any hope of using it.
Not handy and easy but when you landed in shit creek you at least had a paddle.
Windows has increasingly made it easy to just use the OS (or rather the desktop) without every learning about just what makes it all tick. Very good for endusers but when windows drops them in shit creek they instantly go under and often make the mistake of breathing in in suprise.
For us older folks we had to learn the hardway. The trick to learning an OS is realizing/accepting that you have to learn it.
If you drive a new car do you complain the gears work differently, are in a odd place or just don't respond like the car you are used too or do you just note the differences and adapt?
Your statement could work for a person who knows just one OS, wichever that may be, but never for a person who knows two.
OS'es are like learning languages. Once you got over the hardship off learning your fist foreign language and learned to accept that a different language is just different, just because they want to humiliate foreign devils (yes I learned japanese how did you know?), a third and fourth etc etc will be increasinly easy to learn.
How do I know? Well I am learning my fifth language and recently took up opensolaris after a dose of DOS/AIX/OS2/Windows/Linux(more distros then is healthy) and found it to be a breeze. RTFM, accept that things do not have to be the exact same way you expect them to be and adapt.
It is only a mess if you are unable to learn, to just accept that X does things in Y way. RTFM and a large brain should do the trick. In fact for me I think it is easier if things differ greatly then if they are almost 100% the same but not exactly. Like I keep using LS in DOS and DIR in unix. Never when I specify parameters, just the bare command. Exact same task, same looks, different commands. Different boot scripts. Easy peasy.
You are concerned about MS customers being confused. MS is concerned about people who are not their customer being confused. They don't give a shit about the former. They are already hooked. Same reason roughly you don't court your wive. She lost that privilege when she said yes, she is now yours and you expand your energy on the cute girl in the office.
While MP3 players and especially the white buds of the iPod are very common more people I know when they have mobile music have it on their phone.
Yes they are seperate markets. They got a phone, that can also do music from time to time. They typically do not constantly walk with earphones on like me and other MP3 player owners. In fact often they do not even have earphones instead using the speaker option to blast the music. Wich is a nice option by the way as it means instant radio during your break when there is no radio.
Mp3 phones and MP3 players just cater to different crowds. My phone is old and simple and in fact I only upgraded it because it was cheaper then buying a new battery for my even older phone. Needless to say it can't play music. On the other hand I got a video iPod player.
My friends got the latest phones that not only play music but also video. While the tech in our pockets do the same, for the same prize (except I got two devices and they just one) we are using them totally differently. My friends just are not the walkman type persons. I am. I need more then 512mb of music. They do not.
So the answer is, what happened to the MP3 phones. They are an amazing hit and all around us.
Why the same hasn't happened to the media pc, well who says the media PC is an MP3 phone. I think it is closer to a video ipod. Does a media pc compete against the PC or against the tv? Is it too complex or too simple?
But more importantly, just what is it? (Oh I know but most don't) What does it DO for me that a device I already own does not.
This I think is the real killer. If you own a PC, you already got a PC and don't need another one. If you don't have a PC by now, well you probably don't want one.
MP3 phones are not a MP3player replacement. The MP3 part is a nice bonus. An extra. I don't know anyone who owned a real MP3 player that thinks a MP3 capable phone would make a decent replacement. In fact almost everyone I know that uses a MP3 player wants more storage, not less.
Price wise I agree. The media PC just doesn't fit. Too expensive yet not enough quality. It just doesn't have its place. Not because it is bad by itself but because other devices already fill the market, devices wich are better understood.
So we are seeing a shift. If you cannot stand up to the enemy you must find another way to fight back. The geneva convention has rules about were you are supposed to fight. You are not allowed to use for instance civilians as a human shield, neither are civilians allowed to provide a shield or even assistence.
Terrorists do not obey the geneva rules. So they "can" use civilians as a shield, that is their great power. They can mingle between them, attack from within them, get support from them, and then just become them when they want to flee/hide. In fact, they are civilians. They do not wear a proper uniform for one or carry papers to identify them as soldiers of an army.
But the entire idea of innocent civilians who shouldn't be a target in war is a myth. A candyfloss coating we hope can reduce the horror of war. In reality pretty much every war has always targetted the civilian population. Even in the medieval wars were armies would do their fighting in the countryside properly lined up the winning army would usually go on a rampage through the opponents cities.
It is just the way things were/are. You are at war with the enemy and that means its leaders, its armies and its citizens.
Only recently have some of use become unable to accept this and it ain't working. Look at the recent Hiroshima remebrance. Did these same people mourn the countless deaths of japanese bombings? Offcourse not. Hiroshima was not a simple tit for tat, an way of ending a brutal war started by the japanese, supported by the japanese and carried out by the japanese. When you see a war victim of the atom bomb that is not a child, ask yourselve if they cheered when they read about their brave country men bombing undefended cities.
Offcourse they did.
The real problem with the innocent civilian attitude is that it tries to make war less horrible. I think the bombing on gana (or however you spell it) is too little. Go for an allout middle eastern war. Fullscale bombing with casualties in their millions. Perhaps then just like we had to learn in europe these people will have to learn that war is to costly an option.
But by keeping the casualties as low as they are now (just compare them to traffic accident victims) war keeps being an option. Syria still is spouting war because they never truly felt the horror off full out open war with Israel, just limited military casualties, the lebanese haven't done shit to respect the Israeli withdrawal and curb Hezbollah still thinking that they can exist in peace when its neighbour cannot and the Israeli's think they can just go to war and win easily anytime it is needed rather then make sure peace exist for all.
If you walk across one of the western european war grave sites and you see nothing more white markers across the horizon you can feel nothing but the need to stop war forever.
If you see a single kid dead on the street you want revenge. To make the enemy hurt. In this conflict both sides are seeing single deaths asking for revenge. Let it escalate so both sides, all sides must accept that revenge just leads to more revenge and that in the end both sides need to make up.
The only other option is for a solution like that wich happened in south africa. There all sides agreed that there were just two options, a peacefull, non-revengefull end to apartheid or civil war. That this was achieved is a true miracle and speak very highly of south africas people. Sadly this doesn't look likely in the middle east.
I see no end to the conflict unless they either go the south african way OR all sides accept that war just no longer is an option. And it takes all sides. So far none of the sides are willing to wage peace. Not the Israeli, not hezbollah/syria and not the l
Ok, Microsoft doesn't get any money from IE, as far as I can tell.
Okay, just WTF?
Do you believe that you really get a FREE toy with your box of cereal? That you get free gifts if you pump gas at station X?
Offcourse not, anyone who is not a complete slave to advertising knows that these free items are paid for by you!
Same with IE. It comes with the OS wich you paid for. IE could only be free if you could somehow still use it without having paid for the OS wich it needs to run on. Since you can't (the old mac version of IE is an oddity) it can't be said to be free anymore then say windows notepad is, dos, or windows media player.
MS sells not an OS as such but a desktop, sorta like what you get when you use linux/gnu/(kde/gnome/whatever). This means they have to include basic tools. In the same way that a car dealer usually throws in a set of tires and even a tank of gas, for free!
Believing IE to be free really is a truly stupid mistake to make wich shows that you lack any true understanding of how the world works. It reminds me of especially young people who get taken in by mobile phone plans that offer free this and free that and thinking they are getting everything for free. Yeah right, offcourse not.
Just check how free IE is anyday. Call MS, say you aren't running any legal version of their OS and want your free copy in a usable form. Good luck.
Whenever I think consumer watchdogs want to create to much of a nanny state to protect retards from getting themselves killed someone like you comes along and shows just why we need so many fucking laws on truth in advertising. Yeah it makes the world more boring but sadly some people just can't see through the bullshit and we are not allowed to lock them up anymore.
Hate Sony all you want but they are the only console maker to really make their next generation console capable of playing previous generations. Granted it is far fewer generations and they didn't have a media shift but still.
I think this time it is definitly Nintendo who is the one doing the looking. Looking at sony and realizing people don't like having their living room cluttered with consoles and expect the new one to play old games and looking towards MS and its live service and the option to download games as a way of getting money from games that do not warrant a full box price release.
Sorry but no, Steve Jobs offering OS-X for free was nothing but a kind gesture. His product is so out of range of the audience who would have gotten these machines it would be very hard to imagine any generated sales. Unless the project is super succesfull and instantly gives these kids western style incomes. Upper western style incomes.
Windows is an entirely different matter. MS has near dominance of the computer OS and 4 million new users who use non-ms software is nasty. Not horribly nasty but MS is often claimed to keep its dominance because it is dominant. In short you have to use windows, because everyone else uses windows. If everyone else doesn't use windows. Neither do you have to use windows.
It is the reason MS doesn't come down all that hard on piracy and is so willing to offer cheap (by western standards) versions of its OS in high piracy areas. MS rather loose a billion in sales then loose its dominance. Munich showed that MS is basically willing to give its software and services not just away for free but actually offer money on top of it just to make sure some other OS is not used.
Apple competes on quality, MS competes by being the only game in town. Oh and don't forget that linux users will have little difficulty switching to OS-X wich is after all based on that linux wannabe BSD. /me runs for it.
She was apparently a moderate success, a typical idol. Not all idols are shortlived but she was and with so many real girls wanting to be idols who wants to create a virtual one? They are so hard to audition on the couch if you know what I mean.
But yeah, you can see the appeal of a virtual Han Solo or Indiana Jones. Just crank them movies out without having to deal with a grandpa actor.
This ramac seems to be the first practical commericially available disk drive available. You can blame /. for sloppy language but aren't you just as guilty of sloppy research?
The goverment makes the laws you say. This is true but the public gets to elect them. Last time I checked your country had three major parties with at least some political differences. The conservatives (disgcraced but basically sorta of left to the americans), labour (used to be socialist but it is hard to tell these days) and the libdems (the eternal losers). There are smaller parties but not as many and certianly not as powerfull as in mainland europe.
Coalition goverment (were more then one party form the goverment) is unknown in england, winner takes all.
Correct so far?
While the conservatives are not much of a choice if you are anti-iraq/afghanistan (anti the war that is not the countries) the libdems I thought were. So why did they loose? Why did blair win? Although labour suffered losses this cannot be explained by the war. The conservatives were the ones who got more votes, not the anti-war parties.
So at least when it came to choosing their next leader your vast majority does not seem to be all that vast.
The simple fact is that it was not one million, a google return a BBC report claiming a figure somewhere between 700.00 and 2 million. In London.
London has about 7% muslims on a total population somewhere between 6 and 12 million depending on how you select the area. To keep the math simple lets make it ten million. 7% muslims that makes, oh say 700.000 muslims. What do you know, the exact number the police say walked in that march.
But not all the marches are muslims. Indeed, so not even all muslims give a shit about this war. After all for a londoner all it would take to march is to take a day off from school or work. Not exactly an a huge sacrifice.
The problem with such big protests is always that if you really start to count the numbers it just ain't that big a percentage. 7% of the london populatin, a fraction of the total english population.
The reason they are ignoring you is simple. You are just one tiny voice. As hard as it may be to accept the majority of britsh, indeed the world are not against the war in Iraq/Afghanistan. No you won't hear about them in the news because they are the SILENT majority who either just don't give a shit or are in support.
It is what democracy such a bitch for activists. To get public opinion to swing your way you have to overcome a gigantic mass of people who have completly different concerns. Even getting a million people to march is insignificant. Even if you got 10 million to march you would still only have a small portion of the people who can vote. And just because they take part in a march does not mean they will vote the way you want them too.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the masses. If england was a dictatorship of a minority were say the lords wanted to start this war you have would at least have a chance but what are you going to do against the masses telling you that they are not opposed to this war?
Well your answer is clear, deny this is the case.Hang on to your tiny march and ignore the evidence of the election. The goverment is not doing what you want so they must not be listening to the people. They did, at the last election, the people spoke. War is on.
Welcome to the adult world.
But he is not innocent, he was a willing criminal breaking british laws.
The word "innocent" always makes me uneasy. It is claimed so easily. You can only truly claim innocence if you have truly committed no crimes.
There is another element as well. We have heared from his friends and family that he was innocent. At one point they even claimed he was legally in england. He was not. He was, as is proven, an illegal alien in england. Wich is a crime. His family knew this. So they are lying. What other lies are they telling?
I am a very suspicious bastard and always suspect the worsed. I do believe the police made a really stupid mistake here but sadly that is what happens. In the same way we accept several thousand people killed because bad mistakes while driving we have to accept lethal mistakes when we have armed police.
A simple case of mistaken identity couple with extreme orders lead to a tragedy. YET we have to remember one thing. If this guy had not broken the law he would not have been in england at the time but in his own country, a well known safe heaven with perfect police and zero crime.
In reality this case is little different the a case from my own family, a distant aunt was hit on a zebra crossing by a police car with lights but not sirens. They do then not have right of way, only when both are one do they have right of way. She broke her hip and that probably lead to her premature death. Was the police at fault? Yes and no. They should have had sirens on BUT they are also under orders to use them as little as possible to keep the noise down (yes really). My aunt should probably have paid better attention, a flashing police car is hard to ignore, but do we all always pay attention when crossing the street?
In the end it is just a tragic accident.
In a way this person was just another victim of terrorism. True terror that lead to police being given orders to shoot to kill in a country were most cops don't even carry guns. This is what terrorists really want. For us to live in terror. They succeeded. The real victim is us all. Since we are the ones who create this world, we are not innocent.
As for your comments on peacefull protests. Yeah right. The middle east has seen a lot but peacefull protest is not one of them. Check the goals of the arab liberation arm formed by lebanon in 1947. What this is is just kiddies rebelling against the world and selecting the first anti-hero they can find. Earlier generations lashed onto to the USSR as their guiding beacon.
The jews in the fight are outnumbered and out equipped but bolstered by refugees from europe and arab countries, yes my dear onsided fried, jews were forced to flee from arabia long before palestinians fled, the jews nonetheless manage to hold their own. Although various arab countries send their armies they cannot win and slowly the jews carve in the british terreory the land that would become Israel and in 1948 pronounce its founding. This is quickly regonized by almost the entire world, for whole host of reasons almost all political.
The arab world suffers a massive defeat. Setout to wipe the jews from the face of the world they instead end up with military and political defeat. This tiny group of jews defeated their proffesional armies and politically they were forced to accept the creation of Israel, a jewish state on arab land, by the heathens of the world.
In a very real sense the 1948 Israel/Arab war never ends. It is a ceasefire. Not peace. Two more times almost the exact same nations will commit to open warfare. The six day war and the jonn kippur war. The last one at least bring open military conflict to an end for now as egypt regonizes Israel and slightly less known Jordinia warns Israel of the attack ending that conflict as well.
Only syria remains as a warlike neighbour. The other countries are at something less then peace but more then a ceasefire. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for in the region, a realistion that nobody has anything to gain by continued conflict.
One thing to remember that the so called occupied areas, palestine, are in fact areas that belong to jordania and egypt. Jordan especially is less then pleased with the idea that it has to sacrifce land to the palestines. Arab brothers, shared faith is nice but not when it halves your country. This is a common attitude. How many syrians crying over palestine cry over the koerds?
Lebanon is very much involved in this conflict. It was one the founders behind the Arab Liberation Army, the force send to destory Israel during the 1948 conflict. It was lebanon that attacked Israel, not the other way around.
But the current troubles are far simpler. Lebanon goverment has never, either because of lack of will or lack of capability, stopped arab forces from launching attacks against Israel from within its borders. After too many attacks by amonst others palestines from lebanon Israel attacked with the goal of making its northern border secure.
What you call the kidnapping of two soldiers is just one of the countless attacks from lebanon against israel that the lebanese have done nothing to stop. Perhaps even the opposite.
This creates an impossible situation. What can Israel do? The objective of hezbollah and similar groups like hamas is the destruction of Israel. This is not an option Israel can accept, you perhaps love to see all jews erased from the face of the world but the jews themselves do not. Odd but true.
In effect hezbollah and others hide behind a human shield. This is a problem in modern warfare. In more civilized times armies would just meet up somewhere in a field and do their fighting there leaving the civilians in peace. Well until the winning forces went on a rampage but what is a little bit of murder, looting and rape?
But how do you deal with an enemy who shoots at you from behind an "innocent". You can't. You either accept the shootings, the rocket attacks, the suicide bombs and the kidnappings OR you shoot back with the almost assured change of killing the "innocent".
There is ple
Second, what was Cruz doing before. I have seen to many incidents of small incidents escaltating because of bystanders getting involved. Once the riot has started the police is blamed for letting things go out of control but if the police orders the crowd to disperse then they are fascists. A no-win scenario for the police.
This leads to the third question, does the (US) police have the right to tell people to go inside/disperse? I am not a lawyer but I think they do. If the public doesn't have to follow police instructions then things would quickly become impossible "STOP, or don't, whatever you feel like".
Fourth is that journalists have a right to photograph and this is usually accepted with press-photographers only being hit by riot squads say every other riot. In general it seems the police is all to aware that trying to supress the press only leads to more attention. But how does this translate to every citizen having a camera? What if under-cover agents are present? SWAT teams and similar typically wear camoflage not just to hide but to protect their indentity. This is offcourse not possible for under-cover agents. Even drug dealers would notice a customer with a face mask. Does the police have the right to stop photographing in these circumstances?
Fifth, where was cruz photographing, in his back yard or on the street. Furthermore if the police wanted to arrest him why shouldn't they have the right to come on to this yard. I smell rats when two sides seem to quote bogus laws. Imagine that it was true you could not be arrested on your own property. If photographing the police is illegal (I don't know) then surely it doesn't matter from where you do it?
Sixth, was cruz really just an observer? Offcourse he is just an innocent angel harmless standing in his own garden just taking a shot of some police cars. You wouldn't expect his parents to admit that he is a flunky for the drugs mafia and trying to photograph undercover agents to warn other dealers? To often I read stories like this and then when you dig a little bit deeper you learn that much more was going on. It just sets of an alarm in my mind not to take everything this guy says at face value.
No I don't blindly trust the police but so far we only got the neighbours of drug dealers confused and unlogical accounts of what went on. Just because your neighbours deal drugs don't mean you are a liar but when you can't keep your own accounts straight and claim non-existent law (the police has a right to arrest you no matter were you are) I don't trust you. Remember, we only got their word for it that he was just arrested for using a camera phone. It may be true, it may not be. Yet I find it typically of slashdot that very few question the account given. I too would like to use this as an example off out of control police powers BUT precisly because I want to believe this I have to skeptical. If a story confirms what you want to hear you must be extra doubtfull or risk falling in the yes-man trap.
Thank you, I will be here all day.