You are supposed to drink the koolaid, not pickle yourself in it.
The agency concerned also showed no evidence that the incident that happened was likely to happen, but it did.
Isn't that it went wrong so badly enough proof that things can go badly?
A little less faith in the almighty oil companies and a little more critical independent thinking would suit you.
Basically you got a biased judge (everyone does it is NOT a defence) going against the evidence of the disaster and claiming the a few wells are going to ruin the economy. Geez, anymore then it already has been ruined by the likes of this judge whose poor decision making skills have lead to this disaster in the first place?
Right wing capitalists, the Iraqi minister of information got nothing on you. "No sir this oil well is NOT burning, tons of oil are not pooring into the ocean, the local ecology and economy are not being devasated."
But you are slipping, you really should have added how benefits are bad for poor people but good for rich people if they happen to run banks or car companies.
If I was Obama I would tell the Americans to go screw themselves.
Doom is the ultimate example of JUST how to preserve a virtual world. By releasing the source code iD has decoupled it from OS/Hardware and ensured its continued survival.
So Doom is NOT an example of how hard it is to preserve a game but rather an example of just how to make sure a game survives.
On the whole, don't use success stories as an example of how not to do something.
Why are you a Muslim apologist? Because every single one of them is against Israel occupying the lands of Jordan, Egypt etc but never EVER make a single notion of the occupation of the Sahara by Morocco. And that country is in near state of war with Algiers about it all.
Stable? Only because nobody reports on the area. That will change the moment it starts to have any economic relevance. The reality of that area is that all the countries in the area make claims already on what is just worthless sand. If it becomes the powerhouse of the world, they would be very motivated to press those claims.
The Sahara is also the buffer between these barely stable Muslim nations and the black countries were stability is a distant dream. Obviously any development in the Sahara would have on the north near-warring nations and on the south near constant civil war. Yeah, that is place to base the western worlds source of energy.
And you hope that this development will be different then oil dollars? Oil dollars were a sudden influx of big capitol within existing countries/borders. This new development will be in practical no-mans land. I predict a massive land-grab.
No, only if you read the popular press would you get the idea that this area is stable. Read up on the border skirmishes in that area and you realize it is about as stable as the Russian Chinese border or the Indian Chinese border. No, you don't hear about those either, but I wouldn't recommend building your economy there either.
Look at what happens in Japan when a major mistake is make and in the west. Has anyone from BP taken accountability? Has anyone from Boeing ever laid down their jobs because they killed a couple of hundred people with their bad decision? Has any airline director every left? No.
But in Japan the higher ups DO feel that they are at fault for mistakes.
Your explenation of western attitude often becomes: A fault is nobodies fault.
You REALLY do not want to hear the TRUE military opinion about this.
But I will tell you anyway:
War is hell.
You put the lowest class of people you can have with all their prejudices and tiny small minded worries, give them very powerful weapons and tell them to create "peace".
That ain't going to work, it has never worked and it will never work. Very specialist units of the military could possible do that, like the old SAS where you didn't count if you weren't at least 30+. A man, not a punk teenager with a gun and an attitude.
Vietnam. What do you think of it? Poor honest soldiers attempt at a hearts and minds campaign ruined by secret CIA operations? WRONG, it is EXACTLY the opposite. The CIA was doing a good job, copying similar operations by the british to win over the population by building the country up. It was working and then some dickshit politician decided it wasn't going fast enough and send in the regular mass murdering army.
No, this is not what the hollywood movies tell you what happened. You need to read some books to find this out.
Iraq is a war fought by the military and the military kills people. Armed or unarmed doesn't matter. Everyone is a target especially if they got a different skin color. That is war. You can't put a teenager in a tank and expect him to go from fighting to peace-keeping an instant. Highly trained and underpaid cops of 20 years EXPERIENCE have a hard time doing that. Soldiers? Forget it. That is not what they are trained for. they are trained to be killing machines operating killing machines and that is what you saw.
Nasty? You bet, just as nasty as 8 MILLION civilian casualties caused by US soldiers in Vietnam. COUNT THEM and realize that this killing figure was achieved WITHOUT the gas chambers that allows the germans to reach 12 million. Yes, 2/3 of the holocaust by the americans in Vietnam. THAT IS WAR. Not the nice and polite actions of Israel/Egypt were fewer people are killed then on a busy weekend on the roads. But all out brutal war aimed at destroying a peoples freedom and make them subjugated.
Everyone with a brain knew that Iraq would end up like this because America hasn't learned anything from Vietnam. About the only way for America to learn at this point is to round up every single Vietnam veteran and put them on trial for war crimes. Because that is what that war came down to. But America can't do that. It would not tear the nation apart, it would destroy it utterly. Because the US IS war crimes. Compare the holocaust with the trek west and try to spot the difference. The difference? The direction. The germans went east for lebensraum. The americans went west and both slaughtered the people that they viewed as lesser and unworthy of living.
THAT is the US. How can you expect an army from such a country to behave nice in dirty war?
No doubt some American will mod this down, because it comes far to close to the truth. The US is build on war crimes. Its founders of freedom kept slaves. That is the history of the US. Watch the video. There are no missing bits, this is the full story of what happens when you put a scared 20 year old guy in a killing machine amongst people he thinks of as less then himself and who are the enemy of everything he believes in.
No, it ain't nice. But really, you don't want to hear this. Same as you don't want to hear the truth about any of America's past. Note the COMPLETE lack of any mention of how blacks were treated during WW2 in Band of Brothers or The Pacific. Realistic portrayal of WW2 my ass.
Go and trolls somewhere else with your bleeding heart for some freak who can't keep his paws of someone elses stuff and then cries when he is caught. Got a simple deal for him, go to the US or double time in the UK.
And remember, Muslims do have a sense of humor, their hecklers just carry stones instead of rotten tomato's.
Ah, but I have been hogging the stage to long already, please welcome our next guest: The Muslim apologists who will make all this seem perfectly alright. Can he pull it off again? No, but he will believe he did and nothing can persuade him otherwise. Give him a big hand everyone! If you still got them.
This project probably got through on some scaremongering bill but then when the non-vote winning budget was needed, the politicians knew that the voter does not want to spend any money ever, and voted against it.
Police costs a LOT of money. Crime costs even more but no politician has to raise taxes to fund crime.
Take the "three-strikes" law. Interesting idea, but did anyone in favor of it ALSO vote to increase the number of jails by about a 1000%? Because ALL those rotating door criminals that were out in a couple of months are now in for life. Even if you lock them four to a cell and reduce their life expectancy that way, you still are talking about housing an awful lot of people for a bloody long time. And a life-sentence looses its meaning if they are paroled after 6 months because the need the space.
And if you are against the "three-strikes" system? Then what is your solution and how are you going to pay for it? Prevention? Lots of cops and social workers. Re-education? lots of parole officers. Treating those with mental problems before they come to harm? Very expensive mental hospitals (which were cut and now jails fullfill their role).
This project most likely was started as a way to aid parole officers in their job. Then it became a way to cut costs instead and now you got fewer parole officers with more duties and ever more prisoners to track.
But hey, you got a tax cut... oh wait no. that 300 dollars has seen been added to your bills multiple times.
Oh well. That is what you get for giving everyone the vote. You turn the running of the country into Idols.
WoW got 10million people playing a SINGLE game when previously people had argued the entire industry was worth about 1 million players. It was seriously believed that SOE when launching a new title could only canabilize its own existing titles because there just weren't enough players to go around. And then Blizzard came along and released a title that can't appear on graphs with other games because the others end up in a brown streak on the bottom.
THAT is the legacy of WoW.
Yes, it was in some ways a simpler game. It streamlined the EQ type of game by removing much of its needless complexity. It added tons of quests that actually told you were you were supposed to go instead of just "kill 10 x, I don't know what x is or where it is but kill them anyway. Oh x is 100 levels above you? THOUGH SHIT".
Doom was not the first FPS, but it was the smoothest. Lucasarts was not the first to do adventures, but they did some of the best by removing the "you made a tiny mistake, you are dead, you loser" element that had made Sierra infamous. Half-Life was not the first FPS with a story but they did it the best.
And Blizzard did MMORPG better then anyone else. Doesn't mean it is the PERFECT MMO. But it is the one that simply worked in an industry were most MMO's are either incredible boring grindfests or filled with so much needless complexity only a D&D lover could stomach it.
There is room for another game, a game that takes the lessons learned from WoW and applies them. Mostly, to be your own game and not someone elses.
I have heard about the intelligent home all my life. So did my parents AND their parents. Look up some old reels from a "visions of the future" style problem. Where you see some housewife in black&white use robots we still don't have. 50+ years and the toaster still doesn't work right.
Okay, so the dryer is networked. What now? Report its power drain? I know it drains power, I can hear it running. How much? Well, I know how much thank you, I can see it on the bill. If I don't care about the money I sure as hell don't care about the environment OR that it will brownout the district.
If I do care about the environment and bill, then I would hardly want to ADD to the polution and cost by installing electronic devices I don't need.
This belongs in the category of the fridge that scans your food. The gadget is called a wife. They can see straight through metal and can detect rotting food a mile away. The gadget for saving electricity is called a dad. Try it. Get a wife with the optional extra of a kiddy or two (odd enough you don't get a discount for bulk buying) and you soon will be the most efficient energy saver on the planet.
So basically what this new service is that you get a free "newsletter" that is automatically printed for you at a scheduled time. Bit like getting your own newspaper printed before you wake up like a coffee machine and bread maker on a timer but instead of just printing the same page for everyone, they make the ads in the newspaper dynamic, targetted specifically at you.
Pretty harmless... sure, the inkt and paper cost you money but a regular newspaper also costs money.
But then, there used to be unwritten rules about where the ads were placed. None on the front page. Only small ones on the front page. Now they just wrap the entire newspaper in an ad.
Same with tv. You used to get station ID's and "upcoming features" between programs, then during the credits. then a small text bar at the bottom. Now 50% of the screen covers the action for half a minute or more. Often to tell you to watch the program beneath the ad.
How long before these "free" newsletters will be advertorials with 1 sentence of content on a full color print that uses so much ink the paper feels wet?
The idea itself isn't wrong, I just know advertisers have never learned to limit themselves. No advertiser given access to a new medium will ever say "Okay, that is enough, lets not go any further". Bigger, louder, more annoying. Until finally the poor user gives up in disgust and then the advertiser will ask: "What happened? Why are my ads no longer watched. Maybe they weren't loud enough and annoying enough!"
First they came with the banners, and I did not object because I was not a banner.... well you know were I am going with this.
Everyone knows that wires are just tubes with a bit of metal inside to give them strength. You got big tubes beneath the road and small tubes called wires inside the house.
Here I will proof it by removing the useless metal from my network tube[CARRIER LOST]
What you and your fellow capitalists presume is that the museum and library despite endless cost cuttings will always be there. What is iTunes becomes the ONLY music seller and music publishers no longer give libraries the right to lend out music for free? What then?
What when Amazon becomes only the book seller? What then? The issue at hand is NOT what happens now when Apple is a relatively minor player in the distribution of content but what might happen if it continues to grow.
Would anyone have cared about Microsofts security problems if OS2 has not been made to fail (with a lot of help from MS). If you could still go into any shop and buy an Amiga? If Sinclair had a 2010 version? No. Then MS would never have been in court for abusing its monopoly and we would have laughed heartily at its attempts to do so.
When a Christian book store decides to carry only proper Christian books, they should be free to do so. But when that book store becomes a national chain, replacing all the other book stores, then this freedom becomes a serious liability. We could end-up with the self-censored state. Were you are free to publish anything you want, you just can't get it published. Or rather, sold. Everyone has a printing press but the market is locked up. Not by the state but by people who conveniently think the same as the most repressive censors.
Think of the Walmart effect applied to freedom of speech. Walmart ain't the devil. It doesn't force you as a manufacturer to work by their rules. You just won't be selling your items in their store if you don't. If the local grocery tries to get a manufacturer to dictate its terms, it will be told to get shafted. A large retailer might be able to negiotate a deal but Walmart TELLS you how things are going to go. it doesn't negiotate a price-cut. It tells you that you are going to cut your prices. You WILL play by their rules and the bigger they get, the more they can do this and the more you will hurt for not playing by their rules.
Look at the rise of the censored music cd spefically editted for the large retailers. It ain't state censorship, although it is mighty coincidental that what some in power want to be censored happens to be censored in the largest retail chains.
Ever noticed the curious lack of reporting of the issues around copyright by the big media? Or how if Futurama mentions filesharing this is always a bad thing? Gosh, well it must be true then because media producers would NEVER report one-sided on an issue that affects them.
Now imagine say MS-NBC be the only news source (or at least the only one most people access). How often do you think you would get reports on Windows security issues then? And NO, the CURRENT situation with PLENTY of competition for MS-NBC does NOT count. Now they have to, because people will hear it somewhere else. But what if they don't have to?
You only have to look to Italy for the effect. Berlusconi controls the media and amazingly they completly fail to report on any of the issues around him. Or whenthey do they just happen so share his point of view. Freedom of the press? Yes, the state ain't telling them what and what not to report, but I don't think it is the freedom you imagine.
In MS world, exploits don't happen and since they don't happen you don't report on them and you don't patch them. Luckily it ain't a MS world and some people do find exploits and publish them and then MS has to patch them but they get very miffed about it.
What if it was an Apple world? What if iTunes was the music store for 99% of the people. Sure there are alternatives but nobody uses it. What if the iPad becomes THE new way to read books and if you don't get accepted by Apple, your book just doesn't get noticed. Would you then still defend their censorship?
You claim that Apple is like a grocer. That means you are an idiot. Because Apple is a grocer then it is Walmart. Do you LIKE Walmarts censoring of music? How about 10 years in the future when they are the only store left?
Protecting freedom is not about what you have today, but what you would have in 10 years if you do not fight for it now.
Meanwhile countless Wii's are gathering dust and the biggest selling accessory for the DS is the R4 card.
The problem for Nintendo is games. They don't sell all that well. Yes, they got the hits but go to your local game store and look honestly at the shelves of DS games and ask "which one do I want". What percentage? 1%? 2%? I got an R4 card myself and I sampled a lot of games but most barely get beyond 5 minutes of play before I truly know: "No way".
And there is more to staying in business then selling well. You got to sell well enough to fund the next round of the console wars. Sony and Microsoft (especially Microsoft) are not going away. Neither is Apple. These companies got more spending power and can continue to fund the next round of consoles at a loss if need be. Nintendo can't.
The 3DS SOUNDS interesting, OR will it be a Virtual Boy? A power glove? They have got it wrong before. If the 3D doesn't work or gives people headaches or even worse, there are only a handful of games for it, then it could fail. Or gaming could simply switch to the mobile phone. People have been predicting the end of the dedicated MP3 player. But why not the end of the dedicated gaming hardware?
Might the 3D element be a desperate move by Nintendo to offer something the iPhone can't? Yet? 3D tech isn't mature yet. I for one will be very interested in seeing a non fanboy review of the 3DS before I order it, from Japan directly like I have with all my Nintendo handhelds. Yes, I am a regular customer (of their hardware at least) but I also remember the failures from the past and that not all "new" gaming concepts make it. Gosh, I still got the readme.txt of System Shock telling me about support for Virtual Reality Helmets. What ever happened to them eh? WHERE is my VR helmet?
Why do I think the 3DS might fail? Quick, do a check of your favorite DS games. How many are 3D? Most of mine are 2D. Are my favorite 2D games going to be forced into a 3D jacket just to show of a smaller screen? (Smaller then XL)
I once had the unfortunate experience of talking to a gnaa member. He was bitching about someone "hammering" his own webserver by requesting the same page over and over. A guy who spend all time bragging about how he attacked other peoples servers complaining bitterly about how someone was loading the same page on his own server.
A troll would scream bloody murder if he was attacked and sue the hell out of you. Trolls are not decent people, they do NOT like their own medicine.
Seems you missed the point. Targetted works, super targetted doesn't. Advertising housing to me when my mail box is filled with housing related mails works. Advertising that a girl is living next door who sells services I might be interested in considering the images I am downloading... well that is just creepy.
Only someone who has never EVER been inside a publisher would call them a corporation. Maybe something like Harlequin comes close but the more "serious" ones have profits as something that happens sometimes, maybe but what it is, they don't know.
It is most certainly never a "fleece them for every penny" operation like an Apple. No book publisher would use Foxconn because penny-saving is not what they do. Profit for a book publisher is at most something to fund the next costly failure with. A lot of them also feel they got a public duty and that rarely is the one that tells them to do absolutely nothing that might offend anyone.
It is something very different from a mega billion dollar company like Apple to do publishing from some proper book publisher where even the account wears open toed sandals. It is the difference between the accounts running the books and them running the company.
The proof? Far fewer problems with book censorship. Just count the number of books published with naked boobies involved vs iPhone apps with the same.
Boobies are a good indicator of censorship. And yes, censoring yourself is censorship.
We would do well to not have our culture controlled by gigant companies only intrested in the bottom line.
Slashdot Mirror
You are supposed to drink the koolaid, not pickle yourself in it.
The agency concerned also showed no evidence that the incident that happened was likely to happen, but it did.
Isn't that it went wrong so badly enough proof that things can go badly?
A little less faith in the almighty oil companies and a little more critical independent thinking would suit you.
Basically you got a biased judge (everyone does it is NOT a defence) going against the evidence of the disaster and claiming the a few wells are going to ruin the economy. Geez, anymore then it already has been ruined by the likes of this judge whose poor decision making skills have lead to this disaster in the first place?
Right wing capitalists, the Iraqi minister of information got nothing on you. "No sir this oil well is NOT burning, tons of oil are not pooring into the ocean, the local ecology and economy are not being devasated."
But you are slipping, you really should have added how benefits are bad for poor people but good for rich people if they happen to run banks or car companies.
If I was Obama I would tell the Americans to go screw themselves.
Doom is the ultimate example of JUST how to preserve a virtual world. By releasing the source code iD has decoupled it from OS/Hardware and ensured its continued survival.
So Doom is NOT an example of how hard it is to preserve a game but rather an example of just how to make sure a game survives.
On the whole, don't use success stories as an example of how not to do something.
Why are you a Muslim apologist? Because every single one of them is against Israel occupying the lands of Jordan, Egypt etc but never EVER make a single notion of the occupation of the Sahara by Morocco. And that country is in near state of war with Algiers about it all.
Stable? Only because nobody reports on the area. That will change the moment it starts to have any economic relevance. The reality of that area is that all the countries in the area make claims already on what is just worthless sand. If it becomes the powerhouse of the world, they would be very motivated to press those claims.
The Sahara is also the buffer between these barely stable Muslim nations and the black countries were stability is a distant dream. Obviously any development in the Sahara would have on the north near-warring nations and on the south near constant civil war. Yeah, that is place to base the western worlds source of energy.
And you hope that this development will be different then oil dollars? Oil dollars were a sudden influx of big capitol within existing countries/borders. This new development will be in practical no-mans land. I predict a massive land-grab.
No, only if you read the popular press would you get the idea that this area is stable. Read up on the border skirmishes in that area and you realize it is about as stable as the Russian Chinese border or the Indian Chinese border. No, you don't hear about those either, but I wouldn't recommend building your economy there either.
Remember, separate your grad student: Females under the desk, males on the dissection table.
Look at what happens in Japan when a major mistake is make and in the west. Has anyone from BP taken accountability? Has anyone from Boeing ever laid down their jobs because they killed a couple of hundred people with their bad decision? Has any airline director every left? No.
But in Japan the higher ups DO feel that they are at fault for mistakes.
Your explenation of western attitude often becomes: A fault is nobodies fault.
Yeah, government clinics for the poor, and they just happen to have the worsed equipment and the place where the big pharmacuticals do their testing.
You know, most of the developed world has sorted this out a long time ago. It is called socialism. Embrace it or die.
Your suggestions tells poor people who happen to have a handicap or chronic condition to get stuffed.
You sir fail at humanity. Congrats, you can now enroll in US politics.
You REALLY do not want to hear the TRUE military opinion about this.
But I will tell you anyway:
War is hell.
You put the lowest class of people you can have with all their prejudices and tiny small minded worries, give them very powerful weapons and tell them to create "peace".
That ain't going to work, it has never worked and it will never work. Very specialist units of the military could possible do that, like the old SAS where you didn't count if you weren't at least 30+. A man, not a punk teenager with a gun and an attitude.
Vietnam. What do you think of it? Poor honest soldiers attempt at a hearts and minds campaign ruined by secret CIA operations? WRONG, it is EXACTLY the opposite. The CIA was doing a good job, copying similar operations by the british to win over the population by building the country up. It was working and then some dickshit politician decided it wasn't going fast enough and send in the regular mass murdering army.
No, this is not what the hollywood movies tell you what happened. You need to read some books to find this out.
Iraq is a war fought by the military and the military kills people. Armed or unarmed doesn't matter. Everyone is a target especially if they got a different skin color. That is war. You can't put a teenager in a tank and expect him to go from fighting to peace-keeping an instant. Highly trained and underpaid cops of 20 years EXPERIENCE have a hard time doing that. Soldiers? Forget it. That is not what they are trained for. they are trained to be killing machines operating killing machines and that is what you saw.
Nasty? You bet, just as nasty as 8 MILLION civilian casualties caused by US soldiers in Vietnam. COUNT THEM and realize that this killing figure was achieved WITHOUT the gas chambers that allows the germans to reach 12 million. Yes, 2/3 of the holocaust by the americans in Vietnam. THAT IS WAR. Not the nice and polite actions of Israel/Egypt were fewer people are killed then on a busy weekend on the roads. But all out brutal war aimed at destroying a peoples freedom and make them subjugated.
Everyone with a brain knew that Iraq would end up like this because America hasn't learned anything from Vietnam. About the only way for America to learn at this point is to round up every single Vietnam veteran and put them on trial for war crimes. Because that is what that war came down to. But America can't do that. It would not tear the nation apart, it would destroy it utterly. Because the US IS war crimes. Compare the holocaust with the trek west and try to spot the difference. The difference? The direction. The germans went east for lebensraum. The americans went west and both slaughtered the people that they viewed as lesser and unworthy of living.
THAT is the US. How can you expect an army from such a country to behave nice in dirty war?
No doubt some American will mod this down, because it comes far to close to the truth. The US is build on war crimes. Its founders of freedom kept slaves. That is the history of the US. Watch the video. There are no missing bits, this is the full story of what happens when you put a scared 20 year old guy in a killing machine amongst people he thinks of as less then himself and who are the enemy of everything he believes in.
No, it ain't nice. But really, you don't want to hear this. Same as you don't want to hear the truth about any of America's past. Note the COMPLETE lack of any mention of how blacks were treated during WW2 in Band of Brothers or The Pacific. Realistic portrayal of WW2 my ass.
It is pretty amazing but not suprising just how misguided the above poster is.
It is indeed a very a good question asked by the gp, where does it say anonymity on the net is a fundamental right.
Because WE declare it so? Who is this WE? Because part of "WE" seems to want this anonymity to end.
Entitlement only works if you are willing to fight for your entitlements. Not just shout very loudly about them on some nerd forum.
Get it, blow over... storm... blow... I kill myself. What do you mean, "yes please".
Is the hacker facing execution? No.
Is hacking a crime in the UK? Yes.
Did Zuckerman draw any cartoon himself? No.
Similarity ends.
Go and trolls somewhere else with your bleeding heart for some freak who can't keep his paws of someone elses stuff and then cries when he is caught. Got a simple deal for him, go to the US or double time in the UK.
A fate worse then death.
Embrace, death grip. A trivial difference.
And remember, Muslims do have a sense of humor, their hecklers just carry stones instead of rotten tomato's.
Ah, but I have been hogging the stage to long already, please welcome our next guest: The Muslim apologists who will make all this seem perfectly alright. Can he pull it off again? No, but he will believe he did and nothing can persuade him otherwise. Give him a big hand everyone! If you still got them.
This project probably got through on some scaremongering bill but then when the non-vote winning budget was needed, the politicians knew that the voter does not want to spend any money ever, and voted against it.
Police costs a LOT of money. Crime costs even more but no politician has to raise taxes to fund crime.
Take the "three-strikes" law. Interesting idea, but did anyone in favor of it ALSO vote to increase the number of jails by about a 1000%? Because ALL those rotating door criminals that were out in a couple of months are now in for life. Even if you lock them four to a cell and reduce their life expectancy that way, you still are talking about housing an awful lot of people for a bloody long time. And a life-sentence looses its meaning if they are paroled after 6 months because the need the space.
And if you are against the "three-strikes" system? Then what is your solution and how are you going to pay for it? Prevention? Lots of cops and social workers. Re-education? lots of parole officers. Treating those with mental problems before they come to harm? Very expensive mental hospitals (which were cut and now jails fullfill their role).
This project most likely was started as a way to aid parole officers in their job. Then it became a way to cut costs instead and now you got fewer parole officers with more duties and ever more prisoners to track.
But hey, you got a tax cut... oh wait no. that 300 dollars has seen been added to your bills multiple times.
Oh well. That is what you get for giving everyone the vote. You turn the running of the country into Idols.
WoW got 10million people playing a SINGLE game when previously people had argued the entire industry was worth about 1 million players. It was seriously believed that SOE when launching a new title could only canabilize its own existing titles because there just weren't enough players to go around. And then Blizzard came along and released a title that can't appear on graphs with other games because the others end up in a brown streak on the bottom.
THAT is the legacy of WoW.
Yes, it was in some ways a simpler game. It streamlined the EQ type of game by removing much of its needless complexity. It added tons of quests that actually told you were you were supposed to go instead of just "kill 10 x, I don't know what x is or where it is but kill them anyway. Oh x is 100 levels above you? THOUGH SHIT".
Doom was not the first FPS, but it was the smoothest. Lucasarts was not the first to do adventures, but they did some of the best by removing the "you made a tiny mistake, you are dead, you loser" element that had made Sierra infamous. Half-Life was not the first FPS with a story but they did it the best.
And Blizzard did MMORPG better then anyone else. Doesn't mean it is the PERFECT MMO. But it is the one that simply worked in an industry were most MMO's are either incredible boring grindfests or filled with so much needless complexity only a D&D lover could stomach it.
There is room for another game, a game that takes the lessons learned from WoW and applies them. Mostly, to be your own game and not someone elses.
Our flying cars are just around the corner.
I have heard about the intelligent home all my life. So did my parents AND their parents. Look up some old reels from a "visions of the future" style problem. Where you see some housewife in black&white use robots we still don't have. 50+ years and the toaster still doesn't work right.
Okay, so the dryer is networked. What now? Report its power drain? I know it drains power, I can hear it running. How much? Well, I know how much thank you, I can see it on the bill. If I don't care about the money I sure as hell don't care about the environment OR that it will brownout the district.
If I do care about the environment and bill, then I would hardly want to ADD to the polution and cost by installing electronic devices I don't need.
This belongs in the category of the fridge that scans your food. The gadget is called a wife. They can see straight through metal and can detect rotting food a mile away. The gadget for saving electricity is called a dad. Try it. Get a wife with the optional extra of a kiddy or two (odd enough you don't get a discount for bulk buying) and you soon will be the most efficient energy saver on the planet.
The predictable consequence that the gamecube and dreamcast failed and the PS2 still sells?
Oh poor Sony, how will they ever survive the PS2!
So basically what this new service is that you get a free "newsletter" that is automatically printed for you at a scheduled time. Bit like getting your own newspaper printed before you wake up like a coffee machine and bread maker on a timer but instead of just printing the same page for everyone, they make the ads in the newspaper dynamic, targetted specifically at you.
Pretty harmless... sure, the inkt and paper cost you money but a regular newspaper also costs money.
But then, there used to be unwritten rules about where the ads were placed. None on the front page. Only small ones on the front page. Now they just wrap the entire newspaper in an ad.
Same with tv. You used to get station ID's and "upcoming features" between programs, then during the credits. then a small text bar at the bottom. Now 50% of the screen covers the action for half a minute or more. Often to tell you to watch the program beneath the ad.
How long before these "free" newsletters will be advertorials with 1 sentence of content on a full color print that uses so much ink the paper feels wet?
The idea itself isn't wrong, I just know advertisers have never learned to limit themselves. No advertiser given access to a new medium will ever say "Okay, that is enough, lets not go any further". Bigger, louder, more annoying. Until finally the poor user gives up in disgust and then the advertiser will ask: "What happened? Why are my ads no longer watched. Maybe they weren't loud enough and annoying enough!"
First they came with the banners, and I did not object because I was not a banner.... well you know were I am going with this.
Everyone knows that wires are just tubes with a bit of metal inside to give them strength. You got big tubes beneath the road and small tubes called wires inside the house.
Here I will proof it by removing the useless metal from my network tube[CARRIER LOST]
What you and your fellow capitalists presume is that the museum and library despite endless cost cuttings will always be there. What is iTunes becomes the ONLY music seller and music publishers no longer give libraries the right to lend out music for free? What then?
What when Amazon becomes only the book seller? What then? The issue at hand is NOT what happens now when Apple is a relatively minor player in the distribution of content but what might happen if it continues to grow.
Would anyone have cared about Microsofts security problems if OS2 has not been made to fail (with a lot of help from MS). If you could still go into any shop and buy an Amiga? If Sinclair had a 2010 version? No. Then MS would never have been in court for abusing its monopoly and we would have laughed heartily at its attempts to do so.
When a Christian book store decides to carry only proper Christian books, they should be free to do so. But when that book store becomes a national chain, replacing all the other book stores, then this freedom becomes a serious liability. We could end-up with the self-censored state. Were you are free to publish anything you want, you just can't get it published. Or rather, sold. Everyone has a printing press but the market is locked up. Not by the state but by people who conveniently think the same as the most repressive censors.
Think of the Walmart effect applied to freedom of speech. Walmart ain't the devil. It doesn't force you as a manufacturer to work by their rules. You just won't be selling your items in their store if you don't. If the local grocery tries to get a manufacturer to dictate its terms, it will be told to get shafted. A large retailer might be able to negiotate a deal but Walmart TELLS you how things are going to go. it doesn't negiotate a price-cut. It tells you that you are going to cut your prices. You WILL play by their rules and the bigger they get, the more they can do this and the more you will hurt for not playing by their rules.
Look at the rise of the censored music cd spefically editted for the large retailers. It ain't state censorship, although it is mighty coincidental that what some in power want to be censored happens to be censored in the largest retail chains.
Ever noticed the curious lack of reporting of the issues around copyright by the big media? Or how if Futurama mentions filesharing this is always a bad thing? Gosh, well it must be true then because media producers would NEVER report one-sided on an issue that affects them.
Now imagine say MS-NBC be the only news source (or at least the only one most people access). How often do you think you would get reports on Windows security issues then? And NO, the CURRENT situation with PLENTY of competition for MS-NBC does NOT count. Now they have to, because people will hear it somewhere else. But what if they don't have to?
You only have to look to Italy for the effect. Berlusconi controls the media and amazingly they completly fail to report on any of the issues around him. Or whenthey do they just happen so share his point of view. Freedom of the press? Yes, the state ain't telling them what and what not to report, but I don't think it is the freedom you imagine.
In MS world, exploits don't happen and since they don't happen you don't report on them and you don't patch them. Luckily it ain't a MS world and some people do find exploits and publish them and then MS has to patch them but they get very miffed about it.
What if it was an Apple world? What if iTunes was the music store for 99% of the people. Sure there are alternatives but nobody uses it. What if the iPad becomes THE new way to read books and if you don't get accepted by Apple, your book just doesn't get noticed. Would you then still defend their censorship?
You claim that Apple is like a grocer. That means you are an idiot. Because Apple is a grocer then it is Walmart. Do you LIKE Walmarts censoring of music? How about 10 years in the future when they are the only store left?
Protecting freedom is not about what you have today, but what you would have in 10 years if you do not fight for it now.
Hence forth every US citizen will have to travel ANYWHERE in the world were ANYONE at all chooses to sue them for ANYTHING at all.
This new law co-signed by the travel industry who would love to voice their support but are to busy singing "we're in the money, we're in the money".
If you disagree with this new law then you are saying John Hasler is a twit.
Meanwhile countless Wii's are gathering dust and the biggest selling accessory for the DS is the R4 card.
The problem for Nintendo is games. They don't sell all that well. Yes, they got the hits but go to your local game store and look honestly at the shelves of DS games and ask "which one do I want". What percentage? 1%? 2%? I got an R4 card myself and I sampled a lot of games but most barely get beyond 5 minutes of play before I truly know: "No way".
And there is more to staying in business then selling well. You got to sell well enough to fund the next round of the console wars. Sony and Microsoft (especially Microsoft) are not going away. Neither is Apple. These companies got more spending power and can continue to fund the next round of consoles at a loss if need be. Nintendo can't.
The 3DS SOUNDS interesting, OR will it be a Virtual Boy? A power glove? They have got it wrong before. If the 3D doesn't work or gives people headaches or even worse, there are only a handful of games for it, then it could fail. Or gaming could simply switch to the mobile phone. People have been predicting the end of the dedicated MP3 player. But why not the end of the dedicated gaming hardware?
Might the 3D element be a desperate move by Nintendo to offer something the iPhone can't? Yet? 3D tech isn't mature yet. I for one will be very interested in seeing a non fanboy review of the 3DS before I order it, from Japan directly like I have with all my Nintendo handhelds. Yes, I am a regular customer (of their hardware at least) but I also remember the failures from the past and that not all "new" gaming concepts make it. Gosh, I still got the readme.txt of System Shock telling me about support for Virtual Reality Helmets. What ever happened to them eh? WHERE is my VR helmet?
Why do I think the 3DS might fail? Quick, do a check of your favorite DS games. How many are 3D? Most of mine are 2D. Are my favorite 2D games going to be forced into a 3D jacket just to show of a smaller screen? (Smaller then XL)
I once had the unfortunate experience of talking to a gnaa member. He was bitching about someone "hammering" his own webserver by requesting the same page over and over. A guy who spend all time bragging about how he attacked other peoples servers complaining bitterly about how someone was loading the same page on his own server.
A troll would scream bloody murder if he was attacked and sue the hell out of you. Trolls are not decent people, they do NOT like their own medicine.
Seems you missed the point. Targetted works, super targetted doesn't. Advertising housing to me when my mail box is filled with housing related mails works. Advertising that a girl is living next door who sells services I might be interested in considering the images I am downloading... well that is just creepy.
Only someone who has never EVER been inside a publisher would call them a corporation. Maybe something like Harlequin comes close but the more "serious" ones have profits as something that happens sometimes, maybe but what it is, they don't know.
It is most certainly never a "fleece them for every penny" operation like an Apple. No book publisher would use Foxconn because penny-saving is not what they do. Profit for a book publisher is at most something to fund the next costly failure with. A lot of them also feel they got a public duty and that rarely is the one that tells them to do absolutely nothing that might offend anyone.
It is something very different from a mega billion dollar company like Apple to do publishing from some proper book publisher where even the account wears open toed sandals. It is the difference between the accounts running the books and them running the company.
The proof? Far fewer problems with book censorship. Just count the number of books published with naked boobies involved vs iPhone apps with the same.
Boobies are a good indicator of censorship. And yes, censoring yourself is censorship.
We would do well to not have our culture controlled by gigant companies only intrested in the bottom line.