And there's plenty more. Genesis 19:30-36 (NIV; choose your own path at http://biblehub.com/genesis/19.htm, look for "Lot and his Daughters")
Lot and his two daughters left Zoar and settled in the mountains, for he was afraid to stay in Zoar. He and his two daughters lived in a cave. One day the older daughter said to the younger, "Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children--as is the custom all over the earth. Let's get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father." That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and slept with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.
The next day the older daughter said to the younger, "Last night I slept with my father. Let's get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father." So they got their father to drink wine that night also, and the younger daughter went in and slept with him. Again he was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up. So both of Lot's daughters became pregnant by their father.
While not as risqué as your verses, it involves both rape and incest, but still no outcry to remove Bibles...
I think it's more than that: By making a controller that can mimic keyboard/mouse to some acceptable degree of accuracy for all but the hardcore/tournament players, it takes the onus off of the developers to code/test for a regular controller, meaning it becomes much easier to design their game for a Steam Machine, improving the chances they'll do so over a Windows-only version.
And that is the issue of television and movies in Finland are all subtitled, and never dubbed. It seems minor but it's a huge incentive to learn to read. You can not be illiterate in Finland and watch the popular television programs or movies from America. Even Baywatch is subtitled in Finnish and Swedish. Not only do you have to read you have to read at a reasonable speed to keep up. So as a student if the rest of the children are talking about going to see Iron Man 3 and you can't read very well you now have an reason to work much harder.
Highly interesting. I wonder if they could do another round of tests, and this time have an indicator for how much time a tester spent as a kid/teen watching subtitled shows in America (I'm thinking primarily of Anime, especially for those that grew up in the mid 90s when the internet really started expanding but the American Anime industry was yet to see its heyday, or even things like Godzilla.)
And it's not just that, it's also about handling both expected average load and initial max load. If you focus on just max load, you'll wind up capacity that just sits around. If you focus on just average capacity, you run into problems like this (which is assuming they can get roughly the right estimate in the first place.) So a good plan needs to have something where it can account for max load (perhaps offload image hosting to CDNs and non-privacy-related data processing to AWS or something?) but not have a bunch of extra, idling capacity when the initial furor dies down.
I'm hoping that, while they allow anyone to use SteamOS for their system, they create a "branded" system by which to easily measure system specs for quick eyeballing of whether a particular Steam Machine can run a particular game. The way I see it, they have yearly specifications and a ranking system per year. It can be simple numbers 1-5, or tier like Start, Mid, Pro. Then it's a rolling designation, with the idea being that this year's Pro should be roughly equivalent to next year's Mid, then the following year's Start. It also means that games can target only that year's specs on their box; instead of having to say something like "Supports Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP", a game released in 2016 can list SteamOS support as "Supports 2016 Pro and beyond", so gamers that pick it up later will know it also works for 2017 Mid, 2018 Simple, and then everything after that. Maybe have it simplify it and have just a High and Low tier, or go even further and have a minimum hardware requirements to be "Certified SteamOS-Compatible 2015."
This is a lot like the Windows Experience Index, but easier to understand IMHO (their system is an addition one, in that they'll increase the max score over time as newer hardware becomes available; right now it's still 7.9 for Win8, which was the same max for Win7).
With this kind of system in place, they can have the best of both worlds: Those who want more esoteric hardware options or roll their own can do so (SteamOS would include a utility to give your system a rating, though it wouldn't be "certified"), and the major hardware manufacturers can target one or a few of a set of hardware specs in order to improve the price point through mass production. Depending on how high the "minimum" specs are, they could even make a cheap-o or super-small model by targeting a prior year that can still run the biggest AAA games.
A great deal of the (all negative) comments are about the fixed-width design, which is horrible--especially for wide monitors. And I agree.
But I think it's more insidious than that. I think this is Dice making Slashdot available for "Wrap Ads" (my term; I've no idea what the industry term for this is.) This is an advertisement that takes up all the white space around the site content (usually including some flash ad in the regular side-bar ad space.) I've only seen these in relation to video games and movies, but that might just be because I don't visit many sites not dabbling in those categories. Some sites that do this: -IGN (they're running one right now for Final Fantasy XIV, even! Giant flash ad at the top. Load it in a browser without NoScript/adblock to see) -Anime News Network (and what do you know, they're also doing it right now!) -Escapist Magazine (home to the popular Zero Punctuation series of game reviews, but they're not doing it right now.)
Just like city buses wrapped completely for advertising, I believe that Dice has created this layout--which goes against best practices (I think?), especially where nerds and news are concerned--expressly for the purpose of selling wrap-around advertising. Most of us won't feel it, since a large portion of the community uses NoScript, AdBlock, and other such add-ons/services, but it still makes the comment section a pain and that's all Slashdot is good for now. Timely news? No. Properly edited synopsis that remove extreme spin/bias? No. Editing to check for dupes, sometimes within hours of each other? No. More-intelligent-than-average internet commentary with a user-ran moderation system that helps to bring the more useful comments to the front? Yes.
And this new layout cuts the space for that by half, wrap ads or no. So when the current Slashdot layout goes, so do I.
This is why I like to use one-time numbers for things like this. Discover (at least they used to, haven't had to do it in a while) will give you a generated number, and you say how much is on it, and it will deny anything over that. For something that's $1, that might still go through, but if all you need is a valid CC then you can make one for $.50 and they can't do jack about it.
A nice idea. The system could then remove any comments containing only "first/frist post" before displaying all of them, and display the remainder in a randomized order so even those who get around such a filter will likely not be the first to post, anyway.:) (It would also give the editors time to correct any probhahahaha sorry I couldn't suggest the editors doing their job with a straight face.)
Another option is to require a certain amount of characters/words for anyone to post anything. (I think/. already has something like this, if so perhaps the requirement could be made greater?) It's rare to have posts that are worthwhile that are also one or two words; most of these I've seen are "Funny". Make any quoted words count as part of the requirement and you can get these in, anyway (which is also handy because that post might be modded +5 Funny, but it's rare that the parent post will go as high, making it easier to understand the joke.)
(I've yet to hear anyone explain why they see getting FP as such a triumph.)
I'd actually like to see a side-moderation item, open to everyone all the time (limit it to X votes per article, perhaps?) that lets people rate a post with how much they agree/disagree (perhaps going Strongly Favor, Favor, Oppose, Strongly Oppose[1]; a color system would be more preferential to numbers, but then we get into the topic of how colors are seen across various countries...). This way a post can be rated +5 Informative, Strongly Opposed, where someone posts intelligently, uses plenty of (good) sources for their argument, but they arrive at a conclusion that many other readers disagreed with. I call this the Polling (as opposed to the Moderation.)
While this won't stop the most zealous of mods from using Insightful/Underrated/Flamebait|Troll/Overrated as their way of Agree/Disagree, it will decrease that. It will make the groupthink far more apparent, which I consider a good thing: since/. seems to be a more intelligent community overall, if a stance seems to take large approval it will make many take another look at their own views whether they agree or not. It also give a secondary way of filtering stories, so you can go to a story after the modding/polling has settled and see highly rated posts that were Strongly Opposed to get a better idea of the other side. (Alternatively, this can be used to find accounts that are "soapbox" accounts, where some group with a minority opinion on/. makes a post and tells their members, some of whom may have multiple/. accounts to try having mod points more often, to go rate up a post. Someone who only posts in relation to certain topics, like religion, and is constantly rated +5 Informative/Insightful but also Strongly Opposed might be an indication of this.)
And for those of us who love charts, it means you can place a user on quadrant graph in relation to their karma and how often their posts are Approved/Opposed
[1] I use Favor/Oppose instead of Agree/Disagree because the use of the latter as part of a rating display makes it seem more like the site is the one agreeing/disagreeing rather than the community, at least to me. There's probably a better term than "Favor", though...
Another large reason companies dropped Nintendo--and one that seems not well known--is that early on Nintendo had a requirement that if you wanted to develop for the N64 you also had to develop for the Virtual Boy. (Obviously this requirement dropped when the Virtual Boy was, but that didn't fix the lack of space and now-sour taste.)
Can't find the source to back this up ATM, but I did a report on this in college (I think it was a "choose your own history topic" in a writing class or something) and this was part of Nintendo's downfall with the N64. Their stranglehold on third parties made it exceedingly easy when Sony approached them with this new-fangled console they were going to put out called the "Playstation"... which, haha!, was the result of a failed partnership with Nintendo.
I will be forever amused that Nintendo's shortsightedness is what gave rise to their largest competitor and own downfall. (Nintendo stopped working with Sony and worked with Phillips instead--Sony didn't know this until it was announced publicly--before dropping their partnership with Phillips as well. But, hey, that agreement led to the CD-i Zelda games...)
Okay, so we're getting "hundreds" of pages. Even if they're heavily redacted, it's a start. But anyone thinking that the government's documents on this only number in the hundreds is incredibly deluded.
So even if this sheds light above and beyond the Snowden leaks (either now or future), I'm sure they have plenty of stuff about the NSA, FISC/A, and more that they are withholding us. Maybe we'll get an idea of what that is once the EFF and others finish reading through all this...
While I've no data to back this up, I'd argue that the reason traffic became more rough after the speed traps started was because the drivers were spending a far larger proportion of their time either watching their speedometer or checking for where the cops were, instead of focusing on the road and traffic around them with quick glances at the speedometer now and then.
No. There is an important place for constructive criticism, critical questioning, and further study. Deniers do none of this, they just state that Global Climate Change is not real because A) it was cooler this summer than last (or, when shown raw numbers saying they're wrong, it "felt" cooler) B) personal greed (because changing the A/C from 68 to 69 (or, heaven forbid, 70!) or walking to the mailbox instead of driving, are horrible ideas); or, C) my pastor said so. If someone took in and understood the evidence supporting man-made Global Climate Change and was able to produce empirical data that countered the evidence or showed an opposite trend, then they're a critic or an opposing scientist. But these are not the kind of people we are dealing with.
They don't care about keeping the scientific community "honest", they care about shutting it up.
I think there is another gaming depression looming similar to the great Atari game depression of the early 80's.
While I agree that the amount of shovelware on consoles and clones on mobile platforms seems greater than ever (as a %), I don't think we're going to hit the over-saturation that caused the Game Crash of '83.
A big part of this is that gaming is far more decentralized these days. Back then you had a handful of consoles and limited computers. These days we're down to only three major consoles and two handhelds at any given time but now we have two (well, three if you want to include BB or WP) mobile operating systems as well as the PC and Mac (and Linux.) If consumer confidence (the lack of which was a major contributor to the '83 crash) falters it will likely be only on one platform (like the Xbone and/or Wii U) or with one company (such as EA). The number of indie developers now vs. then will also mean that, even should most major devs fall, games will still be made a-plenty.
Instead, I think we'll see the introduction of more curated systems for the mobile platforms. Apple seems to be giving gaming a more prominent place in their walled garden with the next version of iOS, which will likely include something that focuses on "best of the best" for presenting games up front (with all games, including the million "jump" clones, available if you dig a bit deeper). Android is much more decentralized, so each major carrier might bring up their own curated list, but I don't know how important gaming is to any of them beyond Angry Birds and Cut The Rope. Valve is in a great position here with Steam, but so far their mobile Steam app is only for working with your PC account on the go and doesn't seem to offer any Android games at all.
Ironically, it seems that the Big Three are trying to open their systems more to enticing indie games to be released on them. Mobile gaming (that is, phones, not the 3DS or Vita) is a far more casual crowd will put down just as quickly as they pick up, and so the massive amounts of shovelware just means that good games will get less visibility. This is what will cause a loss in developer confidence and lead to the curated gaming services. I also foresee a "renaissance" in the gaming development world: right now most studios are make or break on a single game, to something more streamlined and in line with movie/TV studios. Yes, it means the trend of sequelitis will increase, and we'll see lots of companies like Zynga, but it will also mean more stability for the industry as a whole, which will hopefully lead to more "A" titles (which are a bit cheaper, but still fun for a run through or two) instead of every developer trying to hit the coveted "AAA" title.
The likes of EA will drown in their own, self-dug pit of shit, but sadly they'll pull many good devs down with them before this happens.
I'm reminded of my Calc II class back in college: The professor, while perhaps highly intelligent, was also quite scatterbrained. We had the curriculum at the beginning of class, including what problems we were to do for each section. After the first week I learned that I should disregard the lecture completely, as the professor would often forget where he was in a problem and take a few moments to get back on track or go through a long problem, get to the end, go "Huh, that's not the right answer", and then a student would point out that a + in a very early step should be a -; he'd go "Aha!", erase half the chalkboard, and I'd see most of the students furiously scribbling out or erasing notes they were taking. I just sat in the back of the room and read through the book and did problems at my own (faster) pace.
or they were completely out of touch with what consumers actually wanted and missed the mark completely
I'm going with this one, especially with the Xbone. They thought that their dominance in the desktop market combined with their popularity in console gaming meant that gamers would eat up whatever shit they put out so that they could have supreme control.
But gamers are not business users, and they raised high hell over it. Now Microsoft is backpedaling on their so-called "features" so fast they'll win the Tour de France. I think part of this is that, except for exclusives like Halo, the 360 doesn't have the kind of vendor lock-in that the Windows desktop does, meaning that Microsoft could take a major hit on sales of anything gaming-related if they don't bow to pressure, unlike their Windows unit (which has the same pressure, but Microsoft doesn't seem to realize this yet.) Increasingly, gaming studios are focusing on multi-platform releases (except for Nintendo!) in order to increase their earnings (or at least decrease their loss on games that cost more than most movies to make,) which dwindles that exclusivity even further.
after all it turned out when the wall fell and access to the actual records came out the STASI were "only" watching 10% of the population but that was enough to keep them in line,why? Because everybody thought they were the 1 in 10 and thus thought everything they did was being recorded and this constant scrutiny kept them in line.
No. Full stop. You must never assume that the police are acting in good faith, especially now when they are increasingly avoiding transparency and may be getting information from secret connections. Yes, that's just the DEA.
While I agree that college athletes should get paid when products use their likeness (their main "salary" is a free ride at the college, from my understanding,) and that EA in general is an evil company, I believe the EFF's stance here is proper on a broader scale (I haven't RTFA; this is Slashdot, after all.) What if the person in question was, I don't know, a film actor?
Granted, EA's likeness is far, far more specific, and the team at Naughty Dog did change Ellie's likeness away from Ellen Page and closer to that of Ellie's voice actress before release, but a lot of the same general ideas are at use here. While I believe that everyone should have control over the use of their own likeness and person, there does have to be a limit or any two-bit actor (assuming we limit it to "public figures") could start suing companies because the main character in Modern Shooter 8 sounds like them and uses their catch phrase "Whoop-de-nany." From the summary, EA's use may overstep that boundary, but the EFF may still have the right idea here.
Aye, but once it got going the PS3 was able to do some heavy numbers. Part of that is because even with a slow start, it had hardware more-or-less on spec with the 360, so mutli-platform games were easy enough to bring over once it had a good base, not to mention HD collections of games after the fact.
The Wii U has no such future potential. No matter how many units it sells, the power and capabilities will always be far less than the Xbone and PS4, so devs not only have to worry about a small install base but would also have to go through the trouble of stripping out many "next gen" elements (mainly graphical, but perhaps some advanced AI or mob count, too) to make it play nice on the Wii U, which gamers don't want at all.[1] Furthermore, the attach rate on the original Wii was the worst for third parties out of all three consoles last gen at a bit over half of the overall attach rate, versus >75% on each of the other two (Source; however, it's from Nov 2008, and I'm having an incredibly hard time finding more recent numbers; Nintendo's own site shows a similar attach rate, though, so I doubt the overall ratio changed much for them).
So, with a small install base, underpowered hardware, and a far smaller third party attach rate than its competitors, what is the point in smaller third parties putting anything on the Wii U? And without third party games, why would anyone buy a Wii U unless they were big fans of Nintendo's first party properties, few of which have been announced in any concrete way? So Nintendo has thrust itself into a catch 22 that I doubt it will get out of this generation. With luck they'll have a repeat of the Gamecube; otherwise it's the N64 all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
And there's plenty more. Genesis 19:30-36 (NIV; choose your own path at http://biblehub.com/genesis/19.htm, look for "Lot and his Daughters")
While not as risqué as your verses, it involves both rape and incest, but still no outcry to remove Bibles...
I think it's more than that: By making a controller that can mimic keyboard/mouse to some acceptable degree of accuracy for all but the hardcore/tournament players, it takes the onus off of the developers to code/test for a regular controller, meaning it becomes much easier to design their game for a Steam Machine, improving the chances they'll do so over a Windows-only version.
For those that come along to these comments later, I believe the parent is referring to this: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/10/09/1551240/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003
Highly interesting. I wonder if they could do another round of tests, and this time have an indicator for how much time a tester spent as a kid/teen watching subtitled shows in America (I'm thinking primarily of Anime, especially for those that grew up in the mid 90s when the internet really started expanding but the American Anime industry was yet to see its heyday, or even things like Godzilla.)
And it's not just that, it's also about handling both expected average load and initial max load. If you focus on just max load, you'll wind up capacity that just sits around. If you focus on just average capacity, you run into problems like this (which is assuming they can get roughly the right estimate in the first place.) So a good plan needs to have something where it can account for max load (perhaps offload image hosting to CDNs and non-privacy-related data processing to AWS or something?) but not have a bunch of extra, idling capacity when the initial furor dies down.
I'm hoping that, while they allow anyone to use SteamOS for their system, they create a "branded" system by which to easily measure system specs for quick eyeballing of whether a particular Steam Machine can run a particular game. The way I see it, they have yearly specifications and a ranking system per year. It can be simple numbers 1-5, or tier like Start, Mid, Pro. Then it's a rolling designation, with the idea being that this year's Pro should be roughly equivalent to next year's Mid, then the following year's Start. It also means that games can target only that year's specs on their box; instead of having to say something like "Supports Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP", a game released in 2016 can list SteamOS support as "Supports 2016 Pro and beyond", so gamers that pick it up later will know it also works for 2017 Mid, 2018 Simple, and then everything after that. Maybe have it simplify it and have just a High and Low tier, or go even further and have a minimum hardware requirements to be "Certified SteamOS-Compatible 2015."
This is a lot like the Windows Experience Index, but easier to understand IMHO (their system is an addition one, in that they'll increase the max score over time as newer hardware becomes available; right now it's still 7.9 for Win8, which was the same max for Win7).
With this kind of system in place, they can have the best of both worlds: Those who want more esoteric hardware options or roll their own can do so (SteamOS would include a utility to give your system a rating, though it wouldn't be "certified"), and the major hardware manufacturers can target one or a few of a set of hardware specs in order to improve the price point through mass production. Depending on how high the "minimum" specs are, they could even make a cheap-o or super-small model by targeting a prior year that can still run the biggest AAA games.
If the synopsis had said "men", I might agree. But it says "males", to which the gender opposite is "female".
(No idea if the article itself keeps this trend; this is /., after all.)
A great deal of the (all negative) comments are about the fixed-width design, which is horrible--especially for wide monitors. And I agree.
But I think it's more insidious than that. I think this is Dice making Slashdot available for "Wrap Ads" (my term; I've no idea what the industry term for this is.) This is an advertisement that takes up all the white space around the site content (usually including some flash ad in the regular side-bar ad space.) I've only seen these in relation to video games and movies, but that might just be because I don't visit many sites not dabbling in those categories. Some sites that do this:
-IGN (they're running one right now for Final Fantasy XIV, even! Giant flash ad at the top. Load it in a browser without NoScript/adblock to see)
-Anime News Network (and what do you know, they're also doing it right now!)
-Escapist Magazine (home to the popular Zero Punctuation series of game reviews, but they're not doing it right now.)
Just like city buses wrapped completely for advertising, I believe that Dice has created this layout--which goes against best practices (I think?), especially where nerds and news are concerned--expressly for the purpose of selling wrap-around advertising. Most of us won't feel it, since a large portion of the community uses NoScript, AdBlock, and other such add-ons/services, but it still makes the comment section a pain and that's all Slashdot is good for now. Timely news? No. Properly edited synopsis that remove extreme spin/bias? No. Editing to check for dupes, sometimes within hours of each other? No. More-intelligent-than-average internet commentary with a user-ran moderation system that helps to bring the more useful comments to the front? Yes.
And this new layout cuts the space for that by half, wrap ads or no. So when the current Slashdot layout goes, so do I.
This is why I like to use one-time numbers for things like this. Discover (at least they used to, haven't had to do it in a while) will give you a generated number, and you say how much is on it, and it will deny anything over that. For something that's $1, that might still go through, but if all you need is a valid CC then you can make one for $.50 and they can't do jack about it.
A nice idea. The system could then remove any comments containing only "first/frist post" before displaying all of them, and display the remainder in a randomized order so even those who get around such a filter will likely not be the first to post, anyway. :) (It would also give the editors time to correct any probhahahaha sorry I couldn't suggest the editors doing their job with a straight face.)
Another option is to require a certain amount of characters/words for anyone to post anything. (I think /. already has something like this, if so perhaps the requirement could be made greater?) It's rare to have posts that are worthwhile that are also one or two words; most of these I've seen are "Funny". Make any quoted words count as part of the requirement and you can get these in, anyway (which is also handy because that post might be modded +5 Funny, but it's rare that the parent post will go as high, making it easier to understand the joke.)
(I've yet to hear anyone explain why they see getting FP as such a triumph.)
I'd actually like to see a side-moderation item, open to everyone all the time (limit it to X votes per article, perhaps?) that lets people rate a post with how much they agree/disagree (perhaps going Strongly Favor, Favor, Oppose, Strongly Oppose[1]; a color system would be more preferential to numbers, but then we get into the topic of how colors are seen across various countries...). This way a post can be rated +5 Informative, Strongly Opposed, where someone posts intelligently, uses plenty of (good) sources for their argument, but they arrive at a conclusion that many other readers disagreed with. I call this the Polling (as opposed to the Moderation.)
While this won't stop the most zealous of mods from using Insightful/Underrated/Flamebait|Troll/Overrated as their way of Agree/Disagree, it will decrease that. It will make the groupthink far more apparent, which I consider a good thing: since /. seems to be a more intelligent community overall, if a stance seems to take large approval it will make many take another look at their own views whether they agree or not. It also give a secondary way of filtering stories, so you can go to a story after the modding/polling has settled and see highly rated posts that were Strongly Opposed to get a better idea of the other side. (Alternatively, this can be used to find accounts that are "soapbox" accounts, where some group with a minority opinion on /. makes a post and tells their members, some of whom may have multiple /. accounts to try having mod points more often, to go rate up a post. Someone who only posts in relation to certain topics, like religion, and is constantly rated +5 Informative/Insightful but also Strongly Opposed might be an indication of this.)
And for those of us who love charts, it means you can place a user on quadrant graph in relation to their karma and how often their posts are Approved/Opposed
[1] I use Favor/Oppose instead of Agree/Disagree because the use of the latter as part of a rating display makes it seem more like the site is the one agreeing/disagreeing rather than the community, at least to me. There's probably a better term than "Favor", though...
Another large reason companies dropped Nintendo--and one that seems not well known--is that early on Nintendo had a requirement that if you wanted to develop for the N64 you also had to develop for the Virtual Boy. (Obviously this requirement dropped when the Virtual Boy was, but that didn't fix the lack of space and now-sour taste.)
Can't find the source to back this up ATM, but I did a report on this in college (I think it was a "choose your own history topic" in a writing class or something) and this was part of Nintendo's downfall with the N64. Their stranglehold on third parties made it exceedingly easy when Sony approached them with this new-fangled console they were going to put out called the "Playstation"... which, haha!, was the result of a failed partnership with Nintendo.
I will be forever amused that Nintendo's shortsightedness is what gave rise to their largest competitor and own downfall. (Nintendo stopped working with Sony and worked with Phillips instead--Sony didn't know this until it was announced publicly--before dropping their partnership with Phillips as well. But, hey, that agreement led to the CD-i Zelda games...)
Okay, so we're getting "hundreds" of pages. Even if they're heavily redacted, it's a start. But anyone thinking that the government's documents on this only number in the hundreds is incredibly deluded.
So even if this sheds light above and beyond the Snowden leaks (either now or future), I'm sure they have plenty of stuff about the NSA, FISC/A, and more that they are withholding us. Maybe we'll get an idea of what that is once the EFF and others finish reading through all this...
While I've no data to back this up, I'd argue that the reason traffic became more rough after the speed traps started was because the drivers were spending a far larger proportion of their time either watching their speedometer or checking for where the cops were, instead of focusing on the road and traffic around them with quick glances at the speedometer now and then.
But I agree with your conclusion otherwise.
Well, they've already tossed or are trying to toss the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th, happily ignore the 9th and 10th. So why not the first?
(Just wait until the first "Protective Action" of deploying a military unit to a major US city and we'll see the 3rd go, as well.)
No. There is an important place for constructive criticism, critical questioning, and further study. Deniers do none of this, they just state that Global Climate Change is not real because
A) it was cooler this summer than last (or, when shown raw numbers saying they're wrong, it "felt" cooler)
B) personal greed (because changing the A/C from 68 to 69 (or, heaven forbid, 70!) or walking to the mailbox instead of driving, are horrible ideas); or,
C) my pastor said so.
If someone took in and understood the evidence supporting man-made Global Climate Change and was able to produce empirical data that countered the evidence or showed an opposite trend, then they're a critic or an opposing scientist. But these are not the kind of people we are dealing with.
They don't care about keeping the scientific community "honest", they care about shutting it up.
While I agree that the amount of shovelware on consoles and clones on mobile platforms seems greater than ever (as a %), I don't think we're going to hit the over-saturation that caused the Game Crash of '83.
A big part of this is that gaming is far more decentralized these days. Back then you had a handful of consoles and limited computers. These days we're down to only three major consoles and two handhelds at any given time but now we have two (well, three if you want to include BB or WP) mobile operating systems as well as the PC and Mac (and Linux.) If consumer confidence (the lack of which was a major contributor to the '83 crash) falters it will likely be only on one platform (like the Xbone and/or Wii U) or with one company (such as EA). The number of indie developers now vs. then will also mean that, even should most major devs fall, games will still be made a-plenty.
Instead, I think we'll see the introduction of more curated systems for the mobile platforms. Apple seems to be giving gaming a more prominent place in their walled garden with the next version of iOS, which will likely include something that focuses on "best of the best" for presenting games up front (with all games, including the million "jump" clones, available if you dig a bit deeper). Android is much more decentralized, so each major carrier might bring up their own curated list, but I don't know how important gaming is to any of them beyond Angry Birds and Cut The Rope. Valve is in a great position here with Steam, but so far their mobile Steam app is only for working with your PC account on the go and doesn't seem to offer any Android games at all.
Ironically, it seems that the Big Three are trying to open their systems more to enticing indie games to be released on them. Mobile gaming (that is, phones, not the 3DS or Vita) is a far more casual crowd will put down just as quickly as they pick up, and so the massive amounts of shovelware just means that good games will get less visibility. This is what will cause a loss in developer confidence and lead to the curated gaming services. I also foresee a "renaissance" in the gaming development world: right now most studios are make or break on a single game, to something more streamlined and in line with movie/TV studios. Yes, it means the trend of sequelitis will increase, and we'll see lots of companies like Zynga, but it will also mean more stability for the industry as a whole, which will hopefully lead to more "A" titles (which are a bit cheaper, but still fun for a run through or two) instead of every developer trying to hit the coveted "AAA" title.
The likes of EA will drown in their own, self-dug pit of shit, but sadly they'll pull many good devs down with them before this happens.
In my experience, as an American, there are two mottoes for this country: The spoken and the unspoken.
The spoken: In God We Trust
The unspoken: Fuck You, I Got Mine
Don't forget about the following verses, where Lot's daughters have him drink wine and, once he's properly drunk, they draw graffiti on his face.
I'm reminded of my Calc II class back in college: The professor, while perhaps highly intelligent, was also quite scatterbrained. We had the curriculum at the beginning of class, including what problems we were to do for each section. After the first week I learned that I should disregard the lecture completely, as the professor would often forget where he was in a problem and take a few moments to get back on track or go through a long problem, get to the end, go "Huh, that's not the right answer", and then a student would point out that a + in a very early step should be a -; he'd go "Aha!", erase half the chalkboard, and I'd see most of the students furiously scribbling out or erasing notes they were taking. I just sat in the back of the room and read through the book and did problems at my own (faster) pace.
I'm going with this one, especially with the Xbone. They thought that their dominance in the desktop market combined with their popularity in console gaming meant that gamers would eat up whatever shit they put out so that they could have supreme control.
But gamers are not business users, and they raised high hell over it. Now Microsoft is backpedaling on their so-called "features" so fast they'll win the Tour de France. I think part of this is that, except for exclusives like Halo, the 360 doesn't have the kind of vendor lock-in that the Windows desktop does, meaning that Microsoft could take a major hit on sales of anything gaming-related if they don't bow to pressure, unlike their Windows unit (which has the same pressure, but Microsoft doesn't seem to realize this yet.) Increasingly, gaming studios are focusing on multi-platform releases (except for Nintendo!) in order to increase their earnings (or at least decrease their loss on games that cost more than most movies to make,) which dwindles that exclusivity even further.
Country-wide Panopticon, bordering on global.
No. Full stop. You must never assume that the police are acting in good faith, especially now when they are increasingly avoiding transparency and may be getting information from secret connections. Yes, that's just the DEA.
For now.
As far as we know.
While I agree that college athletes should get paid when products use their likeness (their main "salary" is a free ride at the college, from my understanding,) and that EA in general is an evil company, I believe the EFF's stance here is proper on a broader scale (I haven't RTFA; this is Slashdot, after all.) What if the person in question was, I don't know, a film actor?
Granted, EA's likeness is far, far more specific, and the team at Naughty Dog did change Ellie's likeness away from Ellen Page and closer to that of Ellie's voice actress before release, but a lot of the same general ideas are at use here. While I believe that everyone should have control over the use of their own likeness and person, there does have to be a limit or any two-bit actor (assuming we limit it to "public figures") could start suing companies because the main character in Modern Shooter 8 sounds like them and uses their catch phrase "Whoop-de-nany." From the summary, EA's use may overstep that boundary, but the EFF may still have the right idea here.
Aye, but once it got going the PS3 was able to do some heavy numbers. Part of that is because even with a slow start, it had hardware more-or-less on spec with the 360, so mutli-platform games were easy enough to bring over once it had a good base, not to mention HD collections of games after the fact.
The Wii U has no such future potential. No matter how many units it sells, the power and capabilities will always be far less than the Xbone and PS4, so devs not only have to worry about a small install base but would also have to go through the trouble of stripping out many "next gen" elements (mainly graphical, but perhaps some advanced AI or mob count, too) to make it play nice on the Wii U, which gamers don't want at all.[1] Furthermore, the attach rate on the original Wii was the worst for third parties out of all three consoles last gen at a bit over half of the overall attach rate, versus >75% on each of the other two (Source; however, it's from Nov 2008, and I'm having an incredibly hard time finding more recent numbers; Nintendo's own site shows a similar attach rate, though, so I doubt the overall ratio changed much for them).
So, with a small install base, underpowered hardware, and a far smaller third party attach rate than its competitors, what is the point in smaller third parties putting anything on the Wii U? And without third party games, why would anyone buy a Wii U unless they were big fans of Nintendo's first party properties, few of which have been announced in any concrete way? So Nintendo has thrust itself into a catch 22 that I doubt it will get out of this generation. With luck they'll have a repeat of the Gamecube; otherwise it's the N64 all over again.
[1] Dead Rising: Chop Till' You Drop for the Wii is an excellent example of what happens when this is attempted.