Imply that this means that the Mac is now just as serious a gaming platform as Windows is.:D (I've already gotten a couple of people with Apple Derangement Syndrome pissed off at me for that one.)
Google already pays for a portion of their bandwidth. I seem to recall reading somewhere, in fact, that instead of paying for a lot of their bandwidth, they trade with some ISPs to allow those ISPs to route their traffic over Google's fiber to save on their own bandwidth. So this is partially a strawman - you're talking about a situation in which an ISP is trying to shake Google down for more money.
More than that, on the off-chance that an ISP somehow pulls this off and blocks Google, it will be a while before you see alternate ISPs in your area. And by "area," I mean "your house," because you would have to wait for another ISP to run last mile service up to your building before you could have any competition. And even then, you run into the danger of the oligarchy - if Comcast, Verizon, and TWC all decide to shake down Google in this same way, then who is going to be your alternative exactly?
We're not talking about regulating the content creators - we're talking about regulating the access providers. Exactly how much "innovation" has come out of Comcast and Verizon for internet service as a result of the lack of regulation we've granted them?
Because "astroturfing" is by definition not "community organizing." An astroturf campaign is an organization that has been set up to appear independent and supported by a base of concerned people when in fact it was created by and overwhelmingly supported by the corporations that most stand to benefit from the activism. If the ISPs are directly funding these groups to solicit on their behalf, then that is rightly defined as astroturfing. It doesn't matter what partisan side it falls on.
If you think the telecoms are a problem and government management would be an improvement, you need to find a friend who'll lend you a few grey cells.
Yes, that is exactly the problem - the lack of competition and the corporate influence in the American internet market has gotten so bad that government regulation looks better by comparison.
I would pay THIRTY dollars for a good 10-hour game more often than I would pay forty for a good 40-hour game. Why? Because I have a much higher chance of getting to see the ending of the 10-hour game and feeling fulfilled with it.
Here's a better question - would you rather spend 40 hours of your time playing and finishing four good 10-hour games, or would you rather just play one good 40-hour game?
I don't have access to The Escapist's website at the moment to get the exact quote, but in his review of Portal, Yahtzee said something to the tune of - The only bad thing I can say about this game is that it's short, which actually isn't so bad since that means I can finish it and move on to all of the other games that I want to play.
It's a Metroid-like game set underwater with you playing as a sort of a mermaid. The world is fairly large - maybe a bit too large, even. Good mix of puzzle solving and action. The control style takes some getting used to, but that helps to add to the sense that you're not playing the same old platforming game. Some of the boss fights will make you want to throw a controller. The art design is seriously beautiful - it's 2D sprites for everything, but the overall direction of the graphics is really lovely, as well as the excellent music. I recommend it (though I haven't finished it yet - it really is a bit long.)
When I was in 7th grade or something, I went to a "math camp" at a small state college in another town. It was basically a bunch of nerds hanging around. During the day, we took a few classes that touched on topics like architecture and design. Then in the evening, we went and played sports and ran around or had little shows or watched a movie together, whatever. The point being that it wasn't completely inactive, and I'm willing to bet that a camp based around getting people together to be social probably won't entirely restrict itself to sedentary activity.
Show me a single instance of government regulation of the internet -ever- increasing freedom and having a truly positive end.
Since the government sort of took the initiative in creating the thing in the first place, I'm not sure how to comment to that. I can tell you an example where deregulation had the opposite effect, where telling carriers that they didn't have to lease their lines to competing companies set up local monopolies and discouraged further development beyond high-rent urban areas. It's also sort of funny that we're discussing giving the FTC power to restrict throttling on certain content, and you're trying to tell us that this is what leads to... the FTC censoring certain content. That's a bit like telling me I need to go South to get to Canada from Houston, because eventually I'll swing all the way around the globe.
Regulation breeds monopolies and big businesses that are 'too big to fail'.
It's just the opposite, unless you don't consider antitrust laws to be regulation. We have large investment banks in control of much of our trading sector because we stopped deciding at some point that too-big-to-fail entities were in violation of monopoly laws. You should see how we used to break up large companies, even if they didn't control 100% of the market. It's sort of amazing that after a heavy downturn in the market that came about largely because of commodities being traded unregulated in a sort of a shadow market that people somehow believe that government regulation NEVER improves the market.
Daniel Gross does a decent job of highlighting the Chicken Little effect of regulation on Wall Street here. But of course, this was a discussion about the internet, not Wall Street. In order to believe that further regulation will hurt the development of the internet, you sort of have to believe that there's already healthy competition in the American broadband market, that local monopolies don't exist, that customer service isn't getting worse as the ISPs get lazy on lack of competition, and that the rest of the world isn't slowly smoking us on improving network speeds. But obviously if we'd just get out of Comcast's way, then the internet will be just fine, right?
It's kinda hard to get laws passed these days, when the filibuster effects going on and all. If you can change something just by THREATENING to pass a law, that might be all for the better.
I actually REMEMBER when SNL was funny. Kevin Nealon was running the Weekend Update desk, and was the only guy I can actually remember who was funny at it. And Adam Sandler would occasionally stop by dressed in a cheap tux and sing the week's news in opera form. Good times.
Nice troll in the summary, but it looks like the "think of the children" crowd is on BOTH sides of this issue.
That's sometimes the only way to win in politics - when one side claims that their policy is the only goodly, godly, patriotic, child-protecting side of the issue, prove that your side is even more so. It may sound a bit Machiavellian, but turnabout is fair play.
California is looking at a big budget deficit and is starting to wonder if taxed marijuana wouldn't be a fair tradeoff. You might not have to cross your fingers for too long if people start getting motivated enough.
If you want to get really deep into it, they actually portray Jesus as a pretty nice guy. They've shown the church doing some terrible things, but Jesus is just a guy trying to answer people's questions on his little TV show. He even forgave the whole town for betting against him in his boxing match with Satan. SP!Jesus seems like a decent guy....Y'know, not that fundamentalists ever pick up on small things like that.
You can't exactly pirate WoW. There are a few hacked servers out there, but people aren't terribly fond of them. If every game had to follow the WoW model where you couldn't play at all without having a unique user/pass, that would probably solve a lot of piracy issues (sarcasm mark here).
Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war.
One of the surest differences between incompetence and talent is how you deal with your mistakes - not whether or not you never make mistakes, but whether or not you own up to them, learn from them, and adapt to fix the situation or clean up the mess you made as a result.
It is not simply enough to say, oh, it's war, and in war, mistakes are made. If mistakes are covered up, ignored, and lied about, that is not a good sign to any operation.
Glenn Greenwald's entry this weekend pointed out that when a source from the military states that something happens in Afghanistan, major news sites repeat it directly as reliable news without any sort of follow-up on the source. Maybe "complicit" is too harsh a word - it's just more that news sites are more interested in the headline than in the research.
Slashdot Mirror
Imply that this means that the Mac is now just as serious a gaming platform as Windows is. :D (I've already gotten a couple of people with Apple Derangement Syndrome pissed off at me for that one.)
Google already pays for a portion of their bandwidth. I seem to recall reading somewhere, in fact, that instead of paying for a lot of their bandwidth, they trade with some ISPs to allow those ISPs to route their traffic over Google's fiber to save on their own bandwidth. So this is partially a strawman - you're talking about a situation in which an ISP is trying to shake Google down for more money.
More than that, on the off-chance that an ISP somehow pulls this off and blocks Google, it will be a while before you see alternate ISPs in your area. And by "area," I mean "your house," because you would have to wait for another ISP to run last mile service up to your building before you could have any competition. And even then, you run into the danger of the oligarchy - if Comcast, Verizon, and TWC all decide to shake down Google in this same way, then who is going to be your alternative exactly?
We're not talking about regulating the content creators - we're talking about regulating the access providers. Exactly how much "innovation" has come out of Comcast and Verizon for internet service as a result of the lack of regulation we've granted them?
Because "astroturfing" is by definition not "community organizing." An astroturf campaign is an organization that has been set up to appear independent and supported by a base of concerned people when in fact it was created by and overwhelmingly supported by the corporations that most stand to benefit from the activism. If the ISPs are directly funding these groups to solicit on their behalf, then that is rightly defined as astroturfing. It doesn't matter what partisan side it falls on.
If you think the telecoms are a problem and government management would be an improvement, you need to find a friend who'll lend you a few grey cells.
Yes, that is exactly the problem - the lack of competition and the corporate influence in the American internet market has gotten so bad that government regulation looks better by comparison.
Would you prefer a seven-layer Guacamole dipswitch?
I'm sorry, but I must not be the only one who's facepalming over a post about Guacamole being posted on Cinco de Mayo.
I would pay THIRTY dollars for a good 10-hour game more often than I would pay forty for a good 40-hour game. Why? Because I have a much higher chance of getting to see the ending of the 10-hour game and feeling fulfilled with it.
Here's a better question - would you rather spend 40 hours of your time playing and finishing four good 10-hour games, or would you rather just play one good 40-hour game?
I don't have access to The Escapist's website at the moment to get the exact quote, but in his review of Portal, Yahtzee said something to the tune of - The only bad thing I can say about this game is that it's short, which actually isn't so bad since that means I can finish it and move on to all of the other games that I want to play.
It's a Metroid-like game set underwater with you playing as a sort of a mermaid. The world is fairly large - maybe a bit too large, even. Good mix of puzzle solving and action. The control style takes some getting used to, but that helps to add to the sense that you're not playing the same old platforming game. Some of the boss fights will make you want to throw a controller. The art design is seriously beautiful - it's 2D sprites for everything, but the overall direction of the graphics is really lovely, as well as the excellent music. I recommend it (though I haven't finished it yet - it really is a bit long.)
When I was in 7th grade or something, I went to a "math camp" at a small state college in another town. It was basically a bunch of nerds hanging around. During the day, we took a few classes that touched on topics like architecture and design. Then in the evening, we went and played sports and ran around or had little shows or watched a movie together, whatever. The point being that it wasn't completely inactive, and I'm willing to bet that a camp based around getting people together to be social probably won't entirely restrict itself to sedentary activity.
I thought "fan made" and "unauthorized" were in the definition of "mashup".
I guess that would be fair, now that I think about what "mashup" usually means in musical terms.
Is this one of the early firsts in the new genre of video game mashups?
Uh... Super Smash Bros.?
Show me a single instance of government regulation of the internet -ever- increasing freedom and having a truly positive end.
Since the government sort of took the initiative in creating the thing in the first place, I'm not sure how to comment to that. I can tell you an example where deregulation had the opposite effect, where telling carriers that they didn't have to lease their lines to competing companies set up local monopolies and discouraged further development beyond high-rent urban areas. It's also sort of funny that we're discussing giving the FTC power to restrict throttling on certain content, and you're trying to tell us that this is what leads to... the FTC censoring certain content. That's a bit like telling me I need to go South to get to Canada from Houston, because eventually I'll swing all the way around the globe.
Regulation breeds monopolies and big businesses that are 'too big to fail'.
It's just the opposite, unless you don't consider antitrust laws to be regulation. We have large investment banks in control of much of our trading sector because we stopped deciding at some point that too-big-to-fail entities were in violation of monopoly laws. You should see how we used to break up large companies, even if they didn't control 100% of the market. It's sort of amazing that after a heavy downturn in the market that came about largely because of commodities being traded unregulated in a sort of a shadow market that people somehow believe that government regulation NEVER improves the market.
Daniel Gross does a decent job of highlighting the Chicken Little effect of regulation on Wall Street here. But of course, this was a discussion about the internet, not Wall Street. In order to believe that further regulation will hurt the development of the internet, you sort of have to believe that there's already healthy competition in the American broadband market, that local monopolies don't exist, that customer service isn't getting worse as the ISPs get lazy on lack of competition, and that the rest of the world isn't slowly smoking us on improving network speeds. But obviously if we'd just get out of Comcast's way, then the internet will be just fine, right?
It's kinda hard to get laws passed these days, when the filibuster effects going on and all. If you can change something just by THREATENING to pass a law, that might be all for the better.
I actually REMEMBER when SNL was funny. Kevin Nealon was running the Weekend Update desk, and was the only guy I can actually remember who was funny at it. And Adam Sandler would occasionally stop by dressed in a cheap tux and sing the week's news in opera form. Good times.
In Soviet Russia, minor tragedies exaggerate YOU!
Nice troll in the summary, but it looks like the "think of the children" crowd is on BOTH sides of this issue.
That's sometimes the only way to win in politics - when one side claims that their policy is the only goodly, godly, patriotic, child-protecting side of the issue, prove that your side is even more so. It may sound a bit Machiavellian, but turnabout is fair play.
It's in the fridge! Duh! :D
California is looking at a big budget deficit and is starting to wonder if taxed marijuana wouldn't be a fair tradeoff. You might not have to cross your fingers for too long if people start getting motivated enough.
If you want to get really deep into it, they actually portray Jesus as a pretty nice guy. They've shown the church doing some terrible things, but Jesus is just a guy trying to answer people's questions on his little TV show. He even forgave the whole town for betting against him in his boxing match with Satan. SP!Jesus seems like a decent guy. ...Y'know, not that fundamentalists ever pick up on small things like that.
You also wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinners.
If we haven't renamed it to "Linuxdot" by now...
You can't exactly pirate WoW. There are a few hacked servers out there, but people aren't terribly fond of them. If every game had to follow the WoW model where you couldn't play at all without having a unique user/pass, that would probably solve a lot of piracy issues (sarcasm mark here).
Mistakes are part of war, and this is reflected in the law of war.
One of the surest differences between incompetence and talent is how you deal with your mistakes - not whether or not you never make mistakes, but whether or not you own up to them, learn from them, and adapt to fix the situation or clean up the mess you made as a result.
It is not simply enough to say, oh, it's war, and in war, mistakes are made. If mistakes are covered up, ignored, and lied about, that is not a good sign to any operation.
Glenn Greenwald's entry this weekend pointed out that when a source from the military states that something happens in Afghanistan, major news sites repeat it directly as reliable news without any sort of follow-up on the source. Maybe "complicit" is too harsh a word - it's just more that news sites are more interested in the headline than in the research.