The funny thing is that we are in Afghanistan to help you, not the other way around. You act like we Europeans are depending on you to defend ourselves, but we don't. And actually we don't have anybody to defend ourselves against at the moment, maybe due to the fact that we don't arbitrarily invade foreign countries and act like we rule the world and know better than everyone else.
Nevertheless IMO alliances like NATO or UN are good things because they bring people together around a table rather than on a battlefield ; I guess that's why UN was created in the first place.
Why SHOULD the USA should be concerned with ANYTHING beyond its borders? Why should the USA allow foreign goods? Why should the USA have troops overseas? This conventional wisdom is bleeding the USA dry.
Another excuse... Sorry but you brought this upon yourselves, by electing Dubya 2 times, allowing him to spend billions on the war on terrorism, and to generally fuck up your country's economy.
Maybe if you cared a bit more about what happened abroad your collective head would not be this far up your collective ass, and your country (and the world) would be in a better shape right now.
My apologies. On the Continent, the French tend to drown everyone else out.
Uh, we have soldiers, and have had casualties, in Afghanistan too. And we recently joined NATO.
But maybe what you really meant by "meaningful military alliance" was "willing to blindly accept Bush's lies as facts and go wage a useless and costly war in Irak"...
And please stop using France as an excuse for not giving a shit about anything beyond your own borders.
How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.
Sometimes when I want to type an "A" I end up hitting TAB (french keyboard). If I'm at the end of a word, and I'm not paying attention to what's on screen, I'll hit space while the focus is on the "Send" button, and the email will be sent.
Even Coke have had several rebrandings/new flavours/numerous promotions.
Keep in mind that Coca Cola has to constantly produce and distribute its products.
In Pete Waterman's case, no work at all was required from him in order to put the video on youtube. As you said, he should have taken advantage of the rickroll fad instead of sitting on his ass and demanding money for something he produced 20 years ago.
The big labels would love to apply a blanket cost to ISPs to legitimise file sharing of copyrighted materials.
I'm not sure about that. Here in France, the "global license" solution to piracy was brought up several times during the debates on the Hadopi law. The government, the majors and the SACEM (who collects royalties on music) consistently refused it (on the grounds that it would be too complicated to fairly distribute the money to the artists - as if they ever tried to...).
they (the RIAA) pay the artists much more than those pirating (where last time I checked the artists gets 0)
Yeah, go tell that to Cult of Luna, Isis, Dark Tranquillity, Soilwork, Opeth, Pain of Salvation,... All of whom I discovered through P2P and ended up buying their albums/DVDs/Concert tickets/Tshirts. The majors would never have signed these kind of bands, and large retail chains hardly carry their albums, and when they do it's as €20 "imports".
So I "steal" their music through P2P, if I end up listening to it often I'll buy the album on emusic, amazon, or order merchandise on the band website.
I don't want everything for free. I want to take advantage of the possibility to sample an artist's work, before I make a buying decision. And no, 30s clips or streaming from myspace aren't enough. So please let me enjoy music this way, it costs *nothing* to the music industry or the artist, and they can end up making a nice profit from it.
I currently live in Paris, and quickly learnt to be very careful when crossing roads. I even got yelled at once or twice for not crossing fast enough. And parisian drivers just love their horns, they use it any chance they get.
Compare this to cities like Amsterdam where drivers actually slow down when they see you crossing, and I understand easily why foreigners have a bad opinion of french drivers:)
To be fair, it seems to be a parisian thing, as drivers in other French cities where I lived were nowhere near as aggressive as parisians.
Gentoo is not that hard to install, configure and use, thanks to its excellent documentation. The only prerequisite is that you are willing to learn and to spend some time to make everything work.
I used to run Gentoo exclusively, but I got tired of waiting for the packages to compile...
Re:OP is a condescending asshole, and it shows...
on
I'm a PC and I'm 4-1/2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well Gnome can detect the type of the device (either through HAL or by browsing its content), and change the popup menu accordingly. Furthermore if you browse the digicam content with Nautilus it will also detect the pictures and offer you the possibility to import them. The nice thing about this system is that if you plug the digicam's memory card in a reader you'll be able to browse/import the photos in exactly the same way.
Anyway my point was that it is relatively trivial to import/manage photos under Linux ; my friends/relatives who switched to Linux have no problem doing that. There are other areas where Linux is far behind Windows (games for example), I don't understand why MS doesn't communicate more on those.
Re:OP is a condescending asshole, and it shows...
on
I'm a PC and I'm 4-1/2
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Most (All ?) of the digital cameras I've used are detected by Windows and Linux as USB mass storage devices. Both Gnome/KDE and Windows will pop up a menu asking you what you want to do with it. So it really is about the same level of difficulty under both OSes (except Ubuntu and the like have better picture managers by default).
As for the 'fixing pic(s)' part I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
PS : yeah, I know, I know, don't feed the trolls...
I mean, if I opened a restaurant and started serving (quite literally) shit, you probably wouldn't be interested in how unfair it is to compare me to those guys across the street who've had years to perfect their recipes. Either you like the food, or you don't. If it's not as good as what those guys across the street serve, then good for them, their win, my loss.
Problem is, I *want* to like it. I'm really fed up with WoW, and WotLK doesn't seem to bring anything new to healing priests, so I was looking for a new MMO, and WAR is the first one to really get me excited. So I'm ready to give them their chance, and eat a bit of the shit (ie bad performances mostly) they're feeding me hoping that it will get better, so that in the long term I don't have to go for the millionth time to the restaurant across the street:)
I didn't encountered all the bugs you mentionned, I guess I would have a far worse opinion of the game if I had encountered them. Now that I think about it, the game indeed crashed on me (falling through the ground to an empty map, then "Loading zone #637" then crash), but only once in maybe 20 hours of playtime or so.
As for the PVP flagging thing, I was happy to enter a PVP zone each time so I never considered it an issue, but I can understand your problem with it. Anyway, what struck me is that in your original post you didn't mention a single thing you enjoyed in WAR, so I guess that indeed you'd better cancel your account and spare your money;)
First, it's not fair comparing WoW to WAR on technical grounds, as Blizzard had several years to get rid of the bugs and get to a polished game. And I haven't come across any show-stopper bug yet.
on WoW you can right-click right through your char or through the chat, to, for example, loot a foe you just killed. Here you can't.
I think I saw an option for this in the options (duh) panel.
About the gameplay : I rolled a warrior-priest and I love it. Very refreshing after years of whack-a-mole healing in WoW. The synergy between your healing spells and physical attacks is very well done.
Anyway, I don't agree with most of your gripes. And about the pvp related ones : WTF ? It's been heavily advertised as a PVP-oriented game, and you're trying to avoid PVP by all means ? I don't get it. Whereas in WoW my squishy holy priest got raped continuously by rogues and the like, here I happily engage in PVP and am having a blast.
Only problem for me : performance. On my C2D E8400/GF8800GT/3GB RAM (WinXP) the engine crawls when there are too much characters on screen, even on "max performance" settings. A friend of mine has the same problem with the same setup, but with a quad core instead of the E8400. I hope it will be fixed soon, cause I'd love to get rid of WoW and its endless farming and still get my MMO fix.
I love WoW, and played more than my share of Diablo (both of them), and I don't think you're being fair by saying that we play "SOLELY" for the loot.
I'm in a guild with very nice and interesting people, some of whom have become good friends, and I like to play with them just for the sake of messing around. When we down a raid boss for the first time, the thrill of watching the last few % of his life bar go down, hoping that it will get to 0 faster than my mana bar (I'm a healer) is much more enticing than the loot that we will get.
Of course getting a shiny new piece of gear is rather pleasing, but the real reward is seeing new content, downing new bosses, and enjoying the gameplay. The loot is one of the rewards, not the only one. Else I would still be playing D2 and would'nt be paying my 13 euros per month...
The process to come up with it was not. This law is based on a report by Denis Olivennes, CEO of the FNAC (largest brick & mortar music seller in France), in collaboration with the majors, but not with the consumer defense groups. The minister of culture talked with the majors several times, while the consumer defense groups were left waiting on the sidewalk, although they had a petition signed by several thousands citizen (and RMS' support;)).
As a french citizen, I don't really disagree with the principle of this law, but to see our government act like the RIAA's lap dog is very unnerving. And the fact that the ministry of culture seems completely out of touch with today's technology annoys me even more (Not long ago this ministry published a tender for translation of their websites. They specifically asked for automated translation. Let's just say the translators union was not very pleased, and sent them a letter, along with an man-made english translation of it, and a french translation of the english letter made by google translate. The original letter and the google one had not much in common...)
The French, as a matter of principle, disagree with whatever their government proposes. That's just how it works... Too true. We have some major problems (like social security funding, education,...) that we can't solve because everytime the government tries to tackle them people go on strike and protest. Then the problem gets worse and they protest some more. Go figure...
So no, you can bet that this law project is anything but popular, but that doesn't mean it won't eventually happen. Maybe. I guess it might work ; I once saw on TV a teenager whose favorite pasttime seemed to be reporting copyright infrigement to the SACEM (the french RIAA). And don't forget all the brave collaborateurs that thrived here during WWII...
I might just be getting old, but I think that music today is less compelling than it was 10 or even 5 years ago. Seriously, music today is crap. If by "music today" you mean "Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake", then you are right. However, there's plenty of brilliant bands that are worth listening to nowadays. For example, if you were a prog rock fan in the 70's you might want to check out Porcupine Tree, or Ozric Tentacle. Same goes for almost every genre, you juste have to search a bit (emusic is a good place to start).
Yay, that's where I'm from !
New Caledonia is a small french territory, located east of Australia and north of NZ. In addition to super intelligent wildlife, we also have the world's most beautiful lagoon and beaches (honest !). Come visit us, we're very welcoming and NC's a great vacation spot, but unfortunately the tourism authorities here suck, so we don't get the international recognition we deserve;)
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The funny thing is that we are in Afghanistan to help you, not the other way around. You act like we Europeans are depending on you to defend ourselves, but we don't. And actually we don't have anybody to defend ourselves against at the moment, maybe due to the fact that we don't arbitrarily invade foreign countries and act like we rule the world and know better than everyone else.
Nevertheless IMO alliances like NATO or UN are good things because they bring people together around a table rather than on a battlefield ; I guess that's why UN was created in the first place.
Why SHOULD the USA should be concerned with ANYTHING beyond its borders? Why should the USA allow foreign goods? Why should the USA have troops overseas? This conventional wisdom is bleeding the USA dry.
Another excuse... Sorry but you brought this upon yourselves, by electing Dubya 2 times, allowing him to spend billions on the war on terrorism, and to generally fuck up your country's economy.
Maybe if you cared a bit more about what happened abroad your collective head would not be this far up your collective ass, and your country (and the world) would be in a better shape right now.
My apologies. On the Continent, the French tend to drown everyone else out.
Uh, we have soldiers, and have had casualties, in Afghanistan too. And we recently joined NATO.
But maybe what you really meant by "meaningful military alliance" was "willing to blindly accept Bush's lies as facts and go wage a useless and costly war in Irak"...
And please stop using France as an excuse for not giving a shit about anything beyond your own borders.
The music is played for the horses, not the humans around them, who don't like it and turn it off when they can.
It would be similar to Metallica demanding royalties to the US army because soldiers used Enter Sandman to torture prisonners...
How many people send an e-mail, just to think: "oh no!" 2 - 4 seconds later.
Sometimes when I want to type an "A" I end up hitting TAB (french keyboard). If I'm at the end of a word, and I'm not paying attention to what's on screen, I'll hit space while the focus is on the "Send" button, and the email will be sent.
Even Coke have had several rebrandings/new flavours/numerous promotions.
Keep in mind that Coca Cola has to constantly produce and distribute its products.
In Pete Waterman's case, no work at all was required from him in order to put the video on youtube. As you said, he should have taken advantage of the rickroll fad instead of sitting on his ass and demanding money for something he produced 20 years ago.
Guilty upon accusation laws only summon up memories of Joseph Stalin and similar bums.
Yeah, like Sen. McCarthy.
The big labels would love to apply a blanket cost to ISPs to legitimise file sharing of copyrighted materials.
I'm not sure about that. Here in France, the "global license" solution to piracy was brought up several times during the debates on the Hadopi law. The government, the majors and the SACEM (who collects royalties on music) consistently refused it (on the grounds that it would be too complicated to fairly distribute the money to the artists - as if they ever tried to...).
they (the RIAA) pay the artists much more than those pirating (where last time I checked the artists gets 0)
Yeah, go tell that to Cult of Luna, Isis, Dark Tranquillity, Soilwork, Opeth, Pain of Salvation, ... All of whom I discovered through P2P and ended up buying their albums/DVDs/Concert tickets/Tshirts. The majors would never have signed these kind of bands, and large retail chains hardly carry their albums, and when they do it's as €20 "imports".
So I "steal" their music through P2P, if I end up listening to it often I'll buy the album on emusic, amazon, or order merchandise on the band website.
I don't want everything for free. I want to take advantage of the possibility to sample an artist's work, before I make a buying decision. And no, 30s clips or streaming from myspace aren't enough. So please let me enjoy music this way, it costs *nothing* to the music industry or the artist, and they can end up making a nice profit from it.
No other companies ?
How about MS, Sony, RIAA/MPAA members, ... ?
People don't care about what they buy/use, they just get what they're used to, or what is considered hip by their TV programs or magazines.
I currently live in Paris, and quickly learnt to be very careful when crossing roads. I even got yelled at once or twice for not crossing fast enough. And parisian drivers just love their horns, they use it any chance they get.
Compare this to cities like Amsterdam where drivers actually slow down when they see you crossing, and I understand easily why foreigners have a bad opinion of french drivers :)
To be fair, it seems to be a parisian thing, as drivers in other French cities where I lived were nowhere near as aggressive as parisians.
Gentoo is not that hard to install, configure and use, thanks to its excellent documentation. The only prerequisite is that you are willing to learn and to spend some time to make everything work.
I used to run Gentoo exclusively, but I got tired of waiting for the packages to compile...
Well Gnome can detect the type of the device (either through HAL or by browsing its content), and change the popup menu accordingly. Furthermore if you browse the digicam content with Nautilus it will also detect the pictures and offer you the possibility to import them. The nice thing about this system is that if you plug the digicam's memory card in a reader you'll be able to browse/import the photos in exactly the same way.
Anyway my point was that it is relatively trivial to import/manage photos under Linux ; my friends/relatives who switched to Linux have no problem doing that. There are other areas where Linux is far behind Windows (games for example), I don't understand why MS doesn't communicate more on those.
Most (All ?) of the digital cameras I've used are detected by Windows and Linux as USB mass storage devices. Both Gnome/KDE and Windows will pop up a menu asking you what you want to do with it. So it really is about the same level of difficulty under both OSes (except Ubuntu and the like have better picture managers by default).
As for the 'fixing pic(s)' part I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
PS : yeah, I know, I know, don't feed the trolls...
How do you win that argument?
You don't, if by "doing just fine" you mean "living in a 15m2 studio with a wife and 3 kids" (saw this on (french) TV just yesterday).
I guess you can live with $20K in the US (or any developped country), but that's not the kind of life I'd like to live.
I mean, if I opened a restaurant and started serving (quite literally) shit, you probably wouldn't be interested in how unfair it is to compare me to those guys across the street who've had years to perfect their recipes. Either you like the food, or you don't. If it's not as good as what those guys across the street serve, then good for them, their win, my loss.
Problem is, I *want* to like it. I'm really fed up with WoW, and WotLK doesn't seem to bring anything new to healing priests, so I was looking for a new MMO, and WAR is the first one to really get me excited. So I'm ready to give them their chance, and eat a bit of the shit (ie bad performances mostly) they're feeding me hoping that it will get better, so that in the long term I don't have to go for the millionth time to the restaurant across the street :)
I didn't encountered all the bugs you mentionned, I guess I would have a far worse opinion of the game if I had encountered them. Now that I think about it, the game indeed crashed on me (falling through the ground to an empty map, then "Loading zone #637" then crash), but only once in maybe 20 hours of playtime or so.
As for the PVP flagging thing, I was happy to enter a PVP zone each time so I never considered it an issue, but I can understand your problem with it. Anyway, what struck me is that in your original post you didn't mention a single thing you enjoyed in WAR, so I guess that indeed you'd better cancel your account and spare your money ;)
First, it's not fair comparing WoW to WAR on technical grounds, as Blizzard had several years to get rid of the bugs and get to a polished game. And I haven't come across any show-stopper bug yet.
on WoW you can right-click right through your char or through the chat, to, for example, loot a foe you just killed. Here you can't.
I think I saw an option for this in the options (duh) panel.
About the gameplay : I rolled a warrior-priest and I love it. Very refreshing after years of whack-a-mole healing in WoW. The synergy between your healing spells and physical attacks is very well done.
Anyway, I don't agree with most of your gripes. And about the pvp related ones : WTF ? It's been heavily advertised as a PVP-oriented game, and you're trying to avoid PVP by all means ? I don't get it. Whereas in WoW my squishy holy priest got raped continuously by rogues and the like, here I happily engage in PVP and am having a blast.
Only problem for me : performance. On my C2D E8400/GF8800GT/3GB RAM (WinXP) the engine crawls when there are too much characters on screen, even on "max performance" settings. A friend of mine has the same problem with the same setup, but with a quad core instead of the E8400. I hope it will be fixed soon, cause I'd love to get rid of WoW and its endless farming and still get my MMO fix.
No, but a review of a "Windows-only but to be released on linux & macosx" program is interesting to me.
I love WoW, and played more than my share of Diablo (both of them), and I don't think you're being fair by saying that we play "SOLELY" for the loot.
I'm in a guild with very nice and interesting people, some of whom have become good friends, and I like to play with them just for the sake of messing around. When we down a raid boss for the first time, the thrill of watching the last few % of his life bar go down, hoping that it will get to 0 faster than my mana bar (I'm a healer) is much more enticing than the loot that we will get.
Of course getting a shiny new piece of gear is rather pleasing, but the real reward is seeing new content, downing new bosses, and enjoying the gameplay. The loot is one of the rewards, not the only one. Else I would still be playing D2 and would'nt be paying my 13 euros per month...
In France MSN Messenger is the #1 IM network too, but that doesn't keep us geeks from using Pidgin/Adium under linux/macosx.
The process to come up with it was not. This law is based on a report by Denis Olivennes, CEO of the FNAC (largest brick & mortar music seller in France), in collaboration with the majors, but not with the consumer defense groups. The minister of culture talked with the majors several times, while the consumer defense groups were left waiting on the sidewalk, although they had a petition signed by several thousands citizen (and RMS' support ;)).
As a french citizen, I don't really disagree with the principle of this law, but to see our government act like the RIAA's lap dog is very unnerving. And the fact that the ministry of culture seems completely out of touch with today's technology annoys me even more (Not long ago this ministry published a tender for translation of their websites. They specifically asked for automated translation. Let's just say the translators union was not very pleased, and sent them a letter, along with an man-made english translation of it, and a french translation of the english letter made by google translate. The original letter and the google one had not much in common...)
And don't forget that somewhat popular codec.
Wrong
Yay, that's where I'm from ! ;)
New Caledonia is a small french territory, located east of Australia and north of NZ. In addition to super intelligent wildlife, we also have the world's most beautiful lagoon and beaches (honest !). Come visit us, we're very welcoming and NC's a great vacation spot, but unfortunately the tourism authorities here suck, so we don't get the international recognition we deserve