Re:young kids don't know what's impossible - true!
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 1
I am disgusted by your last comment. How is it their fualt that they are getting screwed? How did they not respect your "wisdom"? According to your own discription, they came in ambitious, willing to work far harder than you in an attempt to keep up with people with far more experience than them. They had different management who no doubt drove them a lot harder than yours did you. You should be thankful instead of feeling as though "you showed them". That competitive attitude was no doubt instilled by the company in order to make both teams work harder. I'm sure the other group was hearing, "Everyone else is getting this on time, on budget, without bugs, and you guys are doing a terrible job and are just going to have to work harder." How about showing some compasion for your fellow worker, instead of this snobish attitude?
I don't fully agree with everything the reviewer said, so I thought I'd just point a few things out.
"It's clear that Pixar didn't have the chops prior to this film to do action sequences, because prior to this, the feeling of moving in a three dimensional space just wasn't there."
I don't see how you can make that argument. Video games, which have long been focused solely on action, and are far behind the quality seen in this film, have been doing action quite successfully for a long time now. If anything, action is MORE suited to poorer quality graphics, because everything whizzes by so fast you don't have time to notice any details. For the stylized cartoonish animation that Pixar does, the technological enhancements really aren't that noticeable anymore. I think Pixar is reaching a point of diminishing returns here... which isn't bad, it's just to say that things are just about as good as they are going to get doing this sort of cartoon animation.
"Previous Pixar films have been consummate kids movies, movies so well made, and so funny that parents could enjoy them. And there are even a few adult gags the kids might not get. "The Incredibles" is a completely different tack. "The Incredibles" is an action movie, first and foremost, one of the best of the current crop of superhero films. Then it is a family film second, and a kids movie third, if at all."
I mostly agree with this. While I think that this movie would be very entertaining to children, they weren't it's focus. The movie was told from the perspective of the parents, with the children being the supporting characters. A lot of the issues that the parents deal with will fly over the heads of the children, which is ironic in a sense, as you see the same thing happening to the child characters in the movie. Still, it should be made clear that this movie doesn't really go any further than that, and most likely couldn't and remain a kid's movie. Non of the adult characters are really faced with any complex situations or moral dilemmas. There's a firm line between good and evil. Things go down a rather predictable path. Things are spelled out mostly and little left to our intuition. So don't go to the movie expecting anything like that. The ADD kids will have their attention kept by the action, and the ADD adults will have their attention kept by their identification with the adult characters and jokes (ya and the action too =P).
The movie's mixture of family interactions and superheros almost always works, but is slightly shakey with its villain Syndrome. He's got great lines, a good backstory, and a perfectly over the top performance from Jason Lee, but something just doesn't quite work, and that's the first time I've ever said that about a Pixar flick. But in the end it doesn't matter. So much works here, that the little stuff gets washed away.
OK to discuss this I'm going to have to throw out a few spoilers here, so you should probably stop reading here. I think his character worked quite well... for a kids movie. He was a two dimensional villain, [SPOILER] which was somewhat disappointing given that they had taken the time to make him be a childhood fan of Mr. Incredible. It almost looked like they were leading up to a sympathetic villain, but then decided they wanted a very firm line between good and evil in this movie. If perhaps they had made Mr. Incredible more at fault for Syndrome's turn to evil, and have Syndrome struggle a bit more instead of being totally evil, he could have been made into a more interesting character. It would also have been nice to show a change in Mr. Incredible, from a young man who didn't really like children or understand them, to a father. They could have made Syndrome's attack on the city not be a totally evil move, but rather have his intention to be to put on a show and be a hero (with the attitude of collateral damage being just "breaking a few eggs"), and the machine goes out of control. Take out his serial killing of heroes, and he might be able to be a villain you could have s
It seems a waste of time to reply to this, since your sense of reality seems quite skewed and there is probably little I can say to change that. Oh well, here's the way normal people see things:
Things are hardly as dark as you paint them. We are still in a democracy, and the only reason the upcomming elections will be controversial is because public opinion is split right down the middle. What will decide the next presidency could be any number of small things, unrelated to public opinion, but the reason it is that way is because of public opinion in the first place.
The reason you've found me and other people disagreeing with what you originally said comes down to your insistance on the use of "any means necessary" and that a situation resulting in that would actually be "a good thing". Re-read what you said, that is how it came across to me.
There are, as you say, many examples of large governments being affected by popular opinion. I never argued that. I argued that militant groups have little hope against large governments. The reason is that a militant group will never get widespread support domestically or abroad. If they are to win, they need to be physically capable of overthrowing their government, and in the case of a country like the US, that is almost certain never to be the case. A peaceful revolution, on the other hand, has the capability of getting support domestically and abroad, and pressure both from the inside and the outside of a country is bound to affect change. All of the examples you gave are exactly of this sort. These groups are even more effective in a country that is (and will always, even in the darkest of predictions, pretend to be) democratic.
Hearing statements like this worry me about your sanity. I can't imagine a situation occuring where a militant group could ever have any hope of overthrowing the US government, or even affecting any kind of change. Your "right to bear arms" extend to at best, a rifle, and that isn't going to achieve much against tanks, planes, and a well trained US military. Groups like that will always be quickly (and rightly) labeled as terrorist groups and have little or no public sympathy. As long as the US remains a democracy, change (though usually slow) will be possible through peaceful means.
You have to remember that the founding fathers were just a little bit radical, which isn't surprising considering they had just rebelled against a very powerful nation, were traitors, and were advocating what at the time was a very different form of government. Taking seriously the suggestion that a revolution is something we should have fairly regularly is a not-so-great idea in my opinion. Just like any source, you can't take everything every founding father said as gospel on how things should be done hundreds of years later.
There are a ton of rules, but I think the most recent changes that had some people angry was that it is traditional to allow audience members to ask questions "town meeting" style. Instead new rules state that audience members will submit questions to the moderator before hand, and are not allowed to in any way deviate from their submitted questions, make comments, etc.
LOL sorry, but I find it hard to believe MS found it necessary to pay people to act like really obnoxious Linux fanboys. In any community there's always people willing to do it for free.
I saw that as well, and while I think the debate was heated and some of the people they interviewed stretched things a bit, the main points are valid. It was NOT one sided, they interviewed the DOE director and he had plenty of chance to present his side of it. He's not stupid, he KNOWS exactly why 60 minutes would be interviewing him, and that it wouldn't be favorable. His arguement was basically... well we already truck toxic waste! So trust us. Kust because we will be hauling more than ever before, doesn't mean something will happen. Right.
It is going to take something like 25 years to get all of this stuff to Yucca mountain, constantly trucking it around the country. The main arguement for Yucca mountain is that it is a more "secure" place to put all this stuff, and is far away from a major population. But to GET it there, it will be made incredibly vulnerable to attack, and we'll be driving it through cities. Instead of spending all this money on one site whose solution is worse than our current problem, we should be spending it to make sure the sites we have are made more secure.
I think this is obviously just a PR stunt by the Mexico officials to make it look like they are "doing something" about the crime in their country, when in fact this doesn't really help at all.
Like some people would say it increases the importance of earth, as everything else was obviously created as scenery just for us.
Others would say that until life is discovered on another planet, we can be as egotistical as we want about our presence. We can speculate all we want, but the fact is that there aren't any signs of life that we've encountered, and that makes us quite unique. On the other hand, others would look at that and say that it's because life only occurs in brief flashes before it becomes intelligent enough to wipe itself out.
Pick your poison. Reality gets pretty flimsy when talking about the unknown.
I have a hard time believing they didn't get "meat sack" from the fantastic dialogue provided for HK-47 in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I don't know for sure they are the first to use that term in that context, but it worked beautifully. "meatbag" sounds so much better than meat sack, and meat sack just comes off as a lame attempt to pretend that it is original. Personally, I think it sounds way too close to ball sack. I have no problem with people reusing cool ideas in creative works (to an extent) but it annoys me when they come up with a less effective version just so they can pretend to be original.
I would say if you are having trouble limiting it, you may just need to cut it out all together. I had tried to balance school and gaming for a long time, and was never very successful at it. If a new game came out I was super interested in I would lose all control, and begin making bad grade again. After flunking a statistics midterm (which I hardly studied for) I finally decided that I just couldn't consitantly control myself, and so I just stopped playing. One of the things that helped is that I realized that games are just a time sink. You don't learn anything from them, better yourself in any way, or create anything of value. For all intents and purposes, you might as well not exist when you are playing games. When I really thought about it I decided I wasn't happy with spending all the free time I had (and some time I didn't have) doing something that had no results or meaning, other than taking time away from what should be my real priorities. I do miss gaming a lot. I'll read about new games comming out and want to play them, but I at least have the self control not to give into it. The upside is that it's given me a lot of time to focus winning the game of life, and I do stuff now that I didn't before, like work out and socialize more. Overall I'm just as happy as I was then, and I'm sure that will increase as the time I spend improving myself pays off.
I disagree. Gibson's whole description of icebreaking was interesting science fiction, rather than something that was really attempting to make an informed guess on how future computer systems would work. For one thing, users could be killed by the security systems through their connection. It seems increadibly unlikely to me that this would ever occur, since any system connected to the internet should be able to handle disconnections, and so one could be produced on purpose the moment trouble showed up. But obviously, it made for a much more exciting plot. The same goes for the visual stuff, it's a lot more interesting than someone spending days maticulously banging away at a system. Gibson's a great author, but I think it silly to give him credit for things he obviously didn't intend in his books. By is own admission, Gibson is no techie. He writes fiction, and trying to pull deeper meaning (or predictions of the future) out of it is a waste of time.
Actually the main way the catch people is not because they are winning (it happens) but because of the way they bet (although if someone is winning a lot they are likely to investigate it thoroughly). Card counters know the odds for every hand they play, so on low odds hands they bet very little, but when the odds favor them they bet high. Someone who wins by luck doesn't have huge shifts in their betting stratagies that coincide with the odds of the deck.
Well, it isn't all bad. Some reefs are going to die, while others expand. And perhaps a few of the reefs will even evolve to live in warmer waters. If worst comes to worst we could always genetically engineer them to do that;)
The Arab oil producting countries don't have the same economic or military clout the US has. Considering how much those countries hate the US, if using that "clout" against us were in their best interests they would never have sold us oil in the first place. Most of the Arab countries are controlled by rulers who maintain their power through the wealth their country's oil brings. The US is a major consumer of that oil, and not selling to us is essentially shooting themselves in the foot. Furthermore, any oil producing country who has an eye for the future is going to realize they need to use their current position of power while it lasts, because in the not very far future oil will be a far less important energy source than it is now. That means developing technology, and right now the US is one of the best places to get that from. Forcing an oil crisis in this day and age will only accelerate the US's switch to other energy sources.
At any rate, I think your suggestion that the US is hanging on to Iraq for its oil is ridiculous. Our expendetures far outweigh any oil we might have or will gain from the country, especially considering how often the pipelines are being blown up. Considering we are now on the brink of switching over from oil, why would we now start invading other countries for oil when we could have done it 14 years ago, and with a better reason? (It's hard for invaders to garner much sympathy) I wish people would stop going after these simple black and white explanations. The political pressures and reasons for going into Iraq were very complicated, as is the current situation, and will most likely not be properly understood for another 10 years. Reducing it all to "the US is just greedy for oil" is as simple minded as you can get.
I'm not surprised. We've certainly made some unforgivable mistakes over there. That said, I still believe that a US presence in Iraq is preferable to seeing the country plunged into civil war for who knows how long, after which to be ruled by yet another dictator or fanatical religious group. Ironically, the longer people in Iraq fight us, the longer our government will have an "excuse" to stay there.
"Don't you get that Bush can't afford a legitimate government in Iraq?"
Nice try. Make a statement implying the "obviousness" of something without providing any supporting arguements. Why would Bush be hurt by a legitimate government in Iraq? The American people want to see an Iraq with a truely democratic government strong enough to keep hold if its country without American military support. Most people in America remember or have read about the consequences of trying to support an unpopular puppet government (South Vietnam). No one wants to see that happen again.
I don't think it is conclusive at all that a wedding party was hit. Although I wouldn't think it impossible that the US military would try to cover something like that up, I think it very likely that the insurgents are getting better at propaganda, and this is exactly the kind of thing they want circulating in US news. Anyone who has studied Vietnam will realize that there was a strong possibility that North Vietnam would have sought a truce had the US been united in its support of the war. I think it is becomming obvious that the best weapon any country has against the US is propaganda, and that the outcome of a war with the US can be changed simply with good propaganda. If you can convince enough americans that what they are doing is morally unjust, and/or that winning isn't worth the losses they'll take, you've won the war. Of course, that takes time, so a short war with the US is almost certainly going to be won by the US.
So, we may have won the war against Saddam, but we could easily lose the war against fanaticism in Iraq if we are forced to pull out before a legitimate Iraqi government can control that country. Everyone hates the tactics that Saddam used, but the reality is that that was what he found necessary to control that country. Hopefully, a legitimate government won't be facing the kind of resentment Saddam's rule did, and so require less force, but there are still many other factions to deal with and that will require proportionally more effort in order to use more acceptable means than Saddam did.
The "Linux is obsolete" flamewar
on
More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I think the Linux is obsolete flamewar is good reading for anyone trying to understand the history behind all of this. It certainly is funny to see Tanenbaum making predictions like "5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5". Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but it does make one wonder what the history of free operating systems would look like had Linux been controlled/produced by someone with Tanenbaum's outlook rather than Linus's.
The real pro gamers are going to be attracted to the games that have the biggest tournaments, and are therefore the most popular. Those are the games that last 4 years. Games like StarCraft, Counter-Strike, and the WarCraft series are all good examples.
The big difference between pro gaming and professional sports is that because professional sports are physical, you can only practice for so many hours before it becomes counter-productive (or impossible) to continue. In competitive gaming, to be competitive you have to spend a TON of time playing. Since it isn't physical you can spend every waking hour practicing. This is why a lot of pro gamers burn out after a while, because playing the same game every waking hour for 4 years gets old fast.
I think what makes the difference between pro gaming is the US and in Korea is our societies. In the US, gaming (well anything to do with computers) still has enough of a "nerd" stigma to it to prevent pro gamers from being sought after to promote most products. In the US we seem to be at the point where you save face if you just play games casually, but you're a total nerd and pathetic if that's all you do.
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I am disgusted by your last comment. How is it their fualt that they are getting screwed? How did they not respect your "wisdom"? According to your own discription, they came in ambitious, willing to work far harder than you in an attempt to keep up with people with far more experience than them. They had different management who no doubt drove them a lot harder than yours did you. You should be thankful instead of feeling as though "you showed them". That competitive attitude was no doubt instilled by the company in order to make both teams work harder. I'm sure the other group was hearing, "Everyone else is getting this on time, on budget, without bugs, and you guys are doing a terrible job and are just going to have to work harder." How about showing some compasion for your fellow worker, instead of this snobish attitude?
"It's clear that Pixar didn't have the chops prior to this film to do action sequences, because prior to this, the feeling of moving in a three dimensional space just wasn't there."
I don't see how you can make that argument. Video games, which have long been focused solely on action, and are far behind the quality seen in this film, have been doing action quite successfully for a long time now. If anything, action is MORE suited to poorer quality graphics, because everything whizzes by so fast you don't have time to notice any details. For the stylized cartoonish animation that Pixar does, the technological enhancements really aren't that noticeable anymore. I think Pixar is reaching a point of diminishing returns here... which isn't bad, it's just to say that things are just about as good as they are going to get doing this sort of cartoon animation.
"Previous Pixar films have been consummate kids movies, movies so well made, and so funny that parents could enjoy them. And there are even a few adult gags the kids might not get. "The Incredibles" is a completely different tack. "The Incredibles" is an action movie, first and foremost, one of the best of the current crop of superhero films. Then it is a family film second, and a kids movie third, if at all."
I mostly agree with this. While I think that this movie would be very entertaining to children, they weren't it's focus. The movie was told from the perspective of the parents, with the children being the supporting characters. A lot of the issues that the parents deal with will fly over the heads of the children, which is ironic in a sense, as you see the same thing happening to the child characters in the movie. Still, it should be made clear that this movie doesn't really go any further than that, and most likely couldn't and remain a kid's movie. Non of the adult characters are really faced with any complex situations or moral dilemmas. There's a firm line between good and evil. Things go down a rather predictable path. Things are spelled out mostly and little left to our intuition. So don't go to the movie expecting anything like that. The ADD kids will have their attention kept by the action, and the ADD adults will have their attention kept by their identification with the adult characters and jokes (ya and the action too =P).
The movie's mixture of family interactions and superheros almost always works, but is slightly shakey with its villain Syndrome. He's got great lines, a good backstory, and a perfectly over the top performance from Jason Lee, but something just doesn't quite work, and that's the first time I've ever said that about a Pixar flick. But in the end it doesn't matter. So much works here, that the little stuff gets washed away.
OK to discuss this I'm going to have to throw out a few spoilers here, so you should probably stop reading here. I think his character worked quite well... for a kids movie. He was a two dimensional villain, [SPOILER] which was somewhat disappointing given that they had taken the time to make him be a childhood fan of Mr. Incredible. It almost looked like they were leading up to a sympathetic villain, but then decided they wanted a very firm line between good and evil in this movie. If perhaps they had made Mr. Incredible more at fault for Syndrome's turn to evil, and have Syndrome struggle a bit more instead of being totally evil, he could have been made into a more interesting character. It would also have been nice to show a change in Mr. Incredible, from a young man who didn't really like children or understand them, to a father. They could have made Syndrome's attack on the city not be a totally evil move, but rather have his intention to be to put on a show and be a hero (with the attitude of collateral damage being just "breaking a few eggs"), and the machine goes out of control. Take out his serial killing of heroes, and he might be able to be a villain you could have s
Things are hardly as dark as you paint them. We are still in a democracy, and the only reason the upcomming elections will be controversial is because public opinion is split right down the middle. What will decide the next presidency could be any number of small things, unrelated to public opinion, but the reason it is that way is because of public opinion in the first place.
The reason you've found me and other people disagreeing with what you originally said comes down to your insistance on the use of "any means necessary" and that a situation resulting in that would actually be "a good thing". Re-read what you said, that is how it came across to me.
There are, as you say, many examples of large governments being affected by popular opinion. I never argued that. I argued that militant groups have little hope against large governments. The reason is that a militant group will never get widespread support domestically or abroad. If they are to win, they need to be physically capable of overthrowing their government, and in the case of a country like the US, that is almost certain never to be the case. A peaceful revolution, on the other hand, has the capability of getting support domestically and abroad, and pressure both from the inside and the outside of a country is bound to affect change. All of the examples you gave are exactly of this sort. These groups are even more effective in a country that is (and will always, even in the darkest of predictions, pretend to be) democratic.
Hearing statements like this worry me about your sanity. I can't imagine a situation occuring where a militant group could ever have any hope of overthrowing the US government, or even affecting any kind of change. Your "right to bear arms" extend to at best, a rifle, and that isn't going to achieve much against tanks, planes, and a well trained US military. Groups like that will always be quickly (and rightly) labeled as terrorist groups and have little or no public sympathy. As long as the US remains a democracy, change (though usually slow) will be possible through peaceful means. You have to remember that the founding fathers were just a little bit radical, which isn't surprising considering they had just rebelled against a very powerful nation, were traitors, and were advocating what at the time was a very different form of government. Taking seriously the suggestion that a revolution is something we should have fairly regularly is a not-so-great idea in my opinion. Just like any source, you can't take everything every founding father said as gospel on how things should be done hundreds of years later.
There are a ton of rules, but I think the most recent changes that had some people angry was that it is traditional to allow audience members to ask questions "town meeting" style. Instead new rules state that audience members will submit questions to the moderator before hand, and are not allowed to in any way deviate from their submitted questions, make comments, etc.
LOL sorry, but I find it hard to believe MS found it necessary to pay people to act like really obnoxious Linux fanboys. In any community there's always people willing to do it for free.
I wouldn't be surprised if companies actually saw this is a plus. Now they can sell you a new one every 1-2 years.
I saw that as well, and while I think the debate was heated and some of the people they interviewed stretched things a bit, the main points are valid. It was NOT one sided, they interviewed the DOE director and he had plenty of chance to present his side of it. He's not stupid, he KNOWS exactly why 60 minutes would be interviewing him, and that it wouldn't be favorable. His arguement was basically... well we already truck toxic waste! So trust us. Kust because we will be hauling more than ever before, doesn't mean something will happen. Right. It is going to take something like 25 years to get all of this stuff to Yucca mountain, constantly trucking it around the country. The main arguement for Yucca mountain is that it is a more "secure" place to put all this stuff, and is far away from a major population. But to GET it there, it will be made incredibly vulnerable to attack, and we'll be driving it through cities. Instead of spending all this money on one site whose solution is worse than our current problem, we should be spending it to make sure the sites we have are made more secure.
I think this is obviously just a PR stunt by the Mexico officials to make it look like they are "doing something" about the crime in their country, when in fact this doesn't really help at all.
Everything depends on how you look at it.
Like some people would say it increases the importance of earth, as everything else was obviously created as scenery just for us.
Others would say that until life is discovered on another planet, we can be as egotistical as we want about our presence. We can speculate all we want, but the fact is that there aren't any signs of life that we've encountered, and that makes us quite unique. On the other hand, others would look at that and say that it's because life only occurs in brief flashes before it becomes intelligent enough to wipe itself out.
Pick your poison. Reality gets pretty flimsy when talking about the unknown.
I have a hard time believing they didn't get "meat sack" from the fantastic dialogue provided for HK-47 in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I don't know for sure they are the first to use that term in that context, but it worked beautifully. "meatbag" sounds so much better than meat sack, and meat sack just comes off as a lame attempt to pretend that it is original. Personally, I think it sounds way too close to ball sack. I have no problem with people reusing cool ideas in creative works (to an extent) but it annoys me when they come up with a less effective version just so they can pretend to be original.
I would say if you are having trouble limiting it, you may just need to cut it out all together. I had tried to balance school and gaming for a long time, and was never very successful at it. If a new game came out I was super interested in I would lose all control, and begin making bad grade again. After flunking a statistics midterm (which I hardly studied for) I finally decided that I just couldn't consitantly control myself, and so I just stopped playing. One of the things that helped is that I realized that games are just a time sink. You don't learn anything from them, better yourself in any way, or create anything of value. For all intents and purposes, you might as well not exist when you are playing games. When I really thought about it I decided I wasn't happy with spending all the free time I had (and some time I didn't have) doing something that had no results or meaning, other than taking time away from what should be my real priorities. I do miss gaming a lot. I'll read about new games comming out and want to play them, but I at least have the self control not to give into it. The upside is that it's given me a lot of time to focus winning the game of life, and I do stuff now that I didn't before, like work out and socialize more. Overall I'm just as happy as I was then, and I'm sure that will increase as the time I spend improving myself pays off.
I guess they must spell variable wariable.
I disagree. Gibson's whole description of icebreaking was interesting science fiction, rather than something that was really attempting to make an informed guess on how future computer systems would work. For one thing, users could be killed by the security systems through their connection. It seems increadibly unlikely to me that this would ever occur, since any system connected to the internet should be able to handle disconnections, and so one could be produced on purpose the moment trouble showed up. But obviously, it made for a much more exciting plot. The same goes for the visual stuff, it's a lot more interesting than someone spending days maticulously banging away at a system. Gibson's a great author, but I think it silly to give him credit for things he obviously didn't intend in his books. By is own admission, Gibson is no techie. He writes fiction, and trying to pull deeper meaning (or predictions of the future) out of it is a waste of time.
Heh... just had to say that.
Actually the main way the catch people is not because they are winning (it happens) but because of the way they bet (although if someone is winning a lot they are likely to investigate it thoroughly). Card counters know the odds for every hand they play, so on low odds hands they bet very little, but when the odds favor them they bet high. Someone who wins by luck doesn't have huge shifts in their betting stratagies that coincide with the odds of the deck.
Well, it isn't all bad. Some reefs are going to die, while others expand. And perhaps a few of the reefs will even evolve to live in warmer waters. If worst comes to worst we could always genetically engineer them to do that ;)
At any rate, I think your suggestion that the US is hanging on to Iraq for its oil is ridiculous. Our expendetures far outweigh any oil we might have or will gain from the country, especially considering how often the pipelines are being blown up. Considering we are now on the brink of switching over from oil, why would we now start invading other countries for oil when we could have done it 14 years ago, and with a better reason? (It's hard for invaders to garner much sympathy) I wish people would stop going after these simple black and white explanations. The political pressures and reasons for going into Iraq were very complicated, as is the current situation, and will most likely not be properly understood for another 10 years. Reducing it all to "the US is just greedy for oil" is as simple minded as you can get.
I'm not surprised. We've certainly made some unforgivable mistakes over there. That said, I still believe that a US presence in Iraq is preferable to seeing the country plunged into civil war for who knows how long, after which to be ruled by yet another dictator or fanatical religious group. Ironically, the longer people in Iraq fight us, the longer our government will have an "excuse" to stay there.
"Don't you get that Bush can't afford a legitimate government in Iraq?"
Nice try. Make a statement implying the "obviousness" of something without providing any supporting arguements. Why would Bush be hurt by a legitimate government in Iraq? The American people want to see an Iraq with a truely democratic government strong enough to keep hold if its country without American military support. Most people in America remember or have read about the consequences of trying to support an unpopular puppet government (South Vietnam). No one wants to see that happen again.
So, we may have won the war against Saddam, but we could easily lose the war against fanaticism in Iraq if we are forced to pull out before a legitimate Iraqi government can control that country. Everyone hates the tactics that Saddam used, but the reality is that that was what he found necessary to control that country. Hopefully, a legitimate government won't be facing the kind of resentment Saddam's rule did, and so require less force, but there are still many other factions to deal with and that will require proportionally more effort in order to use more acceptable means than Saddam did.
I think the Linux is obsolete flamewar is good reading for anyone trying to understand the history behind all of this. It certainly is funny to see Tanenbaum making predictions like "5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5". Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but it does make one wonder what the history of free operating systems would look like had Linux been controlled/produced by someone with Tanenbaum's outlook rather than Linus's.
Oh come on moderators! You know you want to mod it ++++Informative just so other people will fall for it to.
The real pro gamers are going to be attracted to the games that have the biggest tournaments, and are therefore the most popular. Those are the games that last 4 years. Games like StarCraft, Counter-Strike, and the WarCraft series are all good examples.
The big difference between pro gaming and professional sports is that because professional sports are physical, you can only practice for so many hours before it becomes counter-productive (or impossible) to continue. In competitive gaming, to be competitive you have to spend a TON of time playing. Since it isn't physical you can spend every waking hour practicing. This is why a lot of pro gamers burn out after a while, because playing the same game every waking hour for 4 years gets old fast.
I think what makes the difference between pro gaming is the US and in Korea is our societies. In the US, gaming (well anything to do with computers) still has enough of a "nerd" stigma to it to prevent pro gamers from being sought after to promote most products. In the US we seem to be at the point where you save face if you just play games casually, but you're a total nerd and pathetic if that's all you do.