Well push people too far and they revolt. I know I would for 90 hour work weeks. That's maybe the difference between the U.S. and Chinese. We're not as submissive to authority as they are and feel it's within our right to revolt if the government become tyrinnical.
A huge disadvantage compared to who? Indian or China labor? I think not,imperfect as our system may be American workers are still a hell of a lot better off then chinese or indian workers. The possible emergence and dominance of china and india in the economy also brings with the dominance of a lower standard of living in the United States.
I don't know what you're talking about. At least at my school Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the money continues to flow even despite some budget cuts. There are numerous new buildings being constructed,plenty of great cultural events etc.
Netflix is overated, Check out facets.org, there rental policy is great, and the movie selection is vastly superior to netflix, as besides having mainstream stuff, they have all the classic stuff, along with international and obscure as well. Largest movie collection I've ever seen!
All I know is the temp job I work at is at a major grad school in a very large well known University, and we were able to deploy firefox just fine, having it customized to our environment, including homepage, search icon things etc.
I don't know about anyone else but I've found my Sony Clie SJ30 to be incredibly useful. Besides scheduling, with a 128meg memory stick, I use it as an English, philosophy, and music dictionary. With a gps transmitter I've used my pda to route and drive those maps on the road. I've also used all the basic scheduling as well. As far as I know I know I haven't heard of many cell phones that can be used for all those purposes I listed above except scheduling. I know there are cellphones now that can be used as a gps map, but I've heard it's slow, and you have to pay a monthly fee to use that service.
You're acting like the U.S. has reverted to martial law, yes the patriot act is potentionally troublesome but even if abused to its worst it still wouldn't make the U.S. anything near a dictatorship.
Buses suck, and for mass transportation in general, america is just to fricken big for it ever to be economically feasible right now to develop a public transportation akin to what you'd find in Europe where you can drive through entire countries in a few hours. I don't know about you but I'd rather be driving taking my destiny in my own hands rather then waiting around for the bus, which I have to time to time, because there is often no parking downtown.
It's not about our survival, it's about maintaining the world order and preventing many people from dying. That said there's danger of us losing our dominance as a species on the planet. I taking a one credit class on globaL warming (need that one extra credit for my electives to graduate) I was shown some models of how global warming would effect regions. Yes under the more severe predictions, the tropic region will move up to higher latitudes, and yes across the globe something like that would definetly screw the food supply, but it's not like with global warming all the land won't bear fruit, no what will happen is simply where we farm will have to shift. This is a good thing considering how a great deal of land in siberia and canada, that is now too cold to grow anything would become the new farming areas and the areas( considering in places like america and other places of the world farmland is dwindling because of land development). In any case even if billions die prematurely, billions will survive, some of them just might have to relocate.
My subject line refers to the fact that with a limited number of positions in companies or universities, whenever a policy is enacted that forces diversity, while it may give a job to a minority it will in exchange take one away from a member of the white male majority, which so often becomes the Other. Now while I don't agree with past practices of racial or gender bias discounting minority applicants altogether, I also don't support, at least indefinetly, policies that create forced proportions of diversity. Ideally winning a job would be based solely on the merit of the applicant in best meeting the needs of the job. Practically speaking, while that matters there is the matter of networking, as well as in the past racial and gender qualifiers that excluded some from winning the job. So I can understand the apparent need at one time for things like affirmative action to counteract these racial, or gender biases.
I think though that society is much different today than it was back when affirmative action was started. I think this is why the Harvard President raised these issues to suggest that maybe we don't want to take forcing diversity too far to the point where it starts resulting in less qualified applicants getting the job over better qualified applicants for the sake of politically correct ideas of diversity and nurture-tabula rosa only ideas of humanity. By raising the question that maybe there exist real differences between genders that would provide an explanation for why males tend to dominate at the professorship level in the hard sciences in terms of numbers over female.
You can try and fool yourselves and pretend that the difference of numbers is based on discrimination, or the culture or whatever but I'm convinced that science will prove eventually male brain wiring works better for math and sciences. But, there are some very intelligent and unique women out there who excel in science and I'm by no means saying they shouldn't pursue a field in science just because they're female. As for races if one looks at athletics it's clear blacks are better heavyweight boxers, sprinters, runners, etc than whites. The statistics show that. Why is that? Better genes for running etc? I don't know but clearly talent is to some extent dependent upon nature and not just nurture. Why would humans breed dogs and horses if not for the fact that genes determine performance to some extent.
Ok this attack on the U.S. is entirely unfair. Number 1, you should be thankful we came at all to the allies side in WWI considering, first off at that at the time the U.S. was not a superpower, second, it was in a continent apart, third, there was no threat to our security. Mainly it only because the Germans were blowing up our transport ships that we finally came over to the side of Germany. Now let me ask you, what did UK do for US when it was a superpower? Let's see, you guys tried attacking us, burned our capital down etc. If not for a shared language and culture I see no reason why the U.S. shouldn't have supported the Germans in attacking you. Also let's think about these world wars, did the U.S. bear any responsibility for there start, NO!, It was an entirely European thing, so how can you criticize us for not immediately sending over troops to be killed the moment your country decides to enter into a pointless war based on agression for territorial expansion(WWI). Also keep in mind that U.S. only became a true superpower shortly after the beginning of WWII. About this so called self-centeredness you acuse the U.S. of, I could say the same for imperial UK in the past or any other superpower. That's just the way politics work, deal with it. The U.S. isn't perfect but looking at history, we are guilty of much less then other past superpowers, including USSR, UK, Spain,... Rome, so quit whining, we're doing a better job then your country did when it was a superpower in terms of explotation etc.
You seem to forget that corporations are often owned by many normal citizens like you and me along with a fair share of very rich citizens of course. Let's not forget this fact before we start villifying anything with word corporation in it.
So you're saying after we've spent all this money we should just stop and give up? That strikes me as defeatist. Even if this system only ends up with a say %20 success rate that still means that if a country like North lobbed 5 nukes at us we'd at least be able to save one city out of five and the millions that would inhabit it.
Also as a user of a sony clie sj320 for over a year now I can say that it's much easier to not lose a pda than laptop if you happen to be a person who carries a laptop around everywhere. I guess it's all about what portable services you need. My pda has served me very well for calender, contacts, memos, dictionary, as well as map software that I can use to hook up to a gps device while I'm driving. The battery life is great where I can go for over a week without recharging, I don't have long boot up times etc. With a 128 meg memory stick I can also store all the documents I want using quickword if I really wanted to, which I don't. For games, internet, writing papers etc my desktop works fine for me. I see no need for a laptop.
I wouldn't say we are politically losing the war right now. We certainly aren't in a good state politically but it's not like the situation has really changed that much on the ground for the worse since abu gharib. I would say that while we lost more casulaties november then usual that was because of fallujah which I think can be looked upon as a modest success considering we very quickly took over a hostile city and the population of Iraq didn't go up in arms like it looked they were going to do back in april the last time the U.S. was thinking of clearing out fallujah.
What are you talking about, wars can and have to be won purely by military means. Look at U.S. versus Japan, or even better look at what ROme did to Carthage. Politics isn't necessary if the entire people composing an enemy nation are dead.
I would only say that the developers would have to try and balance out what new members join each faction and then these so called rushes you mentioned i can't see as being that effective.
The only time I'd be interested in MMPORGS is if the developers would create an on-going storyline of epic proportions that would hopefully involve a huge war between factions. It would have to have no player-player free kill zones. You should be to kill anything you want to. At the same time friendly killing of weaker players on your own side would disband you from the faction and essentially make you into a brigand and much more likely to be killed. I would say to make MMORPG interesting some special super high level characters would be the faction leaders controlled my the MMORPG developers and who through the direction of a preplanned script written by hopefully some talented novelists would create an interesting dramatic situation between factions. Basically what would make a mmorpg awesome would be developers playing the role of dungeonmaster on a grand scale having an excellent preplanned storyline that extended through months and months of real time. The story of course would be flexible though as to which faction would be doing better militarily. This would give a sense to all players that they do have a role in the outcome of their online world. Too many mmporgs lack any higher level structure so what you have essentially is a bunch of people in small groups going through completely inconsequential quests that have no real effect on the game world. I would like to the think though that in my game world that while when you started you would start out factionless if you wanted to reach past a certain level you would have to join a faction and play role in achieving the factions policy. This is what would get me to play mmoprpg.
Re:Steam-like online distrubtion is inevitable
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
If with Steam Valve makes $25-30 a copy and they were making $5-10, if anything valve should charge LESS not more for their game like say $25 for a game. $50 for a game is far too much in my opinion and I'll never pay that much.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Yes there have been instances where cracks have been laced with trojans but if you're smart and know where to look you have nothing to worry about.
Caring about others is a two way street. What has the rest of the world done for the U.S.? While U.S. policies and actions arising from those policies have not always been good I think we by far have been the most altruistic nation history has ever seen. There really was no great need for the U.S. to go to war in Europe in WWI or WWII. Unlike the Soviets we didn't politically take over our half of Europe that we covered in WWII but gave it back to the current governments. Getting back to this Kyoto treaty the fact of the matter is that the treaty would hurt our economy and would give other potential future rival nations such as China another economic advantage on top of the unfair labor standards and fixed currency that is already hurting our economy. In any case I think the way trends are going I would suspect U.S. will naturally on its own start polluting less as fossil fuels become more expensive and we continue in the direction of a service oriented economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I concur with your assessment. I would even add the storyline wasn't all that bad.
Well push people too far and they revolt. I know I would for 90 hour work weeks. That's maybe the difference between the U.S. and Chinese. We're not as submissive to authority as they are and feel it's within our right to revolt if the government become tyrinnical.
A huge disadvantage compared to who? Indian or China labor? I think not,imperfect as our system may be American workers are still a hell of a lot better off then chinese or indian workers. The possible emergence and dominance of china and india in the economy also brings with the dominance of a lower standard of living in the United States.
I don't know what you're talking about. At least at my school Univ of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the money continues to flow even despite some budget cuts. There are numerous new buildings being constructed,plenty of great cultural events etc.
quit whining and just pirate the damn thing, that way you won't have to deal with steam at all. Of course for multiplayer you'll have a problem.
Not as many as facets.org, Facets has virtually any movie you can find in imdb
Netflix is overated, Check out facets.org, there rental policy is great, and the movie selection is vastly superior to netflix, as besides having mainstream stuff, they have all the classic stuff, along with international and obscure as well. Largest movie collection I've ever seen!
All I know is the temp job I work at is at a major grad school in a very large well known University, and we were able to deploy firefox just fine, having it customized to our environment, including homepage, search icon things etc.
I don't know about anyone else but I've found my Sony Clie SJ30 to be incredibly useful. Besides scheduling, with a 128meg memory stick, I use it as an English, philosophy, and music dictionary. With a gps transmitter I've used my pda to route and drive those maps on the road. I've also used all the basic scheduling as well. As far as I know I know I haven't heard of many cell phones that can be used for all those purposes I listed above except scheduling. I know there are cellphones now that can be used as a gps map, but I've heard it's slow, and you have to pay a monthly fee to use that service.
You're acting like the U.S. has reverted to martial law, yes the patriot act is potentionally troublesome but even if abused to its worst it still wouldn't make the U.S. anything near a dictatorship.
Buses suck, and for mass transportation in general, america is just to fricken big for it ever to be economically feasible right now to develop a public transportation akin to what you'd find in Europe where you can drive through entire countries in a few hours. I don't know about you but I'd rather be driving taking my destiny in my own hands rather then waiting around for the bus, which I have to time to time, because there is often no parking downtown.
It's not about our survival, it's about maintaining the world order and preventing many people from dying. That said there's danger of us losing our dominance as a species on the planet. I taking a one credit class on globaL warming (need that one extra credit for my electives to graduate) I was shown some models of how global warming would effect regions. Yes under the more severe predictions, the tropic region will move up to higher latitudes, and yes across the globe something like that would definetly screw the food supply, but it's not like with global warming all the land won't bear fruit, no what will happen is simply where we farm will have to shift. This is a good thing considering how a great deal of land in siberia and canada, that is now too cold to grow anything would become the new farming areas and the areas( considering in places like america and other places of the world farmland is dwindling because of land development). In any case even if billions die prematurely, billions will survive, some of them just might have to relocate.
My subject line refers to the fact that with a limited number of positions in companies or universities, whenever a policy is enacted that forces diversity, while it may give a job to a minority it will in exchange take one away from a member of the white male majority, which so often becomes the Other. Now while I don't agree with past practices of racial or gender bias discounting minority applicants altogether, I also don't support, at least indefinetly, policies that create forced proportions of diversity. Ideally winning a job would be based solely on the merit of the applicant in best meeting the needs of the job. Practically speaking, while that matters there is the matter of networking, as well as in the past racial and gender qualifiers that excluded some from winning the job. So I can understand the apparent need at one time for things like affirmative action to counteract these racial, or gender biases. I think though that society is much different today than it was back when affirmative action was started. I think this is why the Harvard President raised these issues to suggest that maybe we don't want to take forcing diversity too far to the point where it starts resulting in less qualified applicants getting the job over better qualified applicants for the sake of politically correct ideas of diversity and nurture-tabula rosa only ideas of humanity. By raising the question that maybe there exist real differences between genders that would provide an explanation for why males tend to dominate at the professorship level in the hard sciences in terms of numbers over female. You can try and fool yourselves and pretend that the difference of numbers is based on discrimination, or the culture or whatever but I'm convinced that science will prove eventually male brain wiring works better for math and sciences. But, there are some very intelligent and unique women out there who excel in science and I'm by no means saying they shouldn't pursue a field in science just because they're female. As for races if one looks at athletics it's clear blacks are better heavyweight boxers, sprinters, runners, etc than whites. The statistics show that. Why is that? Better genes for running etc? I don't know but clearly talent is to some extent dependent upon nature and not just nurture. Why would humans breed dogs and horses if not for the fact that genes determine performance to some extent.
Ok this attack on the U.S. is entirely unfair. Number 1, you should be thankful we came at all to the allies side in WWI considering, first off at that at the time the U.S. was not a superpower, second, it was in a continent apart, third, there was no threat to our security. Mainly it only because the Germans were blowing up our transport ships that we finally came over to the side of Germany. Now let me ask you, what did UK do for US when it was a superpower? Let's see, you guys tried attacking us, burned our capital down etc. If not for a shared language and culture I see no reason why the U.S. shouldn't have supported the Germans in attacking you. Also let's think about these world wars, did the U.S. bear any responsibility for there start, NO!, It was an entirely European thing, so how can you criticize us for not immediately sending over troops to be killed the moment your country decides to enter into a pointless war based on agression for territorial expansion(WWI). Also keep in mind that U.S. only became a true superpower shortly after the beginning of WWII. About this so called self-centeredness you acuse the U.S. of, I could say the same for imperial UK in the past or any other superpower. That's just the way politics work, deal with it. The U.S. isn't perfect but looking at history, we are guilty of much less then other past superpowers, including USSR, UK, Spain, ... Rome, so quit whining, we're doing a better job then your country did when it was a superpower in terms of explotation etc.
You seem to forget that corporations are often owned by many normal citizens like you and me along with a fair share of very rich citizens of course. Let's not forget this fact before we start villifying anything with word corporation in it.
So you're saying after we've spent all this money we should just stop and give up? That strikes me as defeatist. Even if this system only ends up with a say %20 success rate that still means that if a country like North lobbed 5 nukes at us we'd at least be able to save one city out of five and the millions that would inhabit it.
Also as a user of a sony clie sj320 for over a year now I can say that it's much easier to not lose a pda than laptop if you happen to be a person who carries a laptop around everywhere. I guess it's all about what portable services you need. My pda has served me very well for calender, contacts, memos, dictionary, as well as map software that I can use to hook up to a gps device while I'm driving. The battery life is great where I can go for over a week without recharging, I don't have long boot up times etc. With a 128 meg memory stick I can also store all the documents I want using quickword if I really wanted to, which I don't. For games, internet, writing papers etc my desktop works fine for me. I see no need for a laptop.
I wouldn't say we are politically losing the war right now. We certainly aren't in a good state politically but it's not like the situation has really changed that much on the ground for the worse since abu gharib. I would say that while we lost more casulaties november then usual that was because of fallujah which I think can be looked upon as a modest success considering we very quickly took over a hostile city and the population of Iraq didn't go up in arms like it looked they were going to do back in april the last time the U.S. was thinking of clearing out fallujah.
What are you talking about, wars can and have to be won purely by military means. Look at U.S. versus Japan, or even better look at what ROme did to Carthage. Politics isn't necessary if the entire people composing an enemy nation are dead.
I would only say that the developers would have to try and balance out what new members join each faction and then these so called rushes you mentioned i can't see as being that effective.
The only time I'd be interested in MMPORGS is if the developers would create an on-going storyline of epic proportions that would hopefully involve a huge war between factions. It would have to have no player-player free kill zones. You should be to kill anything you want to. At the same time friendly killing of weaker players on your own side would disband you from the faction and essentially make you into a brigand and much more likely to be killed. I would say to make MMORPG interesting some special super high level characters would be the faction leaders controlled my the MMORPG developers and who through the direction of a preplanned script written by hopefully some talented novelists would create an interesting dramatic situation between factions. Basically what would make a mmorpg awesome would be developers playing the role of dungeonmaster on a grand scale having an excellent preplanned storyline that extended through months and months of real time. The story of course would be flexible though as to which faction would be doing better militarily. This would give a sense to all players that they do have a role in the outcome of their online world. Too many mmporgs lack any higher level structure so what you have essentially is a bunch of people in small groups going through completely inconsequential quests that have no real effect on the game world. I would like to the think though that in my game world that while when you started you would start out factionless if you wanted to reach past a certain level you would have to join a faction and play role in achieving the factions policy. This is what would get me to play mmoprpg.
If with Steam Valve makes $25-30 a copy and they were making $5-10, if anything valve should charge LESS not more for their game like say $25 for a game. $50 for a game is far too much in my opinion and I'll never pay that much.
You obviously don't know what you're talking about. Yes there have been instances where cracks have been laced with trojans but if you're smart and know where to look you have nothing to worry about.
Caring about others is a two way street. What has the rest of the world done for the U.S.? While U.S. policies and actions arising from those policies have not always been good I think we by far have been the most altruistic nation history has ever seen. There really was no great need for the U.S. to go to war in Europe in WWI or WWII. Unlike the Soviets we didn't politically take over our half of Europe that we covered in WWII but gave it back to the current governments. Getting back to this Kyoto treaty the fact of the matter is that the treaty would hurt our economy and would give other potential future rival nations such as China another economic advantage on top of the unfair labor standards and fixed currency that is already hurting our economy. In any case I think the way trends are going I would suspect U.S. will naturally on its own start polluting less as fossil fuels become more expensive and we continue in the direction of a service oriented economy.
My bad I can't type today. Let me repeat Wonderful idea also considering that the US has enough coal to power our country for over 100 years.