And I know of no business related task that the likes of Vista can do that Linux cannot, absolutely none.
Open source software can do anything, as long as someone's interested in implementing it. That's sort of the glory of it.
The only sticking point here being that a lot of business people are really attached to, let's say, one or two of the unique features of one of the Office suite... and that would be easy to mimic, except if you pick a hundred users of Office at random, probably there aren't any matches of the one or two niche features they just can't live without.
Potentially an OpenOffice or the like can have all those special features, but the reality today is that it's good for all the 'core' word processing, etc., features but not so much with those edge cases.
What I see driving the costs are corporate cutbacks. Oh yea, we haven't seen the articles in a big way but corporate north America is in a recession and chopping where they can. They are looking at the $1000+ software for the desktop and are just rubbing their hands for the savings.
My job has me dealing with people in a lot of different industries/businesses and I just don't see that happening any time soon. You'll see nearly every sizeable business cut the company holiday party or lay people off a long time before they try to get rid of Office, and therefore Windows. If you're losing money, it makes sense to cut the fat, but Office isn't fat to most business people.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that. Your analogy seems significantly worse, given that I don't consider any of the assumptions that it's based on to be true.
Very few (if any) people use all of the unique features Excel has, but a damn lot of them use at least one of them... and often, the price of doing without that one feature is much greater than the cost of buying a copy of Office.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true.
For what it's worth, a number of professional game devs I know have told me they strongly prefer programming against the last version or two of DirectX to the last version or two of OpenGL.
(I don't know shit about the differences in API myself, and I have to assume OpenGL will catch up soon in any shortcomings, but I trust these folks' opinions as to the state of things today.)
Nobody uses Microsoft Office with the specific goal of using Office. They word process, or work with spreadsheets, or make a presentation. All of which can be done under Linux.
You clearly don't deal with many professionals who spend hours a day in Office.
Open replacements for Office are replacements in much the same sense that walking everywhere is a perfect replacement for cars. (Ditto the GIMP vs. Photoshop, etc.) It can get you all the same places! It's just as good!
I respect the tremendous effort people like the OpenOffice team have put forth, but for millions of people who get their work done or don't by the power and usability of their office suite, the alternatives aren't there yet.
What exactly is wrong with Java? As it's now open source and increasingly accessible with multiple languages it would seem the perfect cross-platform system to use.
This is just my opinion, but I've been earning my living doing Java projects at times for about 8 years now and.NET projects for about 5.
It's not that you can't write the same software with Java; it's that it will typically take a developer/team with a similar amount of experience (or, as in my case, even more Java experience) much longer to write it. This is much more true if we're looking at a non-web-based app that needs to have a user interface.
The last few versions of Java are clearly learning/borrowing some of the better.NET features that Java lacked, so I tend to think this won't be true or as true in five years. Today, for all the developers I know with a decent amount of expertise with both platforms, it is.
I'm a consultant, so I tend to be exposed to a lot of different non-software companies in a given year. Which is to say, companies that use computers and software to solve the problems of their business and not as their primary product.
All of them are running Windows and Office on just about every machine they have.
However, most of them are also using at least one Open Source tool to fill some need. For many of them, that's something like Subversion running on a Windows server and Tortoise installs for the devs to go with it, but still, they're using it.
Yeah that is definately true. This is especially the case with an operating system. The operating system does not need to have a well-featured photo organizer, a media player with built-in internet radio browser, music store, cd burning, skinning, visuals and so on. An operating system, first and foremost must do a good job at resource management, thread management, process control. It needs to be stable, effecient, secure.
From an engineer's perspective this is absolutely true. From a typical consumer's perspective, it's anything but.
From a consumer perspective, a media player, cd burning, etc. is to the OS as climate control and leather seats and such are to a car. None of these features are part of the core functionality of the product, but some of them are seen as essential by consumers, and some of them are major differentiators between similar products in the market.
Probably it was a gradual thing, but I'd say it hit a tipping point within the last ten years.
Ten years ago, the internal corporate culture/environment for developers at Microsoft was an awful lot like Google is today. Not identical, of course, but driven by similar values and with similar prestige and benefits. Now, probably not as much.
I believe (perhaps naively) that this 'Golden Shield' will ultimately prove to be a failure, current methods to circumvent it notwithstanding.
More than ever, information is becoming the lifeblood of a people. Without access to the full volume of information freely available to the rest of the world, China will fall behind in crucial ways. The filtering solution won't block out everything important, but it will block out some. Maybe someone mentions Tibet in his chemistry thesis and it's filtered for China, or whatever. There's a piece of information the rest of the world gets for free that a researcher in China might well miss.
Ultimately I think China will decide it's in its best interest to allow the free flow of information into the country, and that in turn will help drive their country ever more towards modern democracy.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe the future will end up like Red Dawn.
What's stopping Blizzard selling a 'bot enabled subscription' at a premium?
In a sense, nothing, but I bet there'd be massive uproar from lots of the game's players that don't want to bot if Blizzard took the stance of institutionalizing rather than condemning it.
So, far from being un-BNetD-able, it has already been done. It has just been driven underground by Blizzard's treatment of the community.
That's sort of true and sort of not...
I mean, yes, some people are running private WoW servers, and yet... really this isn't competition for the core game. People who play WoW are generally looking for the kind of game you can only get with the large community on the "real" servers. They want the kind of trade and economy you only get with the real servers, or to be able to tell their friends they have a level 70 druid, or to take part in 40 man raids, or to walk around Ironforge showing off their cool armor or mount, etc. Basically, whenever people tell me what they like about WoW, it's something they wouldn't really get on even a decently sized private server.
I'd argue that a game like Starcraft is a whole different animal in that respect. Sure, some people will be after the 'real battle.net' ladder stats, but a lot of people would be happy to switch to a private server if it even just had less lag for them.
It's like sueing a company that makes bolt cutters because a customer of theirs bought some bolt cutters and broke into your house, or shed. The person performing the breaking and entering is at fault, not the manufacturer of the tool used to break and enter.
That analogy doesn't quite hold up, if only because there are legal uses of bolt cutters, but there isn't really a use of WoW Glider that doesn't bone Blizzard's ToS. You can bet gun laws would look a lot different if you somehow could ONLY use them to commit crimes.
(Disclaimer: what follows is a pragmatic, not idealistic opinion.)
At best, I think the Glider creator here is the equivalent of a pedestrian who has the right of way and walks in front of a truck. Even if you're in the right, you still don't really win. I have to assume that Blizzard has a lot more money to throw at lawyers to keep this going until it goes away.
I'm saying they need to change their whole world outlook so that perhaps that's not the obvious choice anymore. Your community and your fans are what counts in the long term, not your short-term profits.
That's true.
However, I doubt even 0.01% of the players of their games have even heard of the BNetD incident, and some small fraction of that fraction cares.
Preserving (at least for a little while longer) your current business model at the cost of pissing off a tiny fraction of your customer base isn't necessarily the worst trade.
In a sense, though, they did change their outlook as you're suggesting -- since those days, the vast bulk of their business/revenue has gone over into WoW, which due to the basic nature of the game is essentially un-BNetD-able.
I actually mostly like the Head First Design patterns book. There is a lot of noise there, but they do a pretty good job of explaining the patterns and illustrating cases in which you'd want to use them. Most of the developers I've worked with could benefit from it -- the only thing worse than a developer with no exposure to design patterns is one for whom a small selection of patterns is a hammer and everything looks like a nail.
I have the Gang of Four book also as a reference manual, but it is just that. I would say that trying to read it straight through, to me, is like trying to read a dictionary, except I honestly consider a good dictionary to be much more approachable. It's a book I have handy because it's the definitive work, not because it's easy to read or the best way to learn the concepts.
Just because someone supports an issue does not make their opinion on the issue less valid. The truthiness you seek is not to be had.
You were incorrect last time, and still are.
If this were a science fair or a logical argument, that would be a fallacy. (Actually, still not quite, since on the last newspost on this subject I indicated that I would examine his conclusions more closely given his bias, not that his bias made him automatically wrong.) In this context, highly opinion-based speculation about what might or might not happen in the future, it's not.
If we were having a discussion about which baseball team will win the World Series this year, and you've predicted that the Cubs would win each year for the last 50 years even though they haven't in any of those cases, hell yes your extreme bias is relevant to the discussion. It doesn't make you automatically wrong, but it sure should make someone carefully consider any very subjective points you raise in defense of your conclusion. This isn't any different.
I think including Rob Weir's response is topical, but let's be honest here. He's pretty much the single most outspoken critic of OOXML. That he and Durusau are examining the same situation and drawing very different conclusions isn't much of a surprise.
Personally, I think Weir's kidding himself if he thinks Microsoft was on the wrong side of open standards, if wrong is defined as "bad for Microsoft." Office being Office, millions of people will still be using OOXML because the factors that most businesses evaluate in choosing a word processor / spreadsheet / etc. are far from the factors that seem to be important to Weir. It already will be the de facto standard regardless of how bad it is or isn't or what ISO or anyone else has to say, so it might as well be documented and open for others to implement without legal harassment from Microsoft.
has to be Microsoft fans attacking Mac. Does anyone remember all the talk of Leopard being a knock off of Vista and how much better Vista was?
That's almost certainly not a Microsoft fan posting, but rather someone successfully trolling you.
I assume that trolls go after the Apple die-hards for (one of) the reason most virus writers target insecure Windows boxes: it's just so much damn easier than the alternative. I mean, if someone posted, "Windows is so much better than Linux because it is more secure and runs better on older hardware," on slashdot, 99% of even the most rabid Linux zealots here would recognize that for a troll and leave it be. For whatever reason, equally obvious anti-Apple trolls find bites aplenty.
I completely agree with you. Many times people say "If Microsoft did this... blah blah" and most of the time the comparison is completely silly. But this time it's spot on. And Apple is just as wrong to do it as Microsoft was (and is).
Actually, I'd say it's even a little worse than that. Microsoft back in the day made the argument that people were starting to expect web browsing to be part of the "basic functionality" of a computer and that it made sense to ship IE as part of Windows. While their dirty pool in the browser wars is now a matter of public record, that piece of it at least did make sense.
There's really no way you can argue that people expect to get a new web browser with an update of iTunes, though.
That's part one of the article where he complains that Windows has too much security stuff that slows down games. In part 2 he complains that Windows isn't secure enough.
So basically this guy can't even stay consistent throughout one interview.
From TFA: "Because what it means is that game and media support and keeping the operating system out of the way is secondary to, in many cases, silly security infrastructure and a lot of useless OS junk that impedes the real-time performance of games unnecessarily."
This has to be the first guy ever to say that Microsoft cares too much about security when designing Windows.
Assuming we agree with TFA (and I mostly do), I'm not sure we can automatically draw the parallel that what makes sense for entertainment items (e.g. video games or music) makes sense for, say, business software. A guy who is a Nine Inch Nails fan will probably give them his money even though he can easily download their album for free. A business that wants to use Windows or Office is probably not setting aside money in their budget to give to Microsoft if they don't legally have to. I can't see getting a "We're Bill Gates fans, so we want to give him a bunch of money" line item through most corporate budget committees.
I don't know, convince me. Specifically, that it would be in MS's economic best interests in the form of making more money or whatever exactly warms the possibly-black hearts of their shareholders.
These days a lot of the money from games comes from places other than boxed sales. There's add-on content and online play. If you charge $5 a month to play the game, who really cares if the player pirated it or not?
I think this is what has driven games to online play over the last several years more than anything -- online play as copy protection, or alternately online play as making game piracy mostly pointless. Yes, a lot of people are trying to make the 'next WoW' now, and that's driving a lot of games and dev teams towards online play that probably never should be, but ask yourself, why was there a WoW in the first place?
Although there were subscription-model MMOish games earlier, I think the success of Blizzard's Battle.net was the first big success story of online play. You could easily find a key generator to 'crack' any of their games... but not so easily to play online on their servers, and for most people, you wanted to. Online play drives sales drives word of mouth drives more sales, and before you know it the laws of gaming thermodynamics have been broken and a perpetual money-printing machine has been created.
Is there word anywhere on an official reason for this change in voting procedure? I'm not seeing it in TFA or in any of the things it directly links to, but I might be missing it.
Why do scientists think they need to communicate science to the general populace?
One reason that I haven't seen mentioned yet: people are influenced by the talk/culture around them.
One reason that matters is that a society that is educated about science and that values science will tend to produce more/better scientists in the future than one that doesn't. Sure, you'll have mavericks in any culture that buck convention, and maybe those are even the most valuable people to be your theoretical scientists and researchers anyway, but a lot of valuable work could still be done by people who, if born into a different culture, might grow up believing that science is worthless heresy.
Considerably - I'm 6'4" and weigh just over 250lbs - and I go to the gym not every day but almost. I could stand to lose some weight - but I'm built up like a rugby player.
I'd suspect I'm at least twice as big as the average Japanese - even though i probably weigh less than the average american
Man. Americans aren't that fat. On average.
(Not that I'm saying you're fat, but over 250 lbs on most people would be.)
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And I know of no business related task that the likes of Vista can do that Linux cannot, absolutely none.
Open source software can do anything, as long as someone's interested in implementing it. That's sort of the glory of it.
The only sticking point here being that a lot of business people are really attached to, let's say, one or two of the unique features of one of the Office suite... and that would be easy to mimic, except if you pick a hundred users of Office at random, probably there aren't any matches of the one or two niche features they just can't live without.
Potentially an OpenOffice or the like can have all those special features, but the reality today is that it's good for all the 'core' word processing, etc., features but not so much with those edge cases.
What I see driving the costs are corporate cutbacks. Oh yea, we haven't seen the articles in a big way but corporate north America is in a recession and chopping where they can. They are looking at the $1000+ software for the desktop and are just rubbing their hands for the savings.
My job has me dealing with people in a lot of different industries/businesses and I just don't see that happening any time soon. You'll see nearly every sizeable business cut the company holiday party or lay people off a long time before they try to get rid of Office, and therefore Windows. If you're losing money, it makes sense to cut the fat, but Office isn't fat to most business people.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on that. Your analogy seems significantly worse, given that I don't consider any of the assumptions that it's based on to be true.
Very few (if any) people use all of the unique features Excel has, but a damn lot of them use at least one of them... and often, the price of doing without that one feature is much greater than the cost of buying a copy of Office.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true.
For what it's worth, a number of professional game devs I know have told me they strongly prefer programming against the last version or two of DirectX to the last version or two of OpenGL.
(I don't know shit about the differences in API myself, and I have to assume OpenGL will catch up soon in any shortcomings, but I trust these folks' opinions as to the state of things today.)
Nobody uses Microsoft Office with the specific goal of using Office. They word process, or work with spreadsheets, or make a presentation. All of which can be done under Linux.
You clearly don't deal with many professionals who spend hours a day in Office.
Open replacements for Office are replacements in much the same sense that walking everywhere is a perfect replacement for cars. (Ditto the GIMP vs. Photoshop, etc.) It can get you all the same places! It's just as good!
I respect the tremendous effort people like the OpenOffice team have put forth, but for millions of people who get their work done or don't by the power and usability of their office suite, the alternatives aren't there yet.
What exactly is wrong with Java? As it's now open source and increasingly accessible with multiple languages it would seem the perfect cross-platform system to use.
.NET projects for about 5.
.NET features that Java lacked, so I tend to think this won't be true or as true in five years. Today, for all the developers I know with a decent amount of expertise with both platforms, it is.
This is just my opinion, but I've been earning my living doing Java projects at times for about 8 years now and
It's not that you can't write the same software with Java; it's that it will typically take a developer/team with a similar amount of experience (or, as in my case, even more Java experience) much longer to write it. This is much more true if we're looking at a non-web-based app that needs to have a user interface.
The last few versions of Java are clearly learning/borrowing some of the better
I'm a consultant, so I tend to be exposed to a lot of different non-software companies in a given year. Which is to say, companies that use computers and software to solve the problems of their business and not as their primary product.
All of them are running Windows and Office on just about every machine they have.
However, most of them are also using at least one Open Source tool to fill some need. For many of them, that's something like Subversion running on a Windows server and Tortoise installs for the devs to go with it, but still, they're using it.
Yeah that is definately true. This is especially the case with an operating system. The operating system does not need to have a well-featured photo organizer, a media player with built-in internet radio browser, music store, cd burning, skinning, visuals and so on. An operating system, first and foremost must do a good job at resource management, thread management, process control. It needs to be stable, effecient, secure.
From an engineer's perspective this is absolutely true. From a typical consumer's perspective, it's anything but.
From a consumer perspective, a media player, cd burning, etc. is to the OS as climate control and leather seats and such are to a car. None of these features are part of the core functionality of the product, but some of them are seen as essential by consumers, and some of them are major differentiators between similar products in the market.
Q: When did you think this had happened?
Probably it was a gradual thing, but I'd say it hit a tipping point within the last ten years.
Ten years ago, the internal corporate culture/environment for developers at Microsoft was an awful lot like Google is today. Not identical, of course, but driven by similar values and with similar prestige and benefits. Now, probably not as much.
I believe (perhaps naively) that this 'Golden Shield' will ultimately prove to be a failure, current methods to circumvent it notwithstanding.
More than ever, information is becoming the lifeblood of a people. Without access to the full volume of information freely available to the rest of the world, China will fall behind in crucial ways. The filtering solution won't block out everything important, but it will block out some. Maybe someone mentions Tibet in his chemistry thesis and it's filtered for China, or whatever. There's a piece of information the rest of the world gets for free that a researcher in China might well miss.
Ultimately I think China will decide it's in its best interest to allow the free flow of information into the country, and that in turn will help drive their country ever more towards modern democracy.
Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe the future will end up like Red Dawn.
What's stopping Blizzard selling a 'bot enabled subscription' at a premium?
In a sense, nothing, but I bet there'd be massive uproar from lots of the game's players that don't want to bot if Blizzard took the stance of institutionalizing rather than condemning it.
So, far from being un-BNetD-able, it has already been done. It has just been driven underground by Blizzard's treatment of the community.
That's sort of true and sort of not...
I mean, yes, some people are running private WoW servers, and yet... really this isn't competition for the core game. People who play WoW are generally looking for the kind of game you can only get with the large community on the "real" servers. They want the kind of trade and economy you only get with the real servers, or to be able to tell their friends they have a level 70 druid, or to take part in 40 man raids, or to walk around Ironforge showing off their cool armor or mount, etc. Basically, whenever people tell me what they like about WoW, it's something they wouldn't really get on even a decently sized private server.
I'd argue that a game like Starcraft is a whole different animal in that respect. Sure, some people will be after the 'real battle.net' ladder stats, but a lot of people would be happy to switch to a private server if it even just had less lag for them.
It's like sueing a company that makes bolt cutters because a customer of theirs bought some bolt cutters and broke into your house, or shed. The person performing the breaking and entering is at fault, not the manufacturer of the tool used to break and enter.
That analogy doesn't quite hold up, if only because there are legal uses of bolt cutters, but there isn't really a use of WoW Glider that doesn't bone Blizzard's ToS. You can bet gun laws would look a lot different if you somehow could ONLY use them to commit crimes.
(Disclaimer: what follows is a pragmatic, not idealistic opinion.)
At best, I think the Glider creator here is the equivalent of a pedestrian who has the right of way and walks in front of a truck. Even if you're in the right, you still don't really win. I have to assume that Blizzard has a lot more money to throw at lawyers to keep this going until it goes away.
I'm saying they need to change their whole world outlook so that perhaps that's not the obvious choice anymore. Your community and your fans are what counts in the long term, not your short-term profits.
That's true.
However, I doubt even 0.01% of the players of their games have even heard of the BNetD incident, and some small fraction of that fraction cares.
Preserving (at least for a little while longer) your current business model at the cost of pissing off a tiny fraction of your customer base isn't necessarily the worst trade.
In a sense, though, they did change their outlook as you're suggesting -- since those days, the vast bulk of their business/revenue has gone over into WoW, which due to the basic nature of the game is essentially un-BNetD-able.
I actually mostly like the Head First Design patterns book. There is a lot of noise there, but they do a pretty good job of explaining the patterns and illustrating cases in which you'd want to use them. Most of the developers I've worked with could benefit from it -- the only thing worse than a developer with no exposure to design patterns is one for whom a small selection of patterns is a hammer and everything looks like a nail.
I have the Gang of Four book also as a reference manual, but it is just that. I would say that trying to read it straight through, to me, is like trying to read a dictionary, except I honestly consider a good dictionary to be much more approachable. It's a book I have handy because it's the definitive work, not because it's easy to read or the best way to learn the concepts.
Just because someone supports an issue does not make their opinion on the issue less valid. The truthiness you seek is not to be had.
You were incorrect last time, and still are.
If this were a science fair or a logical argument, that would be a fallacy. (Actually, still not quite, since on the last newspost on this subject I indicated that I would examine his conclusions more closely given his bias, not that his bias made him automatically wrong.) In this context, highly opinion-based speculation about what might or might not happen in the future, it's not.
If we were having a discussion about which baseball team will win the World Series this year, and you've predicted that the Cubs would win each year for the last 50 years even though they haven't in any of those cases, hell yes your extreme bias is relevant to the discussion. It doesn't make you automatically wrong, but it sure should make someone carefully consider any very subjective points you raise in defense of your conclusion. This isn't any different.
I think including Rob Weir's response is topical, but let's be honest here. He's pretty much the single most outspoken critic of OOXML. That he and Durusau are examining the same situation and drawing very different conclusions isn't much of a surprise.
Personally, I think Weir's kidding himself if he thinks Microsoft was on the wrong side of open standards, if wrong is defined as "bad for Microsoft." Office being Office, millions of people will still be using OOXML because the factors that most businesses evaluate in choosing a word processor / spreadsheet / etc. are far from the factors that seem to be important to Weir. It already will be the de facto standard regardless of how bad it is or isn't or what ISO or anyone else has to say, so it might as well be documented and open for others to implement without legal harassment from Microsoft.
has to be Microsoft fans attacking Mac. Does anyone remember all the talk of Leopard being a knock off of Vista and how much better Vista was?
That's almost certainly not a Microsoft fan posting, but rather someone successfully trolling you.
I assume that trolls go after the Apple die-hards for (one of) the reason most virus writers target insecure Windows boxes: it's just so much damn easier than the alternative. I mean, if someone posted, "Windows is so much better than Linux because it is more secure and runs better on older hardware," on slashdot, 99% of even the most rabid Linux zealots here would recognize that for a troll and leave it be. For whatever reason, equally obvious anti-Apple trolls find bites aplenty.
I completely agree with you. Many times people say "If Microsoft did this... blah blah" and most of the time the comparison is completely silly. But this time it's spot on. And Apple is just as wrong to do it as Microsoft was (and is).
Actually, I'd say it's even a little worse than that. Microsoft back in the day made the argument that people were starting to expect web browsing to be part of the "basic functionality" of a computer and that it made sense to ship IE as part of Windows. While their dirty pool in the browser wars is now a matter of public record, that piece of it at least did make sense.
There's really no way you can argue that people expect to get a new web browser with an update of iTunes, though.
That's part one of the article where he complains that Windows has too much security stuff that slows down games. In part 2 he complains that Windows isn't secure enough.
So basically this guy can't even stay consistent throughout one interview.
From TFA: "Because what it means is that game and media support and keeping the operating system out of the way is secondary to, in many cases, silly security infrastructure and a lot of useless OS junk that impedes the real-time performance of games unnecessarily."
This has to be the first guy ever to say that Microsoft cares too much about security when designing Windows.
Eh... maybe, maybe not.
Assuming we agree with TFA (and I mostly do), I'm not sure we can automatically draw the parallel that what makes sense for entertainment items (e.g. video games or music) makes sense for, say, business software. A guy who is a Nine Inch Nails fan will probably give them his money even though he can easily download their album for free. A business that wants to use Windows or Office is probably not setting aside money in their budget to give to Microsoft if they don't legally have to. I can't see getting a "We're Bill Gates fans, so we want to give him a bunch of money" line item through most corporate budget committees.
I don't know, convince me. Specifically, that it would be in MS's economic best interests in the form of making more money or whatever exactly warms the possibly-black hearts of their shareholders.
These days a lot of the money from games comes from places other than boxed sales. There's add-on content and online play. If you charge $5 a month to play the game, who really cares if the player pirated it or not?
I think this is what has driven games to online play over the last several years more than anything -- online play as copy protection, or alternately online play as making game piracy mostly pointless. Yes, a lot of people are trying to make the 'next WoW' now, and that's driving a lot of games and dev teams towards online play that probably never should be, but ask yourself, why was there a WoW in the first place?
Although there were subscription-model MMOish games earlier, I think the success of Blizzard's Battle.net was the first big success story of online play. You could easily find a key generator to 'crack' any of their games... but not so easily to play online on their servers, and for most people, you wanted to. Online play drives sales drives word of mouth drives more sales, and before you know it the laws of gaming thermodynamics have been broken and a perpetual money-printing machine has been created.
Is there word anywhere on an official reason for this change in voting procedure? I'm not seeing it in TFA or in any of the things it directly links to, but I might be missing it.
Why do scientists think they need to communicate science to the general populace?
One reason that I haven't seen mentioned yet: people are influenced by the talk/culture around them.
One reason that matters is that a society that is educated about science and that values science will tend to produce more/better scientists in the future than one that doesn't. Sure, you'll have mavericks in any culture that buck convention, and maybe those are even the most valuable people to be your theoretical scientists and researchers anyway, but a lot of valuable work could still be done by people who, if born into a different culture, might grow up believing that science is worthless heresy.
Considerably - I'm 6'4" and weigh just over 250lbs - and I go to the gym not every day but almost. I could stand to lose some weight - but I'm built up like a rugby player.
I'd suspect I'm at least twice as big as the average Japanese - even though i probably weigh less than the average american
Man. Americans aren't that fat. On average.
(Not that I'm saying you're fat, but over 250 lbs on most people would be.)