Come on, seriously. This wasn't even close to "interesting" or "insightful", it was pure partisan wingnut horse manure with a side of outright lies and a dessert of strawmen.
To the Congressional Republicans, things like school construction won't result in jobs for construction workers: apparently magic pixies will simply drop the new schools out of the sky in exchange for our money.
No, to the Congressional Republicans, school construction is something that should be handled by the local governments and not on the federal level, because the more layers of bureaucracy you have, the more money is wasted.
All of this is coming out of the tax pie. A real Republican/conservative simply believes that the size of the federal government should decline and then, should the local population (state/county/city/village/etc) decide certain services are indeed necessary, that the taxes should be raised on that level to provide them.
The less bureaucracy you have, the more money you can spend on what you actually want it to go to. This is not a hard concept, yet somehow it is impossible for the left wingnuts to comprehend.
- We are having to pay OUR tax money to educate the kids of people who illegally entered the country and mooch off all our social services, demanding handouts even as they thumb their noses at our laws.
- Our classes are forced to move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot, rather than stratifying classes into advanced and non-advanced, moving the smarter kids up to give them greater challenges and keep them from getting bored.
- Thanks to years of parent lawsuits, the very idea of holding a kid back a year because they haven't learned what they needed to learn has gone away. These stupid fucking parents insist "waah but it'll hurt his self-esteem don't you dare cut my kid off from his friends" - I see them every day and want to grab them, shake them, and yell your kid is a fucking moron! He is harming the education of the other kids around him! But nooooo... instead, we socially promote them, so the entire 8th grade class is still trying to read at a 4th grade level. Meanwhile, the smart kids are bored out of their fucking skulls. I've watched a friend's kid actually get sent home with "warnings" from the teacher. What was the kid doing? She was performing like a 4th grader in the 1st grade class. She picked up cursive writing watching her parents. She finished the "math homework" while the teacher was blabbing on trying to teach the rest of the kids how to multiply 2x2, and then got out a copy of The Mysterious Island I'd given as a christmas present and started reading.
US public schools are not foundering because we don't spend enough money. They are foundering because teachers' unions make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers, because school districts do not stratify and have allowed social promotion of retards to become the norm, and because they punish the exemplary kids rather than nurturing their intelligence and love of learning.
And most of this has shit-all to do with monetary spending, too, save for the fact that when the kids of illegals are found in public schools, the administration should be required to report it under penalty of jail time, and INS/ICE should use that as a great opportunity to track down the parents and deport the whole lot.
#1, it can fund actual necessary services that the majority of the populace agrees upon. Things like road infrastructure construction, police/fire/emergency medical services, public parks and recreation facilities, schools, and so on.
#2, it can be a form of "wealth redistribution", which is why the socialists are always playing class-warfare games and insisting on jacking up taxes on "the rich", which they define in ways that make no sense.
Now, taxation can also be done at different levels. Not everything needs to go through the federal government; in fact, the less that goes through the federal government the better, because the more layers you put between the money and its destination, the more you waste in bureaucracy.
And while you're whining about "very needy programs" being cut from the bill, remember the millions of $ that Obama slipped into the bill for his ACORN vote-fraud friends? Yeah, "somehow" the democrats don't want to give that one up either.
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy. Economics, on a micro and short-term level, work fundamentally on how much money there is in the system. If you jack the tax rate up to 50%, you will watch commerce plummet. If you reduce the tax rate, you will see that money reenter the economy - either by investment (banks or business investment, which retranslate into spending through loans) or by spending. The trick is to get the tax rate to where it needs to be to support necessary services and, yes, cut the programs that are either (a) not working or (b) unnecessary.
The problem in this economy is not tax cuts. The problem is that there is a massive amount of bad and unsustainable debt, due to incredibly poor education (most kids in the last 20 years having been given NO classes on basic economics and responsible financial planning in school), "give it to me now" attitudes, and a system of shoddy loans backed by the "securitization" model which grew out of the blackmail/fraud division (of which Obama as a so-called "community organizer" was one of the attack dogs) of ACORN and similar groups.
Over the last 15 years, an incredible number of bad loans were issued. Most of these ought to be in foreclosure right now. This ought to be an incredible time to buy a home for those who have been financially responsible over the last 15 years.
Instead, the government is trying to shore up the housing industry, wasted money "bailing out" banks without any oversight to make sure that the money went into new, properly vetted loans, and this new Spendulus package is based on what works in ordinary times, not on fixing the root problem.
The real answer to the current economic problem, alas, is time. Housing prices ought to be 50-60% what they currently are, and the market has to sort that out. An incredible number of people who previously had mortgages should never have been issued them under normal Three C's criteria (Capital, Capacity, Consistency aka Credit History), and this inflated the price of houses and not only screwed up the banks, but ripped off those who were being financially responsible.
If you're in a foreclosure situation on your house and you could reasonably get out of it with a 25% reduction in the base home value and a loan recalculation, I can see that. But you shouldn't be offered that just because you are in foreclosure.
You want to know why people are pissed about this barrel of pork crap Obama is calling a "stimulus" package? It's because the responsible people once again get fucked. I have over an 800 credit score, I'm building up money for a down payment on a house and doing things the responsible way, living within my means, and my tax rate is going to be jacked up to pay for an "economic stimulus" that consists of handouts to Obama's worthless friends and to "bail out" the mortgage of people who somehow got a
Look back at each "Super Bowl" in turn. Look back at similar games across the league.
Try the dismal performance of the Patriots in SB 31, and then the sleepwalking performance of the Packers one year later in SB32 (when it was "Elway's Turn" to get the SB Ring).
Let's be honest with ourselves. The outcome of "professional sports" is every bit as rigged as "pro wrestling" is. The only difference is that the big "pro sports" groups haven't thrown Kayfabe out the window yet.
Start with the last Super Bowl's lousy, obviously one-sided officiating (blatantly ignoring fouls that were obvious play after play after play) and work your way backwards.
The video provider might counter that you have a choice of places to live.
Bullshit. Any "choice" of places to live is very dependent on job availability and myriad other factors. Plus, again, most cities in the US today have a de facto monopoly ISP; the idea that there is "competition" in this market is mostly smoke and mirrors put on by the ISP's so that the government doesn't actually step in and force the market to offer REAL options, like happened to the phone market.
But it's voluntary. Why not just avoid going there or never voicing a want to your ISP?
Because YOU will find your bill increased based on the drunken sportsmorons who WILL probably phone the ISP because they must have "sports" 24/7 injected directly into their veins or they will die of the realization of what sad, pathetic wastes of oxygen they really are.
"Capitalism" would be letting individual people pay for an ESPN360 account, and then sign in to view the videos.
THIS is trying to get a "critical mass" such that every ISP pays some fee to ESPN for the "service" whether the individual person actually wants (or even has heard of) ESPN360 or not.
ESPN360.com is available at no charge to fans who receive their high-speed internet connection from an ESPN360.com affiliated internet service provider.
Complete lies and bullshit. The user - whether they wanted to or not - was charged for the ESPN360 access when they paid their ISP. You think the ISP would do it "for free"??? If so, you're delusional.
Just think - if this model catches on, you'll be paying $200/month or more to your ISP for all the "free, affiliated content" you get. Of course, your only other option will be dialup, because in most cities one ISP has a local-government-granted monopoly AND we don't yet have equal-access provisions like we do for the phone lines.
Think about it - where you live right now, do you have a choice of ISP's? I either get Comcrap where I live, dialup, or nothing at all.
- Start treating the indies and non-"top 40 list" artists with respect.
- Stop putting out crap content that isn't worth the price they want to price-fix it at.
- Bring back the single (why do you think iTunes and similar do so well? Because most of the time only one song on the album is any good if it's a MafiAA-produced album).
- Start making the production value of CD's worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper. Also, stop pushing the normalized volume of the recording so fucking high that it clips out and sounds like crap. Master them lower and retain audio fidelity, thanks.
- Sign some fucking new artists for god's sakes.
There's also one thing I'd love to see happen from the government's end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies; the biggest and crappiest, "Clear Channel", owns over 50% of the market.
You want to know why your radio sucks today? Because you don't GET local shows any more. There are a small handful of local shows, and the rest is either national-syndicated talk radio (schlesinger, limbaugh, hannity, beck, savage, etc), "top 40" generic shit "music" stations with pre-recorded loops and a guy three states away "reading your local news" to you, or "niche top 40" crap we get down here based on exploiting some racial group (local stations we have here: "La Raza", aka "The Race", the vilest racist mexican Aztlan-movement shit you've ever heard, and "the Box", which is all (c)Rap music about killing cops and regularly features "guest" appearances of the local New Black Panthers leader).
Clear Channel moves into a city, cuts all the employees, pretty much just sets up the stations on automatic reproduction of their master feed, and forgets about you. They get an almost "captive audience" of commuters, and that's that. In many local markets, there is no such thing as "competition" any more because CC owns the entire area.
Reinstate the media ownership rules; make it so we get REAL local music stations again, with REAL DJ's who make their OWN daily playlists, occasionally spin a whole album, and maybe (just maybe) there will be a better chance for music to spread.
Of course, the MafiAA loves media consolidation. That way, they send just one gift basket to one person and get Britney Spears' latest pile of crap spinning on half the stations in the US for five weeks or more, and lock the independent artists completely out of the system much easier. Gyah.
This seems like the first viable solution to the radioactive waste problem of traditional nuclear reactors.
No, we've had a viable solution - breeder reactors and fuel recycling - for decades. We don't use them in the States because we had that fucktard president Jimmy Carter who insisted that if the US "led by example" and didn't refine nuclear fuel, other nations would follow our lead (how'd that work out for korea, india, pakistan...?)
Sadly, Barack Obama aka Jimmy Carter 2.0 is about to do it all again... right after he finishes saying "here take my lunch money please don't beat me up" to a nuclear-armed Iran.
What I find stupid is the fact that emotional states in games with any sneaking component revert way too quickly.
"Hey, I saw an intruder! Hey, he ran away and hid!"... 30 seconds later... "*whistling merrily on patrol back in 'no intruder' state*".
In many games, the enemy will walk right past a dead body, which is now an "object", over and over again.
Much more realistic would be, once you've been spotted once, for the "alert flag" in some radius (shout range, alarm range if they hit one, etc) to go to a default "middle alert" and simply stay there. It's your punishment for being seen, AND it'd be much more realistic. And it wouldn't, if implemented properly, require any more processing power either.
"Free" trade hurts abused workers and the environment. FAIR trade, where tariffs equalize the cost of producing goods locally with the cost of producing in countries where labor rights laws and environmental laws are lax and then importing, is what I ask for.
Face it. Those "cheap goods" you champion come at the cost of blood and the destruction of the environment worldwide.
Part of the ridiculous bullshit is the swinging of the US media leftward, too.
On the classic scale, "Left" = Open Borders: "Right" = Isolationism. The "Center" is the home of reasonable restrictions and policy on immigration (taking in only as many as can reasonably be absorbed, knowing who is entering your country with security of the borders, tuning your immigration to the jobs that need filling).
The US media, meanwhile, paints anything but woo-hoo racist/socialist "Open Borders Yay" nutjobbism as "hateful" because they're no longer even remotely objective.
"Those you want to hire" for a skilled job, have responsibilities (family, mortgage, student loans, etc) that mean they can't work for the shit wages that you can pay to an H1-B holder.
Both the Republicans and Democrats are to blame for this, by the way. Democrats got us into the whole "free trade" bullshit (GATT/WTO/NAFTA/etc) that made it far cheaper for businesses to relocate overseas AND made it easier for big "multinational" corporations to snap up US companies. Republicans pushed economic policies that encouraged more and more big companies to snap up the smaller ones - look at how many companies "Altria group" owns for example, and refused to properly protect and secure our border even when American was screaming for it do be done (gee, thanks Prez Shrub). The result? Former "entry level" jobs (within $1-2 of minimum wage, etc) that used to be done by highschoolers/college kids to work their way up have all been taken over by semipermanent, paid-under-the-table-for-half-minimum-wage illegals and higher-level jobs (except for really high "management" elite) are constantly getting benefits cut and wages sliced (or at least not nearly keeping up with inflation).
Seriously, look at the situation.
On the one hand, you have an American worker, who's got student loans to pay back, who has a social life in America, probably a family and kids.
On the other hand, you have a H1-B holder who has no family, no kids, no significant roots, and thus not only can be paid $20k or more less than the American, but can also more easily be made to work 60-80 hour weeks of unpaid overtime because nobody will tell him he's being abused and is less likely to go to the authorities about it or the courts because if he loses the job, he loses the visa too.
I know people in several large companies that see the job rolls, interview people, send in recommendations, and then watch perfectly qualified American applicants get passed over for yet another H1-B every day.
Some troll gets 5 mod points, they see someone who they don't like or a comment that they don't like... they can only mod the comment down once. But they can ALSO jump backwards in the person's history and downmod their other comments.
It's a bare attack on a person's karma rating; modding "troll" once is a single karma hit. Modding "troll" 5 times is worse and makes the person have to pray that they manage to get upmodded that much more elsewhere.
I've seen a comment manage to go from "5, insightful" (2 days old) down to "-1, Troll" (3 days old) based on the commenter making a negative, but true, comment towards someone like Jimmy Wales or Barack Obama or another darling of the left. Welcome to the "new slashdot", where the mod system is up for grabs and easily abused.
Neither does your average wikipedia page, unless you're being very charitable about defining "content".
Link farms deceive people into going there
And this differs from Wikipedia (which makes sweetheart deals to up their search rankings beyond what they should be in an honest environment) how?
People choose to go to Wikipedia
Debatable. People "choose" to visit the occasional linkfarm that google/etc haven't properly downgraded, too... sorta like wikipedia except it never gets treated like it should.
The number of links isn't relevant to anything.
Randomly making links out of words on a page doesn't make for relevance. Wikipedia's no different from any other linkfarm, or any other site running a linkfarm/dictionaryword/"adword" plugin.
Apparently a bunch of wiki-trolls decided that anyone telling the truth about wikipedia is "trolling." Sad, but true.
Slashdot needs to get rid of the "-1 Troll" function altogether. If it gets modded up, great; if not, modding "troll" for mere disagreement (or merely becuase a particular troll got mod points that day) only hurts the system.
*Gasp* you mean the MafiAA's business model is predicated on the customer being too stupid/uninformed to know when what they are buying is worth the money?
For Shame! I would never have known... well actually I would, because I make it a point not to purchase anything without doing the research first.
Depending on the game, that works. I've been known to raid the bargain bins for games 4-5 years old, picking up some "gems" for $5-10 apiece.
On the other hand, you run the risk of not being able to find a used/discounted copy of the game easier, if there were less in the original print run than they forecasted. Plenty of "platinum hits" titles are actually shit games that just had a lot of prerelease hype and then get reprinted forever (like Brute Force and MechAssault), and plenty of other stellar games have a smaller print run, lesser marketing budget, and become rare or impossible to find even 6 months down the road.
Try to find a copy of Einhander (playstation1) for example. Go ahead. You'll have a hell of a time.
The question was: "Do Game Demos Have An Adverse Effect On Sales?"
The answer is: "Only if the game in question sucks, is mediocre, or is a one-joke wonder."
A better question would be: "If they don't think their gameplay holds up, why won't they release a demo?"
Compare Doom, for example. Doom, on the face of it, rocked for its time. Giving away an entire 1/3 of the game, far from "having an adverse effect on sales", helped make it a sales king. Even when id software released Doom2, they had a demo out, and the demo still kicked ass and drove sales.
Now think of a lot of games with a demo that "hurt" sales. What games are these? They're mediocre titles. They're titles that just plain aren't worth $50-60 to buy in.
They're the titles that the companies have to trick you into buying. A flashy set of screenshots on the box (that may or may not be representative of the game at all, or may be images of the pre-rendered cutscenes masquerading as "gameplay footage"), a paid-for (or threatened-for) review in a few magazines to garner an award or catchy phrase on the box (how many "best XXX of XXX - XXX magazine" blurbs do we see every year?), "managed review scores" that embargo any site giving below X% so as to trick the early-comers into thinking the game is hot (watch how many games drop from 90% to below 70% aggregate within a month or two of release, when the REAL gamers have their say) and so on.
Kick out a demo of a stinker, and the demo will still be a stinker. Kick out a demo of a mediocre title, and you'll probably turn off those who don't have money (or time) to burn on mediocre titles. Kick out a demo of something that kicks ass, and you'll draw sales.
Examples: I bought Doom on the strength of the "demo." I bought Descent on the strength of the demo. I bought Portal for the 360 on the strength of the demo. I bought the first episode of the Penny Arcade games on the strength of the demo (ok, so I bought episode 2 on the strength of episode 1).
I dropped Rocky & Bullwinkle, N+, and Marathon:Durandal after deciding the demo proved they weren't for me. I might have bought Guitar Hero: World Tour but it's almost exactly the same as Rock Band, and I already burned two months' gaming budget buying Rock Band songs. I don't need to burn another two months' budget on the same exact songs (even if I just use the RB controllers) for GH:WT just to play an almost identical game.
Video games may be "fairly inexpensive as far as luxuries go", but I still budget myself. $120 a month = 2 games, now. I think that's pretty extravagant. Plus working full-time and spending time out with friends (you know, enjoying natural light, social contact, girls, the real world and all), I don't have the time to buy 6 games/month and play them all anyways. I have to pick and choose. If there are demos, it helps me pick out the good ones. If a game doesn't have a demo, then my rent-before-buy policy will serve the same purpose.
Lesson to the game purveyors: you're competing for $120 of my budget and 40 hours of my time each month. If you can't bring a demo to the table, then you've got one strike against you, because I know you don't think your gameplay will grip me enough to buy the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on, seriously. This wasn't even close to "interesting" or "insightful", it was pure partisan wingnut horse manure with a side of outright lies and a dessert of strawmen.
To the Congressional Republicans, things like school construction won't result in jobs for construction workers: apparently magic pixies will simply drop the new schools out of the sky in exchange for our money.
No, to the Congressional Republicans, school construction is something that should be handled by the local governments and not on the federal level, because the more layers of bureaucracy you have, the more money is wasted.
All of this is coming out of the tax pie. A real Republican/conservative simply believes that the size of the federal government should decline and then, should the local population (state/county/city/village/etc) decide certain services are indeed necessary, that the taxes should be raised on that level to provide them.
The less bureaucracy you have, the more money you can spend on what you actually want it to go to. This is not a hard concept, yet somehow it is impossible for the left wingnuts to comprehend.
This was only modded "flamebait" because it was actually "+1, Uncomfortable Truth" to the left-wing retards who tend to get mod points on Slashdot.
The whole system is broken.
They are also foundering because:
- We are having to pay OUR tax money to educate the kids of people who illegally entered the country and mooch off all our social services, demanding handouts even as they thumb their noses at our laws.
- Our classes are forced to move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot, rather than stratifying classes into advanced and non-advanced, moving the smarter kids up to give them greater challenges and keep them from getting bored.
- Thanks to years of parent lawsuits, the very idea of holding a kid back a year because they haven't learned what they needed to learn has gone away. These stupid fucking parents insist "waah but it'll hurt his self-esteem don't you dare cut my kid off from his friends" - I see them every day and want to grab them, shake them, and yell your kid is a fucking moron! He is harming the education of the other kids around him! But nooooo... instead, we socially promote them, so the entire 8th grade class is still trying to read at a 4th grade level. Meanwhile, the smart kids are bored out of their fucking skulls. I've watched a friend's kid actually get sent home with "warnings" from the teacher. What was the kid doing? She was performing like a 4th grader in the 1st grade class. She picked up cursive writing watching her parents. She finished the "math homework" while the teacher was blabbing on trying to teach the rest of the kids how to multiply 2x2, and then got out a copy of The Mysterious Island I'd given as a christmas present and started reading.
US public schools are not foundering because we don't spend enough money. They are foundering because teachers' unions make it impossible to get rid of bad teachers, because school districts do not stratify and have allowed social promotion of retards to become the norm, and because they punish the exemplary kids rather than nurturing their intelligence and love of learning.
And most of this has shit-all to do with monetary spending, too, save for the fact that when the kids of illegals are found in public schools, the administration should be required to report it under penalty of jail time, and INS/ICE should use that as a great opportunity to track down the parents and deport the whole lot.
Bullshit.
Taxation can serve one of two purposes.
#1, it can fund actual necessary services that the majority of the populace agrees upon. Things like road infrastructure construction, police/fire/emergency medical services, public parks and recreation facilities, schools, and so on.
#2, it can be a form of "wealth redistribution", which is why the socialists are always playing class-warfare games and insisting on jacking up taxes on "the rich", which they define in ways that make no sense.
Now, taxation can also be done at different levels. Not everything needs to go through the federal government; in fact, the less that goes through the federal government the better, because the more layers you put between the money and its destination, the more you waste in bureaucracy.
And while you're whining about "very needy programs" being cut from the bill, remember the millions of $ that Obama slipped into the bill for his ACORN vote-fraud friends? Yeah, "somehow" the democrats don't want to give that one up either.
Now, tax cuts - in a normal economic environment - do stimulate the economy. Economics, on a micro and short-term level, work fundamentally on how much money there is in the system. If you jack the tax rate up to 50%, you will watch commerce plummet. If you reduce the tax rate, you will see that money reenter the economy - either by investment (banks or business investment, which retranslate into spending through loans) or by spending. The trick is to get the tax rate to where it needs to be to support necessary services and, yes, cut the programs that are either (a) not working or (b) unnecessary.
The problem in this economy is not tax cuts. The problem is that there is a massive amount of bad and unsustainable debt, due to incredibly poor education (most kids in the last 20 years having been given NO classes on basic economics and responsible financial planning in school), "give it to me now" attitudes, and a system of shoddy loans backed by the "securitization" model which grew out of the blackmail/fraud division (of which Obama as a so-called "community organizer" was one of the attack dogs) of ACORN and similar groups.
Over the last 15 years, an incredible number of bad loans were issued. Most of these ought to be in foreclosure right now. This ought to be an incredible time to buy a home for those who have been financially responsible over the last 15 years.
Instead, the government is trying to shore up the housing industry, wasted money "bailing out" banks without any oversight to make sure that the money went into new, properly vetted loans, and this new Spendulus package is based on what works in ordinary times, not on fixing the root problem.
The real answer to the current economic problem, alas, is time. Housing prices ought to be 50-60% what they currently are, and the market has to sort that out. An incredible number of people who previously had mortgages should never have been issued them under normal Three C's criteria (Capital, Capacity, Consistency aka Credit History), and this inflated the price of houses and not only screwed up the banks, but ripped off those who were being financially responsible.
If you're in a foreclosure situation on your house and you could reasonably get out of it with a 25% reduction in the base home value and a loan recalculation, I can see that. But you shouldn't be offered that just because you are in foreclosure.
You want to know why people are pissed about this barrel of pork crap Obama is calling a "stimulus" package? It's because the responsible people once again get fucked. I have over an 800 credit score, I'm building up money for a down payment on a house and doing things the responsible way, living within my means, and my tax rate is going to be jacked up to pay for an "economic stimulus" that consists of handouts to Obama's worthless friends and to "bail out" the mortgage of people who somehow got a
Look back at each "Super Bowl" in turn. Look back at similar games across the league.
Try the dismal performance of the Patriots in SB 31, and then the sleepwalking performance of the Packers one year later in SB32 (when it was "Elway's Turn" to get the SB Ring).
Let's be honest with ourselves. The outcome of "professional sports" is every bit as rigged as "pro wrestling" is. The only difference is that the big "pro sports" groups haven't thrown Kayfabe out the window yet.
Start with the last Super Bowl's lousy, obviously one-sided officiating (blatantly ignoring fouls that were obvious play after play after play) and work your way backwards.
The video provider might counter that you have a choice of places to live.
Bullshit. Any "choice" of places to live is very dependent on job availability and myriad other factors. Plus, again, most cities in the US today have a de facto monopoly ISP; the idea that there is "competition" in this market is mostly smoke and mirrors put on by the ISP's so that the government doesn't actually step in and force the market to offer REAL options, like happened to the phone market.
I'm being modded "flamebait"???
Gee, what a wonder. Come off it, your average football/basketball game is as un-fixed as the outcome of Wrestlemania.
But it's voluntary. Why not just avoid going there or never voicing a want to your ISP?
Because YOU will find your bill increased based on the drunken sportsmorons who WILL probably phone the ISP because they must have "sports" 24/7 injected directly into their veins or they will die of the realization of what sad, pathetic wastes of oxygen they really are.
This isn't "capitalism."
"Capitalism" would be letting individual people pay for an ESPN360 account, and then sign in to view the videos.
THIS is trying to get a "critical mass" such that every ISP pays some fee to ESPN for the "service" whether the individual person actually wants (or even has heard of) ESPN360 or not.
ESPN360.com is available at no charge to fans who receive their high-speed internet connection from an ESPN360.com affiliated internet service provider.
Complete lies and bullshit. The user - whether they wanted to or not - was charged for the ESPN360 access when they paid their ISP. You think the ISP would do it "for free"??? If so, you're delusional.
Just think - if this model catches on, you'll be paying $200/month or more to your ISP for all the "free, affiliated content" you get. Of course, your only other option will be dialup, because in most cities one ISP has a local-government-granted monopoly AND we don't yet have equal-access provisions like we do for the phone lines.
Think about it - where you live right now, do you have a choice of ISP's? I either get Comcrap where I live, dialup, or nothing at all.
And it is quickly dying... alas, the neanderthals who watch ESPN will probably follow precisely the line of thinking that was brought up above!
After all, they pay $$$$$$$$ through the nose to get the "weekend sports packages" to watch obsolete, corrupt, rigged games on TV.
Here's a few options:
- Start treating the indies and non-"top 40 list" artists with respect.
- Stop putting out crap content that isn't worth the price they want to price-fix it at.
- Bring back the single (why do you think iTunes and similar do so well? Because most of the time only one song on the album is any good if it's a MafiAA-produced album).
- Start making the production value of CD's worthwhile again. This means put in proper cover art, lyric sheets, etc rather than just a tiny scrap of paper. Also, stop pushing the normalized volume of the recording so fucking high that it clips out and sounds like crap. Master them lower and retain audio fidelity, thanks.
- Sign some fucking new artists for god's sakes.
There's also one thing I'd love to see happen from the government's end, which would be to reinstate the radio station ownership rules. It used to be, there were over 5000 different radio companies in the US. Now, 98% of the US market is owned by only 5 companies; the biggest and crappiest, "Clear Channel", owns over 50% of the market.
You want to know why your radio sucks today? Because you don't GET local shows any more. There are a small handful of local shows, and the rest is either national-syndicated talk radio (schlesinger, limbaugh, hannity, beck, savage, etc), "top 40" generic shit "music" stations with pre-recorded loops and a guy three states away "reading your local news" to you, or "niche top 40" crap we get down here based on exploiting some racial group (local stations we have here: "La Raza", aka "The Race", the vilest racist mexican Aztlan-movement shit you've ever heard, and "the Box", which is all (c)Rap music about killing cops and regularly features "guest" appearances of the local New Black Panthers leader).
Clear Channel moves into a city, cuts all the employees, pretty much just sets up the stations on automatic reproduction of their master feed, and forgets about you. They get an almost "captive audience" of commuters, and that's that. In many local markets, there is no such thing as "competition" any more because CC owns the entire area.
Reinstate the media ownership rules; make it so we get REAL local music stations again, with REAL DJ's who make their OWN daily playlists, occasionally spin a whole album, and maybe (just maybe) there will be a better chance for music to spread.
Of course, the MafiAA loves media consolidation. That way, they send just one gift basket to one person and get Britney Spears' latest pile of crap spinning on half the stations in the US for five weeks or more, and lock the independent artists completely out of the system much easier. Gyah.
This seems like the first viable solution to the radioactive waste problem of traditional nuclear reactors.
No, we've had a viable solution - breeder reactors and fuel recycling - for decades. We don't use them in the States because we had that fucktard president Jimmy Carter who insisted that if the US "led by example" and didn't refine nuclear fuel, other nations would follow our lead (how'd that work out for korea, india, pakistan...?)
Sadly, Barack Obama aka Jimmy Carter 2.0 is about to do it all again... right after he finishes saying "here take my lunch money please don't beat me up" to a nuclear-armed Iran.
What I find stupid is the fact that emotional states in games with any sneaking component revert way too quickly.
"Hey, I saw an intruder! Hey, he ran away and hid!"... 30 seconds later... "*whistling merrily on patrol back in 'no intruder' state*".
In many games, the enemy will walk right past a dead body, which is now an "object", over and over again.
Much more realistic would be, once you've been spotted once, for the "alert flag" in some radius (shout range, alarm range if they hit one, etc) to go to a default "middle alert" and simply stay there. It's your punishment for being seen, AND it'd be much more realistic. And it wouldn't, if implemented properly, require any more processing power either.
Free trade != Fair trade.
"Free" trade hurts abused workers and the environment. FAIR trade, where tariffs equalize the cost of producing goods locally with the cost of producing in countries where labor rights laws and environmental laws are lax and then importing, is what I ask for.
Face it. Those "cheap goods" you champion come at the cost of blood and the destruction of the environment worldwide.
Part of the ridiculous bullshit is the swinging of the US media leftward, too.
On the classic scale, "Left" = Open Borders: "Right" = Isolationism. The "Center" is the home of reasonable restrictions and policy on immigration (taking in only as many as can reasonably be absorbed, knowing who is entering your country with security of the borders, tuning your immigration to the jobs that need filling).
The US media, meanwhile, paints anything but woo-hoo racist/socialist "Open Borders Yay" nutjobbism as "hateful" because they're no longer even remotely objective.
Bullshit.
"Those you want to hire" for a skilled job, have responsibilities (family, mortgage, student loans, etc) that mean they can't work for the shit wages that you can pay to an H1-B holder.
Both the Republicans and Democrats are to blame for this, by the way. Democrats got us into the whole "free trade" bullshit (GATT/WTO/NAFTA/etc) that made it far cheaper for businesses to relocate overseas AND made it easier for big "multinational" corporations to snap up US companies. Republicans pushed economic policies that encouraged more and more big companies to snap up the smaller ones - look at how many companies "Altria group" owns for example, and refused to properly protect and secure our border even when American was screaming for it do be done (gee, thanks Prez Shrub). The result? Former "entry level" jobs (within $1-2 of minimum wage, etc) that used to be done by highschoolers/college kids to work their way up have all been taken over by semipermanent, paid-under-the-table-for-half-minimum-wage illegals and higher-level jobs (except for really high "management" elite) are constantly getting benefits cut and wages sliced (or at least not nearly keeping up with inflation).
Seriously, look at the situation.
On the one hand, you have an American worker, who's got student loans to pay back, who has a social life in America, probably a family and kids.
On the other hand, you have a H1-B holder who has no family, no kids, no significant roots, and thus not only can be paid $20k or more less than the American, but can also more easily be made to work 60-80 hour weeks of unpaid overtime because nobody will tell him he's being abused and is less likely to go to the authorities about it or the courts because if he loses the job, he loses the visa too.
I know people in several large companies that see the job rolls, interview people, send in recommendations, and then watch perfectly qualified American applicants get passed over for yet another H1-B every day.
Seen the same thing happen to a lot of people.
Some troll gets 5 mod points, they see someone who they don't like or a comment that they don't like... they can only mod the comment down once. But they can ALSO jump backwards in the person's history and downmod their other comments.
It's a bare attack on a person's karma rating; modding "troll" once is a single karma hit. Modding "troll" 5 times is worse and makes the person have to pray that they manage to get upmodded that much more elsewhere.
I've seen a comment manage to go from "5, insightful" (2 days old) down to "-1, Troll" (3 days old) based on the commenter making a negative, but true, comment towards someone like Jimmy Wales or Barack Obama or another darling of the left. Welcome to the "new slashdot", where the mod system is up for grabs and easily abused.
Link farms don't have content
Neither does your average wikipedia page, unless you're being very charitable about defining "content".
Link farms deceive people into going there
And this differs from Wikipedia (which makes sweetheart deals to up their search rankings beyond what they should be in an honest environment) how?
People choose to go to Wikipedia
Debatable. People "choose" to visit the occasional linkfarm that google/etc haven't properly downgraded, too... sorta like wikipedia except it never gets treated like it should.
The number of links isn't relevant to anything.
Randomly making links out of words on a page doesn't make for relevance. Wikipedia's no different from any other linkfarm, or any other site running a linkfarm/dictionaryword/"adword" plugin.
Apparently a bunch of wiki-trolls decided that anyone telling the truth about wikipedia is "trolling." Sad, but true.
Slashdot needs to get rid of the "-1 Troll" function altogether. If it gets modded up, great; if not, modding "troll" for mere disagreement (or merely becuase a particular troll got mod points that day) only hurts the system.
Yesterday, I was at +5 Insightful.
Today, somehow I've been modded "overrated" 4 times and "Troll" once. I wonder how many of them happened to be M$ employees?
*Gasp* you mean the MafiAA's business model is predicated on the customer being too stupid/uninformed to know when what they are buying is worth the money?
For Shame! I would never have known... well actually I would, because I make it a point not to purchase anything without doing the research first.
but we did manage to amplify the problems beyond reason.
No you didn't. And yes, I've had to use Vista.
Depending on the game, that works. I've been known to raid the bargain bins for games 4-5 years old, picking up some "gems" for $5-10 apiece.
On the other hand, you run the risk of not being able to find a used/discounted copy of the game easier, if there were less in the original print run than they forecasted. Plenty of "platinum hits" titles are actually shit games that just had a lot of prerelease hype and then get reprinted forever (like Brute Force and MechAssault), and plenty of other stellar games have a smaller print run, lesser marketing budget, and become rare or impossible to find even 6 months down the road.
Try to find a copy of Einhander (playstation1) for example. Go ahead. You'll have a hell of a time.
The question was: "Do Game Demos Have An Adverse Effect On Sales?"
The answer is: "Only if the game in question sucks, is mediocre, or is a one-joke wonder."
A better question would be: "If they don't think their gameplay holds up, why won't they release a demo?"
Compare Doom, for example. Doom, on the face of it, rocked for its time. Giving away an entire 1/3 of the game, far from "having an adverse effect on sales", helped make it a sales king. Even when id software released Doom2, they had a demo out, and the demo still kicked ass and drove sales.
Now think of a lot of games with a demo that "hurt" sales. What games are these? They're mediocre titles. They're titles that just plain aren't worth $50-60 to buy in.
They're the titles that the companies have to trick you into buying. A flashy set of screenshots on the box (that may or may not be representative of the game at all, or may be images of the pre-rendered cutscenes masquerading as "gameplay footage"), a paid-for (or threatened-for) review in a few magazines to garner an award or catchy phrase on the box (how many "best XXX of XXX - XXX magazine" blurbs do we see every year?), "managed review scores" that embargo any site giving below X% so as to trick the early-comers into thinking the game is hot (watch how many games drop from 90% to below 70% aggregate within a month or two of release, when the REAL gamers have their say) and so on.
Kick out a demo of a stinker, and the demo will still be a stinker. Kick out a demo of a mediocre title, and you'll probably turn off those who don't have money (or time) to burn on mediocre titles. Kick out a demo of something that kicks ass, and you'll draw sales.
Examples: I bought Doom on the strength of the "demo." I bought Descent on the strength of the demo. I bought Portal for the 360 on the strength of the demo. I bought the first episode of the Penny Arcade games on the strength of the demo (ok, so I bought episode 2 on the strength of episode 1).
I dropped Rocky & Bullwinkle, N+, and Marathon:Durandal after deciding the demo proved they weren't for me. I might have bought Guitar Hero: World Tour but it's almost exactly the same as Rock Band, and I already burned two months' gaming budget buying Rock Band songs. I don't need to burn another two months' budget on the same exact songs (even if I just use the RB controllers) for GH:WT just to play an almost identical game.
Video games may be "fairly inexpensive as far as luxuries go", but I still budget myself. $120 a month = 2 games, now. I think that's pretty extravagant. Plus working full-time and spending time out with friends (you know, enjoying natural light, social contact, girls, the real world and all), I don't have the time to buy 6 games/month and play them all anyways. I have to pick and choose. If there are demos, it helps me pick out the good ones. If a game doesn't have a demo, then my rent-before-buy policy will serve the same purpose.
Lesson to the game purveyors: you're competing for $120 of my budget and 40 hours of my time each month. If you can't bring a demo to the table, then you've got one strike against you, because I know you don't think your gameplay will grip me enough to buy the game.