1) Lack of streaming options leads people to pirate. 2) Pirates slow down internet. 3) Media offers better streaming options but connections are too slow becaue of piracy. Even though both are free. 4) People turn to piracy instead of legal streaming because of skipping and lag. 5) Piracy slows down streaming drivng people to download and watch instead of streaming. 6) And so on and so forth.
I pirate shows that I forget to DVR even if they're available on Hulu because my internet connection is only 3mbps on average over an hour... it fluctuates wildly between.5mbps and 5mbps. Watching Hulu takes longer than watching it with commercials... so I download it.
Netflix and Hulu need to get some deals with Comcast, Qwest etc and setup summer olympics style caches of their libraries. Netflix + 360/settop is a potent combination. Qwest could easily sell me on a $1 a month netflix hosting fee to give me a short loop to 6mbps Netflix HD above and beyond my normal internet connection.
ISPs should also be encouraging MANs. If I had 50mbps across town connection I would imagine a lot of bittorrent traffic would be pulled from the backbones. It would also be great for VPN work.
Yeah it was really weird because for the first 30 years or so time actually IMPROVES the quality of the body! But I'm sure the parent was right. Time is what destroys bodies.;)
You give someone who is bad with money $1,000 and they buy a TV. You give someone who is good with money $1,000 and they'll buy treasury bonds.
Personally I would wager the TV buyer is a better economy rejuvinator and better job creator. If I give a minimum wage earner $1,000 he's going to spend it largely at companies that employ other minimum wage workers. If I spend $1,000 on a millionaire he'll probably spend it in one place that employs a small handful of high wage employees.
Giving money to lower income brackets results in the money being spent on more employment positions and gets into the economy much faster.
Trickle down is absurd. It has to trickle down through 3 economic classes of employees to get to the poor.
You give the poor money and dollar for dollar it'll create far more jobs and benefit many more people.
If I were in a position to terraform a planet I would hope we've moved beyond the place where we're still relying on biological organisms to harbour our consciousness. And if we are still relying on biological systems that we've mastered them to the point where engineering ourselves to exist in a hostile environment is trivial. And/Or have remarkeable space suits.
Personal Force Fields and atom thick clear environmental suits are probably easier to create than planet wide terraforming operations.
I can see the arguement being made for "if we have unlimited energy why not" but I would like to believe that we advance to the point where we just don't see any reason to devote any of our unlimited energy to it.
This is an outright falsity of your visual cortex though. Your visual cortex says a sky is "blue" but it's actually a huge variety of hues, saturations and values.
I dare you to take a wideish angle photo of even a blue sky and try reorganizing it. It'll look senseless.
Even a blue sky has a pretty vast dynamic range from the horizon upward.
Photoshoping a sky is harder than photoshoping a forest because your mistakes get covered up in the forest very easily due to so much detail. That's the reason a forest is easy to scramble. Errors are difficult to spot due to the frequency of the data. Low frequency data such as a blue sky is obnoxiously difficult patch up because errors are so easy to spot.
Or sentient life which has transferred its consciousnesses into a networked computer system ala the matrix. Great place for such a farm would be deep under ground in stable bedrock. Then just have little hovering robots fluttering about the surface and exploring the stars. Tele-presence is already vastly more efficient than air travel. It's only a matter of time before we take the leap to being 'digital'.
And one huge source of efficiency is to not unnecessarily modify the environment around you. Sustaining a highway takes an enormous amount of work. Doubly so in a mountain pass. It can be much much more efficient to build a mountain road that's mostly under ground to avoid fighting the constant battle with the elements. It also makes it largely invisible.
Why terraform a planet when you can just change the settlers to easily survive on it.
If you create a sand castle it'll become a flat surface. If you have a clear blue sky and start up a coal plant it'll initially become patchy and black and then hazy gray. The evenness of our blue sky is an example of entropy in action.
Given nothing but erosional forces eventually the earth would be a flat sphere.
Disrupting patterns is the signal of counter-entropy entities such as life. We look for disruptions in the background 'blue sky' of the radio spectrum for something 'different'.
Different is the key word. Unsustainable is another. Perhaps that's the answer to the alien paradox. All alien species discovered that our recklessly ambitious fight against Entropy was being carried out too strongly and as a result have found ways to live as an advanced civilization who does not consume nearly as much energy as we do to conquer the natural entropic forces.
Here is why. Because people are deluded into thinking that we have free will.
So any time a suspicion arises that maybe we are just biological robots following basic programing and the whims of our environment people freak out.
OMG! He lost his free will! So they label it an addiction. If a behavior is percieved to have a negative consequence then it's labeled an addiction. If it's not destructive and is equally 'addictive' such as dating, eating, creating art, video games, watching TV, hanging out with friends, talking to people or reading slashdot it's mostly ignored. Because we do those things of our own free will.
Addiction means. "My brain doesn't make me want to do that so you must be under some 'bad' influence." In reality like you said we're addicted to all sorts of things. But people still cling to this idiotic notion of free will. That 'normal' human behavior is the result of free will and 'abnormal' 'addictive' behavior is the result of some sort of horrible loss of free will.
In highschool I started an informal survey after getting tired of being "addicted to computers".
"SOooo like all you do all day is like sit on computers and shit." "What do you usually do when you get home from school?" "I don't know I usually watch TV."
That summarized about 99% of all conversations I had. Some people usually read books. Some people usually just talked on the phone. But across the board almost every single person only had one or at most two hobbies (usually an extra-curricular sports team).
Because most people don't play video games the average game plays exponentially more games than they're used to observing and as a reslt the conclude that person is crazy addicted. In reality almost nobody does anything productive in their leisure hours and most of their time is taken up by one or two activities.
Computers are also tricky because while an external observer may simply note someone staring at a screen for 6 hours. You may have watched a TV Show. Read the news paper. Played video games. Talked to your friends. Read Slashdot. Read up on science news. Posted a blog on something you read. Worked on an art project and read a short story.
The variety of what I read and do on a computer vastly dwarfs what most people do in a day when broken down into activities instead of locations "Sat on couch reading and typing on keyboard."
I get just as addicted by good books as video games but if someone gets hooked on a book its a positive thing. "Oh my Jeny was up till 3 am she was so engrossed in Twilight." Meanwhile "That Jimmy is rotting his brain playing video games he played for 2 hours yeserday and I tried to get him to put it down and do something else but would have just played till 2AM can you believe it if I hadn't pulled the power cable."
It's a double standard perpetrated by the majority in order to shame the minority into conformity. Which usually entails sitting on the couch and watching TV till you go to bed.
Wrecklessly killing civilians and dragnet style imprisonment reinforces the view in the population that you're the enemy.
Sure the Geneva convention lets you bomb a military target using human shields but if you kill them you've just made more enemies than you've dispatched.
Sure the Geneva convention might say that civilians are supposed to leave the area of conflict. But when your entire country is the area of conflict and the occupying force is trying to encourage you to "go about your daily lives" you can't blaim them for staying. "We're bring peace and prosperity. Return to normal... oh and please... everybody leave the nation for the next 20 weeks while we kill everything that moves."
What's legal and what's pragmatic are two very differnet things. Which is why your ideological black and white contrast of what is "legal" falls far beyond the realms of what is the right course of action. Boofucking hoo Sadaam was a bad guy. Lots of people are bad. It's your kind of "We're going to spread freedom and do what is right--damn the consequences and screw whoever gets trampled under foot in the process" attitude is just as repulsive and disasterously fool hearty as an extreme pacifist.
I hate your games. I mean they're fun. For like an hour. But then I start wondering why I should continue playing.
What keeps me moving to the next room is the story and dialogue. I want to find out what happens next.
The difference between a game I "play" and a game I finish is the game I finish had a story I wanted to find the ending to.
So by all means continue polishing your AI. Meanwhile I'm going to realize your game only had 30 seconds of great gameplay repeated over and over and lose interest. If I don't finish your game I won't be recommending it. Reviewers won't like it and you'll be a failure.
If there is no mission. No story... it's like watching a western shootout with knowing who the outlaw is. BORING.
I've played some really shitty games because I wanted to see how the story ended. I've never finished a game with a shitty story. (Unreal Tournament anybody? Great gameplay. But why should I play through 10 levels of shooting AI?
I'm a VFX artist so I use a lot of 3D to solve problems. And I also use a LOT of 2D to solve problems.
First. You can have one sprite rotate an infinite number of degrees without ever entering the third dimension. If it's an isometric top down view. Just rotate the sprite. There. Done. A "Sprite for each direction" has been outdated for decades. Next you're going to be saying we need a unique sprite for every screen position.;) I kid I kid.
Secondly. I think that we're extremely under utilizing our super fast graphics optimized desktop systems and consoles. Pre-Rendered content will by and large look better. It can be put onto a render farm and baked for days on end. We have gigs of ram and 7200rpm hard drives. Our systems can easily handle a gorgeous super sampled sprite with 10,000 frames of animation. I think sprites are under appreciated. Load up Baldur's Gate 2. It still looks great. I'm terribly addicted to Fallout 3. But Fallout 2 still looks pretty good 10 years later. That's thanks to sprites. I would love to see some HDRI sprites rendered with silky smooth animation. Especially for Turnish based games.
Third. And by this point I'm pretty much not even responding to your post just rambling FYI in case you're trying to figure out what I'm responding to...:) 2D allows you to cheat things much easier. You can pour detail into 2D. You can't pour detail into 3D. Because everything has to "work". Want to increase the detail on a building in the background in 2D? No problem have a matte painter touch it up in an hour or two. Want to increase the detail on a building in the background in 3D? Well... now you have to actually put in that detail... and make it work. It's infinitely more difficult to cheat.
Lastly 2D lets you get infinitely more stylistic. In 3D everything has to be procedural. It goes back to having to be "right" and actually "work". A painterly style requires a nightmare of work in 3D. In 2D it's easy. You paint it.
Even if we could render out of Renderman, Mental Ray or Brazil right now in real time games still wouldn't look as good as movies without the final 2D Polish. It's the composite that can take a shot that in 3D rendered out looking like a video game and sell it as photo-real.
2D is the underutilized and under appreciated workhorse that I think needs to be re-evaluated by game companies. 2D has come a long way just as 3D has. There isn't a false dichotomy between "Modern 3D Game" and "SNES looking game". You can have a 2D Game which is visually more photoreal than a 3D game. And you can have a 3D Game which is more stylized than a 2D Game.
There is no "VS" there is just pragmatic implementation of what works best.
And the people who do have good writing and aren't an RPG often outsource their writing to one of the many many many companies in LA which have staff writers for TV and Film.
A few programs on Cartoon network for instance farm out their screenplays to script doctoring companies.
If you want to write for games you probably will be working for a multi-purpose writing agency.
Furthermore I would expect less people to get checked. Lower rates of detection and higher rates of unknown infection rates followed by even more infections.
I'm running IE8 as we speak. The ONLY problem I've hadwith IE8 is Maps.Google.com which renders completely wrong. (I'm guessing it's because IE8 is rendering it properly and Google still has a bunch of I specific hacks engaged resulting in a bad endering.)
I've been using it for about ?8? months now too. So if they spend 14+ months polishing an already really quite stable beta application then I'm guessing that means their definition of "final" is going to be rock solid.
IE8 is IE 7 done right. I would be more than happy for them to start afresh on a clean foot and not rush out their 'turn around' product too early. And has everyone already forgotten how IE7 got rolled out? RC1 of IE7 became an automatic download. So just because they won't be putting out a final version until later in 2009 doesn't mean everybody won't be using it earier.
Meanwhile I only use google chrome for GMail. Attempting to use it for just about ANYTHING else is a headache. It's a *real* beta product and is no where near where IE8 or Firefox 3 are at.
If this was over NBC then Apple DID have a gun to their business model.
Xbox Live + Zune is a potent combination... and will be ever the more potent when a purchase is exchangeable from your Xbox to yoru zune.
Apple established itself as the music king by doing whatever the labels wanted to have as wide of a selection as was humanely possible.
If you are lacking NBC/Universal you are going to have a very difficult time claiming to be a onestop shop for video. When people shop other places they might discover that you aren't the only shop in town. Microsoft already beat Apple to HD downloads. Apple has to maintain the illusion of a monopoly in the digital media market to keep selling ipods.
The flat tax includes "rebates" which means after all the rebates get added back on everybody pays the same amount as under an income tax system. Wow! What an amazing revolution? Start from scratch in order to get back to where it started... no that's not right.... it's because in the middle of the switch we magically make an additional 40% in revenue while cutting the tax rate dramatically on the wealthy (Just like Bush's tax cuts... wait...).
It's a slight of hand and it's a perpetual motion machine in disguise. We need a 2nd law of thermodynamics analogy for the economy.
Anyway two problems with your two problems. First your problem with the income tax system could be fixed easily. Progressive but non-stepped tax system. Fine. Take out brackets I don't care. If you work 35 hours vs 40 hours. It should be more linear not jumpy. I agree. But that doesn't mean you have to take out the progressive curve on taxation.
Second "education". There are only two choices. Education without standards and Education with standards. You can't have education with mandatory standards and benchmarks but also propose children learn whatever the fuck the teacher feels like. Hence STATE mandatory guidelines.
I know I don't expet an AC to actually understand the things they talk about but you can't fault the federal government for working towards totalitarianism when the thing you complain about isn't even overseen by the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a viscious cycle at work here.
1) Lack of streaming options leads people to pirate.
2) Pirates slow down internet.
3) Media offers better streaming options but connections are too slow becaue of piracy. Even though both are free.
4) People turn to piracy instead of legal streaming because of skipping and lag.
5) Piracy slows down streaming drivng people to download and watch instead of streaming.
6) And so on and so forth.
I pirate shows that I forget to DVR even if they're available on Hulu because my internet connection is only 3mbps on average over an hour... it fluctuates wildly between .5mbps and 5mbps. Watching Hulu takes longer than watching it with commercials... so I download it.
Netflix and Hulu need to get some deals with Comcast, Qwest etc and setup summer olympics style caches of their libraries. Netflix + 360/settop is a potent combination. Qwest could easily sell me on a $1 a month netflix hosting fee to give me a short loop to 6mbps Netflix HD above and beyond my normal internet connection.
ISPs should also be encouraging MANs. If I had 50mbps across town connection I would imagine a lot of bittorrent traffic would be pulled from the backbones. It would also be great for VPN work.
Yeah it was really weird because for the first 30 years or so time actually IMPROVES the quality of the body! But I'm sure the parent was right. Time is what destroys bodies. ;)
You give someone who is bad with money $1,000 and they buy a TV. You give someone who is good with money $1,000 and they'll buy treasury bonds.
Personally I would wager the TV buyer is a better economy rejuvinator and better job creator. If I give a minimum wage earner $1,000 he's going to spend it largely at companies that employ other minimum wage workers. If I spend $1,000 on a millionaire he'll probably spend it in one place that employs a small handful of high wage employees.
Giving money to lower income brackets results in the money being spent on more employment positions and gets into the economy much faster.
Trickle down is absurd. It has to trickle down through 3 economic classes of employees to get to the poor.
You give the poor money and dollar for dollar it'll create far more jobs and benefit many more people.
If I were in a position to terraform a planet I would hope we've moved beyond the place where we're still relying on biological organisms to harbour our consciousness. And if we are still relying on biological systems that we've mastered them to the point where engineering ourselves to exist in a hostile environment is trivial. And/Or have remarkeable space suits.
Personal Force Fields and atom thick clear environmental suits are probably easier to create than planet wide terraforming operations.
I can see the arguement being made for "if we have unlimited energy why not" but I would like to believe that we advance to the point where we just don't see any reason to devote any of our unlimited energy to it.
This is an outright falsity of your visual cortex though. Your visual cortex says a sky is "blue" but it's actually a huge variety of hues, saturations and values.
I dare you to take a wideish angle photo of even a blue sky and try reorganizing it. It'll look senseless.
Even a blue sky has a pretty vast dynamic range from the horizon upward.
Photoshoping a sky is harder than photoshoping a forest because your mistakes get covered up in the forest very easily due to so much detail. That's the reason a forest is easy to scramble. Errors are difficult to spot due to the frequency of the data. Low frequency data such as a blue sky is obnoxiously difficult patch up because errors are so easy to spot.
Just unlikely errors? I write internal software for the small company I work at. All of the error messages are derogatory and insulting.
Even the progress bars insult the user's intelligence and patience.
Then again almost all of my error messages are actual user error warnings not actual software failures so they deserve it.
Another internal 'rule' is that all buttons must be star trek or star wars related. "Make it so!"
Or sentient life which has transferred its consciousnesses into a networked computer system ala the matrix. Great place for such a farm would be deep under ground in stable bedrock. Then just have little hovering robots fluttering about the surface and exploring the stars. Tele-presence is already vastly more efficient than air travel. It's only a matter of time before we take the leap to being 'digital'.
Good point. Efficiency is a better way to put it.
And one huge source of efficiency is to not unnecessarily modify the environment around you. Sustaining a highway takes an enormous amount of work. Doubly so in a mountain pass. It can be much much more efficient to build a mountain road that's mostly under ground to avoid fighting the constant battle with the elements. It also makes it largely invisible.
Why terraform a planet when you can just change the settlers to easily survive on it.
If you create a sand castle it'll become a flat surface. If you have a clear blue sky and start up a coal plant it'll initially become patchy and black and then hazy gray. The evenness of our blue sky is an example of entropy in action.
Given nothing but erosional forces eventually the earth would be a flat sphere.
Disrupting patterns is the signal of counter-entropy entities such as life. We look for disruptions in the background 'blue sky' of the radio spectrum for something 'different'.
Different is the key word. Unsustainable is another. Perhaps that's the answer to the alien paradox. All alien species discovered that our recklessly ambitious fight against Entropy was being carried out too strongly and as a result have found ways to live as an advanced civilization who does not consume nearly as much energy as we do to conquer the natural entropic forces.
Perhaps Alien life is just discreet.
Uncompressed HD, 2k and 4k film playback and capture.
At work we regularly are working with dozens of layers of 2048x1024 32bit uncompressed footage at the same time.
Here is why. Because people are deluded into thinking that we have free will.
So any time a suspicion arises that maybe we are just biological robots following basic programing and the whims of our environment people freak out.
OMG! He lost his free will! So they label it an addiction. If a behavior is percieved to have a negative consequence then it's labeled an addiction. If it's not destructive and is equally 'addictive' such as dating, eating, creating art, video games, watching TV, hanging out with friends, talking to people or reading slashdot it's mostly ignored. Because we do those things of our own free will.
Addiction means. "My brain doesn't make me want to do that so you must be under some 'bad' influence." In reality like you said we're addicted to all sorts of things. But people still cling to this idiotic notion of free will. That 'normal' human behavior is the result of free will and 'abnormal' 'addictive' behavior is the result of some sort of horrible loss of free will.
In highschool I started an informal survey after getting tired of being "addicted to computers".
"SOooo like all you do all day is like sit on computers and shit."
"What do you usually do when you get home from school?"
"I don't know I usually watch TV."
That summarized about 99% of all conversations I had. Some people usually read books. Some people usually just talked on the phone. But across the board almost every single person only had one or at most two hobbies (usually an extra-curricular sports team).
Because most people don't play video games the average game plays exponentially more games than they're used to observing and as a reslt the conclude that person is crazy addicted. In reality almost nobody does anything productive in their leisure hours and most of their time is taken up by one or two activities.
Computers are also tricky because while an external observer may simply note someone staring at a screen for 6 hours. You may have watched a TV Show. Read the news paper. Played video games. Talked to your friends. Read Slashdot. Read up on science news. Posted a blog on something you read. Worked on an art project and read a short story.
The variety of what I read and do on a computer vastly dwarfs what most people do in a day when broken down into activities instead of locations "Sat on couch reading and typing on keyboard."
I get just as addicted by good books as video games but if someone gets hooked on a book its a positive thing. "Oh my Jeny was up till 3 am she was so engrossed in Twilight." Meanwhile "That Jimmy is rotting his brain playing video games he played for 2 hours yeserday and I tried to get him to put it down and do something else but would have just played till 2AM can you believe it if I hadn't pulled the power cable."
It's a double standard perpetrated by the majority in order to shame the minority into conformity. Which usually entails sitting on the couch and watching TV till you go to bed.
That message was sent 25 years ago. It was delivered on a cassette tape.
Who cares what the Geneva convention says.
Wrecklessly killing civilians and dragnet style imprisonment reinforces the view in the population that you're the enemy.
Sure the Geneva convention lets you bomb a military target using human shields but if you kill them you've just made more enemies than you've dispatched.
Sure the Geneva convention might say that civilians are supposed to leave the area of conflict. But when your entire country is the area of conflict and the occupying force is trying to encourage you to "go about your daily lives" you can't blaim them for staying. "We're bring peace and prosperity. Return to normal... oh and please... everybody leave the nation for the next 20 weeks while we kill everything that moves."
What's legal and what's pragmatic are two very differnet things. Which is why your ideological black and white contrast of what is "legal" falls far beyond the realms of what is the right course of action. Boofucking hoo Sadaam was a bad guy. Lots of people are bad. It's your kind of "We're going to spread freedom and do what is right--damn the consequences and screw whoever gets trampled under foot in the process" attitude is just as repulsive and disasterously fool hearty as an extreme pacifist.
It's true I've never played Half Life twice.
I have played CS for years and years and years.
Multiplayer is fun. I am one of those few who actually liked Shadowrun and it has zero story.
But if I'm play a single player game it had better have a story. I would say a single player game without story has about 6 hours of life in it.
Doesn't the headline imply that there were ficticious monsters behind Godzilla?
I think real question is not "should we clone a Neanderthal" it's "Should we clone more than one?"
What if they're Sapient? Are we obligated to provide them a mate? It's all very Adam and Eve/Frankenstein.
We would be bringing something into the world which may end up incredibly lonely. Do we allow the Neanderthal species to breed?
I hate your games. I mean they're fun. For like an hour. But then I start wondering why I should continue playing.
What keeps me moving to the next room is the story and dialogue. I want to find out what happens next.
The difference between a game I "play" and a game I finish is the game I finish had a story I wanted to find the ending to.
So by all means continue polishing your AI. Meanwhile I'm going to realize your game only had 30 seconds of great gameplay repeated over and over and lose interest. If I don't finish your game I won't be recommending it. Reviewers won't like it and you'll be a failure.
If there is no mission. No story... it's like watching a western shootout with knowing who the outlaw is. BORING.
I've played some really shitty games because I wanted to see how the story ended. I've never finished a game with a shitty story. (Unreal Tournament anybody? Great gameplay. But why should I play through 10 levels of shooting AI?
I have to disagree with you.
I'm a VFX artist so I use a lot of 3D to solve problems. And I also use a LOT of 2D to solve problems.
First. You can have one sprite rotate an infinite number of degrees without ever entering the third dimension. If it's an isometric top down view. Just rotate the sprite. There. Done. A "Sprite for each direction" has been outdated for decades. Next you're going to be saying we need a unique sprite for every screen position. ;) I kid I kid.
Secondly. I think that we're extremely under utilizing our super fast graphics optimized desktop systems and consoles. Pre-Rendered content will by and large look better. It can be put onto a render farm and baked for days on end. We have gigs of ram and 7200rpm hard drives. Our systems can easily handle a gorgeous super sampled sprite with 10,000 frames of animation. I think sprites are under appreciated. Load up Baldur's Gate 2. It still looks great. I'm terribly addicted to Fallout 3. But Fallout 2 still looks pretty good 10 years later. That's thanks to sprites. I would love to see some HDRI sprites rendered with silky smooth animation. Especially for Turnish based games.
Third. And by this point I'm pretty much not even responding to your post just rambling FYI in case you're trying to figure out what I'm responding to... :) 2D allows you to cheat things much easier. You can pour detail into 2D. You can't pour detail into 3D. Because everything has to "work". Want to increase the detail on a building in the background in 2D? No problem have a matte painter touch it up in an hour or two. Want to increase the detail on a building in the background in 3D? Well... now you have to actually put in that detail... and make it work. It's infinitely more difficult to cheat.
Lastly 2D lets you get infinitely more stylistic. In 3D everything has to be procedural. It goes back to having to be "right" and actually "work". A painterly style requires a nightmare of work in 3D. In 2D it's easy. You paint it.
Even if we could render out of Renderman, Mental Ray or Brazil right now in real time games still wouldn't look as good as movies without the final 2D Polish. It's the composite that can take a shot that in 3D rendered out looking like a video game and sell it as photo-real.
2D is the underutilized and under appreciated workhorse that I think needs to be re-evaluated by game companies. 2D has come a long way just as 3D has. There isn't a false dichotomy between "Modern 3D Game" and "SNES looking game". You can have a 2D Game which is visually more photoreal than a 3D game. And you can have a 3D Game which is more stylized than a 2D Game.
There is no "VS" there is just pragmatic implementation of what works best.
And the people who do have good writing and aren't an RPG often outsource their writing to one of the many many many companies in LA which have staff writers for TV and Film.
A few programs on Cartoon network for instance farm out their screenplays to script doctoring companies.
If you want to write for games you probably will be working for a multi-purpose writing agency.
Furthermore I would expect less people to get checked. Lower rates of detection and higher rates of unknown infection rates followed by even more infections.
This will only end badly.
Not to mention you can get IE8 right *now*.
I'm running IE8 as we speak. The ONLY problem I've hadwith IE8 is Maps.Google.com which renders completely wrong. (I'm guessing it's because IE8 is rendering it properly and Google still has a bunch of I specific hacks engaged resulting in a bad endering.)
I've been using it for about ?8? months now too. So if they spend 14+ months polishing an already really quite stable beta application then I'm guessing that means their definition of "final" is going to be rock solid.
IE8 is IE 7 done right. I would be more than happy for them to start afresh on a clean foot and not rush out their 'turn around' product too early. And has everyone already forgotten how IE7 got rolled out? RC1 of IE7 became an automatic download. So just because they won't be putting out a final version until later in 2009 doesn't mean everybody won't be using it earier.
Meanwhile I only use google chrome for GMail. Attempting to use it for just about ANYTHING else is a headache. It's a *real* beta product and is no where near where IE8 or Firefox 3 are at.
Could you please repost your comment as a car analogy? KK Thanx.
If this was over NBC then Apple DID have a gun to their business model.
Xbox Live + Zune is a potent combination... and will be ever the more potent when a purchase is exchangeable from your Xbox to yoru zune.
Apple established itself as the music king by doing whatever the labels wanted to have as wide of a selection as was humanely possible.
If you are lacking NBC/Universal you are going to have a very difficult time claiming to be a onestop shop for video. When people shop other places they might discover that you aren't the only shop in town. Microsoft already beat Apple to HD downloads. Apple has to maintain the illusion of a monopoly in the digital media market to keep selling ipods.
The flat tax includes "rebates" which means after all the rebates get added back on everybody pays the same amount as under an income tax system. Wow! What an amazing revolution? Start from scratch in order to get back to where it started... no that's not right.... it's because in the middle of the switch we magically make an additional 40% in revenue while cutting the tax rate dramatically on the wealthy (Just like Bush's tax cuts... wait...).
It's a slight of hand and it's a perpetual motion machine in disguise. We need a 2nd law of thermodynamics analogy for the economy.
Anyway two problems with your two problems. First your problem with the income tax system could be fixed easily. Progressive but non-stepped tax system. Fine. Take out brackets I don't care. If you work 35 hours vs 40 hours. It should be more linear not jumpy. I agree. But that doesn't mean you have to take out the progressive curve on taxation.
Second "education". There are only two choices. Education without standards and Education with standards. You can't have education with mandatory standards and benchmarks but also propose children learn whatever the fuck the teacher feels like. Hence STATE mandatory guidelines.
I know I don't expet an AC to actually understand the things they talk about but you can't fault the federal government for working towards totalitarianism when the thing you complain about isn't even overseen by the federal government.