Then you didn't really get very far into the game. Levels 1-20 are about teaching you the basics of the game, ending with a foray into an instance at about level 18-20. The rest of the time up until the level cap is learning about equipment and exploring the world. The first iteration of the game was pretty good, although it got boring from levels 30-40, but the expansion fixed a lot of those problems with better zone and quest design.
But it is, as someone said, a social game. You really won't have much to do unless you make friends in the game (or you're a healer, which means everyone is your friend). It sounds hackneyed, but in WoW the journey is the reward, especially in co-operative play. You will meet a lot of assholes in WoW (especially on PvP servers), but you will meet a lot of really good people as well.
If you ask people what their best memory of WoW is, they won't usually say something like "When I finally got my ghosthacker helmet", but rather "Remember that time when Wilbert aggroed 3 rooms of monsters and we still didn't die".
You are playing the right way when you log on and immediately get loads of tells asking how you are and if you want to do something. I stopped because I didn't have time, but I still keep in contact with many of the friends I made in the game.
"But there is one key aspect of the X story that has to be remembered: Apple was effectively a dead platform with a small user base. The vast majority of active Mac users today are new to the platform, or on a new-ish machine. There was little to no installed base to lose."
Uhh... no. By the time OS X came out Apple was doing reasonably well. They had been selling these oddly shaped coloured computers that were very popular for the previous three years, and the company was profitable. In the pro sphere, the G3 towers were selling quite well.
All in all Apple was in reasonable shape when OS X came out. It was a risky move though. Apple risked alienating developers of the key pro apps on the Mac.
In no way, shape or form, was the Mac a dying platform in 2001. You'd have a reasonable argument if you said 95-96.
Things have been very good for the Mac platform in the last 2 years. But it was fine before that.
Apple support are pretty cool. I'm sure they'll find a way around that.
Just this week, a "complete my album" dialogue didn't work in iTunes, so I bought the whole thing and filed a request for a refund for the one song I already had. The customer service person misunderstood me and refunded me the price of the whole album. So I wrote back and explained again and told them they had refunded me too much, and could they please reverse it.
Apple's response. Here's the one song refund you wanted and you can keep the free album credit as a gift.
Smack me in the head, but that is pretty damn decent.
The iPhone could be equipped with a perpetual motion machine and a love ray that instantly seduces any woman it is aimed at, and some people would still complain that it doesn't support MMS, and thus they would rather have their free flip phone.
Look, you can't have trade without rules. Americans are able to trade with each other because the US has laws enforcing contracts and agreements. It is no different between states: some agreement about the rules is required to protect people who want to trade across borders. If the US wants to ignore the agreements it has made, then other countries will ignore their agreements and everyone will be worse off. International trade is for the most part beneficial to all parties. Actions like this are the result of special interests and are damaging not only to other countries but to Americans who aren't part of that interest group.
The US is a sovereign nation with a sovereign government given the power to enact treaties with other nations. If you expect other nations to live up to their side of the treaties you like, then you have to stick to your obligations under the ones you don't like. The US is no longer in the position where it can violate whatever treaty it likes without consequences. This is not 1950. You aren't even the world's largest economy any more and the status of the dollar as reserve currency is the lowest it has been since the signing of Bretton Woods.
Simple self interest ought to be enough to motivate the US to abide by the agreements it has made.
This is the same Hitchens who claims in his book that religion poisons everything. I own that particular book, and I don't think it does him much credit. You can't seriously defend Hitchens by saying that hyperbole is forbidden, since his whole criticism of religion reeks of it.
As I said above, religion by itself doesn't inevitably lead to evil. Bad people will interpret religions as permitting their bad behaviour or in some cases requiring it. Good people will interpret religions as not permitting bad behaviour or as requiring good behaviour. Martin Luther King was in many ways a modern saint. Jerry Falwell was a bigoted asshole. Yet both claimed to read the same book. What they got from the book says more about their characters than it does about the book.
Of course this is true of some times and some places and untrue of others. Being subject to this institution was not always the terrible affliction you paint it as. Certainly by today's standards it would not be up to scratch, but given the general level of religious tolerance through history the practices of Islamic civilization come off rather well.
Until recently, Islam had a much much better record of overall religious tolerance than Christianity. I can't help but feel that you have a dog in this fight, which is clouding your judgement.
I don't like what Obama did either, but for a different reason. Check out the extended versions of Jeremiah Wright's sermons on Youtube. The media picked out parts that would sound inflammatory on their own, but in context they don't sound completely unreasonable. His 9/11 sermon is particularly moving. It actually includes examples of racial discrimination against non-blacks. The point of the sermon is to urge people to a greater self examination in the aftermath of the attacks. In other words, look at what you've done before you start getting mad at others. IIRC that is straight out of the Gospels, and even though I am not a religious person, I think it is still sound advice. Moreover, much of the sermon is devoted to Wright telling people not to get so mad that they end up supporting any sort of brutish vengeance in response. Again, I think in light of events since, we probably would have been better off listening to the Reverend.
Similarly, the "God Damn America" is not unreasonable viewed in its proper context. Wright argues (oddly enough for a preacher) that the law of God is inerrant, whereas the laws of men are not. In other words, he thinks we should not take the law of any particular nation above the law of God (or morality for that matter) and that any country which violates God's laws will be damned. In the speech he makes the same point about other states, particularly the British Empire. I don't think asking people not to submit blindly to the state is an unreasonable thing to ask. The "God Damn America" comment is made in this context, specifically with reference to the idea that the Biblical prophets rail against the injustices of the state in the name of a higher morality. Both are pretty damn good sermons as Wright is an exceptionally gifted preacher. I'm an atheist, but listening to them made me want to attend Wright's church, and I am not the only person who ended up thinking that way.
Please take time to watch the comments in context. You can find the extended sermons on Youtube. While I might not agree with everything that Wright says, I feel he has been the victim of an electronic lynching by the mass media choosing to deliberately misrepresent his comments. It realy is depressing, whether or not you agree with Wright. Obama didn't help by giving the impression that the Reverend was accurately presented in the media.
The Koran is also very famous for declaring that there is no compulsion in religion. The early Islamic world was well known for tolerating other faiths. In fact, there was a financial incentive for this as well, since people of other religions were taxed to fund the Empire. Al Andalus was a model of religious co-existence for many years. It is no surprise that what is arguably the high water mark of Sephardic Jewish culture occurs at this time.
It's rather pointless to blame Islam, or Christianity for that matter. Both are in fact inert doctrines until they are taken up and interpreted by individuals. Martin Luther King was a Christian, but so was Jerry Falwell, and so were the Crusaders and Oliver Cromwell. Similarly, Osama bin Laden is a Muslim, but Avicenna, Abd Ar Rahman, and Suleyman the Magnificent were Muslims too.
I'm an atheist, but I admire many religious people and deplore others. It's a mixed bad. Idiots like Hitchens can pretend that religion has never done anything good, but has he ever listened to a Bach oratorio or stood in the Mezquita? Only an idiot could say religion has done nothing good.
Oddly enough, I bought my 360 for the DVD drive as much as for the games. You see, I needed a DVD player, and a game console on its own has extremely low WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor), but if it plays DVDs the WAF manages to increase into merely "disapproving glare" territory.
Waited until she was out of the country before I bought a PS3, though.:)
The obvious move is to get a PS3 then. It is a decent media centre as well, and everyone who buys one can have the added pleasure of humiliating me at Warhawk, since I am the worst player on God's green earth.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-PS3 crowd are simply those people who publicly predicted its failure and are now desperate not to be proven wrong. e.g. the "I'd rather have trousers full of rabid ferrets than buy a PS3!!!" meme.
I bought a PS3 out of curiosity with Blu Ray, and after watching 2001 and A Clockwork Orange in HD (would buy Eyes Wide Shut for the nudie bits, but wife objects), I'd say it was well worth it if you're a film buff.
Obsessive idiots in the singular are not the problem. It's when they start ganging up and organizing themselves via email that problems arise.
The "Wisdom of Crowds" thesis that Wikipedia is based on is absolutely clear that things like this work when people contribute as individuals rather than groups. Once people start to collude, each person's individual take on the situation is polluted by information received from the others.
Every human being knows that taken individually people are more often than not quite reasonable. As I understand it, the WOC thesis is the discovery that groups of people acting as individuals are collectively more accurate than any single individual. But the WOC confirms what everyone knows in that groups of people acting as groups can be wildly unreasonable (the madness of crowds).
Wikipedia is pretty much good enough for most of the non-controversial articles I have read. In my own area of expertise, I am generally pleased at their standard. The problem articles are the ones everyone knows about. They are a problem because zealous minorities discovers that the WOC works against them (most likely because they are wrong) and resort to collusion to drive away ordinary editors. It's the same principle by which organized crime develops.
Wikipedia's open nature, respect for anonymity and inability to properly deal with collusion between editors are its most pressing problems. As is usual in human affairs the things that are causing the problems are the absolute last thing that the participants are willing to give up. The standard open source response to this is to fork and allow the survival of the fittest model. Wikipedia needs that desperately.
My own hope is that Google will finally wake up and smell the coffee, copy everything from Wikipedia, improve the layout, slap ads in a small sidebar, write the equivalent of a constitution (not alterable by rank and file editors) and use the ad revenue to pay for professional moderators or meta moderators, while requiring greater disclosure from editors if they wish to edit controversial articles. No contributor should be a moderator and vice versa.
Even if you hate the idea of Google running it, at least the search would fucking work properly.
The paid moderators are a must, as long as they are prevented from adding new content (C.O.I). But I don't expect that this will ever happen in Wikipedia, which has almost run its course. If nothing else, Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of the wiki concept, but its inability to self regulate in weeding out sociopaths, POV warriors and petty authoritarians has led to the departure of many good contributors, who simply can't stand dealing with some of the obsessive and Machiavellian loons who populate the site. There's no better sign of the downfall of Wikipedia than the endlessly increasing sets of rules and the endless discussions over them. I guess they just lost sight of the fact that Wikipedia should be structured to serve its users and not the obsessive people who have made it their hobby. Secret email lists, cabals, evidence of admin dishonesty oversighted, rules bent to suit the ruling clique, etc.
But it's rare to see something so novel work perfectly the first time. No doubt someone will realize that there is money to be made in providing a better mousetrap, or at least one that doesn't so obviously reek of bongwater as Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, I like Wikipedia, but we can do better.
I said that voting won't work. There are alternatives to voting. The Boston Tea Party was not a vote. How about some of our American friends dump their politicians in Boston Harbour (although the truly cruel and sadistic would make them drink some of it).
They have always known, as Frank Herbert did, that fear is the mind killer.
Those who are afraid will hand over their liberties to the strong leader who promises to rid them of whatever made them afraid. However, the leader himself has an endless stock of new things to be feared, so the state of emergency persists perpetually. Why else do you think that conservative politicians always run on a law and order platform. Even when crime has been decreasing, they will rename or reimagine some common crime in a way that terrifies people. e.g. "home invasions". Goebbels would be proud.
What are they supposed to do? It's all very well for young people to talk about overthrowing the entire political class, because that is who is driving this agenda. It's not one party or one side, but all the mainstream political entities that are for this Orwellian bullshit. Bob the baby boomer doesn't like this, but he's not going to risk his investments, property and future by supporting some radical movement for "freedom" that might decide to make the economy more like Sweden's or Cuba's (and our Lords and Masters would do anything to stop that).
We should be absolutely clear that voting won't work. Those who have the greatest power in our societies have the largest stake in the current system. That's why a political party that ran on a platform of opposing this would find itself marginalized by the news media, or otherwise hog-tied so that it became unelectable. Plus you have all the people like Bob, who are all for it unless they have to make a personal sacrifice.
Since it doesn't seem to matter who you vote for in Britain, it appears that the only way to stop crap like this would be active forms of civil disobedience, which the authorities would then point to to justify what was being protested against in the first place. Joseph Heller would be proud.
"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city, as well."
Bigstrat, you sound just like that guy who wears a golf club in his head.
I don't see this as a bad thing. In fact just the opposite. OSS developers are reasonable enough that they can organize the creation of a whole operating system. There's nothing stopping OSS programmers from forming a co-operative that pays Apple the $99 and then releases software to the iTunes store. They can even charge you for it. Of course there is the problem of making sure that some members of the co-operative don't release malware and cause Apple to withdraw distribution, but OSS developers are obviously smart enough to organize some sort of peer review amongst members of the co-operative to prevent this. Hell, you can even charge for the app (which the GPL allows)
That's all you have to do. Apple will then distribute your software on an absolutely equal basis with the proprietary developers. That's right: users who browse the iTunes store looking for apps will find OSS apps right next to proprietary ones. In fact, the OSS apps are likely to be more popular, since many of them will be free, and people love the smell of free. In addition, all updates to your software will be easily accessible directly from the device so that any idiot knows when to update. Given that OSS tends to be perpetually updated, this is a good thing.
Think about it. How many computer stores do you do into and find OSS software on the shelf right next to the proprietary stuff and being given away for free. I mean right next to it. You don't have to go to some obscure site to download it, or send for a disk through the mail. It's right where all the other software is.
Hit me in the head, but that's a pretty awesome opportunity for OSS developers to take on the enemy on the most level playing field yet. If OSS truly is the better way, then this is an opportunity to OSS to dominate this new mobile platform. I'm really hoping you folks will take this opportunity and run with it. It is possibly a chance for a big win for free software.
That's a bit mean. Wikipedia has obvious problems, but the fact that it is probably the world's largest book and is more or less accurate is an astonishing achievement. What it loses in accuracy or polish it makes up for in sheer breadth.
The problems it has occur largely because the management, and Wales in particular, are incompetent. Many of the obvious problems with Wikipedia could be solved by having professional administrators (at least at the top of the tree) who are barred from creating content, but merely enforce the rules. When those who create the content may also enforce the rules, it is obvious that there is the potential for conflict of interest. It is even worse when not only are those who create the content able to enforce the rules, but are able to themselves make the rules.
As it stands, Wikipedia's open structure encourages obsessives with major personality disorders. It's no surprise that the most influential admins tend to be obsessive, manipulative, vindictive scum, because the structure of the organization is such that obsessive, manipulative, vindictive scum will rise to the top. If you aren't an obsessive, you simply won't be able to match the work rate of people who are, and if you aren't Machiavellian, you will be beaten out by people who are. Communities need separation between those who make the rules, those who interpret them, and those who enforce them. Wikipedia doesn't have that, so the rules are simply interpreted according to the interests of the ruling clique.
It's all turned out rather like "Animal Farm" (with Wales as the swine in chief). Secret email lists, administrators who are seemingly able to break the rules, yet never be punished, while good faith editors whose agenda conflicts with those of the ruling clique are blocked based on the most trivial evidence. Mindless groupthink among the cabal. Rules continue to multiply like rabbits, many of them based on the weird personal agendas of admins. The Israel/Palestine articles are a shameful mess, etc.
Jimbo Wales has to go. Wikipedia is now one of the most important and influential sites on the net. It needs, competent and professional management.
"The biggest, nastiest, most impersonal corporation can never *force* you to act against your own nature and trade with it; they can only entice."
That's Randian sophistry. If a corporation acquires a monopoly on food distribution in my town, then while it isn't rifling through my pockets and then dumping food into my bags, I may well have no practical option other than to shop there. It real terms it is not much different from a country where the communist party owned the local store. Of course, right wing people will delight that I am free to starve to death, but I'm sure the communists would have said the same.
I love it how Randians try to blame corporate corruption on governments. "There's only corruption because of government regulation!!". It's like saying: "There's only murders because the police are trying to prevent crime!!". Of course no corporation would ever bribe officials or suppliers, or blackmail people or hire goons to beat workers or journalists, or to sabotage its competitors, or spread malicious rumours about the content of rival's products, or hire or sell a car that would blow up if you backed it into a post, or impale you on the steering column if you went in frontwise.
No... that would never happen. Like that time all those people in Eastern Europe got poisoned because the food companies were all grinding up lead paint into their products to make them look nicer.
It would result in a nation of Al Capones.
I'd love to see a Randian country come into being. It'd be like Cambodia in less than a week.
I wasn't able to hear those songs at the time, since my room mate who owned the album would only ever play "Closer" on endless repeat (I think that is the song... the one where he says "fuck like an animal" over and over again"). Presumably, this gave me a false impression of NIN. Everyone in our house grew to hate that song.
I will check out the other albums though, and Whitebox's recommendations as well.
Don't read too much into that comment. The point of my post was that I had little idea what "Ghosts" would be like (having no NIN reference other than old stuff).
I like the ambient Eno stuff (his is about the only music of that type I can stand). The first part of Ghosts reminded me of some of that material, which had been in heavy rotation on my iPod in recent months. When I heard NIN in the 90s it was exceptionally loud material with screaming over the top of it, so the relatively quiet soundscapes of Ghosts 1 were a pleasant surprise (I was expecting a musical apocalypse).
Slashdot Mirror
Then you didn't really get very far into the game. Levels 1-20 are about teaching you the basics of the game, ending with a foray into an instance at about level 18-20. The rest of the time up until the level cap is learning about equipment and exploring the world. The first iteration of the game was pretty good, although it got boring from levels 30-40, but the expansion fixed a lot of those problems with better zone and quest design.
But it is, as someone said, a social game. You really won't have much to do unless you make friends in the game (or you're a healer, which means everyone is your friend). It sounds hackneyed, but in WoW the journey is the reward, especially in co-operative play. You will meet a lot of assholes in WoW (especially on PvP servers), but you will meet a lot of really good people as well.
If you ask people what their best memory of WoW is, they won't usually say something like "When I finally got my ghosthacker helmet", but rather "Remember that time when Wilbert aggroed 3 rooms of monsters and we still didn't die".
You are playing the right way when you log on and immediately get loads of tells asking how you are and if you want to do something. I stopped because I didn't have time, but I still keep in contact with many of the friends I made in the game.
"But there is one key aspect of the X story that has to be remembered: Apple was effectively a dead platform with a small user base. The vast majority of active Mac users today are new to the platform, or on a new-ish machine. There was little to no installed base to lose."
Uhh... no. By the time OS X came out Apple was doing reasonably well. They had been selling these oddly shaped coloured computers that were very popular for the previous three years, and the company was profitable. In the pro sphere, the G3 towers were selling quite well.
All in all Apple was in reasonable shape when OS X came out. It was a risky move though. Apple risked alienating developers of the key pro apps on the Mac.
In no way, shape or form, was the Mac a dying platform in 2001. You'd have a reasonable argument if you said 95-96.
Things have been very good for the Mac platform in the last 2 years. But it was fine before that.
Apple support are pretty cool. I'm sure they'll find a way around that.
Just this week, a "complete my album" dialogue didn't work in iTunes, so I bought the whole thing and filed a request for a refund for the one song I already had. The customer service person misunderstood me and refunded me the price of the whole album. So I wrote back and explained again and told them they had refunded me too much, and could they please reverse it.
Apple's response. Here's the one song refund you wanted and you can keep the free album credit as a gift.
Smack me in the head, but that is pretty damn decent.
The iPhone could be equipped with a perpetual motion machine and a love ray that instantly seduces any woman it is aimed at, and some people would still complain that it doesn't support MMS, and thus they would rather have their free flip phone.
Don't underestimate the power of the dark side.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned the lightning bolt lightning bolt guy. Is this still slashdot?
Look, you can't have trade without rules. Americans are able to trade with each other because the US has laws enforcing contracts and agreements. It is no different between states: some agreement about the rules is required to protect people who want to trade across borders. If the US wants to ignore the agreements it has made, then other countries will ignore their agreements and everyone will be worse off. International trade is for the most part beneficial to all parties. Actions like this are the result of special interests and are damaging not only to other countries but to Americans who aren't part of that interest group.
The US is a sovereign nation with a sovereign government given the power to enact treaties with other nations. If you expect other nations to live up to their side of the treaties you like, then you have to stick to your obligations under the ones you don't like. The US is no longer in the position where it can violate whatever treaty it likes without consequences. This is not 1950. You aren't even the world's largest economy any more and the status of the dollar as reserve currency is the lowest it has been since the signing of Bretton Woods.
Simple self interest ought to be enough to motivate the US to abide by the agreements it has made.
This is the same Hitchens who claims in his book that religion poisons everything. I own that particular book, and I don't think it does him much credit. You can't seriously defend Hitchens by saying that hyperbole is forbidden, since his whole criticism of religion reeks of it.
As I said above, religion by itself doesn't inevitably lead to evil. Bad people will interpret religions as permitting their bad behaviour or in some cases requiring it. Good people will interpret religions as not permitting bad behaviour or as requiring good behaviour. Martin Luther King was in many ways a modern saint. Jerry Falwell was a bigoted asshole. Yet both claimed to read the same book. What they got from the book says more about their characters than it does about the book.
Of course this is true of some times and some places and untrue of others. Being subject to this institution was not always the terrible affliction you paint it as. Certainly by today's standards it would not be up to scratch, but given the general level of religious tolerance through history the practices of Islamic civilization come off rather well.
Until recently, Islam had a much much better record of overall religious tolerance than Christianity. I can't help but feel that you have a dog in this fight, which is clouding your judgement.
I don't like what Obama did either, but for a different reason. Check out the extended versions of Jeremiah Wright's sermons on Youtube. The media picked out parts that would sound inflammatory on their own, but in context they don't sound completely unreasonable. His 9/11 sermon is particularly moving. It actually includes examples of racial discrimination against non-blacks. The point of the sermon is to urge people to a greater self examination in the aftermath of the attacks. In other words, look at what you've done before you start getting mad at others. IIRC that is straight out of the Gospels, and even though I am not a religious person, I think it is still sound advice. Moreover, much of the sermon is devoted to Wright telling people not to get so mad that they end up supporting any sort of brutish vengeance in response. Again, I think in light of events since, we probably would have been better off listening to the Reverend.
Similarly, the "God Damn America" is not unreasonable viewed in its proper context. Wright argues (oddly enough for a preacher) that the law of God is inerrant, whereas the laws of men are not. In other words, he thinks we should not take the law of any particular nation above the law of God (or morality for that matter) and that any country which violates God's laws will be damned. In the speech he makes the same point about other states, particularly the British Empire. I don't think asking people not to submit blindly to the state is an unreasonable thing to ask. The "God Damn America" comment is made in this context, specifically with reference to the idea that the Biblical prophets rail against the injustices of the state in the name of a higher morality. Both are pretty damn good sermons as Wright is an exceptionally gifted preacher. I'm an atheist, but listening to them made me want to attend Wright's church, and I am not the only person who ended up thinking that way.
Please take time to watch the comments in context. You can find the extended sermons on Youtube. While I might not agree with everything that Wright says, I feel he has been the victim of an electronic lynching by the mass media choosing to deliberately misrepresent his comments. It realy is depressing, whether or not you agree with Wright. Obama didn't help by giving the impression that the Reverend was accurately presented in the media.
The Koran is also very famous for declaring that there is no compulsion in religion. The early Islamic world was well known for tolerating other faiths. In fact, there was a financial incentive for this as well, since people of other religions were taxed to fund the Empire. Al Andalus was a model of religious co-existence for many years. It is no surprise that what is arguably the high water mark of Sephardic Jewish culture occurs at this time.
It's rather pointless to blame Islam, or Christianity for that matter. Both are in fact inert doctrines until they are taken up and interpreted by individuals. Martin Luther King was a Christian, but so was Jerry Falwell, and so were the Crusaders and Oliver Cromwell. Similarly, Osama bin Laden is a Muslim, but Avicenna, Abd Ar Rahman, and Suleyman the Magnificent were Muslims too.
I'm an atheist, but I admire many religious people and deplore others. It's a mixed bad. Idiots like Hitchens can pretend that religion has never done anything good, but has he ever listened to a Bach oratorio or stood in the Mezquita? Only an idiot could say religion has done nothing good.
Oddly enough, I bought my 360 for the DVD drive as much as for the games. You see, I needed a DVD player, and a game console on its own has extremely low WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor), but if it plays DVDs the WAF manages to increase into merely "disapproving glare" territory.
:)
Waited until she was out of the country before I bought a PS3, though.
The obvious move is to get a PS3 then. It is a decent media centre as well, and everyone who buys one can have the added pleasure of humiliating me at Warhawk, since I am the worst player on God's green earth.
Sometimes I wonder if the anti-PS3 crowd are simply those people who publicly predicted its failure and are now desperate not to be proven wrong. e.g. the "I'd rather have trousers full of rabid ferrets than buy a PS3!!!" meme.
I bought a PS3 out of curiosity with Blu Ray, and after watching 2001 and A Clockwork Orange in HD (would buy Eyes Wide Shut for the nudie bits, but wife objects), I'd say it was well worth it if you're a film buff.
Obsessive idiots in the singular are not the problem. It's when they start ganging up and organizing themselves via email that problems arise.
The "Wisdom of Crowds" thesis that Wikipedia is based on is absolutely clear that things like this work when people contribute as individuals rather than groups. Once people start to collude, each person's individual take on the situation is polluted by information received from the others.
Every human being knows that taken individually people are more often than not quite reasonable. As I understand it, the WOC thesis is the discovery that groups of people acting as individuals are collectively more accurate than any single individual. But the WOC confirms what everyone knows in that groups of people acting as groups can be wildly unreasonable (the madness of crowds).
Wikipedia is pretty much good enough for most of the non-controversial articles I have read. In my own area of expertise, I am generally pleased at their standard. The problem articles are the ones everyone knows about. They are a problem because zealous minorities discovers that the WOC works against them (most likely because they are wrong) and resort to collusion to drive away ordinary editors. It's the same principle by which organized crime develops.
Wikipedia's open nature, respect for anonymity and inability to properly deal with collusion between editors are its most pressing problems. As is usual in human affairs the things that are causing the problems are the absolute last thing that the participants are willing to give up. The standard open source response to this is to fork and allow the survival of the fittest model. Wikipedia needs that desperately.
My own hope is that Google will finally wake up and smell the coffee, copy everything from Wikipedia, improve the layout, slap ads in a small sidebar, write the equivalent of a constitution (not alterable by rank and file editors) and use the ad revenue to pay for professional moderators or meta moderators, while requiring greater disclosure from editors if they wish to edit controversial articles. No contributor should be a moderator and vice versa.
Even if you hate the idea of Google running it, at least the search would fucking work properly.
The paid moderators are a must, as long as they are prevented from adding new content (C.O.I). But I don't expect that this will ever happen in Wikipedia, which has almost run its course. If nothing else, Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of the wiki concept, but its inability to self regulate in weeding out sociopaths, POV warriors and petty authoritarians has led to the departure of many good contributors, who simply can't stand dealing with some of the obsessive and Machiavellian loons who populate the site. There's no better sign of the downfall of Wikipedia than the endlessly increasing sets of rules and the endless discussions over them. I guess they just lost sight of the fact that Wikipedia should be structured to serve its users and not the obsessive people who have made it their hobby. Secret email lists, cabals, evidence of admin dishonesty oversighted, rules bent to suit the ruling clique, etc.
But it's rare to see something so novel work perfectly the first time. No doubt someone will realize that there is money to be made in providing a better mousetrap, or at least one that doesn't so obviously reek of bongwater as Wikipedia.
Don't get me wrong, I like Wikipedia, but we can do better.
""All your live are belong to me, hahaha make your time""
Am I the only one who now wants to spend years training as an airline pilot just so you can say this? So worth it...
I said that voting won't work. There are alternatives to voting. The Boston Tea Party was not a vote. How about some of our American friends dump their politicians in Boston Harbour (although the truly cruel and sadistic would make them drink some of it).
They have always known, as Frank Herbert did, that fear is the mind killer.
Those who are afraid will hand over their liberties to the strong leader who promises to rid them of whatever made them afraid. However, the leader himself has an endless stock of new things to be feared, so the state of emergency persists perpetually. Why else do you think that conservative politicians always run on a law and order platform. Even when crime has been decreasing, they will rename or reimagine some common crime in a way that terrifies people. e.g. "home invasions". Goebbels would be proud.
What are they supposed to do? It's all very well for young people to talk about overthrowing the entire political class, because that is who is driving this agenda. It's not one party or one side, but all the mainstream political entities that are for this Orwellian bullshit. Bob the baby boomer doesn't like this, but he's not going to risk his investments, property and future by supporting some radical movement for "freedom" that might decide to make the economy more like Sweden's or Cuba's (and our Lords and Masters would do anything to stop that).
We should be absolutely clear that voting won't work. Those who have the greatest power in our societies have the largest stake in the current system. That's why a political party that ran on a platform of opposing this would find itself marginalized by the news media, or otherwise hog-tied so that it became unelectable. Plus you have all the people like Bob, who are all for it unless they have to make a personal sacrifice.
Yes, it sucks.
Since it doesn't seem to matter who you vote for in Britain, it appears that the only way to stop crap like this would be active forms of civil disobedience, which the authorities would then point to to justify what was being protested against in the first place. Joseph Heller would be proud.
"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city, as well."
Bigstrat, you sound just like that guy who wears a golf club in his head.
I don't see this as a bad thing. In fact just the opposite. OSS developers are reasonable enough that they can organize the creation of a whole operating system. There's nothing stopping OSS programmers from forming a co-operative that pays Apple the $99 and then releases software to the iTunes store. They can even charge you for it. Of course there is the problem of making sure that some members of the co-operative don't release malware and cause Apple to withdraw distribution, but OSS developers are obviously smart enough to organize some sort of peer review amongst members of the co-operative to prevent this. Hell, you can even charge for the app (which the GPL allows)
That's all you have to do. Apple will then distribute your software on an absolutely equal basis with the proprietary developers. That's right: users who browse the iTunes store looking for apps will find OSS apps right next to proprietary ones. In fact, the OSS apps are likely to be more popular, since many of them will be free, and people love the smell of free. In addition, all updates to your software will be easily accessible directly from the device so that any idiot knows when to update. Given that OSS tends to be perpetually updated, this is a good thing.
Think about it. How many computer stores do you do into and find OSS software on the shelf right next to the proprietary stuff and being given away for free. I mean right next to it. You don't have to go to some obscure site to download it, or send for a disk through the mail. It's right where all the other software is.
Hit me in the head, but that's a pretty awesome opportunity for OSS developers to take on the enemy on the most level playing field yet. If OSS truly is the better way, then this is an opportunity to OSS to dominate this new mobile platform. I'm really hoping you folks will take this opportunity and run with it. It is possibly a chance for a big win for free software.
That's a bit mean. Wikipedia has obvious problems, but the fact that it is probably the world's largest book and is more or less accurate is an astonishing achievement. What it loses in accuracy or polish it makes up for in sheer breadth.
The problems it has occur largely because the management, and Wales in particular, are incompetent. Many of the obvious problems with Wikipedia could be solved by having professional administrators (at least at the top of the tree) who are barred from creating content, but merely enforce the rules. When those who create the content may also enforce the rules, it is obvious that there is the potential for conflict of interest. It is even worse when not only are those who create the content able to enforce the rules, but are able to themselves make the rules.
As it stands, Wikipedia's open structure encourages obsessives with major personality disorders. It's no surprise that the most influential admins tend to be obsessive, manipulative, vindictive scum, because the structure of the organization is such that obsessive, manipulative, vindictive scum will rise to the top. If you aren't an obsessive, you simply won't be able to match the work rate of people who are, and if you aren't Machiavellian, you will be beaten out by people who are. Communities need separation between those who make the rules, those who interpret them, and those who enforce them. Wikipedia doesn't have that, so the rules are simply interpreted according to the interests of the ruling clique.
It's all turned out rather like "Animal Farm" (with Wales as the swine in chief). Secret email lists, administrators who are seemingly able to break the rules, yet never be punished, while good faith editors whose agenda conflicts with those of the ruling clique are blocked based on the most trivial evidence. Mindless groupthink among the cabal. Rules continue to multiply like rabbits, many of them based on the weird personal agendas of admins. The Israel/Palestine articles are a shameful mess, etc.
Jimbo Wales has to go. Wikipedia is now one of the most important and influential sites on the net. It needs, competent and professional management.
"The biggest, nastiest, most impersonal corporation can never *force* you to act against your own nature and trade with it; they can only entice."
That's Randian sophistry. If a corporation acquires a monopoly on food distribution in my town, then while it isn't rifling through my pockets and then dumping food into my bags, I may well have no practical option other than to shop there. It real terms it is not much different from a country where the communist party owned the local store. Of course, right wing people will delight that I am free to starve to death, but I'm sure the communists would have said the same.
I love it how Randians try to blame corporate corruption on governments. "There's only corruption because of government regulation!!". It's like saying: "There's only murders because the police are trying to prevent crime!!". Of course no corporation would ever bribe officials or suppliers, or blackmail people or hire goons to beat workers or journalists, or to sabotage its competitors, or spread malicious rumours about the content of rival's products, or hire or sell a car that would blow up if you backed it into a post, or impale you on the steering column if you went in frontwise.
No... that would never happen. Like that time all those people in Eastern Europe got poisoned because the food companies were all grinding up lead paint into their products to make them look nicer.
It would result in a nation of Al Capones.
I'd love to see a Randian country come into being. It'd be like Cambodia in less than a week.
I wasn't able to hear those songs at the time, since my room mate who owned the album would only ever play "Closer" on endless repeat (I think that is the song... the one where he says "fuck like an animal" over and over again"). Presumably, this gave me a false impression of NIN. Everyone in our house grew to hate that song.
I will check out the other albums though, and Whitebox's recommendations as well.
Thanks.
Don't read too much into that comment. The point of my post was that I had little idea what "Ghosts" would be like (having no NIN reference other than old stuff).
I like the ambient Eno stuff (his is about the only music of that type I can stand). The first part of Ghosts reminded me of some of that material, which had been in heavy rotation on my iPod in recent months. When I heard NIN in the 90s it was exceptionally loud material with screaming over the top of it, so the relatively quiet soundscapes of Ghosts 1 were a pleasant surprise (I was expecting a musical apocalypse).