Well considering that in the Bill & Ted "perfect future" they had a council with time travel i always figured they would just stick someone which had broken the law someplace in the past where he couldn't do any harm, after all if you dropped him on an uninhabited island 200k plus years ago with nothing but the clothes on his back all evidence that he ever existed would be gone by the time anybody inhabited that island and it didn't matter how much future knowledge he had if he was dropped so far back he had no way of building any kind of warning that would survive that long.
But at the end the point I was trying to make was that Bill and Ted was a COMEDY and even THEY got it more right than these guys writing what we are supposed to take as a serious story? I'm sorry but suspension of disbelief only goes so far, especially if what you are doing not only defies the rules you have already established for your universe but simple common sense as well. I'd put this one on the "Hirogen making Voyager a giant holodeck even though size has never been an issue on holodecks" level of dumb because even 5 seconds worth of thought would have caused the plothole to bitchslap you in the face.
Actually when my oldest went to college i saw where that is heading, and its online. Damned near every kid there was playing online games, from your girls playing second life to guys having giant TF2 fragfests its ALL online. Add this to the fact that pretty much any $400 AMD laptop can play most online games just fine and its not hard to have everybody in the same room playing,hell the dorm rooms and break rooms were filled with kids playing together online.
I don't see why two factor authentication isn't standard across the web, what with flash chips being so cheap. i mean if i can get a 16GB USB drive that is so thin and small it fits in the card holder of my wallet why we can't have something similar that works with any website? And public/private keys are frankly more complex than most users could handle, at least from the ones I've looked at.
As for TFA you just hit the nail on the head when you mentioned FB because what I'm seeing is more and more people that let FB handle it and if there isn't a FB option they pass. Should we consider this good or bad? On the one hand FB knows too damned much about people as it is but on the other hand at least they aren't reusing passwords constantly
I don't think so and here is why: When the Wii was released a tablet that could play games cost $500+ and a phone that could play games if you could even find one would have cost a grand, now you get $99 tablets that comes with Angry Birds and a $150 phone can likewise play most if not all the games Android has to offer.
What has screwed Nintendo is that frankly other than a handful of titles there was nothing but crap on the Wii, in fact I know a lot of people who bought the Wii and every single one is rotting in a closet, and after getting burnt buying the Wii only to find a handful of good games and an assload of shovelware most folks aren't gonna take the chance. I mean why should they when that tablet or phone which they wanted for other tasks can play games as well?
So what is wrong with Valve? From what I understand it looks to open consoles up the way competition opened up the PC in that they will come up with the OS and minimum specs but any company that wants to add to that or make it better is welcome to. If someone wants to make a portable? Go right ahead, if somebody wants to make one twice as powerful? That is fine too as the baseline is gonna be just that, a baseline, so you can choose the model and price point that bests fits your needs.
But I don't blame you for hating MSFT on the console as while I think Win 7 is a truly great OS the fact that they charge for MP on X360 is just fucked up IMHO, if you buy a game you shouldn't have to pay a second time just to use a major feature of the game you had already paid for. No need for you to get screwed by Nintendo though, if Valve can even do half as good with their console as they had on the PC it should be a damned nice system.
Yeah I have to say I USED to like Pegg until I read that and what I would have to say to him is thus...if 99 out of a 100 people say you smell like dogshit? Then maybe you should take a fucking bath. When 99 out of a 100 people are going "What the fuck is with all these damned lens flares, its distracting and annoying"? Then maybe your ass might ought to tone that shit down just to be on the safe side.
But of course that is ignoring the dirty truth which is that Abrams and Bay really don't give a flying fuck WHAT the audience thinks as long as they can get enough "sheeple" to buy the shit, the are the ultimate corporate creation, movies by focus groups. As I said at least when people pointed out how much they fucking HATE Jar Jar Lucas put his ass on a bus, when you complain to either Bay or Abrams you can bet your last dollar they'll do whatever you hated twice as much just to flip you the bird.
To me that is the worst part, its all cynical market driven product placement "processed movie product" designed NOT because somebody wanted to tell a good story, had some interesting characters, hell even had just a cool idea they wanted to see on the screen, nope this is all just designed by and for marketing and I have a feeling that in 20 years these films will be looked at as trashy garbage like the serials of the 40s or the cheap sci-fi designed to cash in on Star Wars in the 70s. Just because they have a big budget doesn't make it any good and I honestly don't think either director gives a shit about whether its good or not, its all about how much money they can make on the merchandising.
Oh watch me go off like a mushroom cloud superfly TNT on THAT one, that is one of my biggest WHAT THE FUCK??? moments in the entire history of Star Trek!
In ST:DS9 they said that the gun the Vulcan that snapped and was killing people on the station was using was "one of the last slug throwers" and was old tech...now wait just a fucking minute. You have a gun that lets you 1.- See through walls several layers deep, no matter what the make of the material, 2.- Give you perfect targeting through those walls, and 3.- Allows you to transport a bullet through any object and hit your target perfectly every time...and you are IN A WAR YOU ARE LOSING and you don't fucking use this gun? WHAT THE HOLY FUCK!!!
That is when I had to stop watching because it was pissing me off too much, every single Dominion war death could be blamed on leadership too fucking STUPID to hand out a weapon that could easily help them win the war...morons, the entire federation is made up of morons.
Again its a story so I'll buy your bullshit as long as its consistent bullshit. Yes we all know the ONLY way to actually go backwards would be to calculate the EXACT point in time and space that you are trying to hit, which frankly would make the flying time machine in BTTF II more believable as it would be easier to give or take a thousand feet in the air than to figure up the exact point to have the tires perfectly meet the road, but again its a story so okay, I'll let that slide.
What I WILL NOT LET SLIDE and what nobody else should either is when their time travel also refuses to fucking acknowledge the power that they have just been given and thus making the time traveler be the biggest dumbass in the universe. I mean in Star Trek generations HOW many times could he have had Sauron without risking anybody AND saving his family? yet he chooses to go back 3 fucking minutes? Or a time ship in Voyager that travels all the way back to the 23rd century from the 29th but the pilot actually says "no time to explain"...WHAT THE FUCK?????
Even Bill and fucking Ted knew that time travel gave you a hell of an advantage but we are supposed to buy that somebody that has the ability to go back in time is too God damned stupid to understand that concept? Really? For the love of God you have ALL OF TIME, from the beginning to the end, so fixing something like his planet exploding? trivial, he has tons of time to warn his race, get his family off the planet, hell they got fricking warp drives and his knowledge of how the next 30 years are supposed to play out, they would be building statues in his honor on Romulus II and that would be the end of it.
With suspension of disbelief there ARE limits, sure I'll believe a world where there are vampires, or where aliens live among us, hell you can spin just about any tale as long as you are consistent in universe. But when you are trying to sell us that 1.- Someone has gone back in time and 2.- he blames somebody for something that hasn't even happened yet and which HE CAN PREVENT thanks to his having knowledge of future events? yeah i gotta throw the red flag and call bullshit on the field, sorry.
You are kidding right? he had a fricking TIME MACHINE and he doesn't go to warn everybody, maybe give them plenty of time to move, nope he goes to blow up the federation? That is as stupid as the time ship that attacked Voyager saying "there is no time to explain" or Picard going back to 3 minutes before he got his ass handed to him in ST:Generations instead of just grabbing Sauron on the bridge and saying his family from the fire../facepalm/
There should be a law that if you are gonna do a time travel story you have to show you understand the concept and realize that you have just given a character a giant reset button. I mean how sad is it when the last movie i saw that realized this was Back To The Future, where Marty goes "Duh, I'm in a time machine!" and goes back before he left to save Doc. If you have a functional time machine? Its pretty damned hard to lose. And don't give me that alternate dimension crap but if that is the case then it should be the case for every other time they have used it, but its not. I have to agree with Chuck at SFDebris in that "I'll buy your bullshit, time travel, clones, alien invaders, just be consistent with your bullshit".
That is because both Abrams and Bay can't seem to write any character but differing levels of douchebag and for the love of God will somebody PLEASE make him stop with the damned lens flares? I don't know which is worse, Abrams making everything bright and throwing lens flares in all over the place or bay's ultra fast cuts but they are both annoying as hell to set through.
At the end of the day though lets face it, its all about marketing. you'll never see a film "Wrath of Khan" quality from either director because its not about telling a good story, or making a great movie, its about turning out a product that can be slapped on everything from t-shirts to mouse pads and selling the hell out of that. While this can work the movie has to come first but if the second one is anything like the first the whole thing felt like an excuse to get scenes that would work in the trailers.
And maybe its just me but do these movies have this undercurrent of cynicism to anybody else? I watch films by Abrams and Bay and get this "Meh, it'll be good enough for the sheeple" feeling when I watch them, it just feels to me that its done with the absolute minimum of effort required to make a marketable product, like filming by focus group.
I have to agree, the ship looked like a hipster coffee bar and the movie could have been subtitled "lens flare" thanks to how damned much he used that stupid ass effect.
Abrams and Bay are frankly the two worst directors I think we have today, both are cynical as fuck and care about the marketing more than the films they make but have learned how to appeal to that lowest common denominator to make the big bucks. God I dread seeing what he is gonna do to Star Wars, I want to say he can't be worse than prequel Lucas but then I look at that bridge and how every 5 minutes there is a lens flare...ugh.
Functioning fairly well? Compared to what, WWII? The EU has several countries about to go under, everyone is just waiting for Germany to say fuck it and pull out for the whole thing to collapse, and the USA has had 98% of the value of the dollar burned away by having the printing press cranking 24/7 and if it wasn't for the USA making damned sure the petrodollar stays the money would be worth less than Zimbabwe.
Go look up the real numbers, not the song and dance the government feeds you, and you'll see the whole thing is a fucking trainwreck.
Seriously who cares, Nintendo is FUCKED with a capital F. They bet their ass on the casual gaming market only to find that the casual gaming market is "here today, gone later today" and are too busy playing with their iPads and Kindle Fires to give a rat's ass about another Nintendo gimmick controller, their sales are terrible and that is when compared to systems that should have been EOLed 2 years ago, and when the PS4 and Xbox next come out along with the Steambox Nintendo will be lucky if they get half a shelf in the kiddie section.
Everyone should just post a link to TFA when a Nintendo story comes up anywhere on the net, just so everybody will know they are acting like douchebags, but with the casuals going to tablets and handhelds being replaced by phones? Yeah unless Nintendo can pull off a miracle they be fucked.
Because most offices just don't need that much power? I deal with a LOT of SMBs, know what my two most popular builds are? The SFF box with an AMD Bobcat APU like this one which just FYI but if you have anybody still stuck on a P4 that needs a cheap upgrade, or if you could use an ultra low power system? They are great little units, only use around 18w under load and are still powerful enough to do 1080P. And for those that need a little more power something like this in a SFF case.
Frankly a good 95%+ of office users will be happy with either of those APUs, no need to go discrete on an office box. Hell i have one of those Bobcat APUs in my netbook and can play HL2, Portal 1&2, there are even vids of guys running Crysis on the things with minimum setting but to me that is going a little too far.
How so? Because i have been using AMD exclusively in the shop for 5 years now, we are talking hundreds of systems with everything from AMD IGPs to APU to every level of discrete they make and honestly? I haven't had a single problem.
Well I take that back i had ONE problem but I don't see how I could blame AMD for that, a customer had me order him a GPU and then a month later decided to use the system as an HTPC but since i didn't know he was even contemplating that I got him a gamer card that had DVI but no HDMI and when I used an adapter the card couldn't read the EDID to set the display correctly, about 30 minutes of futzing to set overscan and Bob's your uncle.
So I don't see how anybody can say AMD has gone downhill, I really can't. I have cards as old as 1650 pro and IGPs as old as Xpress 200 out in the field and they are still purring like a kitten, as a matter of fact I even managed to find a Vista driver for the Xpress 200 so now its running Win 7, can't do Aero naturally but the driver is stable and the customer is happy, that is all that matters. Hell I was impressed enough that my entire family is on AMD across the board, we are talking 5 desktops and 2 laptops, running everything from an HD4830 to a Bobcat APU on my netbook and again, no worries.
While I'm glad that works for you my users? Aren't using those either, they are doing everything either real time with FB and twitter or they are using webmail and that is pretty much it. I don't have a single customer using any of those, in fact i had to go look up what drive was as i hadn't heard of it.
When it comes to home users the future is instant or near instant, its here today gone later today and they really don't care because they'll just move on to something else. They have their pics backed up in their webmail and a USB drive, they use chat and FB and that really is pretty much it. I'm making decent money showing them the wonders of HTPCs but its being used more for casual gaming and movie collections than anything else and I could easily see the day that docs become like databases, something corps use that home users don't care about.
The problem with your argument is thus: You can move a billion dollars around the planet in seconds. this means that you would have to fix EVERY country and ALL the politicians on the entire planet to do anything about the problem of too much wealth giving too much power, and that simply isn't realistic.
Just look at T. Boone Pickens who has said on several occasions he intends to own every drop of water in the United States, even if YOUR state refuses to sell to him all he has to do is find one upstream who will, now picture that on a global scale because that is what we are talking about here.
The simple fact is money is power and power corrupts, end of story. With the ability to move wealth at a push of a button the ability to just "fix politics" just doesn't exist because the wealthy can use the fact that they can move billions in a second to turn nation against nation.
Uhhh...why? What difference at the end of the day does it make if they use OO or LO, they are both FOSS correct? Frankly you shouldn't care one way or the other whether you get 65 million OO or LO or a combination of the two.
Honestly I'd say in the grand scheme of things both OO and LO are irrelevant, as the ones that can most use it, home users, are increasingly not opting for any office software at all. Hell i stopped including an office suite in my default install ages ago unless they specifically ask for it because I found they just weren't being used, most users are too busy with FB and twitter and a thousand other sites to really care about office software one way or another. And some might bitch at me saying so but businesses can't really use either because Writer is pretty piss poor when it comes to handling complex office docs and don't even get me started on Calc which doesn't deserve to be in the same sentence as Excel.
At the end of the day I'm finding fewer and fewer home users use this stuff anymore, its like stand alone email clients in that way, its just no longer relevant to the majority. But I don't see how its "bad" that OO gets downloaded more than LO, that seems like its just splitting hairs as its not like its gonna "hurt" LO one way or another, anymore than people say using Gnome over KDE is really gonna hurt anything, its a personal preference thing really.
After Google changed their privacy policy I don't see how anybody could disagree with you OR this video, at the end of the day Google wants to know what you had for breakfast because that is how they make their money. You the user are not their customer, you are the product, the advertisers are the customers. I wouldn't mind this if they were just upfront about it but as you say they employ an army of shrinks to give you a 'warm fuzzy feeling" instead of just being honest about it.
That is why in the interests of full disclosure I switched to Bing search as not only is their privacy policy easy to follow but I get a cut of what they are making off of me in the form of Amazon gift cards. If you wanna make money off me? Fine give me a cut, even a little cut is better than what I get from Google which is a big fat nothing. At least this way all those little things i go through at the shop like CD sleeves,cables, and adapters are paid by my share of what MSFT is making off my search, so as long as they do give me a cut I'll stick with 'em as well as recommend them to my customers. Hell if they are gonna make money off you either way you might as well get a percentage, don't ya think?
Google like many others were using Ireland as a tax dodge and as we have seen in the USA what happens when you put the corps in the driver seat now Ireland has a collapsing economy and companies like Google are slowly but surely bailing like rats from a sinking ship.
This is of course the reason why free trade and globalism will cause a worldwide economic collapse, it forces every country on the planet to be as weak and powerless as the most broken third world country because thanks to the ability to send a trillion dollars around the world in seconds there really is no loyalty to ones home anymore.
Our founding fathers saw this coming all those years ago, too bad we didn't listen. Thomas Jefferson: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
Straw man, nobody gives a rat's ass about the Mac as its not even 10% of the market, sorry. But you knew that didn't you? Nobody kisses the ring for the Mac, which is getting slower and slower refreshes and mark my words within 7 years will be replaced with ARM, nope the reason they kiss the ring is iMoney, specifically iPad and iPod.
And you can make excuses for their behavior all you want but the simple fact is Flash is open, if they didn't think Adobe was doing a good enough job they could have backed Gnash or made their own fork, but that isn't what they did, was it? Nope they backed a known patent troll who will attack their biggest rival which is Android by making it damned clear there will be NO downstream licenses involving H.26x thus insuring that only proprietary OSes can have H.26x unless they set themselves up in non Berne countries which in that case it will be trivial to get those devices banned from the west for patent and copyright infringement.
I'm sorry but you'd have to have stains all down the front of your shirt from gulping the iKoolaid to not see that Cupertino is attempting to pull off what Redmond never could, and that is locking the web down into formats that they control. MSFT tried this with IE but again hamfisted and obvious whereas posts like yours prove how good the marketing team at Cupertino is, they can sell you a walled garden and you will thank them for the barrier.
The only person to blame for shitty drivers in Linux is Linus Torvalds, who is an arrogant douchebag who thinks his shit don't stink. Quick, how many OSes OTHER than Linux use his driver model? NONE because its shit, that's why. Even BSD and Solaris have stable driver ABIs but Torvalds is just too fucking cool for that daddy-o, and the ones who defend it use fucking religious arguments. Its an operating system not a church,quit acting batshit.
And I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit because I have used a couple of hundred AMD GPUs in the shop and not had a single problem, NOT ONE. In fact the only time I can think of having a problem with an AMD GPU since AMD took over from ATI was a single case of not having the GPU detect the right format for the TV it was plugged into....and I wouldn't even blame that on AMD as the guy didn't tell me before he had it built he was thinking about using it as an HTPC so the GPU I had chosen had DVI but not HDMI so I had to use an adapter. A little futzing with the driver settings and voila! Perfect picture.
So blaming AMD for Linux having a broken driver model is wrong, they simply don't have the resources to pull an Nvidia and give Torvalds the finger (which is really what Nvidia does, they gut about half the Linux graphics subsystem and replace with their own proprietary builds) and the fact that you just can't run the Linux drivers they released just shows what a piss poor driver model Linux has. Sorry but if you use a crap OS you should expect crap performance and crap problems, as long as Torvalds has a pulse the drivers are gonna be deep fried tampons. If you want drivers that work, don't use Linux, end of story..
How much of that can you blame on AMD though versus how much of it is Intel cockblocking? After all the reason Nvidia got out of the chipset business was intel cockblocking and Intel has been making it pretty clear that the future to them is Intel APUs with Intel boards and Intel support chips like it or lump it, so I have to wonder how much of the problem is Intel refusing to give jack shit to AMD to help interoperability as far as samples, docs, and specs.
Ultimately if you are going with an AMD GPU you'd probably be better off pairing it with an AMD CPU as that seems to be the best combo as far as drivers, at least from what I've seen at the shop. Lets face it CPUs haven't been the limiting factor in games for awhile, hell the new XBox and PS4 are both using chips originally designed for tablets and netbooks for the love of Pete. So unless you are one of the handful that need every bit of speed you can get (which I would argue why are you on a laptop if that is the case) you'll save some money by going all AMD which can then be used on a real performance booster like fast SSDs or more/faster RAM.
As a retailer I can tell ya why....its pointless. You know how many buy gaming laptops? MAYBE 3% of the population IF THAT, we are talking about a teeny tiny itsy bitsy niche so it is really pointless as the few percent that actually buy gaming laptops aren't gonna stick with an old CPU and replace the GPU so its just pointless.
Reality is that the majority of laptops sold are in the $400-$750 range, gamers tend to go for desktops anyway because no matter how powerful the cooling problems of trying to fit everything into this thin light package means you'll end up with slower parts that cost more, and with the amount of power the high end chips suck making battery life measured in minutes? All in all these just don't make sense to pretty much all but a handful of die hard LAN players and road warriors so its no wonder that the support for switching GPUs just isn't there.
IF they have a browser that runs in low rights mode and IF they have a good AV? Then sure java is fine, but you are dead wrong about it JUST being the plug in that is a threat.
At the end of the day you just can't change the fact that java has one of the most piss poor security records out there, it competes with flash and reader for most security risks per version. When you are looking at something with that poor a record frankly excuses are pointless, nothing will change the fact that bugs jumping out of their sandbox is common and dozens of bugs come out for each version, its really bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Well considering that in the Bill & Ted "perfect future" they had a council with time travel i always figured they would just stick someone which had broken the law someplace in the past where he couldn't do any harm, after all if you dropped him on an uninhabited island 200k plus years ago with nothing but the clothes on his back all evidence that he ever existed would be gone by the time anybody inhabited that island and it didn't matter how much future knowledge he had if he was dropped so far back he had no way of building any kind of warning that would survive that long.
But at the end the point I was trying to make was that Bill and Ted was a COMEDY and even THEY got it more right than these guys writing what we are supposed to take as a serious story? I'm sorry but suspension of disbelief only goes so far, especially if what you are doing not only defies the rules you have already established for your universe but simple common sense as well. I'd put this one on the "Hirogen making Voyager a giant holodeck even though size has never been an issue on holodecks" level of dumb because even 5 seconds worth of thought would have caused the plothole to bitchslap you in the face.
Actually when my oldest went to college i saw where that is heading, and its online. Damned near every kid there was playing online games, from your girls playing second life to guys having giant TF2 fragfests its ALL online. Add this to the fact that pretty much any $400 AMD laptop can play most online games just fine and its not hard to have everybody in the same room playing,hell the dorm rooms and break rooms were filled with kids playing together online.
I don't see why two factor authentication isn't standard across the web, what with flash chips being so cheap. i mean if i can get a 16GB USB drive that is so thin and small it fits in the card holder of my wallet why we can't have something similar that works with any website? And public/private keys are frankly more complex than most users could handle, at least from the ones I've looked at.
As for TFA you just hit the nail on the head when you mentioned FB because what I'm seeing is more and more people that let FB handle it and if there isn't a FB option they pass. Should we consider this good or bad? On the one hand FB knows too damned much about people as it is but on the other hand at least they aren't reusing passwords constantly
I don't think so and here is why: When the Wii was released a tablet that could play games cost $500+ and a phone that could play games if you could even find one would have cost a grand, now you get $99 tablets that comes with Angry Birds and a $150 phone can likewise play most if not all the games Android has to offer.
What has screwed Nintendo is that frankly other than a handful of titles there was nothing but crap on the Wii, in fact I know a lot of people who bought the Wii and every single one is rotting in a closet, and after getting burnt buying the Wii only to find a handful of good games and an assload of shovelware most folks aren't gonna take the chance. I mean why should they when that tablet or phone which they wanted for other tasks can play games as well?
So what is wrong with Valve? From what I understand it looks to open consoles up the way competition opened up the PC in that they will come up with the OS and minimum specs but any company that wants to add to that or make it better is welcome to. If someone wants to make a portable? Go right ahead, if somebody wants to make one twice as powerful? That is fine too as the baseline is gonna be just that, a baseline, so you can choose the model and price point that bests fits your needs.
But I don't blame you for hating MSFT on the console as while I think Win 7 is a truly great OS the fact that they charge for MP on X360 is just fucked up IMHO, if you buy a game you shouldn't have to pay a second time just to use a major feature of the game you had already paid for. No need for you to get screwed by Nintendo though, if Valve can even do half as good with their console as they had on the PC it should be a damned nice system.
Yeah I have to say I USED to like Pegg until I read that and what I would have to say to him is thus...if 99 out of a 100 people say you smell like dogshit? Then maybe you should take a fucking bath. When 99 out of a 100 people are going "What the fuck is with all these damned lens flares, its distracting and annoying"? Then maybe your ass might ought to tone that shit down just to be on the safe side.
But of course that is ignoring the dirty truth which is that Abrams and Bay really don't give a flying fuck WHAT the audience thinks as long as they can get enough "sheeple" to buy the shit, the are the ultimate corporate creation, movies by focus groups. As I said at least when people pointed out how much they fucking HATE Jar Jar Lucas put his ass on a bus, when you complain to either Bay or Abrams you can bet your last dollar they'll do whatever you hated twice as much just to flip you the bird.
To me that is the worst part, its all cynical market driven product placement "processed movie product" designed NOT because somebody wanted to tell a good story, had some interesting characters, hell even had just a cool idea they wanted to see on the screen, nope this is all just designed by and for marketing and I have a feeling that in 20 years these films will be looked at as trashy garbage like the serials of the 40s or the cheap sci-fi designed to cash in on Star Wars in the 70s. Just because they have a big budget doesn't make it any good and I honestly don't think either director gives a shit about whether its good or not, its all about how much money they can make on the merchandising.
Oh watch me go off like a mushroom cloud superfly TNT on THAT one, that is one of my biggest WHAT THE FUCK??? moments in the entire history of Star Trek!
In ST:DS9 they said that the gun the Vulcan that snapped and was killing people on the station was using was "one of the last slug throwers" and was old tech...now wait just a fucking minute. You have a gun that lets you 1.- See through walls several layers deep, no matter what the make of the material, 2.- Give you perfect targeting through those walls, and 3.- Allows you to transport a bullet through any object and hit your target perfectly every time...and you are IN A WAR YOU ARE LOSING and you don't fucking use this gun? WHAT THE HOLY FUCK!!!
That is when I had to stop watching because it was pissing me off too much, every single Dominion war death could be blamed on leadership too fucking STUPID to hand out a weapon that could easily help them win the war...morons, the entire federation is made up of morons.
Again its a story so I'll buy your bullshit as long as its consistent bullshit. Yes we all know the ONLY way to actually go backwards would be to calculate the EXACT point in time and space that you are trying to hit, which frankly would make the flying time machine in BTTF II more believable as it would be easier to give or take a thousand feet in the air than to figure up the exact point to have the tires perfectly meet the road, but again its a story so okay, I'll let that slide.
What I WILL NOT LET SLIDE and what nobody else should either is when their time travel also refuses to fucking acknowledge the power that they have just been given and thus making the time traveler be the biggest dumbass in the universe. I mean in Star Trek generations HOW many times could he have had Sauron without risking anybody AND saving his family? yet he chooses to go back 3 fucking minutes? Or a time ship in Voyager that travels all the way back to the 23rd century from the 29th but the pilot actually says "no time to explain"...WHAT THE FUCK?????
Even Bill and fucking Ted knew that time travel gave you a hell of an advantage but we are supposed to buy that somebody that has the ability to go back in time is too God damned stupid to understand that concept? Really? For the love of God you have ALL OF TIME, from the beginning to the end, so fixing something like his planet exploding? trivial, he has tons of time to warn his race, get his family off the planet, hell they got fricking warp drives and his knowledge of how the next 30 years are supposed to play out, they would be building statues in his honor on Romulus II and that would be the end of it.
With suspension of disbelief there ARE limits, sure I'll believe a world where there are vampires, or where aliens live among us, hell you can spin just about any tale as long as you are consistent in universe. But when you are trying to sell us that 1.- Someone has gone back in time and 2.- he blames somebody for something that hasn't even happened yet and which HE CAN PREVENT thanks to his having knowledge of future events? yeah i gotta throw the red flag and call bullshit on the field, sorry.
You are kidding right? he had a fricking TIME MACHINE and he doesn't go to warn everybody, maybe give them plenty of time to move, nope he goes to blow up the federation? That is as stupid as the time ship that attacked Voyager saying "there is no time to explain" or Picard going back to 3 minutes before he got his ass handed to him in ST:Generations instead of just grabbing Sauron on the bridge and saying his family from the fire../facepalm/
There should be a law that if you are gonna do a time travel story you have to show you understand the concept and realize that you have just given a character a giant reset button. I mean how sad is it when the last movie i saw that realized this was Back To The Future, where Marty goes "Duh, I'm in a time machine!" and goes back before he left to save Doc. If you have a functional time machine? Its pretty damned hard to lose. And don't give me that alternate dimension crap but if that is the case then it should be the case for every other time they have used it, but its not. I have to agree with Chuck at SFDebris in that "I'll buy your bullshit, time travel, clones, alien invaders, just be consistent with your bullshit".
That is because both Abrams and Bay can't seem to write any character but differing levels of douchebag and for the love of God will somebody PLEASE make him stop with the damned lens flares? I don't know which is worse, Abrams making everything bright and throwing lens flares in all over the place or bay's ultra fast cuts but they are both annoying as hell to set through.
At the end of the day though lets face it, its all about marketing. you'll never see a film "Wrath of Khan" quality from either director because its not about telling a good story, or making a great movie, its about turning out a product that can be slapped on everything from t-shirts to mouse pads and selling the hell out of that. While this can work the movie has to come first but if the second one is anything like the first the whole thing felt like an excuse to get scenes that would work in the trailers.
And maybe its just me but do these movies have this undercurrent of cynicism to anybody else? I watch films by Abrams and Bay and get this "Meh, it'll be good enough for the sheeple" feeling when I watch them, it just feels to me that its done with the absolute minimum of effort required to make a marketable product, like filming by focus group.
I have to agree, the ship looked like a hipster coffee bar and the movie could have been subtitled "lens flare" thanks to how damned much he used that stupid ass effect.
Abrams and Bay are frankly the two worst directors I think we have today, both are cynical as fuck and care about the marketing more than the films they make but have learned how to appeal to that lowest common denominator to make the big bucks. God I dread seeing what he is gonna do to Star Wars, I want to say he can't be worse than prequel Lucas but then I look at that bridge and how every 5 minutes there is a lens flare...ugh.
Functioning fairly well? Compared to what, WWII? The EU has several countries about to go under, everyone is just waiting for Germany to say fuck it and pull out for the whole thing to collapse, and the USA has had 98% of the value of the dollar burned away by having the printing press cranking 24/7 and if it wasn't for the USA making damned sure the petrodollar stays the money would be worth less than Zimbabwe.
Go look up the real numbers, not the song and dance the government feeds you, and you'll see the whole thing is a fucking trainwreck.
Seriously who cares, Nintendo is FUCKED with a capital F. They bet their ass on the casual gaming market only to find that the casual gaming market is "here today, gone later today" and are too busy playing with their iPads and Kindle Fires to give a rat's ass about another Nintendo gimmick controller, their sales are terrible and that is when compared to systems that should have been EOLed 2 years ago, and when the PS4 and Xbox next come out along with the Steambox Nintendo will be lucky if they get half a shelf in the kiddie section.
Everyone should just post a link to TFA when a Nintendo story comes up anywhere on the net, just so everybody will know they are acting like douchebags, but with the casuals going to tablets and handhelds being replaced by phones? Yeah unless Nintendo can pull off a miracle they be fucked.
Because most offices just don't need that much power? I deal with a LOT of SMBs, know what my two most popular builds are? The SFF box with an AMD Bobcat APU like this one which just FYI but if you have anybody still stuck on a P4 that needs a cheap upgrade, or if you could use an ultra low power system? They are great little units, only use around 18w under load and are still powerful enough to do 1080P. And for those that need a little more power something like this in a SFF case.
Frankly a good 95%+ of office users will be happy with either of those APUs, no need to go discrete on an office box. Hell i have one of those Bobcat APUs in my netbook and can play HL2, Portal 1&2, there are even vids of guys running Crysis on the things with minimum setting but to me that is going a little too far.
How so? Because i have been using AMD exclusively in the shop for 5 years now, we are talking hundreds of systems with everything from AMD IGPs to APU to every level of discrete they make and honestly? I haven't had a single problem.
Well I take that back i had ONE problem but I don't see how I could blame AMD for that, a customer had me order him a GPU and then a month later decided to use the system as an HTPC but since i didn't know he was even contemplating that I got him a gamer card that had DVI but no HDMI and when I used an adapter the card couldn't read the EDID to set the display correctly, about 30 minutes of futzing to set overscan and Bob's your uncle.
So I don't see how anybody can say AMD has gone downhill, I really can't. I have cards as old as 1650 pro and IGPs as old as Xpress 200 out in the field and they are still purring like a kitten, as a matter of fact I even managed to find a Vista driver for the Xpress 200 so now its running Win 7, can't do Aero naturally but the driver is stable and the customer is happy, that is all that matters. Hell I was impressed enough that my entire family is on AMD across the board, we are talking 5 desktops and 2 laptops, running everything from an HD4830 to a Bobcat APU on my netbook and again, no worries.
While I'm glad that works for you my users? Aren't using those either, they are doing everything either real time with FB and twitter or they are using webmail and that is pretty much it. I don't have a single customer using any of those, in fact i had to go look up what drive was as i hadn't heard of it.
When it comes to home users the future is instant or near instant, its here today gone later today and they really don't care because they'll just move on to something else. They have their pics backed up in their webmail and a USB drive, they use chat and FB and that really is pretty much it. I'm making decent money showing them the wonders of HTPCs but its being used more for casual gaming and movie collections than anything else and I could easily see the day that docs become like databases, something corps use that home users don't care about.
The problem with your argument is thus: You can move a billion dollars around the planet in seconds. this means that you would have to fix EVERY country and ALL the politicians on the entire planet to do anything about the problem of too much wealth giving too much power, and that simply isn't realistic.
Just look at T. Boone Pickens who has said on several occasions he intends to own every drop of water in the United States, even if YOUR state refuses to sell to him all he has to do is find one upstream who will, now picture that on a global scale because that is what we are talking about here.
The simple fact is money is power and power corrupts, end of story. With the ability to move wealth at a push of a button the ability to just "fix politics" just doesn't exist because the wealthy can use the fact that they can move billions in a second to turn nation against nation.
Uhhh...why? What difference at the end of the day does it make if they use OO or LO, they are both FOSS correct? Frankly you shouldn't care one way or the other whether you get 65 million OO or LO or a combination of the two.
Honestly I'd say in the grand scheme of things both OO and LO are irrelevant, as the ones that can most use it, home users, are increasingly not opting for any office software at all. Hell i stopped including an office suite in my default install ages ago unless they specifically ask for it because I found they just weren't being used, most users are too busy with FB and twitter and a thousand other sites to really care about office software one way or another. And some might bitch at me saying so but businesses can't really use either because Writer is pretty piss poor when it comes to handling complex office docs and don't even get me started on Calc which doesn't deserve to be in the same sentence as Excel.
At the end of the day I'm finding fewer and fewer home users use this stuff anymore, its like stand alone email clients in that way, its just no longer relevant to the majority. But I don't see how its "bad" that OO gets downloaded more than LO, that seems like its just splitting hairs as its not like its gonna "hurt" LO one way or another, anymore than people say using Gnome over KDE is really gonna hurt anything, its a personal preference thing really.
After Google changed their privacy policy I don't see how anybody could disagree with you OR this video, at the end of the day Google wants to know what you had for breakfast because that is how they make their money. You the user are not their customer, you are the product, the advertisers are the customers. I wouldn't mind this if they were just upfront about it but as you say they employ an army of shrinks to give you a 'warm fuzzy feeling" instead of just being honest about it.
That is why in the interests of full disclosure I switched to Bing search as not only is their privacy policy easy to follow but I get a cut of what they are making off of me in the form of Amazon gift cards. If you wanna make money off me? Fine give me a cut, even a little cut is better than what I get from Google which is a big fat nothing. At least this way all those little things i go through at the shop like CD sleeves,cables, and adapters are paid by my share of what MSFT is making off my search, so as long as they do give me a cut I'll stick with 'em as well as recommend them to my customers. Hell if they are gonna make money off you either way you might as well get a percentage, don't ya think?
Google like many others were using Ireland as a tax dodge and as we have seen in the USA what happens when you put the corps in the driver seat now Ireland has a collapsing economy and companies like Google are slowly but surely bailing like rats from a sinking ship.
This is of course the reason why free trade and globalism will cause a worldwide economic collapse, it forces every country on the planet to be as weak and powerless as the most broken third world country because thanks to the ability to send a trillion dollars around the world in seconds there really is no loyalty to ones home anymore.
Our founding fathers saw this coming all those years ago, too bad we didn't listen. Thomas Jefferson: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
Straw man, nobody gives a rat's ass about the Mac as its not even 10% of the market, sorry. But you knew that didn't you? Nobody kisses the ring for the Mac, which is getting slower and slower refreshes and mark my words within 7 years will be replaced with ARM, nope the reason they kiss the ring is iMoney, specifically iPad and iPod.
And you can make excuses for their behavior all you want but the simple fact is Flash is open, if they didn't think Adobe was doing a good enough job they could have backed Gnash or made their own fork, but that isn't what they did, was it? Nope they backed a known patent troll who will attack their biggest rival which is Android by making it damned clear there will be NO downstream licenses involving H.26x thus insuring that only proprietary OSes can have H.26x unless they set themselves up in non Berne countries which in that case it will be trivial to get those devices banned from the west for patent and copyright infringement.
I'm sorry but you'd have to have stains all down the front of your shirt from gulping the iKoolaid to not see that Cupertino is attempting to pull off what Redmond never could, and that is locking the web down into formats that they control. MSFT tried this with IE but again hamfisted and obvious whereas posts like yours prove how good the marketing team at Cupertino is, they can sell you a walled garden and you will thank them for the barrier.
The only person to blame for shitty drivers in Linux is Linus Torvalds, who is an arrogant douchebag who thinks his shit don't stink. Quick, how many OSes OTHER than Linux use his driver model? NONE because its shit, that's why. Even BSD and Solaris have stable driver ABIs but Torvalds is just too fucking cool for that daddy-o, and the ones who defend it use fucking religious arguments. Its an operating system not a church,quit acting batshit.
And I'm sorry but I have to call bullshit because I have used a couple of hundred AMD GPUs in the shop and not had a single problem, NOT ONE. In fact the only time I can think of having a problem with an AMD GPU since AMD took over from ATI was a single case of not having the GPU detect the right format for the TV it was plugged into....and I wouldn't even blame that on AMD as the guy didn't tell me before he had it built he was thinking about using it as an HTPC so the GPU I had chosen had DVI but not HDMI so I had to use an adapter. A little futzing with the driver settings and voila! Perfect picture.
So blaming AMD for Linux having a broken driver model is wrong, they simply don't have the resources to pull an Nvidia and give Torvalds the finger (which is really what Nvidia does, they gut about half the Linux graphics subsystem and replace with their own proprietary builds) and the fact that you just can't run the Linux drivers they released just shows what a piss poor driver model Linux has. Sorry but if you use a crap OS you should expect crap performance and crap problems, as long as Torvalds has a pulse the drivers are gonna be deep fried tampons. If you want drivers that work, don't use Linux, end of story..
How much of that can you blame on AMD though versus how much of it is Intel cockblocking? After all the reason Nvidia got out of the chipset business was intel cockblocking and Intel has been making it pretty clear that the future to them is Intel APUs with Intel boards and Intel support chips like it or lump it, so I have to wonder how much of the problem is Intel refusing to give jack shit to AMD to help interoperability as far as samples, docs, and specs.
Ultimately if you are going with an AMD GPU you'd probably be better off pairing it with an AMD CPU as that seems to be the best combo as far as drivers, at least from what I've seen at the shop. Lets face it CPUs haven't been the limiting factor in games for awhile, hell the new XBox and PS4 are both using chips originally designed for tablets and netbooks for the love of Pete. So unless you are one of the handful that need every bit of speed you can get (which I would argue why are you on a laptop if that is the case) you'll save some money by going all AMD which can then be used on a real performance booster like fast SSDs or more/faster RAM.
As a retailer I can tell ya why....its pointless. You know how many buy gaming laptops? MAYBE 3% of the population IF THAT, we are talking about a teeny tiny itsy bitsy niche so it is really pointless as the few percent that actually buy gaming laptops aren't gonna stick with an old CPU and replace the GPU so its just pointless.
Reality is that the majority of laptops sold are in the $400-$750 range, gamers tend to go for desktops anyway because no matter how powerful the cooling problems of trying to fit everything into this thin light package means you'll end up with slower parts that cost more, and with the amount of power the high end chips suck making battery life measured in minutes? All in all these just don't make sense to pretty much all but a handful of die hard LAN players and road warriors so its no wonder that the support for switching GPUs just isn't there.
IF they have a browser that runs in low rights mode and IF they have a good AV? Then sure java is fine, but you are dead wrong about it JUST being the plug in that is a threat.
At the end of the day you just can't change the fact that java has one of the most piss poor security records out there, it competes with flash and reader for most security risks per version. When you are looking at something with that poor a record frankly excuses are pointless, nothing will change the fact that bugs jumping out of their sandbox is common and dozens of bugs come out for each version, its really bad.