Dude you should load the time limited version you can get from MSFT into a VM just so you can marvel at the suck of Windows 8, its like watching a company blow their brains out on national TV. Its just amazing that anybody thought they could throw something so half assed and obviously built for tablets onto every new desktop and laptop on the planet and get people to take that shit, I've probably made a good $800 just wiping Win 8 systems for Win 7, its THAT bad.
But at least with FFVII I can pick up a PS One or PS2 and still play the thing, try one of those PC only titles like i76 or MW3 on Win 7 X64 and see how quickly you'll be crying. MW3 was one of my fav games back in the day, hell I even had my own clan and we kicked some major ass using the WWII "big blue blanket" combat tactics, but now that game is lost to me unless I build some hardware that will run Win9X because even on XP its seriously iffy. With anything newer than Win98 you risk tripping this "bouncing APC" bug which will cause all vehicles to "bounce" hundreds of feet in the air and sadly one of the first missions you have to use the APC and then guide it to a place but since its bouncing you can't activate it so the rest of the game can't be played. The same with i76 as one of the first missions you have to time a jump to coincide with an event that never happens because the game uses the PC's timing clock to time the event but it is expecting a clock under 1200MHz and today the clocks are too fast and it just never triggers.
But at least with DOSBox or a "Win9X Box" the code would be out there so as long as enough programmers like these old games you could still run 'em, thanks to the liquid caps they used then drying out and the bad cap debacle of the early 00s its gonna be harder every year to find working hardware that will run Win9x so its gonna be getting harder and harder to even play these games. And I agree they are art and should be preserved but unless MSFT hands out the Win9X code (when hell freezes over) or somebody builds a Win9X box most of these sadly will be lost to history.
Its sad but I have a feeling in the future there will be a stretch called the "Win9x gap" as we have plenty of VMs that will run XP or later, we have DOSBox for 1980-1994, but the 5 years that Win9x ruled will end up lost to time. Its a damned shame, it really is, hell if we could only get someone to make drivers for the damned thing AMD has the C50 and C60 Bobcats which at 1GHz with built in GPU would make a KILLER Win9x box, but as it is now with every passing year Win9x games will get harder and harder to run. Its just a damned shame, a damned shame.
Can't help you with Ubuntu friend, got tired of bashing my head against the desk at one dumbass move after another by the Linux devs (You fucking kill KDE 3 and Gnome 2 and ALSA not only when they are FINALLY stable and solid but right at the same time MSFT is dropping the Vista stinkbomb? WTF? You just gave the field to MSFT by crippling your own software morons!) so me? I'm holding onto Windows 7 like a drowning man hanging onto a log. Its rock solid stable, easy to customize, in fact i fucking hated Aero AND I hated the fugly Basic so I just hacked the theme engine so I could use Vista Black, only decent thing about Vista, and it kicks ass for gaming.
But there is something about that game you can't see by YouTube rips dude...its like being IN the Universal horror movies! The score, set design, its like you have been sucked into a classic horror movie like "Dracula 1931" or well...Nosferatu, and their use of score and shadow is fucking INCREDIBLE, I've found even those that don't like shooters but like well made horror like this just because of how incredibly detailed and well constructed the horror is. Sadly if it were done today, in the Age of Michael bay, it would be a gorefest but this has surprisingly little blood and gore in it because they know that your imagination is better than anything they can come up with, its just fucking awesome!
Oh and don't work about quick reflexes dude, you have a lousy 6 shot pistol and a flintlock, neither of which is gonna do jack shit against a vampire ONLY the familars that work for them which are few and far between. No this game is all about stealth and being smart. Do you try to stake that vamp asleep in its coffin in the corner, or do you sneak past and let it be? Do you take on that demon dog prowling the end of the hall, or do you make a run for it when it turns a corner and hope you can hit the exit before it tears you a new ass? You see the goal in the game is NOT to clear out the castle, its to get your family out of there before dawn, otherwise they are gonna be the meal at a vampire wedding feast with your sister as the main course so its NOT your job to be the "big damn hero" like in most games, its your job to go in, get them loose (which no, they don't make you escort them out because the devs know how much escort quests suck) and then get the fuck out of dodge using only a few items you can pick up here or there, like a chalice a dying priest gives you which lets you bless any water or a revolver your uncle hands you when you untie him.
So even if you aren't a shooter fan but like a good horror you should try it dude, you can pick it up for less than $10 on Amazon and I doubt it would be hard at all to get running under Wine. But when you play something like that, where its truly well made and well thought out? You realize why the new Michael bay way of doing things sucks, as it probably had not a 20th of the budget of a "Call Of Halo: Maximum Do The Dew" but has more immersion in its first 10 minutes than those things have for the entire game.
And how many people would know how to convert an Xvid AVI or H.264 MKV into a format that will play on a DVD player? Not many. And that still doesn't explain why I can get music in bog standard MP3 when for TV shows you are already broadcasting unencrypted so adding ANY DRM is doing fuck all to piracy its ONLY being a pain in the paying customer's ass.
The amount of effort it takes to convert a file from X to Y is the same no matter WHAT format you start out in, by your logic they shouldn't sell DVDs because there is software that can easily copy those. The point you and they are missing is if you make it easy and cheap? We humans are lazy bastards and thus WE WON'T BOTHER because it would mean bullshit we don't want to deal with. I mean I've spent probably $400+ in the past couple of years on Steam for me and my boys....do you HONESTLY think I couldn't have downloaded every. damned. game. and paid nothing for them? yep but then I'd have to set up BT, download the thing, download the patches, find a crack for the patches...that is too fucking much bullshit when i can just go "push this button to get game" and there, DONE. No work, no thought, no hassle, i wanted the fucking game so I pushed the button and in less than 3 minutes enough of the game is in I can start playing. Oh my oldest wants the Walking dead game? BAM, done. i pushed the button and now he has it, I didn't have to download the thing, drive over to his place, install the thing, no, fuck that, push the button and I'm fricking DONE end of story.
So I think you are missing the big picture, i mean games are some of the easiest to pirate things out there yet valve has doubled their profits every year for SEVEN YEARS in a row, why? Because they GET IT, make it so fucking simple and easy that everything else is a pain in my ass by comparison. Its gotten to the point if it isn't on steam I won't even buy it, I looked in my non Steam folder and I hadn't even played a single one in over a year because that would man dealing with manual patches and crap i just don't care about doing.
There are ALWAYS gonna be pirates, i knew guys back in the day that spent just insane amounts of time getting past CD checks and shit rather than spend a dollar, just accept that and move on. The vast majority will be happy to pay as long as you make it stupid simple and easy, if you wanted you could make it need a key that is tied to your PC for the first time you open it so you'd have to go to the trouble of converting it before you could hand it out. That alone would kill Billy Bob passing it around to his buddies without making it a royal PITA like it is now. make it easy and I'll buy, make it a PITA and I'll pass, simple as that.
Actually? Nope, not really. You REALLY need to look at the history of this country as it is pretty fascinating, for the first century or so you could really represent yourself and not be in a major disadvantage and if a case went on for more than a week it was a rarity. Now cases taking a decade to worm its way through the courts isn't uncommon and if I were to drop just the laws of your county onto your head i could kill you, that isn't even counting state and federal.
And I'm sorry but Ms Thomas got 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty, its an old joke but VERY true. My mom is VERY civic minded so when called she didn't try to get out and what she saw frankly shocked her, she had to hang a jury 11 to 1 because they were gonna convict a guy of arson because...get this, he was Italian and "Italians burn down things, didn't you watch Goodfellas?". Now I live down the street from the courthouse I I've sit in the back and watched how truly fucked up things have gotten but she didn't believe until she saw with her own eyes, hell even the fire chief admitted he didn't have a clue what had started the fire and that it would have made no sense for him to burn it as he didn't have enough insurance to even cover what he owed on the property, much less make anything, but that didn't matter because he was Italian and they had seen goodfellas. Hell I wish I could find it as I remember seeing a test where they gave random people a mock pair of trails, SAME evidence and SAME script word for word, the ONLY difference was they put the defendant in a fancy suit and styled his hair VS having him in jeans and a t-shirt, the outcome? T-shirt guy would have gotten 10 years while Armani suit walked and again SAME guy with SAME script, just different outfits!
So I'm sorry but things were VERY different back then but your average person could easily understand your average trial. Today the laws are written to be as obtuse as possible and your average Joe is lucky if he can read the legal BS put in your average EULA, much less understand a couple of dozen statues written by lawyers getting paid by the hour.
This is why I've said that FOSS really only works if you have a business plan that uses what I call "The blessed three" which is 1.-Sell support/services, 2.-Sell hardware, 3.-The tin cup, which of course this is the third of the three, because the traditional methods of making money off the software just doesn't work thanks to the GPL redistribution clause.
Is this a bad thing? No, in fact if you build around the blessed three you can make a LOT of money, just ask Red Hat, but what that means is you are gonna have a hard time keeping that email client funded if you can't figure out a way to use the blessed three because in FOSS the software is free in every sense of the word so traditional methods just don't work. This is why you've never seen a FOSS game with the depth and quality of a Bioshock despite all the free engines, this is why you've never seen a desktop with the level of polish of OSX or Windows, its because these things are VERY difficult to fit into the blessed three model.
So I wish you luck but its probably gonna be rough going unless you can figure out a way to fit into the blessed three, because desktop software like the desktop itself just isn't an easy fit into that model. Servers fit because there is always companies wanting this or that feature or this or that bug fixed and having direct access to the devs is a useful thing to have in that space, it works in embedded because its the hardware itself that brings the value, it can be a solid and lucrative business but like all business models you really have to conform to it, it can't conform to you.
The problem is the founding fathers never saw how infinite wealth would tilt the scales, cops can do anything they want now because the state has virtually unlimited wealth to break you. After all its not costing the prosecutor a dime to come up with 50 bullshit charges to throw at you to lessen your chances of winning a lawsuit and if it takes 10 years to worm its way through the courts how does it hurt them? It don't but since the average citizen can't afford to pay a decades worth of lawyer fees and the law is so twisted and full of jargon now you have to have a damned good lawyer and with each charge they stick on you,no matter how bullshit, will make your lawyer's fees go up so in the end you simply can't fight back.
This is why cops act like such douchebags now, they know they can get away with it thanks to the state having unlimited time and wealth to use against you.
Oh bullshit. even Nielsen group is talking about "zero TV" households which are "households that use netflix or Amazon but don't use traditional OTA or cable broadcasts" because ya know what? THAT is what TV IS, its you having to tune in at a certain time to watch a certain program.
so i'm sorry if you don't like the definition but you don't get to just change it like that, "TV" has a VERY specific meaning which was laid down ages about by the various cable channels and broadcasters for the purposes of counting viewers. if neither the advertisers nor the networks count watching netflix as TV watching? Then I'm sorry but it isn't and AAMOF when it first came out there was debate and it was decided to be subscription based PPV, NOT TV in the traditional sense.
That is still just ONE game dude, how many games were released for Win9X again? 20,000? I don't know the figure but I bet it was insanely high and sadly I've seen a lot of the ones that really pushed the graphics don't run worth a damned on anything NT based,which is why we really need a "Win9XBox" that would simulate a typical system around 99 so we don't end up losing all those games.
As much as I think MSFT has been infected with a case of the stupids i really do have to give them credit for backwards compatibility, I was one of the first to switch to X64, buying XP X64 on release, and even with it being so new and cutting edge I was amazed at how many older programs still ran just fine, they really did a great job on BC from XP-Windows 7...win 8 is a heaping pile of ass though, the BC for win 8 isn't worth a damn.
Well considering the weight of your average fatass lobbyist is roughly the same as a deer i'd figure deer rules in effect...of course that don't mean you can't just be a lousy shot and wing 'em a few times before you finally drop 'em but you always have to consider whether it'll damage the pelt, if its a nice specimen you might want to have them stuffed ya know.
Uhhh...not really. I mean didn't you ever ask how Uwe boll kept making movies? He used a German law that gave a bunch of tax breaks to support German cinema and so he got people to invest as a tax shelter. they all KNEW it was gonna be crap that didn't make money, that didn't matter, what mattered was this law made making shitty films a great tax dodge. I heard they changed the law which is probably why we haven't seen any Uwe Boll stinkbombs in a while.
From the guy selling fake leather jackets to get The Room made, to Franchise pictures, which used star's egos (and a LOT of fraud from what I've read) to get shit like Battlefield Earth made, its really not that hard to get up enough dough to make a movie, especially if you are using a D-List hasbeen actor and shooting in some place like Romania where you can hire an entire film crew for less than the cost of catering in Canada which is what it sounds like they did with this flick.
So I seriously doubt it would take much to make this into a viable business model, plenty of actors you've heard of that have careers on the skids (Jeffery Jones and Nick Nolte come to mind) that with a little bullshit and some creative accounting you could get a direct to DVD movie made without costing you anything out of pocket. Hell go to one of the smaller countries and tell them you want to make a movie about one of their historical figures and they'd probably pay you to make it.
Personally I think its the STD which I call "Michael Bay-ism" which has infected my beloved FPS genre. I mean you look at these "Call Of Halo: Gears Of Killzone Maximum Do The Dew" crap and its ALL about creating a "Michael Bay moment" with a big set piece with lots of fire and sparks and shit flying...but is it fun? IMHO no, its really not. Oh it looks fucking AWESOME on the screenshots or the trailer but then you play it and its just...meh. Its all "graphics good, gameplay repetitive and dull" which is why anything done smart like the Lucasarts adventures are so well loved.
You wanna try a fucking AMAZING FPS that you have probably never heard of, one that you can whip out around Halloween and scare the shit out of your friends with? Try "Nosferatu: The Wraith of Malachi" and prepare to shit thyself. First of all ALL of the rooms AND the enemies are randomly generated every. single. time. even between saves so there is NO way you can go "Oh well that room is clear so who cares" because you don't know if it is or not! And the feel is right out of a Universal horror, complete with big honking castle and full moon with the haunting score to match, VERY well done.
And you know how in all these games you either start out as or quickly become "Billy Badass" and blow through shit? Well we are talking about master vampires and demon dogs and you are JUST a guy, and I don't mean its one of those games that hamstring you and purposely make you weak, oh no, your stakes work fine...as long as you get their asses when they are asleep. You walk into a room and there is 3 coffins and you are like "Oh shit, gotta be quiet, gotta be quiet" while you sneak up and try to stake their ugly asses, because if they wake up? Yeah if you get DAMN lucky you might be able to plant that stake but more likely you'll be wearing your ass for a hat!
So if you want to try a killer, well made game, that will run on pretty much any machine made in the past 7 years (I ran it on an E350 netbook and it ran great) then pick up a copy, you play that and you'll look at the set piece crap and it'll stink like Skids and Mudflap in Transformers II. I can sooo get why people would want to hang onto well made stuff like Lucasarts because after you play the new crap and compare you can really tell the difference in craftsmanship. don't get me wrong, I think Bioshock and the Borderlands series are some of the best made games ever, but for every Bioshock you have a dozen "Gears Of Halo" which after playing a GREAT game playing a meh game just sucks that much more.
For me I have a little slogan "If you want me to buy, MKV or AVI" because I am NOT dealing with a bunch of phone home DRM bullshit, not when i can just buy the damned disc and rip it if I really want the show. online is supposed to be EASIER, make it EASIER for me and I'll be happy to give you my money but its gotta be in a format that it doesn't matter if I want to watch it with my mom, who only has one of those old DivX AVI players, or my dad at his place with his Nbox that plays MKVs, or if my ex wanted to watch something on her tablet I want to be able to say "here" and that is that.
I mean I can buy any song and any album in plain old MP3 and that plays on everything so why in the fuck should I have to have more bullshit just to watch a damned show? Especially with the shows as it makes NO fucking sense, any pirate can just record that shit OTA or off their cable and its on TPB the next day so ALL you are doing with the DRM is being a pain in MY ass, NOT the pirate's, so why should I pay you for being a dick?
Just give me the damned thing in my choice of a bog standard.MKV or.AVI and call it a damned day already, sheesh.
Dude its not just reality TV, I tried watching some of the shows recently and...damn. its total lowest common denominator, any action scenes were overblown and looked like low budget Michael Bay shit, what with all the cutaways and stupid dialog, the comedies make you want to groan more than laugh because you can see the shit coming a mile away...You watch this, or at least i did, and I felt stupider just from having watched it.
And I am NOT a snobby person, hell I love to watch cheesy shit like Asylum pictures and even bought a crappy Russian FPS just because it had "20 foot mutant attack chickens" on the back on the list of enemies but this shit wasn't even fun in a "so bad you can riff trax it" kinda way, it was just fucking DUMB. so no wonder the young are staying the hell away from that shit, I honestly don't blame 'em.
Oh and the other guy talked about his young co-workers supposedly knowing all the latest shows and talking around the cooler? I've watched the 20 somethings here do the same thing but they are talking about some flick they went to see with their buds or some MMO...TF2 is still a popular subject but I guess I'm too old as I tried it and don't get it but the young 'ens seem to, but I wasn't hearing shit from them about new shows and from the sound of it if it isn't on netflix they wouldn't know about it anyway as they all seem to have netflix accounts.
Exactly, the days of tuning in at X to watch Y are fricking over, some of my oldest boy's friends like Walking Dead, I'm guessing they get it from the net because they are watching it on laptops and tablets. Like I said he doesn't have a single friend that OWNS a TV that is used for that, a couple got cheap 32 inchers they use for monitors but none of them are watching traditional cable or OTA, they see it as too expensive (or in the case of OTA too much a PITA as we lie in a valley and digital don't work worth a shit here) for too little they care to watch.
And if that is true you might as well just replace the whole fucking thing with a 24/7 channel running "oww my balls" and call it a fucking day dude.
By your logic the ONLY movies we should be seeing in theaters should be made by Michael bay, after all he makes shitloads more than any other director, yet we still get dramas and comedies and horror, they may not have a 300 million dollar budget to shit special effects over the camera but you know what? Watch "The man from Earth" to see how a director with 2 cameras, a handful of good actors and a cabin can make a GREAT fucking movie. hell look at Start trek II, that thing had the least budget of any movie in the entire franchise, yet is the best movie in the bunch BY FAR.
Good actors, a good script, and a decent director could take the budget for a SyFy movie and make a fucking masterpiece,so I'm sorry but you are full of it.
Because their news service is shit it...what makes the channel better by comparison? they both still suck ass, you might as well be arguing over whether you'd prefer to have dog shit or cat shit thrown on you, any way you go its still shit.
so please get off your high horse because i really do NOT give a fuck, I've seen both, they are BOTH TRASH, so quit wasting your breath trying to argue that one pile of trash has a different aroma than the other, its still fucking garbage dude.
Nah you first idea was better, you could offer tags good for one lobbyist each, help pay down the debt while making the world a better place, sounds like a win/win in my book.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who has noticed that trend, its like how EA shit all over their customers with the new SimCity or MSFT is gonna slit their throats with the X720 by making it online only, the thought that somebody, ANYBODY, could possibly get away without their making every dime of profit on them they can just blinds these companies to reality. Did the online for single player games stop piracy? Nope but it sure as hell killed sales, tons of people took one look and said "fuck that" and walked away and if Fox does this I predict the same thing.
As for profits going down? PPT math dude, I have noticed a LOT of companies using PPT math. For those that don't know PPT math is where you start from the premise that your shit don't stink so no matter what happens its NOT your fault, its somebody else, because the PPT math says so. Here is an example: "Game X sold Y and we know that this genre is popular so by jamming it into X we should have sold X+Y but instead we lost money so...its teh pirates argh!". We saw MSFT pull a PPT math at the start of the year, it wasn't the fact that people dislike Windows 8 because tablets are selling you see so it HAD to be the OEMs not offering a "premium Windows 8 experience" because Windows sells X normally and tablets sell Y so by combined X+Y we should get Z, see how logical that is?
Its basically like that Heinlein quote someone posted earlier, these companies get big and fat and then go from selling a product to the world OWING them a profit, no matter how shitty their product is now or treatment of customers, simply because the PPT says they made X last year so should have made X+Y this year.
Dude that is like arguing over the composition of the shit that you just stepped in. Its still shit, whether its more runny or squishy its still shit. One is reality shit, the other is shilling shit...either way it still smells dude.
And I'm sure the right wingers will get all shirty for me pointing that out but...c'mon guys, get fucking serious. Fox news is the Skids and Mudflap of the right wing, they are REALLY not doing you any favors. I have seen plenty that can argue for right wing causes with some intelligence and thought, but you watch Faux and the amount of purposely arguing from ignorance is downright scary, its obvious that not only do these guys not know anything deeper than the soundbyte level they really don't WANT to know anything deeper, its like thinking about an issue might cloud their black and white viewpoint so the less they know the better.
so I'm sorry right wingers but having faux representing your views is like the NAACP adopting Skids and Mudflap as their spokesmen, it really is because they make the rest of you look bad by association, its to the right wing what reality TV is to quality programming.
If you make something good people WILL buy it, you may not have the budget that the mass market crap has but I don't see why they couldn't turn a modest profit. That is why I thought the idea Joss Whedon floated a couple years back was smart, it was basically "if enough people buy the DVD of X we make another one" which I thought was a brilliant way to just bypass the whole system. If enough people want a Spike and Dru series or Firefly or whatever? let them put their money where their mouth is and buy the DVD. hell I'd buy the DVDs and t-shirts if it would give us more of Juliet Landau as Dru, she was great on the show and even creepier in the comix.
If anything I'd say the CURRENT system produces 90% dreck, I haven't watched TV in years because its fucking drowning in reality garbage but apparently watching white trash and cat fights is cheap to make and easy to sell so now we are up to our ass in this shit. Hell look at it this way...it can't get any fucking worse than what we have now, what we have now is so close to idiocracy its fucking scary. Its not even the kind of trainwreck bad you can make fun of like "Heil Honey I'm Home" its just pathetic and sad how stupid and worthless this dreck is.
You are forgetting one thing Mr or Mrs AC, and that is the corps own the politicians and have for a couple of decades now so if Fox REALLY wants to do this and willing to pay the bribes? It'll get done.
Personally I'd love to see it, I just love to watch arrogant corps blow shitpiles of money on stupid ideas that flop miserably. Fox pulls that shit and their numbers are gonna fall like a stone as others have pointed out NOBODY is gonna pay for a descrambler and go through that hassle just for one lousy channel, one with an assload of ads at that, so it'll be funny to watch their numbers go from something like 15% to the same figures as some fourth tier basic cable channel.
And what will REALLY make them shit their pants is when they all switch...and nobody shows up.
I live in a college town with my oldest in college so I am pretty much surrounded by 20 somethings all damned day and you know what I found? they don't watch TV, in fact more and more of them don't even own a TV. They might have netflix to watch a movie, might catch a clip on YouTube but THAT IS IT, they really don't give a rat's ass about watching traditional TV, they have their social stuff and their games and they just don't have any desire to sit and just passively veg out in front of a TV like previous generations did.
I always thought I was a bit of an oddball because I dropped TV nearly a decade ago, turns out I was just ahead of the curve. talking to these kids that come into the shop pretty much TV is looked at something for your parents or grandparents, its just not something they care about. They are a HELL of a lot more social oriented, they are getting together with friends and watching a rifftrax on the widescreen one of them uses as a monitor, they are on their FB or in an MMO, regular passive TV really just doesn't hold any appeal to them and I honestly don't blame 'em as when I go out to visit my mother I'm forced to watch it and...fuck is ALL TV this God damned stupid? Is it ALL reality garbage now? Because spinning through the channels that is what it seems like to me, every time I'm exposed to it all I can think is "When is "Ass" or "Oww my balls" coming on?" because it feels THAT stupid.
So give the OTA bandwidth to cellphones, maybe add a nice free channel for the next gen of WiFi, because honestly even the old folks aren't watching that shit anymore, they have Dish or DirectTV and the kids don't watch any of it.
I don't think so. I mean sure they may have put cancer down as something else but for most of the last century we knew enough to tell the difference between it and say a heart attack.
Personally i think a LOT of it can be traced back to chemicals. I mean my grandparents lived to be nearly 100 with one of them a smoker but the BIG difference between them and us is every single thing they ate came directly from the land, no chemicals of any kind in their meats or veggies. they needed to preserve something? it was canned or smoked or candied, NEVER a single chemical preservative.
Did you know that certain preservatives when mixed basically creates benzene, which is a seriously nasty cancer causing agent? Do YOU know which combos to avoid? I sure as hell don't, hell I can't even pronounce half the ingredients listed on most canned goods anymore, its just nuts how much crap they put into stuff. And that is not even getting into the fact that we have coated every can on the planet with a plastic that leaks so badly they've found the shit in blood samples from newborns, the whole thing is just nuts.
But see at LEAST in your example you can't just grab the damned thing because they are outside and you are in, at least THAT makes fucking sense!
Again look at my example with the grate or the door, in both of those you HAVE what would be the simplest and most obvious means of solving the problem but it won't LET YOU use any kind of common sense, its like its punishing you for not smoking a bong and turning off your brain so you can figure out what "wacky hi-jinks" they expect you to fucking do to get through what should be a simple fucking thing.
And the bitch is it would take 5 seconds worth of thinking on the part of the developers to fix this shit which is why i say its just being lazy. The grate? Don't give me a fucking screwdriver or a prybar before that, or have alarms set on the grates so if I try to just pop it off I'm gonna get caught...done! See how just 5 seconds of thinking could remove the glaring "Dr Evil Logic" plot holes in the puzzle? like I said with red faction ALL THEY DID was change the texture of the door from wood to metal, that is it. Then when you got to the door not being able to open it with your AK47 or RPG made fricking sense, its 8 inches of plate steel so its like a firecracker hitting the thing. All it would take is just 5 minutes of thought, hell just grab a guy off the street and show him the sitch and see if he names off an obvious solution and then write in a reason why that solution won't work.
I'm not asking for much here, hell I'm not even saying they can't go for the "wacky hi-jinks' puzzles, just put a little thought into it so obviously easier solutions aren't bitchslapping you in the face the entire time...is that REALLY so much to ask for?
Crosshair, dude, lay off the beer before you post, seriously as YOU MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT of the fucking post!
I do NOT give a rat's ass about the iron broad or her policies all I was doing was highlighting how stats are bullshit without details and THAT IS IT, okay? THAT IS ALL. I honestly do not care enough about the fricking UK to bother even looking up whether her policies worked or not as I REALLY do not care, i really don't. I DO care however on the fact that anybody can pull a metric out of their ass and without details can say any damned thing they want. Like I said if you just go by Walmart's payroll size you'd think they were a fucking blessing upon the economy but when you look closer and see how much government assistance it requires to keep a Walmart employee from sleeping on a grate behind the store? Then they are a BLIGHT NOT A BLESSING and the ONLY thing that has changed is you have gathered more information, THAT IS ALL.
So please do NOT tell me you are arguing that fucking ignorance is bliss because then I'll have to throw your words right back at you, you are better than that. Was the iron broad better or worse? Fuck if I know, i don't care, I really don't. I was simply pointing out pulling a single vague metric out of your ass can make her a hero or a villain and tells us exactly fuck all about what was really going on. hell pick the right metric, like how much the top 5% made in the past 5 years? you would NEVER know there was a slump, the data would show its all blue skies and puppies, but that is just cherry picking which was the fucking point, vague metrics without context are just fucking useless.
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Dude you should load the time limited version you can get from MSFT into a VM just so you can marvel at the suck of Windows 8, its like watching a company blow their brains out on national TV. Its just amazing that anybody thought they could throw something so half assed and obviously built for tablets onto every new desktop and laptop on the planet and get people to take that shit, I've probably made a good $800 just wiping Win 8 systems for Win 7, its THAT bad.
But at least with FFVII I can pick up a PS One or PS2 and still play the thing, try one of those PC only titles like i76 or MW3 on Win 7 X64 and see how quickly you'll be crying. MW3 was one of my fav games back in the day, hell I even had my own clan and we kicked some major ass using the WWII "big blue blanket" combat tactics, but now that game is lost to me unless I build some hardware that will run Win9X because even on XP its seriously iffy. With anything newer than Win98 you risk tripping this "bouncing APC" bug which will cause all vehicles to "bounce" hundreds of feet in the air and sadly one of the first missions you have to use the APC and then guide it to a place but since its bouncing you can't activate it so the rest of the game can't be played. The same with i76 as one of the first missions you have to time a jump to coincide with an event that never happens because the game uses the PC's timing clock to time the event but it is expecting a clock under 1200MHz and today the clocks are too fast and it just never triggers.
But at least with DOSBox or a "Win9X Box" the code would be out there so as long as enough programmers like these old games you could still run 'em, thanks to the liquid caps they used then drying out and the bad cap debacle of the early 00s its gonna be harder every year to find working hardware that will run Win9x so its gonna be getting harder and harder to even play these games. And I agree they are art and should be preserved but unless MSFT hands out the Win9X code (when hell freezes over) or somebody builds a Win9X box most of these sadly will be lost to history.
Its sad but I have a feeling in the future there will be a stretch called the "Win9x gap" as we have plenty of VMs that will run XP or later, we have DOSBox for 1980-1994, but the 5 years that Win9x ruled will end up lost to time. Its a damned shame, it really is, hell if we could only get someone to make drivers for the damned thing AMD has the C50 and C60 Bobcats which at 1GHz with built in GPU would make a KILLER Win9x box, but as it is now with every passing year Win9x games will get harder and harder to run. Its just a damned shame, a damned shame.
Can't help you with Ubuntu friend, got tired of bashing my head against the desk at one dumbass move after another by the Linux devs (You fucking kill KDE 3 and Gnome 2 and ALSA not only when they are FINALLY stable and solid but right at the same time MSFT is dropping the Vista stinkbomb? WTF? You just gave the field to MSFT by crippling your own software morons!) so me? I'm holding onto Windows 7 like a drowning man hanging onto a log. Its rock solid stable, easy to customize, in fact i fucking hated Aero AND I hated the fugly Basic so I just hacked the theme engine so I could use Vista Black, only decent thing about Vista, and it kicks ass for gaming.
But there is something about that game you can't see by YouTube rips dude...its like being IN the Universal horror movies! The score, set design, its like you have been sucked into a classic horror movie like "Dracula 1931" or well...Nosferatu, and their use of score and shadow is fucking INCREDIBLE, I've found even those that don't like shooters but like well made horror like this just because of how incredibly detailed and well constructed the horror is. Sadly if it were done today, in the Age of Michael bay, it would be a gorefest but this has surprisingly little blood and gore in it because they know that your imagination is better than anything they can come up with, its just fucking awesome!
Oh and don't work about quick reflexes dude, you have a lousy 6 shot pistol and a flintlock, neither of which is gonna do jack shit against a vampire ONLY the familars that work for them which are few and far between. No this game is all about stealth and being smart. Do you try to stake that vamp asleep in its coffin in the corner, or do you sneak past and let it be? Do you take on that demon dog prowling the end of the hall, or do you make a run for it when it turns a corner and hope you can hit the exit before it tears you a new ass? You see the goal in the game is NOT to clear out the castle, its to get your family out of there before dawn, otherwise they are gonna be the meal at a vampire wedding feast with your sister as the main course so its NOT your job to be the "big damn hero" like in most games, its your job to go in, get them loose (which no, they don't make you escort them out because the devs know how much escort quests suck) and then get the fuck out of dodge using only a few items you can pick up here or there, like a chalice a dying priest gives you which lets you bless any water or a revolver your uncle hands you when you untie him.
So even if you aren't a shooter fan but like a good horror you should try it dude, you can pick it up for less than $10 on Amazon and I doubt it would be hard at all to get running under Wine. But when you play something like that, where its truly well made and well thought out? You realize why the new Michael bay way of doing things sucks, as it probably had not a 20th of the budget of a "Call Of Halo: Maximum Do The Dew" but has more immersion in its first 10 minutes than those things have for the entire game.
And how many people would know how to convert an Xvid AVI or H.264 MKV into a format that will play on a DVD player? Not many. And that still doesn't explain why I can get music in bog standard MP3 when for TV shows you are already broadcasting unencrypted so adding ANY DRM is doing fuck all to piracy its ONLY being a pain in the paying customer's ass.
The amount of effort it takes to convert a file from X to Y is the same no matter WHAT format you start out in, by your logic they shouldn't sell DVDs because there is software that can easily copy those. The point you and they are missing is if you make it easy and cheap? We humans are lazy bastards and thus WE WON'T BOTHER because it would mean bullshit we don't want to deal with. I mean I've spent probably $400+ in the past couple of years on Steam for me and my boys....do you HONESTLY think I couldn't have downloaded every. damned. game. and paid nothing for them? yep but then I'd have to set up BT, download the thing, download the patches, find a crack for the patches...that is too fucking much bullshit when i can just go "push this button to get game" and there, DONE. No work, no thought, no hassle, i wanted the fucking game so I pushed the button and in less than 3 minutes enough of the game is in I can start playing. Oh my oldest wants the Walking dead game? BAM, done. i pushed the button and now he has it, I didn't have to download the thing, drive over to his place, install the thing, no, fuck that, push the button and I'm fricking DONE end of story.
So I think you are missing the big picture, i mean games are some of the easiest to pirate things out there yet valve has doubled their profits every year for SEVEN YEARS in a row, why? Because they GET IT, make it so fucking simple and easy that everything else is a pain in my ass by comparison. Its gotten to the point if it isn't on steam I won't even buy it, I looked in my non Steam folder and I hadn't even played a single one in over a year because that would man dealing with manual patches and crap i just don't care about doing.
There are ALWAYS gonna be pirates, i knew guys back in the day that spent just insane amounts of time getting past CD checks and shit rather than spend a dollar, just accept that and move on. The vast majority will be happy to pay as long as you make it stupid simple and easy, if you wanted you could make it need a key that is tied to your PC for the first time you open it so you'd have to go to the trouble of converting it before you could hand it out. That alone would kill Billy Bob passing it around to his buddies without making it a royal PITA like it is now. make it easy and I'll buy, make it a PITA and I'll pass, simple as that.
Actually? Nope, not really. You REALLY need to look at the history of this country as it is pretty fascinating, for the first century or so you could really represent yourself and not be in a major disadvantage and if a case went on for more than a week it was a rarity. Now cases taking a decade to worm its way through the courts isn't uncommon and if I were to drop just the laws of your county onto your head i could kill you, that isn't even counting state and federal.
And I'm sorry but Ms Thomas got 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty, its an old joke but VERY true. My mom is VERY civic minded so when called she didn't try to get out and what she saw frankly shocked her, she had to hang a jury 11 to 1 because they were gonna convict a guy of arson because...get this, he was Italian and "Italians burn down things, didn't you watch Goodfellas?". Now I live down the street from the courthouse I I've sit in the back and watched how truly fucked up things have gotten but she didn't believe until she saw with her own eyes, hell even the fire chief admitted he didn't have a clue what had started the fire and that it would have made no sense for him to burn it as he didn't have enough insurance to even cover what he owed on the property, much less make anything, but that didn't matter because he was Italian and they had seen goodfellas. Hell I wish I could find it as I remember seeing a test where they gave random people a mock pair of trails, SAME evidence and SAME script word for word, the ONLY difference was they put the defendant in a fancy suit and styled his hair VS having him in jeans and a t-shirt, the outcome? T-shirt guy would have gotten 10 years while Armani suit walked and again SAME guy with SAME script, just different outfits!
So I'm sorry but things were VERY different back then but your average person could easily understand your average trial. Today the laws are written to be as obtuse as possible and your average Joe is lucky if he can read the legal BS put in your average EULA, much less understand a couple of dozen statues written by lawyers getting paid by the hour.
This is why I've said that FOSS really only works if you have a business plan that uses what I call "The blessed three" which is 1.-Sell support/services, 2.-Sell hardware, 3.-The tin cup, which of course this is the third of the three, because the traditional methods of making money off the software just doesn't work thanks to the GPL redistribution clause.
Is this a bad thing? No, in fact if you build around the blessed three you can make a LOT of money, just ask Red Hat, but what that means is you are gonna have a hard time keeping that email client funded if you can't figure out a way to use the blessed three because in FOSS the software is free in every sense of the word so traditional methods just don't work. This is why you've never seen a FOSS game with the depth and quality of a Bioshock despite all the free engines, this is why you've never seen a desktop with the level of polish of OSX or Windows, its because these things are VERY difficult to fit into the blessed three model.
So I wish you luck but its probably gonna be rough going unless you can figure out a way to fit into the blessed three, because desktop software like the desktop itself just isn't an easy fit into that model. Servers fit because there is always companies wanting this or that feature or this or that bug fixed and having direct access to the devs is a useful thing to have in that space, it works in embedded because its the hardware itself that brings the value, it can be a solid and lucrative business but like all business models you really have to conform to it, it can't conform to you.
The problem is the founding fathers never saw how infinite wealth would tilt the scales, cops can do anything they want now because the state has virtually unlimited wealth to break you. After all its not costing the prosecutor a dime to come up with 50 bullshit charges to throw at you to lessen your chances of winning a lawsuit and if it takes 10 years to worm its way through the courts how does it hurt them? It don't but since the average citizen can't afford to pay a decades worth of lawyer fees and the law is so twisted and full of jargon now you have to have a damned good lawyer and with each charge they stick on you,no matter how bullshit, will make your lawyer's fees go up so in the end you simply can't fight back.
This is why cops act like such douchebags now, they know they can get away with it thanks to the state having unlimited time and wealth to use against you.
Oh bullshit. even Nielsen group is talking about "zero TV" households which are "households that use netflix or Amazon but don't use traditional OTA or cable broadcasts" because ya know what? THAT is what TV IS, its you having to tune in at a certain time to watch a certain program.
so i'm sorry if you don't like the definition but you don't get to just change it like that, "TV" has a VERY specific meaning which was laid down ages about by the various cable channels and broadcasters for the purposes of counting viewers. if neither the advertisers nor the networks count watching netflix as TV watching? Then I'm sorry but it isn't and AAMOF when it first came out there was debate and it was decided to be subscription based PPV, NOT TV in the traditional sense.
That is still just ONE game dude, how many games were released for Win9X again? 20,000? I don't know the figure but I bet it was insanely high and sadly I've seen a lot of the ones that really pushed the graphics don't run worth a damned on anything NT based,which is why we really need a "Win9XBox" that would simulate a typical system around 99 so we don't end up losing all those games.
As much as I think MSFT has been infected with a case of the stupids i really do have to give them credit for backwards compatibility, I was one of the first to switch to X64, buying XP X64 on release, and even with it being so new and cutting edge I was amazed at how many older programs still ran just fine, they really did a great job on BC from XP-Windows 7...win 8 is a heaping pile of ass though, the BC for win 8 isn't worth a damn.
Well considering the weight of your average fatass lobbyist is roughly the same as a deer i'd figure deer rules in effect...of course that don't mean you can't just be a lousy shot and wing 'em a few times before you finally drop 'em but you always have to consider whether it'll damage the pelt, if its a nice specimen you might want to have them stuffed ya know.
Uhhh...not really. I mean didn't you ever ask how Uwe boll kept making movies? He used a German law that gave a bunch of tax breaks to support German cinema and so he got people to invest as a tax shelter. they all KNEW it was gonna be crap that didn't make money, that didn't matter, what mattered was this law made making shitty films a great tax dodge. I heard they changed the law which is probably why we haven't seen any Uwe Boll stinkbombs in a while.
From the guy selling fake leather jackets to get The Room made, to Franchise pictures, which used star's egos (and a LOT of fraud from what I've read) to get shit like Battlefield Earth made, its really not that hard to get up enough dough to make a movie, especially if you are using a D-List hasbeen actor and shooting in some place like Romania where you can hire an entire film crew for less than the cost of catering in Canada which is what it sounds like they did with this flick.
So I seriously doubt it would take much to make this into a viable business model, plenty of actors you've heard of that have careers on the skids (Jeffery Jones and Nick Nolte come to mind) that with a little bullshit and some creative accounting you could get a direct to DVD movie made without costing you anything out of pocket. Hell go to one of the smaller countries and tell them you want to make a movie about one of their historical figures and they'd probably pay you to make it.
Personally I think its the STD which I call "Michael Bay-ism" which has infected my beloved FPS genre. I mean you look at these "Call Of Halo: Gears Of Killzone Maximum Do The Dew" crap and its ALL about creating a "Michael Bay moment" with a big set piece with lots of fire and sparks and shit flying...but is it fun? IMHO no, its really not. Oh it looks fucking AWESOME on the screenshots or the trailer but then you play it and its just...meh. Its all "graphics good, gameplay repetitive and dull" which is why anything done smart like the Lucasarts adventures are so well loved.
You wanna try a fucking AMAZING FPS that you have probably never heard of, one that you can whip out around Halloween and scare the shit out of your friends with? Try "Nosferatu: The Wraith of Malachi" and prepare to shit thyself. First of all ALL of the rooms AND the enemies are randomly generated every. single. time. even between saves so there is NO way you can go "Oh well that room is clear so who cares" because you don't know if it is or not! And the feel is right out of a Universal horror, complete with big honking castle and full moon with the haunting score to match, VERY well done.
And you know how in all these games you either start out as or quickly become "Billy Badass" and blow through shit? Well we are talking about master vampires and demon dogs and you are JUST a guy, and I don't mean its one of those games that hamstring you and purposely make you weak, oh no, your stakes work fine...as long as you get their asses when they are asleep. You walk into a room and there is 3 coffins and you are like "Oh shit, gotta be quiet, gotta be quiet" while you sneak up and try to stake their ugly asses, because if they wake up? Yeah if you get DAMN lucky you might be able to plant that stake but more likely you'll be wearing your ass for a hat!
So if you want to try a killer, well made game, that will run on pretty much any machine made in the past 7 years (I ran it on an E350 netbook and it ran great) then pick up a copy, you play that and you'll look at the set piece crap and it'll stink like Skids and Mudflap in Transformers II. I can sooo get why people would want to hang onto well made stuff like Lucasarts because after you play the new crap and compare you can really tell the difference in craftsmanship. don't get me wrong, I think Bioshock and the Borderlands series are some of the best made games ever, but for every Bioshock you have a dozen "Gears Of Halo" which after playing a GREAT game playing a meh game just sucks that much more.
For me I have a little slogan "If you want me to buy, MKV or AVI" because I am NOT dealing with a bunch of phone home DRM bullshit, not when i can just buy the damned disc and rip it if I really want the show. online is supposed to be EASIER, make it EASIER for me and I'll be happy to give you my money but its gotta be in a format that it doesn't matter if I want to watch it with my mom, who only has one of those old DivX AVI players, or my dad at his place with his Nbox that plays MKVs, or if my ex wanted to watch something on her tablet I want to be able to say "here" and that is that.
I mean I can buy any song and any album in plain old MP3 and that plays on everything so why in the fuck should I have to have more bullshit just to watch a damned show? Especially with the shows as it makes NO fucking sense, any pirate can just record that shit OTA or off their cable and its on TPB the next day so ALL you are doing with the DRM is being a pain in MY ass, NOT the pirate's, so why should I pay you for being a dick?
Just give me the damned thing in my choice of a bog standard .MKV or .AVI and call it a damned day already, sheesh.
Dude its not just reality TV, I tried watching some of the shows recently and...damn. its total lowest common denominator, any action scenes were overblown and looked like low budget Michael Bay shit, what with all the cutaways and stupid dialog, the comedies make you want to groan more than laugh because you can see the shit coming a mile away...You watch this, or at least i did, and I felt stupider just from having watched it.
And I am NOT a snobby person, hell I love to watch cheesy shit like Asylum pictures and even bought a crappy Russian FPS just because it had "20 foot mutant attack chickens" on the back on the list of enemies but this shit wasn't even fun in a "so bad you can riff trax it" kinda way, it was just fucking DUMB. so no wonder the young are staying the hell away from that shit, I honestly don't blame 'em.
Oh and the other guy talked about his young co-workers supposedly knowing all the latest shows and talking around the cooler? I've watched the 20 somethings here do the same thing but they are talking about some flick they went to see with their buds or some MMO...TF2 is still a popular subject but I guess I'm too old as I tried it and don't get it but the young 'ens seem to, but I wasn't hearing shit from them about new shows and from the sound of it if it isn't on netflix they wouldn't know about it anyway as they all seem to have netflix accounts.
Exactly, the days of tuning in at X to watch Y are fricking over, some of my oldest boy's friends like Walking Dead, I'm guessing they get it from the net because they are watching it on laptops and tablets. Like I said he doesn't have a single friend that OWNS a TV that is used for that, a couple got cheap 32 inchers they use for monitors but none of them are watching traditional cable or OTA, they see it as too expensive (or in the case of OTA too much a PITA as we lie in a valley and digital don't work worth a shit here) for too little they care to watch.
And if that is true you might as well just replace the whole fucking thing with a 24/7 channel running "oww my balls" and call it a fucking day dude.
By your logic the ONLY movies we should be seeing in theaters should be made by Michael bay, after all he makes shitloads more than any other director, yet we still get dramas and comedies and horror, they may not have a 300 million dollar budget to shit special effects over the camera but you know what? Watch "The man from Earth" to see how a director with 2 cameras, a handful of good actors and a cabin can make a GREAT fucking movie. hell look at Start trek II, that thing had the least budget of any movie in the entire franchise, yet is the best movie in the bunch BY FAR.
Good actors, a good script, and a decent director could take the budget for a SyFy movie and make a fucking masterpiece,so I'm sorry but you are full of it.
Because their news service is shit it...what makes the channel better by comparison? they both still suck ass, you might as well be arguing over whether you'd prefer to have dog shit or cat shit thrown on you, any way you go its still shit.
so please get off your high horse because i really do NOT give a fuck, I've seen both, they are BOTH TRASH, so quit wasting your breath trying to argue that one pile of trash has a different aroma than the other, its still fucking garbage dude.
Nah you first idea was better, you could offer tags good for one lobbyist each, help pay down the debt while making the world a better place, sounds like a win/win in my book.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who has noticed that trend, its like how EA shit all over their customers with the new SimCity or MSFT is gonna slit their throats with the X720 by making it online only, the thought that somebody, ANYBODY, could possibly get away without their making every dime of profit on them they can just blinds these companies to reality. Did the online for single player games stop piracy? Nope but it sure as hell killed sales, tons of people took one look and said "fuck that" and walked away and if Fox does this I predict the same thing.
As for profits going down? PPT math dude, I have noticed a LOT of companies using PPT math. For those that don't know PPT math is where you start from the premise that your shit don't stink so no matter what happens its NOT your fault, its somebody else, because the PPT math says so. Here is an example: "Game X sold Y and we know that this genre is popular so by jamming it into X we should have sold X+Y but instead we lost money so...its teh pirates argh!". We saw MSFT pull a PPT math at the start of the year, it wasn't the fact that people dislike Windows 8 because tablets are selling you see so it HAD to be the OEMs not offering a "premium Windows 8 experience" because Windows sells X normally and tablets sell Y so by combined X+Y we should get Z, see how logical that is?
Its basically like that Heinlein quote someone posted earlier, these companies get big and fat and then go from selling a product to the world OWING them a profit, no matter how shitty their product is now or treatment of customers, simply because the PPT says they made X last year so should have made X+Y this year.
Dude that is like arguing over the composition of the shit that you just stepped in. Its still shit, whether its more runny or squishy its still shit. One is reality shit, the other is shilling shit...either way it still smells dude.
And I'm sure the right wingers will get all shirty for me pointing that out but...c'mon guys, get fucking serious. Fox news is the Skids and Mudflap of the right wing, they are REALLY not doing you any favors. I have seen plenty that can argue for right wing causes with some intelligence and thought, but you watch Faux and the amount of purposely arguing from ignorance is downright scary, its obvious that not only do these guys not know anything deeper than the soundbyte level they really don't WANT to know anything deeper, its like thinking about an issue might cloud their black and white viewpoint so the less they know the better.
so I'm sorry right wingers but having faux representing your views is like the NAACP adopting Skids and Mudflap as their spokesmen, it really is because they make the rest of you look bad by association, its to the right wing what reality TV is to quality programming.
If you make something good people WILL buy it, you may not have the budget that the mass market crap has but I don't see why they couldn't turn a modest profit. That is why I thought the idea Joss Whedon floated a couple years back was smart, it was basically "if enough people buy the DVD of X we make another one" which I thought was a brilliant way to just bypass the whole system. If enough people want a Spike and Dru series or Firefly or whatever? let them put their money where their mouth is and buy the DVD. hell I'd buy the DVDs and t-shirts if it would give us more of Juliet Landau as Dru, she was great on the show and even creepier in the comix.
If anything I'd say the CURRENT system produces 90% dreck, I haven't watched TV in years because its fucking drowning in reality garbage but apparently watching white trash and cat fights is cheap to make and easy to sell so now we are up to our ass in this shit. Hell look at it this way...it can't get any fucking worse than what we have now, what we have now is so close to idiocracy its fucking scary. Its not even the kind of trainwreck bad you can make fun of like "Heil Honey I'm Home" its just pathetic and sad how stupid and worthless this dreck is.
You are forgetting one thing Mr or Mrs AC, and that is the corps own the politicians and have for a couple of decades now so if Fox REALLY wants to do this and willing to pay the bribes? It'll get done.
Personally I'd love to see it, I just love to watch arrogant corps blow shitpiles of money on stupid ideas that flop miserably. Fox pulls that shit and their numbers are gonna fall like a stone as others have pointed out NOBODY is gonna pay for a descrambler and go through that hassle just for one lousy channel, one with an assload of ads at that, so it'll be funny to watch their numbers go from something like 15% to the same figures as some fourth tier basic cable channel.
And what will REALLY make them shit their pants is when they all switch...and nobody shows up.
I live in a college town with my oldest in college so I am pretty much surrounded by 20 somethings all damned day and you know what I found? they don't watch TV, in fact more and more of them don't even own a TV. They might have netflix to watch a movie, might catch a clip on YouTube but THAT IS IT, they really don't give a rat's ass about watching traditional TV, they have their social stuff and their games and they just don't have any desire to sit and just passively veg out in front of a TV like previous generations did.
I always thought I was a bit of an oddball because I dropped TV nearly a decade ago, turns out I was just ahead of the curve. talking to these kids that come into the shop pretty much TV is looked at something for your parents or grandparents, its just not something they care about. They are a HELL of a lot more social oriented, they are getting together with friends and watching a rifftrax on the widescreen one of them uses as a monitor, they are on their FB or in an MMO, regular passive TV really just doesn't hold any appeal to them and I honestly don't blame 'em as when I go out to visit my mother I'm forced to watch it and...fuck is ALL TV this God damned stupid? Is it ALL reality garbage now? Because spinning through the channels that is what it seems like to me, every time I'm exposed to it all I can think is "When is "Ass" or "Oww my balls" coming on?" because it feels THAT stupid.
So give the OTA bandwidth to cellphones, maybe add a nice free channel for the next gen of WiFi, because honestly even the old folks aren't watching that shit anymore, they have Dish or DirectTV and the kids don't watch any of it.
I don't think so. I mean sure they may have put cancer down as something else but for most of the last century we knew enough to tell the difference between it and say a heart attack.
Personally i think a LOT of it can be traced back to chemicals. I mean my grandparents lived to be nearly 100 with one of them a smoker but the BIG difference between them and us is every single thing they ate came directly from the land, no chemicals of any kind in their meats or veggies. they needed to preserve something? it was canned or smoked or candied, NEVER a single chemical preservative.
Did you know that certain preservatives when mixed basically creates benzene, which is a seriously nasty cancer causing agent? Do YOU know which combos to avoid? I sure as hell don't, hell I can't even pronounce half the ingredients listed on most canned goods anymore, its just nuts how much crap they put into stuff. And that is not even getting into the fact that we have coated every can on the planet with a plastic that leaks so badly they've found the shit in blood samples from newborns, the whole thing is just nuts.
But see at LEAST in your example you can't just grab the damned thing because they are outside and you are in, at least THAT makes fucking sense!
Again look at my example with the grate or the door, in both of those you HAVE what would be the simplest and most obvious means of solving the problem but it won't LET YOU use any kind of common sense, its like its punishing you for not smoking a bong and turning off your brain so you can figure out what "wacky hi-jinks" they expect you to fucking do to get through what should be a simple fucking thing.
And the bitch is it would take 5 seconds worth of thinking on the part of the developers to fix this shit which is why i say its just being lazy. The grate? Don't give me a fucking screwdriver or a prybar before that, or have alarms set on the grates so if I try to just pop it off I'm gonna get caught...done! See how just 5 seconds of thinking could remove the glaring "Dr Evil Logic" plot holes in the puzzle? like I said with red faction ALL THEY DID was change the texture of the door from wood to metal, that is it. Then when you got to the door not being able to open it with your AK47 or RPG made fricking sense, its 8 inches of plate steel so its like a firecracker hitting the thing. All it would take is just 5 minutes of thought, hell just grab a guy off the street and show him the sitch and see if he names off an obvious solution and then write in a reason why that solution won't work.
I'm not asking for much here, hell I'm not even saying they can't go for the "wacky hi-jinks' puzzles, just put a little thought into it so obviously easier solutions aren't bitchslapping you in the face the entire time...is that REALLY so much to ask for?
Crosshair, dude, lay off the beer before you post, seriously as YOU MISSED THE ENTIRE POINT of the fucking post!
I do NOT give a rat's ass about the iron broad or her policies all I was doing was highlighting how stats are bullshit without details and THAT IS IT, okay? THAT IS ALL. I honestly do not care enough about the fricking UK to bother even looking up whether her policies worked or not as I REALLY do not care, i really don't. I DO care however on the fact that anybody can pull a metric out of their ass and without details can say any damned thing they want. Like I said if you just go by Walmart's payroll size you'd think they were a fucking blessing upon the economy but when you look closer and see how much government assistance it requires to keep a Walmart employee from sleeping on a grate behind the store? Then they are a BLIGHT NOT A BLESSING and the ONLY thing that has changed is you have gathered more information, THAT IS ALL.
So please do NOT tell me you are arguing that fucking ignorance is bliss because then I'll have to throw your words right back at you, you are better than that. Was the iron broad better or worse? Fuck if I know, i don't care, I really don't. I was simply pointing out pulling a single vague metric out of your ass can make her a hero or a villain and tells us exactly fuck all about what was really going on. hell pick the right metric, like how much the top 5% made in the past 5 years? you would NEVER know there was a slump, the data would show its all blue skies and puppies, but that is just cherry picking which was the fucking point, vague metrics without context are just fucking useless.