I really don't know how much of Bush's was "playing" friend, ever watch a collection of "Bushisms"? One can't just butcher the living hell out of basic speech THAT badly and fake it easily. I have a feeling its more like TFA, Bush was a rich kid that majored in keg tapping and hiring other people to do the work and hey! He got to be POTUS so that's cool, right?
Lets face it, there really is no difference between the current system and the feudal system of old, only difference is you are given your title by big corp instead of the state. The rich didn't really have to work to get the cushy life back then, they don't have to really work to get the cushy life now, the Harvards and Yales might as well be handing out titles of count and baron since its insider track means anybody that graduates there will be among the top 5% of the country as far as lifestyle. Notice they didn't throw anybody out? Can't piss off the elite ya know.
This is why I gotta agree with Jim Sterling who says consoles are just crappy PCs because instead of consoles embracing the good parts of PCs, lower prices, faster refreshes, they have adopted the absolute worst aspects of the PC, the DRM, lots of patches, and added shitty on top like lousy MP (which in the case of the X360 you actually pay for) and prices staying higher for longer. As he points out there really isn't any upsides to the consoles anymore, even a low end PC can do better graphics while lowering your cost for games by a pretty damned large amount.
Oooooorrrr...you could just admit that doody and bario are beating ye old dead horse for all she be worth and call it a day? Hell Nintendo has built an empire out of dead horse beating and nostalgia, if people are willing to buy new systems just to play the same 3 or 4 games whose to say they are wrong? I don't get Madden either but I hear its a license to print money and at the end of the day that's what its all about, getting those gamers to open up them wallets and let the money out.
Well we haven't heard either company say a peep about compatibility and since we are talking about a change of arch that's pretty radical (PPC and Cell for a quad AMD with HT) I'd say the odds are poor for backwards compatibility. of course both current systems have been out so long that they are plentiful and cheap so I have a feeling both companies will tell you simply hang onto the one you have, although I kinda doubt that they will keep making the PS3 the way they made the PS2 for so long as they were never able to get the price down on the cell chip.
That said it looks like the only system that isn't gonna come with AMD this time is the Steambox, Nintendo went with an AMD GPU, the PS4 an AMD APU and the Xboxxx or whatever its called having an AMD CPU plus GPU. This will be pretty interesting and should be a boon to us PC gamers as porting between the systems should be pretty damned trivial this time, I don't know if calling these systems "octo-core" is correct though, you look at the tests of the Bulldozer arch and it really behaves more like a quad with HT than they do true cores like the Stars arch. In either case with that much horsepower we should have plenty of room for great looking and playing games, bring it on I say.
Well you might want to wait until your sober, as most wouldn't consider anarchists as "left" anymore than they would consider a facist as "right". These are fringe groups that don't really fit into the "left/right" dynamic of American politics which is the subject at hand.
To have any kind of relevance on the American political landscape one would at least have to have a platform where your ideas can be exposed to the masses and anarchists just don't have that, nor are they included in discussions or have a place at the table, again like the fascists.
So I'm sorry but for the purposes of American politics they simply have no voice, you might as well be posting links to militia sites for as little effect they have on American politics. If you want to see the left that will actually get the laws that will effect you rammed through just go to HuffPo, Mother Jones, these are where the American left hang out and frankly they are just as much for Big Brother as the right, its too sides of the same coin.
Except that because the desktop is merely an "app" running on top of metro you have Metro sucking down resources no matter if you ever touch the thing, you have control panel settings splattered between the metro settings and classic control panel, and that thanks to their anti-piracy crap things that used to be simple like making a restore CD that actually restores the OS (as opposed to just bootstrapping a hidden image) on the drive is damned near impossible.....but yeah, other than that its just Windows 7/rolls eyes/.
If you haven't seen it I urge you to watch this video that was highlighted the other day right here which explains better than I ever could why Win 8 just don't cut it. I would only add that when discussing Win 8 on several tech sites i found techs, that have NO problem with the funkier UIs in Linux or just running in CLI, all of them had trouble doing basic tasks and after more than 6 months running it most couldn't do even half what they could in 7 on 8, MSFT just doesn't explain shit or give anybody any real context clues in this OS, its just confusing and poorly designed.
Garbage, but then again so is their version of Word for anything more complex than a grocery list. Honestly MS Office is one of the few places where there really is no competition, LO isn't even up to Office 97 when it comes to feature parity and Google docs is pretty damned basic.
But the problem for MSFT is most offices frankly don't need the "latest and greatest" MS Office, i know quite a few still on Office 2K3 or 2K7 that are quite happy where they are at. Frankly this gives the competition a static target to aim for while making it harder for MSFT to sell new versions of Office in a down economy but ATM for serious office use MS Office is really the only game in town.
don't get me wrong, LO has its uses, most of my home users are quite happy with LO and for the kinds of things a home user does, book reports and recipes and making a little slidehow for school it works just fine, it just isn't any kind of real competition for MS Office anymore than gimp is a suitable replacement for Photoshop or even Corel Draw.
While this is true I have to say that analogy works pretty damned well, as so are chairs and pens and paperclips in your average office but its not something most think about and there certainly isn't much brand loyalty to most of that stuff. Sure you'll stick with the brand you have been buying as long as its stays reasonably similar due to apathy and because its just easier to stick with what you know but if they suddenly jack the price or make it a giant PITA to use its not like switching to another brand is gonna bother you all that much as long as it performs the same or similar.
But you can really tell by watching the moves Ballmer has made the past few years he really thinks he has a "brand" that he can charge top dollar while gimping the hell out of it and people will just pay because "They love my product so much" when in reality? Honestly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows, ALL they care about is the software they want to run which happens to run on windows. If somebody comes up with a Wine style emulation layer so it all "just runs" or the companies start porting it all to Android and iOS? Most won't be bothered in the slightest to walk away from Windows, especially when they are trying to force a lame Windows 3.x looking UI down our throats.
Dude XP is dead as a doornail, nobody out there is gonna have a card capable of OpenGL 4.2 running on some ancient WinXP box, they just aren't. Believe me I know as i have plenty of customers with XP boxes but every damned one is a LEGACY box being used to run old applications or as a nettop/netbook NOT as a gaming system.
So if you want to talk about how you can use OpenGL on mobile phones that would be one thing but you ain't finding new hardware on XP boxes, I bet if you did a poll of the hardware a good 80%+ of the XP boxes out there are Pentium 4s, the rest a mix of Athlons and Pentium Ds, with the average box being a 2.x GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and 80-160GB HDD, and a good70%+ of those having Intel integrated graphics NOT something you are gonna be gaming on. Unless you think Farmville counts as gaming.
Its all a variation on the classic "for the good of the public" argument only now they throw in rising health costs as a red herring to take people's minds off the fact its all about control, same as its always been. This is why I have come up with my own "modest proposal" which I've found short circuits all their arguments and lays bare the true desire which again is control.
Its actually quite simple to do, simply walk up to ANY politician, be they state or federal and make this proposal "I will sign an ironclad contract that if I EVER get ill the only treatment I will get is morphine, which is the cheapest painkiller we have, and in return you remove ALL sin taxes and restrictions on me, deal?"
Give this proposal to any politician and watch them squirm because it takes away all the bullshit they are used to using like "rising healthcare costs" and leaves them with actually having to justify treating us like we're infants and they can't. Ultimately you are either a responsible adult or you aren't and an adult has the right to make choices, even ones that may/may not be good for them.
But as far as "dissent being patriotic" during the Bush years? You forget the Dixie Chick album burnings already? This is why I never could subscribe to either the left or the right as too often they become two sides of the same coin. the same ones that flipped their shit over Dubya using drone strikes and running Gitmo don't say a single peep if Obama does the same shit because "that's different" somehow. If you are gonna be for or against something fucking be for or against it, flip flopping because of a single D or R after the title makes you nothing but a hypocrite.
But the bigger point, which is why these stupid "wars on drugs" never ever work, is that as long as somebody is willing to pay SOMEBODY is gonna take that business. If Silk Road goes under they'll just move to Freenet or some other anon communication tool, its not like people haven't been using the net for dope deals since the days of BBS so the ONLY difference here is some noobs in the press got wind of it, that's all.
This is why I'm ultimately for legalizing most drugs (There are some like the so called "bath salts" that do so much brain damage that frankly they are just too dangerous) because as long as somebody wants to get high somebody else is going to be willing to take that money. The Silk Road is just another flash in the pan, dealing on the net existed before and it'll exist after, this is just another fad.
Its simply gonna go back to the "old days" of the traveling troubadour, going from town to town and singing for your supper. The problem is the cartels have made damned sure you can give up on any kind of indie collective bargaining, they make sure they are the gatekeepers to the radio, MTV, etc so that you have to sell everything you have worked so hard to create for pennies to get anywhere.
So this really doesn't surprise me, its either live hand to mouth or sign with a label and risk losing everything, see for example Meatloaf having to file for bankruptcy after "Hollywood accounting" said Bat Out Of Hell I, which still holds the record for longest charting on the billboard top 200 BTW, didn't make a profit, or how Cheap Trick is having to sue their former label for not getting a single cent from any digital sales.
So its not like the big names get treated much better, the Internet has given all the tools to the musician but the downside of that is with so much competition the actual amount made per song is lower than its ever been and will go nowhere but down. The smart musician will be selling everything from t-shirts to keyrings and will have to do a LOT of traveling to make ends meet, if you are the kind of act that can only exist on recordings? Well things aren't gonna be good for you that's for sure.
I wouldn't call it hype, even those of us who hate Apple for their policies can admit they have a marketing team second to none. Just look at the iPad, tablets certainly weren't new or innovative but it was Apple marketing that made them the "must have" device. Also if you look at Apple's history they have NO choice but to try to get into new markets as any market they are in will become commodity soon enough and their ability to charge a premium dries up, again see the pads and phones and how quickly lower priced Android units have grown.
So we all know Apple has to try to create a new market for them to sell expensive consumer gear in, the only question is where and Gabe may be right that they take a real shot at the living room and try to leverage iTunes to carve out a chunk of the market. Although Gabe frankly also needs to be worried about Windows because like it or not the majority of AAA PC games are DirectX and its gonna be hell getting anybody to port all those games to OpenGL. Lets face it OpenGL has never been less popular for AAA gaming titles, the consensus being that DirectX is easier to use when going for high end graphics and the fact you can't use OpenGL ES on the desktop certainly doesn't help matters so gabe still has to worry about Ballmer crapping all over the desktop and ruining it for everybody. Until he can get the majority of games to be ported like it or not Gabe you are stuck with Ballmer.....man that has GOT to suck.
Uhhhh...I thought that was what those 75% off Steam sales were for? I don't care about reselling the games because frankly the vast majority I'm getting for cheaper than renting the console version so honestly who cares about resale? I think the most I paid for a single purchase was $17 and I got all the Crysis games for that!
To me the prices that you get by going steam make it well worth not having resale which honestly would be such a pittance that it wouldn't be worth the effort anyway. And if I want to give a game to a friend? I just gift them a copy, not like these games are expensive or anything. I mean sure if you buy on release day its gonna be full price but there are soooo many games on Steam and so many sales I don't have to buy squat on release day, hell i haven't gotten through all the games i got from the summer sale yet, much less the fall sale, Xmas sale, or the THQ Humble Bundle, there are more great games cheap than i got hours in the day!
So if you want to pass a game to a friend or family member just do as i do and keep an eye out on the sales, it'll come around again. And that way you can give it to them as the complete series or with all the DLC in one bundle which is frankly a nicer gift anyway.
For THAT to be true MSFT would have to have a CEO with vision, evil vision but vision nonetheless, and what we have seen in Ballmer is just "What is Apple doing? Lets do that but poorly" so until I see some proof i'm gonna have to call bullshit. If Gates were running the show? then I'd be right there with ya but frankly Ballmer couldn't pull off the EEE maneuver if you drew it out in crayon and came up with a little song to go with it.
More likely they had trouble getting DirectX to run on his precious WinPhone and God fucking forbid that the whole shitty company isn't 110% behind WinPhone so anything that doesn't run on WinPhone? Probably gonna be getting shitcanned.
I'd say the only positive is when the WinPhones and Wintabs hit Woot! for dirt cheap those of us who missed out on a TouchPad might get a shot but knowing Ballmer's ego he'll probably bury them in NM next to the ET carts rather than admit his "brilliant" Windows 8 plan is a big giant failwhale. If this turns out to be true though Valve really ought to send Ballmer a nice moist delicious cake, after all he'll have done more to get the game devs to leave Windows than anybody as nobody is gonna want to develop for a dead end.
What I don't get is why he'd choose Win 3.1 of all things when Win95 has been supported for the last couple of releases and its a lot easier to find newer programs that will run on Win9X than it is to find stuff that runs on Win 3.x, not to mention while Win95 wasn't the most stable OS out there it was leaps and bounds better than 3.x.
Not according to the SCOTUS they ain't, because they ruled that you are SOL if you can't defend yourself, the cops have ZERO obligation to even show up at all, much less show up in a timely manner.
This is why I tell all those that are for banning guns to go read for themselves Castle Rock V Gonzales, the SCOTUS could not make it more clear if they drew a picture. At the end of the day the ONLY one you can count on to protect your family is YOU, the cops don't even have to show up at all if they don't feel like it.
Yeah there was, they were gonna make anything that could be product placement blue and then they could green screen any product that week that they wanted.
Which just makes his "The public has a right to know" even more asinine, where do you want the notice? 10 minutes of single space text scrolling before every show and movie? some website which 90% of the public will never visit where you keep a DB of each product and where it was and who paid?
Saying "the public has a right to know" sounds all well and good until you start looking at the details and then it gets over-complicated REAL fucking quick, you could have something the size of people magazine in disclaimers just for the shows your average person watches in a single day. the info overload would get overwhelming pretty damned fast.
Its actually quite simple, Steve Ballmer is burning the company to the ground because he has it in his big fat head that he has a "brand" like Prada and Nike when in reality he has a replaceable good, like Coke or Pepsi.
You see Steve Ballmer thinks if you click your heels three times and say "There is no place like Cupertino" why you can just turn the company into Apple, of course those of us in the trenches know there ain't enough dope in the world to make it so, but old fathead doesn't see any value in anything that isn't just aping Apple, hence why he shit on the desktop, he's shitting on the OEMs, and now he's shitting all over DirectX which frankly is the only thing that keeps many on windows.
My only question is will Gates get tired of seeing everything he spent so many years building being burnt to the ground and step in, or will he kick back with his big piles o' cash and just watch the whole thing burn?
Uhhhh...yeah, you go right on believing that Sparky. Most of the "ultra far left" I've talked to would be quite happy for a communist state ala the classic Soviet model, where "Big Mother" would take care of you from womb to the tomb, you would be told what to do and everything would be taken care of by the state.
Ironically the "ultra far left" remind me the most of the bible thumpers on the ultra right, as BOTH don't want to think for themselves, BOTH want some higher authority to tell them what to do, and BOTH are happy handing the reigns over to this higher authority. But I'm sorry but the only definition of ultra left that fits yours is in your own mind, go to HuffPo or Mother Jones or any other place the ultra left hang out and tell them that and see how far you get.
Ah screw that, give me a Maliwan Hellfire, when I tripped over that bad boy I was "Hellllloooo baby! Come to daddy!" and would be happy to buy that bad boy IRL. "Bullets not doing enough damage? Buy a Maliwan and set your opponents on fire!"
Dude, seriously, go watch Jack & Jill, its your "Logo, The Movie" made flesh. I swear if you did a drinking game where you took a shot where you saw an obvious product placement you'd have alcohol poisoning inside of 20 minutes, yes its THAT bad.
But that movie is like "They Live" in that once you have seen it, its like it takes the blinders off as you WILL start noticing the product placements a lot more and you'd be surprised, damned near every movie of the past 5 years is so product heavy its not even funny.
But how many will just go somewhere else instead? i know that I frequently shop at Amazon, Tigerdirect, and Newegg and if one was down I'd just go to the next one, not like they all don't sell tech stuff.
So while its true that some might come back later one of the nice things about doing your shopping on the web is that you aren't stuck doing your shopping in one place and i have a feeling that many would do just like me and go "oh well" and just go to the next site.
Wrong several businesses have been sued because an employee merely had a radio playing while they worked to make the day a little more pleasant, that constituted a "public performance" and thus was illegal.
I'm afraid the laws have been twisted so badly in the last 25 years that you just whistling a tune while you walk down the street could be copyright infringement, its that big of a fucked up maze of laws now.
Wow, way for you and everybody else to miss the point. Don't feel bad, I used to miss the point to, trying to apply things like common sense and logic to these things.
But you see logic and common sense need not apply here, just like how copyrights have become "forever minus a single day" and protect the "rights" of people that have been worm food for decades its ALL about allowing a bunch of old fucks at the top to continue to stay at the top, that's all. It lets those in power put up toll booths that their fellow corporate owners have no trouble paying but which leaves new startups with no choice to sell out or be crushed under a wall of lawsuits they can't afford to fight, even if they are proven ultimately to be right the lawyer's fees alone will break them.
so if you look at it from that perspective, that these things are written so rich old fucks who got there first can stay on top? Then it all makes perfect sense. oh its evil and wrong and will allow another country like China to come along and eventually supplant us but as long as the old fucks at the top get to keep their mountains of money that's perfectly okay then.
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I really don't know how much of Bush's was "playing" friend, ever watch a collection of "Bushisms"? One can't just butcher the living hell out of basic speech THAT badly and fake it easily. I have a feeling its more like TFA, Bush was a rich kid that majored in keg tapping and hiring other people to do the work and hey! He got to be POTUS so that's cool, right?
Lets face it, there really is no difference between the current system and the feudal system of old, only difference is you are given your title by big corp instead of the state. The rich didn't really have to work to get the cushy life back then, they don't have to really work to get the cushy life now, the Harvards and Yales might as well be handing out titles of count and baron since its insider track means anybody that graduates there will be among the top 5% of the country as far as lifestyle. Notice they didn't throw anybody out? Can't piss off the elite ya know.
This is why I gotta agree with Jim Sterling who says consoles are just crappy PCs because instead of consoles embracing the good parts of PCs, lower prices, faster refreshes, they have adopted the absolute worst aspects of the PC, the DRM, lots of patches, and added shitty on top like lousy MP (which in the case of the X360 you actually pay for) and prices staying higher for longer. As he points out there really isn't any upsides to the consoles anymore, even a low end PC can do better graphics while lowering your cost for games by a pretty damned large amount.
Oooooorrrr...you could just admit that doody and bario are beating ye old dead horse for all she be worth and call it a day? Hell Nintendo has built an empire out of dead horse beating and nostalgia, if people are willing to buy new systems just to play the same 3 or 4 games whose to say they are wrong? I don't get Madden either but I hear its a license to print money and at the end of the day that's what its all about, getting those gamers to open up them wallets and let the money out.
Well we haven't heard either company say a peep about compatibility and since we are talking about a change of arch that's pretty radical (PPC and Cell for a quad AMD with HT) I'd say the odds are poor for backwards compatibility. of course both current systems have been out so long that they are plentiful and cheap so I have a feeling both companies will tell you simply hang onto the one you have, although I kinda doubt that they will keep making the PS3 the way they made the PS2 for so long as they were never able to get the price down on the cell chip.
That said it looks like the only system that isn't gonna come with AMD this time is the Steambox, Nintendo went with an AMD GPU, the PS4 an AMD APU and the Xboxxx or whatever its called having an AMD CPU plus GPU. This will be pretty interesting and should be a boon to us PC gamers as porting between the systems should be pretty damned trivial this time, I don't know if calling these systems "octo-core" is correct though, you look at the tests of the Bulldozer arch and it really behaves more like a quad with HT than they do true cores like the Stars arch. In either case with that much horsepower we should have plenty of room for great looking and playing games, bring it on I say.
Well you might want to wait until your sober, as most wouldn't consider anarchists as "left" anymore than they would consider a facist as "right". These are fringe groups that don't really fit into the "left/right" dynamic of American politics which is the subject at hand.
To have any kind of relevance on the American political landscape one would at least have to have a platform where your ideas can be exposed to the masses and anarchists just don't have that, nor are they included in discussions or have a place at the table, again like the fascists.
So I'm sorry but for the purposes of American politics they simply have no voice, you might as well be posting links to militia sites for as little effect they have on American politics. If you want to see the left that will actually get the laws that will effect you rammed through just go to HuffPo, Mother Jones, these are where the American left hang out and frankly they are just as much for Big Brother as the right, its too sides of the same coin.
Except that because the desktop is merely an "app" running on top of metro you have Metro sucking down resources no matter if you ever touch the thing, you have control panel settings splattered between the metro settings and classic control panel, and that thanks to their anti-piracy crap things that used to be simple like making a restore CD that actually restores the OS (as opposed to just bootstrapping a hidden image) on the drive is damned near impossible.....but yeah, other than that its just Windows 7 /rolls eyes/.
If you haven't seen it I urge you to watch this video that was highlighted the other day right here which explains better than I ever could why Win 8 just don't cut it. I would only add that when discussing Win 8 on several tech sites i found techs, that have NO problem with the funkier UIs in Linux or just running in CLI, all of them had trouble doing basic tasks and after more than 6 months running it most couldn't do even half what they could in 7 on 8, MSFT just doesn't explain shit or give anybody any real context clues in this OS, its just confusing and poorly designed.
Garbage, but then again so is their version of Word for anything more complex than a grocery list. Honestly MS Office is one of the few places where there really is no competition, LO isn't even up to Office 97 when it comes to feature parity and Google docs is pretty damned basic.
But the problem for MSFT is most offices frankly don't need the "latest and greatest" MS Office, i know quite a few still on Office 2K3 or 2K7 that are quite happy where they are at. Frankly this gives the competition a static target to aim for while making it harder for MSFT to sell new versions of Office in a down economy but ATM for serious office use MS Office is really the only game in town.
don't get me wrong, LO has its uses, most of my home users are quite happy with LO and for the kinds of things a home user does, book reports and recipes and making a little slidehow for school it works just fine, it just isn't any kind of real competition for MS Office anymore than gimp is a suitable replacement for Photoshop or even Corel Draw.
While this is true I have to say that analogy works pretty damned well, as so are chairs and pens and paperclips in your average office but its not something most think about and there certainly isn't much brand loyalty to most of that stuff. Sure you'll stick with the brand you have been buying as long as its stays reasonably similar due to apathy and because its just easier to stick with what you know but if they suddenly jack the price or make it a giant PITA to use its not like switching to another brand is gonna bother you all that much as long as it performs the same or similar.
But you can really tell by watching the moves Ballmer has made the past few years he really thinks he has a "brand" that he can charge top dollar while gimping the hell out of it and people will just pay because "They love my product so much" when in reality? Honestly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows, ALL they care about is the software they want to run which happens to run on windows. If somebody comes up with a Wine style emulation layer so it all "just runs" or the companies start porting it all to Android and iOS? Most won't be bothered in the slightest to walk away from Windows, especially when they are trying to force a lame Windows 3.x looking UI down our throats.
Dude XP is dead as a doornail, nobody out there is gonna have a card capable of OpenGL 4.2 running on some ancient WinXP box, they just aren't. Believe me I know as i have plenty of customers with XP boxes but every damned one is a LEGACY box being used to run old applications or as a nettop/netbook NOT as a gaming system.
So if you want to talk about how you can use OpenGL on mobile phones that would be one thing but you ain't finding new hardware on XP boxes, I bet if you did a poll of the hardware a good 80%+ of the XP boxes out there are Pentium 4s, the rest a mix of Athlons and Pentium Ds, with the average box being a 2.x GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and 80-160GB HDD, and a good70%+ of those having Intel integrated graphics NOT something you are gonna be gaming on. Unless you think Farmville counts as gaming.
Its all a variation on the classic "for the good of the public" argument only now they throw in rising health costs as a red herring to take people's minds off the fact its all about control, same as its always been. This is why I have come up with my own "modest proposal" which I've found short circuits all their arguments and lays bare the true desire which again is control.
Its actually quite simple to do, simply walk up to ANY politician, be they state or federal and make this proposal "I will sign an ironclad contract that if I EVER get ill the only treatment I will get is morphine, which is the cheapest painkiller we have, and in return you remove ALL sin taxes and restrictions on me, deal?"
Give this proposal to any politician and watch them squirm because it takes away all the bullshit they are used to using like "rising healthcare costs" and leaves them with actually having to justify treating us like we're infants and they can't. Ultimately you are either a responsible adult or you aren't and an adult has the right to make choices, even ones that may/may not be good for them.
But as far as "dissent being patriotic" during the Bush years? You forget the Dixie Chick album burnings already? This is why I never could subscribe to either the left or the right as too often they become two sides of the same coin. the same ones that flipped their shit over Dubya using drone strikes and running Gitmo don't say a single peep if Obama does the same shit because "that's different" somehow. If you are gonna be for or against something fucking be for or against it, flip flopping because of a single D or R after the title makes you nothing but a hypocrite.
But the bigger point, which is why these stupid "wars on drugs" never ever work, is that as long as somebody is willing to pay SOMEBODY is gonna take that business. If Silk Road goes under they'll just move to Freenet or some other anon communication tool, its not like people haven't been using the net for dope deals since the days of BBS so the ONLY difference here is some noobs in the press got wind of it, that's all.
This is why I'm ultimately for legalizing most drugs (There are some like the so called "bath salts" that do so much brain damage that frankly they are just too dangerous) because as long as somebody wants to get high somebody else is going to be willing to take that money. The Silk Road is just another flash in the pan, dealing on the net existed before and it'll exist after, this is just another fad.
Its simply gonna go back to the "old days" of the traveling troubadour, going from town to town and singing for your supper. The problem is the cartels have made damned sure you can give up on any kind of indie collective bargaining, they make sure they are the gatekeepers to the radio, MTV, etc so that you have to sell everything you have worked so hard to create for pennies to get anywhere.
So this really doesn't surprise me, its either live hand to mouth or sign with a label and risk losing everything, see for example Meatloaf having to file for bankruptcy after "Hollywood accounting" said Bat Out Of Hell I, which still holds the record for longest charting on the billboard top 200 BTW, didn't make a profit, or how Cheap Trick is having to sue their former label for not getting a single cent from any digital sales.
So its not like the big names get treated much better, the Internet has given all the tools to the musician but the downside of that is with so much competition the actual amount made per song is lower than its ever been and will go nowhere but down. The smart musician will be selling everything from t-shirts to keyrings and will have to do a LOT of traveling to make ends meet, if you are the kind of act that can only exist on recordings? Well things aren't gonna be good for you that's for sure.
I wouldn't call it hype, even those of us who hate Apple for their policies can admit they have a marketing team second to none. Just look at the iPad, tablets certainly weren't new or innovative but it was Apple marketing that made them the "must have" device. Also if you look at Apple's history they have NO choice but to try to get into new markets as any market they are in will become commodity soon enough and their ability to charge a premium dries up, again see the pads and phones and how quickly lower priced Android units have grown.
So we all know Apple has to try to create a new market for them to sell expensive consumer gear in, the only question is where and Gabe may be right that they take a real shot at the living room and try to leverage iTunes to carve out a chunk of the market. Although Gabe frankly also needs to be worried about Windows because like it or not the majority of AAA PC games are DirectX and its gonna be hell getting anybody to port all those games to OpenGL. Lets face it OpenGL has never been less popular for AAA gaming titles, the consensus being that DirectX is easier to use when going for high end graphics and the fact you can't use OpenGL ES on the desktop certainly doesn't help matters so gabe still has to worry about Ballmer crapping all over the desktop and ruining it for everybody. Until he can get the majority of games to be ported like it or not Gabe you are stuck with Ballmer.....man that has GOT to suck.
Uhhhh...I thought that was what those 75% off Steam sales were for? I don't care about reselling the games because frankly the vast majority I'm getting for cheaper than renting the console version so honestly who cares about resale? I think the most I paid for a single purchase was $17 and I got all the Crysis games for that!
To me the prices that you get by going steam make it well worth not having resale which honestly would be such a pittance that it wouldn't be worth the effort anyway. And if I want to give a game to a friend? I just gift them a copy, not like these games are expensive or anything. I mean sure if you buy on release day its gonna be full price but there are soooo many games on Steam and so many sales I don't have to buy squat on release day, hell i haven't gotten through all the games i got from the summer sale yet, much less the fall sale, Xmas sale, or the THQ Humble Bundle, there are more great games cheap than i got hours in the day!
So if you want to pass a game to a friend or family member just do as i do and keep an eye out on the sales, it'll come around again. And that way you can give it to them as the complete series or with all the DLC in one bundle which is frankly a nicer gift anyway.
For THAT to be true MSFT would have to have a CEO with vision, evil vision but vision nonetheless, and what we have seen in Ballmer is just "What is Apple doing? Lets do that but poorly" so until I see some proof i'm gonna have to call bullshit. If Gates were running the show? then I'd be right there with ya but frankly Ballmer couldn't pull off the EEE maneuver if you drew it out in crayon and came up with a little song to go with it.
More likely they had trouble getting DirectX to run on his precious WinPhone and God fucking forbid that the whole shitty company isn't 110% behind WinPhone so anything that doesn't run on WinPhone? Probably gonna be getting shitcanned.
I'd say the only positive is when the WinPhones and Wintabs hit Woot! for dirt cheap those of us who missed out on a TouchPad might get a shot but knowing Ballmer's ego he'll probably bury them in NM next to the ET carts rather than admit his "brilliant" Windows 8 plan is a big giant failwhale. If this turns out to be true though Valve really ought to send Ballmer a nice moist delicious cake, after all he'll have done more to get the game devs to leave Windows than anybody as nobody is gonna want to develop for a dead end.
What I don't get is why he'd choose Win 3.1 of all things when Win95 has been supported for the last couple of releases and its a lot easier to find newer programs that will run on Win9X than it is to find stuff that runs on Win 3.x, not to mention while Win95 wasn't the most stable OS out there it was leaps and bounds better than 3.x.
Not according to the SCOTUS they ain't, because they ruled that you are SOL if you can't defend yourself, the cops have ZERO obligation to even show up at all, much less show up in a timely manner.
This is why I tell all those that are for banning guns to go read for themselves Castle Rock V Gonzales, the SCOTUS could not make it more clear if they drew a picture. At the end of the day the ONLY one you can count on to protect your family is YOU, the cops don't even have to show up at all if they don't feel like it.
Yeah there was, they were gonna make anything that could be product placement blue and then they could green screen any product that week that they wanted.
Which just makes his "The public has a right to know" even more asinine, where do you want the notice? 10 minutes of single space text scrolling before every show and movie? some website which 90% of the public will never visit where you keep a DB of each product and where it was and who paid?
Saying "the public has a right to know" sounds all well and good until you start looking at the details and then it gets over-complicated REAL fucking quick, you could have something the size of people magazine in disclaimers just for the shows your average person watches in a single day. the info overload would get overwhelming pretty damned fast.
Its actually quite simple, Steve Ballmer is burning the company to the ground because he has it in his big fat head that he has a "brand" like Prada and Nike when in reality he has a replaceable good, like Coke or Pepsi.
You see Steve Ballmer thinks if you click your heels three times and say "There is no place like Cupertino" why you can just turn the company into Apple, of course those of us in the trenches know there ain't enough dope in the world to make it so, but old fathead doesn't see any value in anything that isn't just aping Apple, hence why he shit on the desktop, he's shitting on the OEMs, and now he's shitting all over DirectX which frankly is the only thing that keeps many on windows.
My only question is will Gates get tired of seeing everything he spent so many years building being burnt to the ground and step in, or will he kick back with his big piles o' cash and just watch the whole thing burn?
Uhhhh...yeah, you go right on believing that Sparky. Most of the "ultra far left" I've talked to would be quite happy for a communist state ala the classic Soviet model, where "Big Mother" would take care of you from womb to the tomb, you would be told what to do and everything would be taken care of by the state.
Ironically the "ultra far left" remind me the most of the bible thumpers on the ultra right, as BOTH don't want to think for themselves, BOTH want some higher authority to tell them what to do, and BOTH are happy handing the reigns over to this higher authority. But I'm sorry but the only definition of ultra left that fits yours is in your own mind, go to HuffPo or Mother Jones or any other place the ultra left hang out and tell them that and see how far you get.
Ah screw that, give me a Maliwan Hellfire, when I tripped over that bad boy I was "Hellllloooo baby! Come to daddy!" and would be happy to buy that bad boy IRL. "Bullets not doing enough damage? Buy a Maliwan and set your opponents on fire!"
Dude, seriously, go watch Jack & Jill, its your "Logo, The Movie" made flesh. I swear if you did a drinking game where you took a shot where you saw an obvious product placement you'd have alcohol poisoning inside of 20 minutes, yes its THAT bad.
But that movie is like "They Live" in that once you have seen it, its like it takes the blinders off as you WILL start noticing the product placements a lot more and you'd be surprised, damned near every movie of the past 5 years is so product heavy its not even funny.
But how many will just go somewhere else instead? i know that I frequently shop at Amazon, Tigerdirect, and Newegg and if one was down I'd just go to the next one, not like they all don't sell tech stuff.
So while its true that some might come back later one of the nice things about doing your shopping on the web is that you aren't stuck doing your shopping in one place and i have a feeling that many would do just like me and go "oh well" and just go to the next site.
Wrong several businesses have been sued because an employee merely had a radio playing while they worked to make the day a little more pleasant, that constituted a "public performance" and thus was illegal.
I'm afraid the laws have been twisted so badly in the last 25 years that you just whistling a tune while you walk down the street could be copyright infringement, its that big of a fucked up maze of laws now.
Wow, way for you and everybody else to miss the point. Don't feel bad, I used to miss the point to, trying to apply things like common sense and logic to these things.
But you see logic and common sense need not apply here, just like how copyrights have become "forever minus a single day" and protect the "rights" of people that have been worm food for decades its ALL about allowing a bunch of old fucks at the top to continue to stay at the top, that's all. It lets those in power put up toll booths that their fellow corporate owners have no trouble paying but which leaves new startups with no choice to sell out or be crushed under a wall of lawsuits they can't afford to fight, even if they are proven ultimately to be right the lawyer's fees alone will break them.
so if you look at it from that perspective, that these things are written so rich old fucks who got there first can stay on top? Then it all makes perfect sense. oh its evil and wrong and will allow another country like China to come along and eventually supplant us but as long as the old fucks at the top get to keep their mountains of money that's perfectly okay then.