Well to be fair while Win 8 is a giant clusterfuck of a UI Win 7 did actually bring some nice useful features to the UI, such as breadcrumbs and jumplists. I've found with breadcrumbs I can fly around the file system quicker than I've ever been able to and jumplists make it so easy to get back to what i was working on the previous day. if you haven't tried them they are quite nice.
As for what's under the hood while it uses a little less memory (although personally I LIKE how Win 7 uses memory, having all my most used programs precached into RAM makes for a hell of a snappy OS, even on my little netbook) the only thing I'd wish they'd backport is the new services model which frankly Windows should have had a decade ago. For those that don't know Windows FINALLY has an on demand services mode, where a service will only activate as long as its used and turn itself off when its no longer needed.
But other than that one change frankly i haven't seen anything that would make me want to put up with metro or waste the time hacking metro away when Win 7 works great and is supported until 2020. I had high hopes that win 8 would simply be more of Win 7, since its frankly one of the most rock solid OSes I'd seen since XP X64 but I have no desire to replace my monitor with a touchscreen or get my programs from the MSFT "appstore" (man I'm really starting to hate that fucking word) so it just doesn't have anything to upsell me and from talking to my customers after playing with the Win 8 box I have set up in the shop frankly they aren't impressed either.
Bottom line? Unless you are buying a cell phone or touchscreen device like a tablet don't bother, Win 7 works just as well and doesn't feel like you should be holding your screen in your lap with a sliding keyboard like a supergigantic smartphone.
Well as I'm sure you know its impossible to prove a negative so showing that the Yankees, with their supposed "tolerance' is nothing but bullshit, is a lot easier. I've lived in both the north and the south and I can say NEVER have I seen so blatant "they know their place" attitude than I have in the north. Frankly the only reason there isn't even more race problems in the north is nobody goes into each other's neighborhoods for precisely that reason.
Now compare that to the south, where nearly every one of our big cities has gay communities now and nobody bothers them, in fact they quickly become tourist traps because the gay folks set up nice little shops and markets that cater to the tourists. In my apt building we have white, black, asian, and latino which frankly you never see up north because that kind of mixing? It just don't happen as everyone strictly stays to their neighborhood.
If anything I would argue the south has moved from racism to classism, where you have the poor, middle class, and rich neighborhoods and frankly there isn't much mixing of social groups but even that is changing now as the local college has gone out of its way to get more poor and lower middle class into the school which is quickly tearing down the class structures. My oldest has become a BMOC, head of his frat and on the dean's list and you see how much things are changing when I swing by to visit and I see his 2000 S10 parked at the frat surrounded by brand new Porsche and BMW sportscars.
So I think folks should quit looking at decades old history and come see the actual south and they'd find its certainly not like that anymore. In these small towns you can walk the streets at 3AM and the worst you'll have happen in most places is someone will ask if you've had a breakdown or somebody will ask if you have a cigarette, that's it. Hell i sat with my drummer at 2AM on the "wrong" side of Memphis having awesome BBQ at this little all night BBQ shack and the worst we got was locals laughing at how often i had to hit my drink to keep my mouth from burning up LOL! I know that up north being the only two white boys in a sea of black and Mexicans would NOT be someplace i'd wanna be, we simply wouldn't have been tolerated.
Tried it for 3 weeks, that good enough AC? And you might want to watch this video of a typical user reaction to Win 8 which I can tell you from having a Win 8 CP machine running in the shop for customers to play with I can tell you her reaction? VERY typical. See how lost she is? How the OS isn't giving her a damned clue about where to go or what to do? Do you know what the next stage of that reaction is? Its called frustration which sets in VERY quickly. Nobody likes feeling lost and that confusion quickly turns to anger.
Final verdict? Windows 8 is the new MS Bob and will most likely bomb hard if MSFT doesn't strong arm the living shit out of the OEMs to ONLY offer Win 8 which mark my words, will cause sales in an already bad market to go down. Why do you think dell is suddenly talking Ubuntu again? remember what was happening the LAST time they talked Ubuntu? A little OS called...Vista?
Here is the thing that gets to me....MSFT has always been known for using focus groups and actually having real honest to God user studies, so why then is this a typical reaction from my customers when they try the Win 8 CP box I have set up at the shop? See how lost she is? How she doesn't have a clue where to go or what to do and the OS is not even giving her so much as a tooltip or pop up to help?
So i'm sorry Win 8 fanbois, Win 8 isn't just bad with a keyboard and mouse, although it sucks the big wet titty on those, no Windows 8 is just a bad design PERIOD. Its not intuitive, its not discoverable, it doesn't follow either desktop or cellphone UI conventions, doesn't give the user jack shit in the way of help or guidance which is shocking as hell as MSFT ALWAYS has little tooltips and guides to help new users, in a word its a sloppily thrown together mess that simply doesn't belong on the desktop or laptop and gives the user nothing that Win 7 doesn't give with a much better experience.
Oh don't worry ya dang kangaroo munchers we ain't forgot about what you did to us in the USA, we'll get you yet!
I mean there we was, think y'all were friendly, we save your butts in WWII, you gave us some Foster's and it seemed like everything was going nice...hell you even gave us one of the best damned movies in history, the incredible piece of cinema known as Mad Max, but now we know it was just to trick us into thinking you were nice! I mean sure, we should have known you dirty down underers were up to something when you sent Olivia Newton John but we figured you was just blinded by the cuteness like we were and then....BAM! You hit us with Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious! That damned Young Einstein was so far beyond anything allowed in the Geneva Convention it would be considered an act of war in any civilized country! What in the hell did we ever do to you to deserve THAT huh? Hell even the commies weren't that damned mean, all they did was send us Yakov and made Russian reversals the lame joke of the century which was NOTHING compared to Reckless Kelley!
So you'll be getting yours you back stabbers, oh yes, you'll be getting yours. Just as soon as we find a containment unit powerful enough to stick that witch harpie Celine Dion in that'll withstand her shrieking long enough to launch her ass back to the frozen north (after they gave us The Shat, ought to roll the damned tanks on them filthy canucks) we'll be coming for YOU!
But the problem is they are marketing it wrong. Look at it THIS way, do you think anybody would have bought the "I Am Rich!" app on Android? they did on iOS. whether the Apple people want to admit it or not a LOT of the appeal is fashion and the ability to feel superior. Nothing wrong with that, Nike makes a mint off of Air Jordans that way and so do many other top brands.
But a good reason why you'll see less piracy on iOS is it ruins the whole effect. It would be like having Air Jordans held together with duct tape, it just takes away from the point of having an Apple device. Sure the average user wouldn't be able to tell but a lot of the appeal is "I have money see? i have Apple" so you won't see the piracy you do on Android, same as i bet piracy is lower on OSX than it is on Windows, its part of the mindset.
Frankly if it weren't for appstore restrictions it'd be easy to solve, you could just sell the android one for 25c and throw some extra bit into the iOS version so they could feel superior and that is the end of that. Maybe they should do like Steam and get together with other devs and offer bundles? After all during the Steam summer sale the Indie bundles stayed in the top 20 pretty much the entire run.
But its obvious that Android users simply won't pay the same price as iOS users and in a perfect world the devs could try different prices until they found the "sweet spot" but thanks to Apple's policies its same price or nothing.
You're not a luddite friend, the entire ecosystem is being turned into a giant shit sandwich by the ever growing greed and need for control of the big three and frankly its sucks the big wet titty.
If this is what a "post PC world" is supposed to be like, with SuperMegaCorp getting every bit of data and controlling all my devices and what i do with them...uhhh...no thanks?
And while we are at it can we please tell the OS devs that computers aren't really big smartphones and can we PLEASE bitchslap anyone that says the word "app" when NOT talking about a smartphone/tablet, please?
Sadly I see what they call "the future of computing" and all I can think of is the classic Monty Python "World's biggest twit" sketch, where a bunch of retards trip over themselves and can't even shoot themselves in the head correctly. That is what it feels like to me, Apple came out with iOS and the entire industry just lost its damned mind and decided EVERYTHING is a smartphone now "because dammit we want iMoney too!".../facepalm/
But the elephant in the room that nobody seems to be willing to accept is this....how many PCs do you honestly believe are gonna be sold with touchscreens?
As we saw recently both AMD and Intel are reporting worse projections for sales this year and yet we are supposed to believe that the answer is RAISING prices, in a dead economy, to throw on touchscreens? Really? Look at the prices for touchscreens folks they ain't cheap. Sure you can get a buggy PITA resistive but its still gonna cost a good $75-$100 more than the same screen without and as we all know resistive sucks ass. Even with economies of scale and the OEMs shaving to the bone for decent capacitive touchscreens in laptops and desktops you are talking a good $150+ more than current units cost.
Let me tell ya that as a PC retailer in the trenches, and talking to other retailers that frankly the "sweet spot" for a good 75%+ of your PC sales out there are between $350-$500, with the biggest sellers being the $400-$450 laptops. Go into any B&M that sells PCs and count how many AMD laptops you see, the stores will be full of them because that's the only way to hit the crucial price point with Intel pushing chips that are frankly too expensive as it is.
Mark my words....windows 8? The new MS Bob. The market simply won't support the price point required to move to touchscreens, not when so many are already afraid and living check to check. The OEMs certainly aren't gonna close their doors just because MSFT wants to be Apple, so they will either tell MSFT to do the same move they did when Vista flopped, that is to allow them to just keep selling Win 7 with a Win 8 DVD dropped in the box, or frankly they'll start talking to Google and Canonical. I have to wonder if it was a coincidence that Dell suddenly started talking Ubuntu again as it gives them leverage.
Its just not gonna work folks, windows 8 SUCKS without a touchscreen and we all know this. I wish i had bookmarked the article I saw praising win 8, it may have been WinSupersite, where they said "See how easy win 8 is? Now to show how well it runs on old hardware we'll use this touchscreen Athlon 64 laptop to run it" and I about died because that said it all right there. Without touch win 8 sucks and with a worldwide recession people simply aren't gonna shell out an extra 30%-40%+ they don't have for units with touchscreens.
Was it the south where those kids were beat to death for walking into the wrong neighborhood? Nope that was NJ. Race riots? IL, CA, nope not southern either. Was it the south where they beat a gay kid and left him to bleed and freeze to death? Nope again.
Maybe you might want to come down to the south sometime, then you'll find it ain't the 1950s anymore. most of the major cities here have thriving gay communities, went shopping at one last week, everyone was happy, plenty of PDAs, no bashing anywhere I could see.
In fact the only intolerance I've been seeing is with the Mexicans and frankly? they are just RUDE. they DEMAND everything be in THEIR language but won't even learn to say hello in ours, will shove you out of the way, make no attempt at conversation or integration, no wonder nobody likes them much. Everyobody else? Seems to be getting along just fine. We ran the Klan into the hills decades ago, and even in a teeny tiny town like mine most folks are nothing but friendly. in my apt building we got white, black, asian,gay, and one latina but she actually takes the time to say hello and be neighborly so she is treated just like everybody else.
So maybe its time you let go of your yankee bigotry and take another look, you might be surprised.
I'd argue the stock market frankly is a large cause of our current problems, both by allowing parasites to constantly leech money (in the form of sub second trades that only the super rich can afford to engage in) and by pushing a constantly shrinking short term "damn everything but the quarterly reports!" attitude.
If you look at the original stock market it was all about investment, you would see a company whom you believed had a sound plan and would invest in return for a piece of the pie. In a way it reminds me of what kickstarter is now, allowing those with a plan but without the needed capital to implement the plan to have the means to acquire the capital.
But with the current system long term planning and investment are chunked right out the window in favor of short term gains. Look at Circuit City for an example, the CEOs made a ton by firing the employees that actually made the most sales (and thus were paid more) and then cashing out before the whole business collapsed around them. The current system rewards short term thinking above all, even when that thinking ultimately torpedoes the company.
That is why I've said for years we need to tax the living hell out of the short term traders and get them out of the market. Something like 90% for trades that last less than a week, with the number going down until it reaches a very low number for long term, like say 3% for 5 years. Because until we can fix this frankly any company that plans long term, especially if that long term thinking requires spending capital to say upgrade capacity or infrastructure, will get a royal beat down by the market while those that only think short term get rewarded.
It would probably help if you had a good example and I think I have one....software patents. With software patents being purposely vague as hell it lets a company that didn't spend a dime or have a damned thing to do with a product get paid for that product anyway, thus making a barrier to entry against those that would compete. Take MSFT and Android for example, they didn't spend a dime making Android but because they have so many vague patents they get paid for millions of units they didn't have a damned thing to do with. You look at all of the really big corps and they all do this, using patents and copyrights to make sure nobody can play in their sandbox without a really big check or giving them a cut of everything, thus making sure they have no real way to lose.
So what you end up with when you are dealing with rent seekers is those at the top making sure that they always come out on top, no matter what happens. Think of it like a game of Three Card Monty you are forced to play every day as you walk out your door. You know you are not going to win, nobody ever does. You know he is not going to lose, he never does. But because he has a cop on the corner he makes sure you HAVE to play and that money you could have used to buy something else ends up in his pocket every. single. day.
Now personally i think the cop should be there to make sure that everyone gets the same odds and everyone plays fairly, but sadly we have such a high concentration of wealth in this country (you could take the holders of 85% of this country's wealth and put them in your average HS gym and have seats left over) that all we ever get is the corps buying the law or as we saw in the late 1800s the corps BEING the law, but in either case they always win because they have enough wealth to make sure the game is rigged. See TARP, too big to fail, etc.
Here is a good example you can use to show the difference Circle, and that is the robber barons of the late 1800. The robber barons had no regulation at all, even got to hire their own police forces in the form of the Pinkertons to crush anybody that opposed them, and basically ran riot over the market until they were finally hit by Teddy busting the trusts. Before that they could do whatever they wished, crush any business that refused to sell out, crack the heads of any workers that dared complain, pollute and destroy with nary a word said because they owned the media as well.
So it would be good to remember we already have had a period of no regulation and frankly it really wasn't a nice time to live if you weren't one of the top 1%. Although frankly looking out the shop window at how many empty buildings there are, and seeing most of the local business district closed and in the process of being torn down i have to wonder how long before all of us that aren't in that top group will be feeling like those peasants did back then. I know it just makes me sick to see people picking through the trash bins for cans to recycle just so they have something to live on. 5 years ago i just didn't see that, now driving down the streets i see that daily.
Not to mention all the wonderful "tricks" a corp lets you pull that the common man can't which helps them make sure they can't lose.
Case in point we have a lot of natural gas wildcatting in our area right now and some of them caused some damage and ran up some serious bills, did they get paid? Nope, they have a nice little scam going where Shellcorp A leases everything from the drills to the office furniture from corp B and then if anything goes badly they simply dissolve Shellcorp A and the next week there is Shellcorp C with a new name leasing the same gear and right back in business. I've seen local people lose it all thanks to finding out the hard way that with Shellcorps they can just walk away at any time and leave them high and dry.
So I have to agree, the entire system is so badly tilted in favor of the rich it isn't even funny anymore, its just sad and pathetic. When CEOs who made on average 8 to 18 times what a line worker did in 1960 make on average 3000 to 30,000 times what the line worker does, when you can actually become the "job czar" while sending thousands of jobs overseas and actually getting tax credits for doing so, when they can simply walk into the office of whomever wins an election with a suitcase full of money and get any law they want, no matter what the people say? I'm sorry but the whole system is broken.
They have court docs that prove MSFT bought some licenses...they have also bought licenses from Novell in the same time period and current buy plenty of liceneses from SUSE, last I checked to the tune of 400 million so far...and?
MSFT has always been a conservative CYA type of company, and it sure as hell would put egg on their face if SCO would have won and named them as an infringer, especially after all the money they had sunk into the BSA going after infringers. Just look at how quickly they released their Win 7 USB tool as GPL when they found out they had infringed GPL code, MSFT doesn't like to hear the word infringement anywhere near their corp.
Finally as we have seen time and time again with all the leaks you can't keep any kind of conspiracy like what PJ was selling secret inside a company that big, you just can't. There are too many ways for the data to get out, too many lower ranks with access, too easy for one PHB to hit "reply all" instead of reply.
Let me ask you this....do YOU believe that Psystar was a secret plot by MSFT to destroy the GPL? because the same kind of half assed "evidence' is what PJ used to make that claim so there is no real reason for you to accept her word on one and not the other. you have to look at the source when you are dealing with such things and with Psystar PJ made it clear she is a rabid FOSSie as I call them, one that believes in the "one true way" and all that don't follow the GPL are one of "them".
When you have an "us VS them" mindset frankly it isn't hard to see connections where none exist, after all that is what every conspiracy from the grassy knoll to the faked moon landings counts on, taking a bunch of random facts that don't really go together and as you put it "connect the dots"....even if there are no dots to connect.
Well it may also simply be the southern mindset, JD has always been a home grown southern brand and we southerners do tend to put a little more value on being social and neighborly, especially to a fellow southerner like the author was.
Of course all bets are off if its a damned yankee, they need to take them fast talking, carpet bagging ways and git the heck off our lawns!
Want me to highlight? Okey dokey, here you go That is what the public has chosen,. Now unless you think the public is made up of computer geeks, which is who I said was bitching in the very first of the post, I think most can understand there is a difference between the public at large and a gathering of professionals. the public at large would be...oh say here, where you get everything from PC repairmen to fricking rocket scientists and everything in between, and a gathering of professionals would be something like Black hat or Securina where such grammar nazi crap would actually make sense since they would need to know specific behavior.
Now lets quote you, shall we? Popular usage - reducing the language to the lowest common denominator since the advent of human speech. I guess we should just change the definition of "terrorist" in the dictionary to "Muslim", and "web browser" to "internet". After all, the public has spoken Now I'm sorry but if you didn't intend for that to be flamebait perhaps you might want to take a Midol because your as cranky as a woman under heavy flow bro.
Especially when there is a simple fix and its called fix your broken ass business models you douchebags which Valve has proved can work quite well.
I'll be honest...I used to pirate the hell out of games, so did all my friends, now I can't even remember the last game I downloaded and I've even bought a good chunk of those games i pirated back in the day, why? Because Valve fixed the broken ass business model that was PC gaming, that's why.
Now if I can't get it on steam I simply won't buy it, nor will i buy those games that require a constant net connection even if they are on Steam. with Steam i get ALL the updates automatically, all my friends and family are on there so all i have to do is look in my friends list and say "Hey you wanna play some?" and BOOM, right into the game, easy chat, constant sales and most having included DLC, when new DLC comes out you can get it cheap, etc.
So if the damned studios would give me something just as easy, where I can buy in a USEFUL format, instead of some bug ridden DRMed to the 50th power crap, like say.AVI or.MKV to where I can just drop them on my netbook or my dad's media tank and just hit the play button? I'd be happy to buy their product. Instead i simply don't buy nor do I download, if I can't watch it online for free i just don't watch.
All these media companies are doing is speeding up the progress of P2P, that's all. By gouging for every last nickel they possibly can and screwing over viewers with region coded bullshit all they are doing with draconian crap like this is making sure P2P will end up with full crypto and obfuscation so nobody will be able to tell what anyone else is getting. How much you wanna bet their sales figures didn't go up for shit despite the drop in downloaders? I bet many just said to hell with their product altogether, it isn't like we don't have a wealth of entertainment online for free now anyway.
I would like to apologize to all the people of NZ as sadly we here in the USA lost any form of control over the cartels years ago so I'm afraid we can't do shit to stop them from fucking you over, sorry. Some tried writing a petition to the POTUS and all they got for their trouble was a flowery "Fuck you peasant LOL!" form letter and both parties are totally owned so we're screwed too, sorry.
Are you being this obtuse on purpose? Or are you just feeling like being an asshole today? Because your argument makes no damned sense and seems more like an attempt at flamebait than a discussion.
Nobody said that computer PROFESSIONALS would not still have the words trojan, backdoor, rootkit, etc because they have a need to know specifics and thus need more specific words. Your argument is frankly as foolish as saying "because doctors need to know which specific germ is making a patient sick then the patients should all learn latin medical terminology" because that is pretty much what you are advocating.
Specialists have specific words because hey! What do ya know, what they do is specialized. the layperson has ZERO need for such specific terminology, all they need to know is whether its hardware or software and virus and bug take care of that quite nicely.
If you wanna be a douchebag grammar nazi that is your choice, but there is a damned good reason why we call them grammar nazis and not grammar fairies, because frankly nobody likes them.
After PJ said Psystar was a secret plot by MSFT to destroy the GPL? Yeah I'd have serious problems trusting anything on Groklaw without actual proof. I think the whole SCO case drove PJ totally batshit myself, they say that can happen when you start messing with conspiracy theories in that you start seeing them everywhere.
But don't take my word for it, go to Groklaw and look up the Psystar case, you'll find PJ's thought on the subject soon enough, and since PJ was Groklaw for the longest I'd have a hard time taking anything from there seriously without actual documents or some other physical proof to back up the statements.
After all I could set up a website and claim that Apple has secretly cloned Jobs like the boys of Brazil and are just waiting for them to mature so they can come up with fantastic new products, but that don't make it so.
I would say the word you are looking for is feudalism, because like in the days of the barons these orgs are treated more like Gods than they are organizations of men. Those at the top wield almost Godlike power over all, they can make elections go their way, control governments, make the people believe what they desire through massive advertising campaigns, can even get the churches singing their praises by putting money in the right coffers.
I would say looking back over history feudalism would be the term closest to describing the current situation in many countries, the only difference from the classical feudalism is the size and scope.
But once it becomes part of common language frankly your arguments become grammar nazi crap. Take virus, I'm so damned tired of listening to the geeks have a royal shitfit over whether something is a virus, a rootkit, or a trojan because for all intents and purposes the common word for ALL computer bugs is virus. That is what the public has chosen, that is what works, and you can't change the language of the entire damned planet because you don't like what they use to describe computer bugs.
Language changes, it morphs and grows and mutates constantly, and there is simply nothing you can do about it. The word car came from carriage...do they LOOK like a carriage to you? No and in fact i doubt most of the public even knows that word came from the era of the horse and buggy, nor do they care. Accept it and move on folks.
You wanna see how easy it is to be a PC gamer? Fine here goes..
1.-Go to local mom&pop shop, tell them you want to be a PC gamer and ask what they would recommend. Mine usually go for $450-$500 depending on the card and CPU, until I recently ran out that would get you an AMD triple with 4Gb of RAM, an HD4850 (becoming harder to find, will be going up $30 as I switch to HD5770s or midrange HD6xxx), a 500Gb HDD and Win 7 HP X64.
2.-Install Steam, make an account. Buy whatever games you want.
3.-There is no step 3, just enjoy your games.
How much fricking easier do you want it? You'll have to make an account and pay up for XBL, no better and in fact worse than Steam, because at least with Steam you are only paying for games, not the right to have fricking MP which should have been included for free. And no I'm not an overweight English guy, but Sterling said it better than I could, consoles now have all of the bad of PCs without the superior graphics, lower prices, and all the extra utility. When my gaming PC finally gets too old to play games it can be a HTPC, it can be a jukebox or media tank, it can be an office box, it has a ton of other uses. With the consoles it goes in the trash because once you can't play games with them it goes in the same pile as the GC and XBox 1 and every other console that's ever been built.
There is simply nothing the console do better any more. Playing in the living room? HDMI and wireless controllers work just as well on the PC. MP gaming? Better on the PC as games continue to have players years after the console players have abandoned them, case in point my oldest bought Bioshock II on the steam sale and has been fragging away for days, while I got the original HL:DM in a bundle a while back and have been having a blast rocket jumping and trying to get the drop on the other players of which there are plenty.
Again you wanna pay more for less? Its a free country, help thyself. But frankly other than the few exclusives, which honestly seems to be the only real selling points for anyone over 20 anymore, the consoles simply have nothing you can't get just as good or better from the PC. Now if you'll excuse me the youngest is bugging me on steam chat, he has been having hell in Genki Bowl (Man that is HARD) and wants me to cover his back...peace.
You have to be constantly dealing with your lawyer, helping him get information he needs for your case, then there are the hearings, some you can skip, some you can't, and then add the stress in on top because this will be constantly brought to your attention over and over?
Yeah...I hope Notch wasn't planning to do anything with his life for the next 2 to 3 years, because until this is over he's gonna be tied up. Now considering how much his last game made if his next game would have even made a third of that (which would be reasonable, as many who bought Craft would be likely to buy his next product if for nothing else the name) the troll will have given him an opportunity cost of $30 million plus which he'll not see back, plus 3 years of his life which again nobody can give you back.
Hell of a lot of cost you won't be getting back huh? especially when defeating one troll doesn't give you any immunity from others. Personally I think the whole system stinks and needs reform, but that won't help Notch who has to deal with the system as is.
Its not paranoia Pope, as I live a block from the local PD and have worked on many of their computers and you could draw a chalk line between the "good" side and the "bad" side and its like a fricking force field.
I asked one a few years ago when there was a shooting a half a dozen blocks from the shop if I should be worried and he said "Nope, it was on the bad side" and when i asked WTF does an imaginary line have to do with shit he said its NOT imaginary, that the criminals know that with their limited resources they can't afford to spend all their time across the line but if they start pulling shit on the other side? they'll have no choice but to come down hard on the bad side of the line.
So its not paranoia friend if its the truth. The gangs know that every time one of them crosses the line a lot more heat comes down so the smart move is to "stay in their place" and the PTB don't give a shit about ghettos (other than as sound bytes which they promptly ignore) so as long as they only prey upon their own neighborhoods they are tolerated. sad but true friend, sad but true.
Because we don't give a shit what happens in ghettos? Not trying to be crude about it or anything, just speak the truth. You know as well as I that if MS13 started doing drive bys in Beverly Hills that they'd be getting hit hard at this very moment, but as long as they stay in the ghettos by and large the PTB just ain't gonna give a shit.
So I don't think its about what the terrorist are motivated by when it comes to gangs like MS13, it comes down to if they "know to stay in their place' or not. Hell one could probably argue that the reason we went from working with the mob in WWII to going after the mob with the Kennedys is that they quit "knowing their place" and started going out with celebs and trying to buy their way into "nice society" instead of staying in their neighborhoods.
America has always had serious issues when it came to class and social standing and the fact that the gangs can get away with so much as long as they stay in their place just highlights that fact.
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Well to be fair while Win 8 is a giant clusterfuck of a UI Win 7 did actually bring some nice useful features to the UI, such as breadcrumbs and jumplists. I've found with breadcrumbs I can fly around the file system quicker than I've ever been able to and jumplists make it so easy to get back to what i was working on the previous day. if you haven't tried them they are quite nice.
As for what's under the hood while it uses a little less memory (although personally I LIKE how Win 7 uses memory, having all my most used programs precached into RAM makes for a hell of a snappy OS, even on my little netbook) the only thing I'd wish they'd backport is the new services model which frankly Windows should have had a decade ago. For those that don't know Windows FINALLY has an on demand services mode, where a service will only activate as long as its used and turn itself off when its no longer needed.
But other than that one change frankly i haven't seen anything that would make me want to put up with metro or waste the time hacking metro away when Win 7 works great and is supported until 2020. I had high hopes that win 8 would simply be more of Win 7, since its frankly one of the most rock solid OSes I'd seen since XP X64 but I have no desire to replace my monitor with a touchscreen or get my programs from the MSFT "appstore" (man I'm really starting to hate that fucking word) so it just doesn't have anything to upsell me and from talking to my customers after playing with the Win 8 box I have set up in the shop frankly they aren't impressed either.
Bottom line? Unless you are buying a cell phone or touchscreen device like a tablet don't bother, Win 7 works just as well and doesn't feel like you should be holding your screen in your lap with a sliding keyboard like a supergigantic smartphone.
Well as I'm sure you know its impossible to prove a negative so showing that the Yankees, with their supposed "tolerance' is nothing but bullshit, is a lot easier. I've lived in both the north and the south and I can say NEVER have I seen so blatant "they know their place" attitude than I have in the north. Frankly the only reason there isn't even more race problems in the north is nobody goes into each other's neighborhoods for precisely that reason.
Now compare that to the south, where nearly every one of our big cities has gay communities now and nobody bothers them, in fact they quickly become tourist traps because the gay folks set up nice little shops and markets that cater to the tourists. In my apt building we have white, black, asian, and latino which frankly you never see up north because that kind of mixing? It just don't happen as everyone strictly stays to their neighborhood.
If anything I would argue the south has moved from racism to classism, where you have the poor, middle class, and rich neighborhoods and frankly there isn't much mixing of social groups but even that is changing now as the local college has gone out of its way to get more poor and lower middle class into the school which is quickly tearing down the class structures. My oldest has become a BMOC, head of his frat and on the dean's list and you see how much things are changing when I swing by to visit and I see his 2000 S10 parked at the frat surrounded by brand new Porsche and BMW sportscars.
So I think folks should quit looking at decades old history and come see the actual south and they'd find its certainly not like that anymore. In these small towns you can walk the streets at 3AM and the worst you'll have happen in most places is someone will ask if you've had a breakdown or somebody will ask if you have a cigarette, that's it. Hell i sat with my drummer at 2AM on the "wrong" side of Memphis having awesome BBQ at this little all night BBQ shack and the worst we got was locals laughing at how often i had to hit my drink to keep my mouth from burning up LOL! I know that up north being the only two white boys in a sea of black and Mexicans would NOT be someplace i'd wanna be, we simply wouldn't have been tolerated.
Tried it for 3 weeks, that good enough AC? And you might want to watch this video of a typical user reaction to Win 8 which I can tell you from having a Win 8 CP machine running in the shop for customers to play with I can tell you her reaction? VERY typical. See how lost she is? How the OS isn't giving her a damned clue about where to go or what to do? Do you know what the next stage of that reaction is? Its called frustration which sets in VERY quickly. Nobody likes feeling lost and that confusion quickly turns to anger.
Final verdict? Windows 8 is the new MS Bob and will most likely bomb hard if MSFT doesn't strong arm the living shit out of the OEMs to ONLY offer Win 8 which mark my words, will cause sales in an already bad market to go down. Why do you think dell is suddenly talking Ubuntu again? remember what was happening the LAST time they talked Ubuntu? A little OS called...Vista?
Here is the thing that gets to me....MSFT has always been known for using focus groups and actually having real honest to God user studies, so why then is this a typical reaction from my customers when they try the Win 8 CP box I have set up at the shop? See how lost she is? How she doesn't have a clue where to go or what to do and the OS is not even giving her so much as a tooltip or pop up to help?
So i'm sorry Win 8 fanbois, Win 8 isn't just bad with a keyboard and mouse, although it sucks the big wet titty on those, no Windows 8 is just a bad design PERIOD. Its not intuitive, its not discoverable, it doesn't follow either desktop or cellphone UI conventions, doesn't give the user jack shit in the way of help or guidance which is shocking as hell as MSFT ALWAYS has little tooltips and guides to help new users, in a word its a sloppily thrown together mess that simply doesn't belong on the desktop or laptop and gives the user nothing that Win 7 doesn't give with a much better experience.
Oh don't worry ya dang kangaroo munchers we ain't forgot about what you did to us in the USA, we'll get you yet!
I mean there we was, think y'all were friendly, we save your butts in WWII, you gave us some Foster's and it seemed like everything was going nice...hell you even gave us one of the best damned movies in history, the incredible piece of cinema known as Mad Max, but now we know it was just to trick us into thinking you were nice! I mean sure, we should have known you dirty down underers were up to something when you sent Olivia Newton John but we figured you was just blinded by the cuteness like we were and then....BAM! You hit us with Paul Hogan and Yahoo Serious! That damned Young Einstein was so far beyond anything allowed in the Geneva Convention it would be considered an act of war in any civilized country! What in the hell did we ever do to you to deserve THAT huh? Hell even the commies weren't that damned mean, all they did was send us Yakov and made Russian reversals the lame joke of the century which was NOTHING compared to Reckless Kelley!
So you'll be getting yours you back stabbers, oh yes, you'll be getting yours. Just as soon as we find a containment unit powerful enough to stick that witch harpie Celine Dion in that'll withstand her shrieking long enough to launch her ass back to the frozen north (after they gave us The Shat, ought to roll the damned tanks on them filthy canucks) we'll be coming for YOU!
But the problem is they are marketing it wrong. Look at it THIS way, do you think anybody would have bought the "I Am Rich!" app on Android? they did on iOS. whether the Apple people want to admit it or not a LOT of the appeal is fashion and the ability to feel superior. Nothing wrong with that, Nike makes a mint off of Air Jordans that way and so do many other top brands.
But a good reason why you'll see less piracy on iOS is it ruins the whole effect. It would be like having Air Jordans held together with duct tape, it just takes away from the point of having an Apple device. Sure the average user wouldn't be able to tell but a lot of the appeal is "I have money see? i have Apple" so you won't see the piracy you do on Android, same as i bet piracy is lower on OSX than it is on Windows, its part of the mindset.
Frankly if it weren't for appstore restrictions it'd be easy to solve, you could just sell the android one for 25c and throw some extra bit into the iOS version so they could feel superior and that is the end of that. Maybe they should do like Steam and get together with other devs and offer bundles? After all during the Steam summer sale the Indie bundles stayed in the top 20 pretty much the entire run.
But its obvious that Android users simply won't pay the same price as iOS users and in a perfect world the devs could try different prices until they found the "sweet spot" but thanks to Apple's policies its same price or nothing.
You're not a luddite friend, the entire ecosystem is being turned into a giant shit sandwich by the ever growing greed and need for control of the big three and frankly its sucks the big wet titty.
If this is what a "post PC world" is supposed to be like, with SuperMegaCorp getting every bit of data and controlling all my devices and what i do with them...uhhh...no thanks?
And while we are at it can we please tell the OS devs that computers aren't really big smartphones and can we PLEASE bitchslap anyone that says the word "app" when NOT talking about a smartphone/tablet, please?
Sadly I see what they call "the future of computing" and all I can think of is the classic Monty Python "World's biggest twit" sketch, where a bunch of retards trip over themselves and can't even shoot themselves in the head correctly. That is what it feels like to me, Apple came out with iOS and the entire industry just lost its damned mind and decided EVERYTHING is a smartphone now "because dammit we want iMoney too!".../facepalm/
But the elephant in the room that nobody seems to be willing to accept is this....how many PCs do you honestly believe are gonna be sold with touchscreens?
As we saw recently both AMD and Intel are reporting worse projections for sales this year and yet we are supposed to believe that the answer is RAISING prices, in a dead economy, to throw on touchscreens? Really? Look at the prices for touchscreens folks they ain't cheap. Sure you can get a buggy PITA resistive but its still gonna cost a good $75-$100 more than the same screen without and as we all know resistive sucks ass. Even with economies of scale and the OEMs shaving to the bone for decent capacitive touchscreens in laptops and desktops you are talking a good $150+ more than current units cost.
Let me tell ya that as a PC retailer in the trenches, and talking to other retailers that frankly the "sweet spot" for a good 75%+ of your PC sales out there are between $350-$500, with the biggest sellers being the $400-$450 laptops. Go into any B&M that sells PCs and count how many AMD laptops you see, the stores will be full of them because that's the only way to hit the crucial price point with Intel pushing chips that are frankly too expensive as it is.
Mark my words....windows 8? The new MS Bob. The market simply won't support the price point required to move to touchscreens, not when so many are already afraid and living check to check. The OEMs certainly aren't gonna close their doors just because MSFT wants to be Apple, so they will either tell MSFT to do the same move they did when Vista flopped, that is to allow them to just keep selling Win 7 with a Win 8 DVD dropped in the box, or frankly they'll start talking to Google and Canonical. I have to wonder if it was a coincidence that Dell suddenly started talking Ubuntu again as it gives them leverage.
Its just not gonna work folks, windows 8 SUCKS without a touchscreen and we all know this. I wish i had bookmarked the article I saw praising win 8, it may have been WinSupersite, where they said "See how easy win 8 is? Now to show how well it runs on old hardware we'll use this touchscreen Athlon 64 laptop to run it" and I about died because that said it all right there. Without touch win 8 sucks and with a worldwide recession people simply aren't gonna shell out an extra 30%-40%+ they don't have for units with touchscreens.
Was it the south where those kids were beat to death for walking into the wrong neighborhood? Nope that was NJ. Race riots? IL, CA, nope not southern either. Was it the south where they beat a gay kid and left him to bleed and freeze to death? Nope again.
Maybe you might want to come down to the south sometime, then you'll find it ain't the 1950s anymore. most of the major cities here have thriving gay communities, went shopping at one last week, everyone was happy, plenty of PDAs, no bashing anywhere I could see.
In fact the only intolerance I've been seeing is with the Mexicans and frankly? they are just RUDE. they DEMAND everything be in THEIR language but won't even learn to say hello in ours, will shove you out of the way, make no attempt at conversation or integration, no wonder nobody likes them much. Everyobody else? Seems to be getting along just fine. We ran the Klan into the hills decades ago, and even in a teeny tiny town like mine most folks are nothing but friendly. in my apt building we got white, black, asian,gay, and one latina but she actually takes the time to say hello and be neighborly so she is treated just like everybody else.
So maybe its time you let go of your yankee bigotry and take another look, you might be surprised.
I'd argue the stock market frankly is a large cause of our current problems, both by allowing parasites to constantly leech money (in the form of sub second trades that only the super rich can afford to engage in) and by pushing a constantly shrinking short term "damn everything but the quarterly reports!" attitude.
If you look at the original stock market it was all about investment, you would see a company whom you believed had a sound plan and would invest in return for a piece of the pie. In a way it reminds me of what kickstarter is now, allowing those with a plan but without the needed capital to implement the plan to have the means to acquire the capital.
But with the current system long term planning and investment are chunked right out the window in favor of short term gains. Look at Circuit City for an example, the CEOs made a ton by firing the employees that actually made the most sales (and thus were paid more) and then cashing out before the whole business collapsed around them. The current system rewards short term thinking above all, even when that thinking ultimately torpedoes the company.
That is why I've said for years we need to tax the living hell out of the short term traders and get them out of the market. Something like 90% for trades that last less than a week, with the number going down until it reaches a very low number for long term, like say 3% for 5 years. Because until we can fix this frankly any company that plans long term, especially if that long term thinking requires spending capital to say upgrade capacity or infrastructure, will get a royal beat down by the market while those that only think short term get rewarded.
It would probably help if you had a good example and I think I have one....software patents. With software patents being purposely vague as hell it lets a company that didn't spend a dime or have a damned thing to do with a product get paid for that product anyway, thus making a barrier to entry against those that would compete. Take MSFT and Android for example, they didn't spend a dime making Android but because they have so many vague patents they get paid for millions of units they didn't have a damned thing to do with. You look at all of the really big corps and they all do this, using patents and copyrights to make sure nobody can play in their sandbox without a really big check or giving them a cut of everything, thus making sure they have no real way to lose.
So what you end up with when you are dealing with rent seekers is those at the top making sure that they always come out on top, no matter what happens. Think of it like a game of Three Card Monty you are forced to play every day as you walk out your door. You know you are not going to win, nobody ever does. You know he is not going to lose, he never does. But because he has a cop on the corner he makes sure you HAVE to play and that money you could have used to buy something else ends up in his pocket every. single. day.
Now personally i think the cop should be there to make sure that everyone gets the same odds and everyone plays fairly, but sadly we have such a high concentration of wealth in this country (you could take the holders of 85% of this country's wealth and put them in your average HS gym and have seats left over) that all we ever get is the corps buying the law or as we saw in the late 1800s the corps BEING the law, but in either case they always win because they have enough wealth to make sure the game is rigged. See TARP, too big to fail, etc.
Here is a good example you can use to show the difference Circle, and that is the robber barons of the late 1800. The robber barons had no regulation at all, even got to hire their own police forces in the form of the Pinkertons to crush anybody that opposed them, and basically ran riot over the market until they were finally hit by Teddy busting the trusts. Before that they could do whatever they wished, crush any business that refused to sell out, crack the heads of any workers that dared complain, pollute and destroy with nary a word said because they owned the media as well.
So it would be good to remember we already have had a period of no regulation and frankly it really wasn't a nice time to live if you weren't one of the top 1%. Although frankly looking out the shop window at how many empty buildings there are, and seeing most of the local business district closed and in the process of being torn down i have to wonder how long before all of us that aren't in that top group will be feeling like those peasants did back then. I know it just makes me sick to see people picking through the trash bins for cans to recycle just so they have something to live on. 5 years ago i just didn't see that, now driving down the streets i see that daily.
Not to mention all the wonderful "tricks" a corp lets you pull that the common man can't which helps them make sure they can't lose.
Case in point we have a lot of natural gas wildcatting in our area right now and some of them caused some damage and ran up some serious bills, did they get paid? Nope, they have a nice little scam going where Shellcorp A leases everything from the drills to the office furniture from corp B and then if anything goes badly they simply dissolve Shellcorp A and the next week there is Shellcorp C with a new name leasing the same gear and right back in business. I've seen local people lose it all thanks to finding out the hard way that with Shellcorps they can just walk away at any time and leave them high and dry.
So I have to agree, the entire system is so badly tilted in favor of the rich it isn't even funny anymore, its just sad and pathetic. When CEOs who made on average 8 to 18 times what a line worker did in 1960 make on average 3000 to 30,000 times what the line worker does, when you can actually become the "job czar" while sending thousands of jobs overseas and actually getting tax credits for doing so, when they can simply walk into the office of whomever wins an election with a suitcase full of money and get any law they want, no matter what the people say? I'm sorry but the whole system is broken.
They have court docs that prove MSFT bought some licenses...they have also bought licenses from Novell in the same time period and current buy plenty of liceneses from SUSE, last I checked to the tune of 400 million so far...and?
MSFT has always been a conservative CYA type of company, and it sure as hell would put egg on their face if SCO would have won and named them as an infringer, especially after all the money they had sunk into the BSA going after infringers. Just look at how quickly they released their Win 7 USB tool as GPL when they found out they had infringed GPL code, MSFT doesn't like to hear the word infringement anywhere near their corp.
Finally as we have seen time and time again with all the leaks you can't keep any kind of conspiracy like what PJ was selling secret inside a company that big, you just can't. There are too many ways for the data to get out, too many lower ranks with access, too easy for one PHB to hit "reply all" instead of reply.
Let me ask you this....do YOU believe that Psystar was a secret plot by MSFT to destroy the GPL? because the same kind of half assed "evidence' is what PJ used to make that claim so there is no real reason for you to accept her word on one and not the other. you have to look at the source when you are dealing with such things and with Psystar PJ made it clear she is a rabid FOSSie as I call them, one that believes in the "one true way" and all that don't follow the GPL are one of "them".
When you have an "us VS them" mindset frankly it isn't hard to see connections where none exist, after all that is what every conspiracy from the grassy knoll to the faked moon landings counts on, taking a bunch of random facts that don't really go together and as you put it "connect the dots"....even if there are no dots to connect.
Well it may also simply be the southern mindset, JD has always been a home grown southern brand and we southerners do tend to put a little more value on being social and neighborly, especially to a fellow southerner like the author was.
Of course all bets are off if its a damned yankee, they need to take them fast talking, carpet bagging ways and git the heck off our lawns!
Want me to highlight? Okey dokey, here you go That is what the public has chosen,. Now unless you think the public is made up of computer geeks, which is who I said was bitching in the very first of the post, I think most can understand there is a difference between the public at large and a gathering of professionals. the public at large would be...oh say here, where you get everything from PC repairmen to fricking rocket scientists and everything in between, and a gathering of professionals would be something like Black hat or Securina where such grammar nazi crap would actually make sense since they would need to know specific behavior.
Now lets quote you, shall we? Popular usage - reducing the language to the lowest common denominator since the advent of human speech. I guess we should just change the definition of "terrorist" in the dictionary to "Muslim", and "web browser" to "internet". After all, the public has spoken Now I'm sorry but if you didn't intend for that to be flamebait perhaps you might want to take a Midol because your as cranky as a woman under heavy flow bro.
Especially when there is a simple fix and its called fix your broken ass business models you douchebags which Valve has proved can work quite well.
I'll be honest...I used to pirate the hell out of games, so did all my friends, now I can't even remember the last game I downloaded and I've even bought a good chunk of those games i pirated back in the day, why? Because Valve fixed the broken ass business model that was PC gaming, that's why.
Now if I can't get it on steam I simply won't buy it, nor will i buy those games that require a constant net connection even if they are on Steam. with Steam i get ALL the updates automatically, all my friends and family are on there so all i have to do is look in my friends list and say "Hey you wanna play some?" and BOOM, right into the game, easy chat, constant sales and most having included DLC, when new DLC comes out you can get it cheap, etc.
So if the damned studios would give me something just as easy, where I can buy in a USEFUL format, instead of some bug ridden DRMed to the 50th power crap, like say .AVI or .MKV to where I can just drop them on my netbook or my dad's media tank and just hit the play button? I'd be happy to buy their product. Instead i simply don't buy nor do I download, if I can't watch it online for free i just don't watch.
All these media companies are doing is speeding up the progress of P2P, that's all. By gouging for every last nickel they possibly can and screwing over viewers with region coded bullshit all they are doing with draconian crap like this is making sure P2P will end up with full crypto and obfuscation so nobody will be able to tell what anyone else is getting. How much you wanna bet their sales figures didn't go up for shit despite the drop in downloaders? I bet many just said to hell with their product altogether, it isn't like we don't have a wealth of entertainment online for free now anyway.
I would like to apologize to all the people of NZ as sadly we here in the USA lost any form of control over the cartels years ago so I'm afraid we can't do shit to stop them from fucking you over, sorry. Some tried writing a petition to the POTUS and all they got for their trouble was a flowery "Fuck you peasant LOL!" form letter and both parties are totally owned so we're screwed too, sorry.
Are you being this obtuse on purpose? Or are you just feeling like being an asshole today? Because your argument makes no damned sense and seems more like an attempt at flamebait than a discussion.
Nobody said that computer PROFESSIONALS would not still have the words trojan, backdoor, rootkit, etc because they have a need to know specifics and thus need more specific words. Your argument is frankly as foolish as saying "because doctors need to know which specific germ is making a patient sick then the patients should all learn latin medical terminology" because that is pretty much what you are advocating.
Specialists have specific words because hey! What do ya know, what they do is specialized. the layperson has ZERO need for such specific terminology, all they need to know is whether its hardware or software and virus and bug take care of that quite nicely.
If you wanna be a douchebag grammar nazi that is your choice, but there is a damned good reason why we call them grammar nazis and not grammar fairies, because frankly nobody likes them.
After PJ said Psystar was a secret plot by MSFT to destroy the GPL? Yeah I'd have serious problems trusting anything on Groklaw without actual proof. I think the whole SCO case drove PJ totally batshit myself, they say that can happen when you start messing with conspiracy theories in that you start seeing them everywhere.
But don't take my word for it, go to Groklaw and look up the Psystar case, you'll find PJ's thought on the subject soon enough, and since PJ was Groklaw for the longest I'd have a hard time taking anything from there seriously without actual documents or some other physical proof to back up the statements.
After all I could set up a website and claim that Apple has secretly cloned Jobs like the boys of Brazil and are just waiting for them to mature so they can come up with fantastic new products, but that don't make it so.
I would say the word you are looking for is feudalism, because like in the days of the barons these orgs are treated more like Gods than they are organizations of men. Those at the top wield almost Godlike power over all, they can make elections go their way, control governments, make the people believe what they desire through massive advertising campaigns, can even get the churches singing their praises by putting money in the right coffers.
I would say looking back over history feudalism would be the term closest to describing the current situation in many countries, the only difference from the classical feudalism is the size and scope.
But once it becomes part of common language frankly your arguments become grammar nazi crap. Take virus, I'm so damned tired of listening to the geeks have a royal shitfit over whether something is a virus, a rootkit, or a trojan because for all intents and purposes the common word for ALL computer bugs is virus. That is what the public has chosen, that is what works, and you can't change the language of the entire damned planet because you don't like what they use to describe computer bugs.
Language changes, it morphs and grows and mutates constantly, and there is simply nothing you can do about it. The word car came from carriage...do they LOOK like a carriage to you? No and in fact i doubt most of the public even knows that word came from the era of the horse and buggy, nor do they care. Accept it and move on folks.
You wanna see how easy it is to be a PC gamer? Fine here goes..
1.-Go to local mom&pop shop, tell them you want to be a PC gamer and ask what they would recommend. Mine usually go for $450-$500 depending on the card and CPU, until I recently ran out that would get you an AMD triple with 4Gb of RAM, an HD4850 (becoming harder to find, will be going up $30 as I switch to HD5770s or midrange HD6xxx), a 500Gb HDD and Win 7 HP X64.
2.-Install Steam, make an account. Buy whatever games you want.
3.-There is no step 3, just enjoy your games.
How much fricking easier do you want it? You'll have to make an account and pay up for XBL, no better and in fact worse than Steam, because at least with Steam you are only paying for games, not the right to have fricking MP which should have been included for free. And no I'm not an overweight English guy, but Sterling said it better than I could, consoles now have all of the bad of PCs without the superior graphics, lower prices, and all the extra utility. When my gaming PC finally gets too old to play games it can be a HTPC, it can be a jukebox or media tank, it can be an office box, it has a ton of other uses. With the consoles it goes in the trash because once you can't play games with them it goes in the same pile as the GC and XBox 1 and every other console that's ever been built.
There is simply nothing the console do better any more. Playing in the living room? HDMI and wireless controllers work just as well on the PC. MP gaming? Better on the PC as games continue to have players years after the console players have abandoned them, case in point my oldest bought Bioshock II on the steam sale and has been fragging away for days, while I got the original HL:DM in a bundle a while back and have been having a blast rocket jumping and trying to get the drop on the other players of which there are plenty.
Again you wanna pay more for less? Its a free country, help thyself. But frankly other than the few exclusives, which honestly seems to be the only real selling points for anyone over 20 anymore, the consoles simply have nothing you can't get just as good or better from the PC. Now if you'll excuse me the youngest is bugging me on steam chat, he has been having hell in Genki Bowl (Man that is HARD) and wants me to cover his back...peace.
You have to be constantly dealing with your lawyer, helping him get information he needs for your case, then there are the hearings, some you can skip, some you can't, and then add the stress in on top because this will be constantly brought to your attention over and over?
Yeah...I hope Notch wasn't planning to do anything with his life for the next 2 to 3 years, because until this is over he's gonna be tied up. Now considering how much his last game made if his next game would have even made a third of that (which would be reasonable, as many who bought Craft would be likely to buy his next product if for nothing else the name) the troll will have given him an opportunity cost of $30 million plus which he'll not see back, plus 3 years of his life which again nobody can give you back.
Hell of a lot of cost you won't be getting back huh? especially when defeating one troll doesn't give you any immunity from others. Personally I think the whole system stinks and needs reform, but that won't help Notch who has to deal with the system as is.
Its not paranoia Pope, as I live a block from the local PD and have worked on many of their computers and you could draw a chalk line between the "good" side and the "bad" side and its like a fricking force field.
I asked one a few years ago when there was a shooting a half a dozen blocks from the shop if I should be worried and he said "Nope, it was on the bad side" and when i asked WTF does an imaginary line have to do with shit he said its NOT imaginary, that the criminals know that with their limited resources they can't afford to spend all their time across the line but if they start pulling shit on the other side? they'll have no choice but to come down hard on the bad side of the line.
So its not paranoia friend if its the truth. The gangs know that every time one of them crosses the line a lot more heat comes down so the smart move is to "stay in their place" and the PTB don't give a shit about ghettos (other than as sound bytes which they promptly ignore) so as long as they only prey upon their own neighborhoods they are tolerated. sad but true friend, sad but true.
Because we don't give a shit what happens in ghettos? Not trying to be crude about it or anything, just speak the truth. You know as well as I that if MS13 started doing drive bys in Beverly Hills that they'd be getting hit hard at this very moment, but as long as they stay in the ghettos by and large the PTB just ain't gonna give a shit.
So I don't think its about what the terrorist are motivated by when it comes to gangs like MS13, it comes down to if they "know to stay in their place' or not. Hell one could probably argue that the reason we went from working with the mob in WWII to going after the mob with the Kennedys is that they quit "knowing their place" and started going out with celebs and trying to buy their way into "nice society" instead of staying in their neighborhoods.
America has always had serious issues when it came to class and social standing and the fact that the gangs can get away with so much as long as they stay in their place just highlights that fact.