Just stop using sales tax. Most states already have income taxes of some kind, it's a simple matter of ratcheting down sales tax until it's eventually zero and ratcheting up income tax.
Sales tax is unfair because it's a regressive tax. It's base on how much you buy, not how much you make, and the poor are taxed more percentage wise than a rich person. A $20 shirt with 6% sales tax costs the same if you make $10,000 vs if you make $1,000,000. Income tax is the fair way to go.
**Commence flames from the other side of the political spectrum**
Russians who believe they single-handedly took down the Nazis are as foolish as Americans who think they single-handedly took down the Nazis.
As any reasonable historian will tell you, it was a combined effort. The Nazis lost because they were outnumbered. Had the Nazis not invaded Russia (or at least waited until the UK fell) or Japan hadn't bombed pearl harbor, the war would have been quite different. It's a testament to both the Russian and US soldiers for what they had endured, but to say simply that the only factor was how awesomely great one army was over the other discounts the thousands of factors that go into modern warfare.
Oh and by the way, we didn't get a whole lot of help from the Russians in the pacific theater. You like to take a lot of credit over the Nazis and you forget that the Italians and Japanese were allied with Germany and someone had to deal with them, and it sure wasn't the Russians.
Next thing you know we'll take the same approach to murder, theft, gangs, drugs, etc and soon we'll end up with a utopia... then how will the billionaires get $100 bills to light their $500 cigars???
Okay, we need to get moving faster on wireless networking oversight. It's getting worse than the cable/dsl nightmare of crappy service and quality they provide. How about we unbundle these wireless connections from their devices and simply allow us to select the right one and drop in the appropriate chip? Someone put some pressure on the US market to standardize on something. then have them compete on price, speed, service, and support. Right now they compete with lock in and fancy stupid commercials.
And it's not "free". At the very least, it's included with the price of the device. And how does one exactly subsidize that on a single device? It's $30 a month for the iPhone data plan, that's $360 a year in fees. Are they going to tack on $360 to the price of the device? And how do they expect to do this in multiple countries? And in the US will anyone accept the hit their network is going to take? They saw the iPhone, they should be wary of the nintendo with 3G wireless.
There are too many questions here, and so many fail points. The best way to serve consumers is to UNBundle the wireless component so we can all make choices. I'd love to be able to do that on all the networks, and I'd sacrifice visual voicemail to do it.
My intent by saying "people who program computers" was not to single out computer programmers, but designers, managers, and everyone else involved too. In military, this involves politicians, government contractors, and generals too, who all make huge piles of money even if the project is less than successful, like the Patriot missile and F-22.
A programmer was probably told to use that register size, even though he knew it would be flawed.
I work the phone for support. If I spend one or two hours reading tech articles trying to increase my knowledge of my job when I was scheduled to be taking calls from customers, I'm not doing my job. If I go to my boss and schedule time to read those articles when I'm not supposed to be taking calls, that's the right way to handle that.
When you are a piloting an airplane, your job is to pilot the airplane!
This seems to be more educated guessing than analysis, because there's not enough evidence to say that the Android train has enough steam yet. However the possibility of this coming true does exist, but that's a gamble on a guess, not fact (not yet anyway). The mistake is understanding how Apple will work vs the rest of the market.
Apple makes the iPhone, and controls the hardware and software from top to bottom. This is just like how they handle macs. The trends here can be easily understood and traced.
Google is only releasing the software, and it's up to other people to make the hardware. According to Wikipedia (who appears to have gotten their info from google, as of the end of 2008 there were already 18 devices released that run Android with about 17 possible forthcoming devices. This entry is from last year, and now we have things like the myTouch coming out. Sony, Samsung, and Motorola are seriously looking at using Android.
Apple's OS is proprietary, and the OS only sees growth when the hardware has growth, and apple is the only manufacturer.
Android sees growth when multiple manufacturers get up and start building multiple phones. If Android phones become a commercial success, and most of the major phone companies start using it, then yes it's market share will skyrocket and could surpass Apple. I'm in fact an iPhone fan but I understand the potential of the division of labor here and accept that this is a possibility.
Now, there are two problems with the analysis. One is that Android is basically free, so it's yet to be seen how this would be a financial success to google yet. I'm sure they have leverage somewhere but it's basically an experiment. So increased marketshare doesn't immediately mean increased revenue, not yet anyway.
Second, this is the same mistake analysts made comparing Microsoft to Apple in terms of OS marketshare, and have oft proclaimed Apple dead by not understanding their core business. Compare Apple to hardware sellers, not software makers. Android's OS might overtake iphone OS... so? Apple makes money on the iPhone hardware. The major news you want to look for is if this company HTC which makes the myTouch makes a good quality Android phone for less than the iPhone and has all or more of the features and that new phone's marketshare overtakes Apple. That will be huge news and maybe the analysis should be that we should be looking to invest in HTC. I don't see that happening any time soon, and definitely not by 2012. I do see a whole bunch of manufacturers taking their own slice and sharing the market hardware wise.
If Ballmer says this isn't the release he wanted, then why didn't he kill it? It says a lot about a company if you "have" to release a product even though it's crappy, and all that it says is very bad. Not to draw yet another cliched Apple parallel, but look at Steve. Rumors abound that Apple has been working on this tablet mac since 2003, and that Steve has been unsatisfied with it and has refused to release it because he doesn't feel it's a product people want. Yet Apple's stock isn't tanking on this news. Why the hell can't Steve reign in something like this?
Thus continues the long slow decline of Microsoft, who can't even generated shit that smells like shit any more.
People vote for smarter representatives all the time... they are called Europeans.
In the US, our system is so corrupt from top to bottom. There's too much corporate money involved in elections and campaigns, and their are too many stupid Americans who vote based on things like abortion, banning gay marriage, being able to have prayer in schools, keeping guns unrestricted, and eliminating the IRS. They've been brainwashed to think that God will just make everything okay if they make sure all the "dirty sinful liberals" can't actually pass laws like economic and health reform. There is no logical discourse in our country any more as it's drowned out by illogical screaming, and that screaming is backed by corporate money because corporations don't like democracy. How can we vote smarter politicians into office when the ten idiots around you are voting for the idiot?
Yes I know European politicians aren't perfect but our idiots make their idiots pale in comparison in sheer ineptitude and corruption.
Do you live in the US? The US is a huge mix of people, who all don't really spend time mixing. Going from state to state, to a US citizen, it's often like venturing to a whole new world. Going from the suburbs to the inner cities is night and day. I live in Pennsylvania, and we have an old joke that PA is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between... it's 100% true! Socially and physically central PA is very "country." And to top it all off, we have violent and deep oppositions politically between our two major political parties. These type of differences have existed since 1776.
For most of our history, the US has had deep divisions between difference areas, races, and classes. I contest the assertion that the north "knew" the south and vice versa, and that the UK parliment "knew" the colonies on a personal level, especially since they were separated by such large distances. When it comes to politics, I myself have been annoyed at those "backwards uneducated hick southerners" and I'm sure there are plenty of southerners who are annoyed with "those rotten liberal hippie commie yankee northerners." This is just dehumanizing speech that makes us look at each other as obstacles to a goal rather than as humans with feelings and needs and rights.
We've done it to each other for years and we keep on doing it, because that's the one thing that unites us, our willingness to call each other names for our slanted political ideals.
I like how near the top of the article he practically answers his own question:
"Ah -- reading between the lines might make it seem that Microsoft sweetened the deal substantially. I have no direct knowledge of this particular situation, but it's not far-fetched to believe that Microsoft probably gave Nissan oodles of free licenses and support in order to get the company to run Hyper-V in production. It's a good thing, too, since it simply wasn't an enterprise-grade hypervisor then and isn't now. I can only imagine the hoops those admins have to jump through to maintain that infrastructure."
Did, for example, someone find a feature that VMware had that Hyper-V did not, but then after negotiation they find a scenario that Hyper-V didn't do, and then offered to make it up with a workaround and $500,000 in licensing? That's a perfectly common practice in most software shops and perfectly acceptable from a business standpoint. And who said the Admin would not like hyper-V if it meets all their needs? I use outlook at work, seems to work just fine for what I need.
Such a planet already exists... it's called Philadelphia.
I happen to be an inhabitant of said planet. My name is Adrian, I welcome you to my world.
Dead serious, yes, my name is Adrian, and in fact, in my high school there was a also a guy named Rocky, and we were both in marching band and our band once performed "Gonna fly now." Such is the life on my planet, even though I'm a guy.
*goes back to watching sports and eating cheesesteaks*
First true MMO innovation I've seen in a long time
on
Review: Champions Online
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· Score: 2, Informative
One of the really good innovations in Champions is what they call the Powerhouse. This is where you go to buy new powers, increase your stats, and upgrade existing powers -- the equivalent of a class trainer in other games. However, the Powerhouse is instanced, and it has a large testing area at the back. You can pick up your new powers, test them, and get rid of them if you don't like them. Changes aren't finalized until you leave the Powerhouse. It's great for trying out new things without worrying that they'll work poorly with your character. The game does have a re-specialization system, appropriately called "retcon," but at current it's ridiculously expensive. Recent power purchases aren't bad to change, but if you want to fix a mistake from early on (when you weren't that familiar with the game), it will likely cost you several times the wealth you've managed to accumulate.
This is huge. I remember playing Diablo 2 early on, and everyone was making a sorceress and loading her up with Blizzard, a level 24 spell. It was ridiculously powerful, and poorly balanced, and the first patch which came out a month later nerfed this skill into the stone age. In other words, not only was it less powerful, it was now less useful, because the skill above it, Ice Sphere, became the more powerful and useful spell. So now everyone with Blizzard was not the best Sorceress. this pissed off thousands of players who spent their time building a character they liked. Blizzard called this skill "broken" and passing it off as a a bug fix, trying to contain the outcry, but that of course didn't help. Gamers see thru BS like this, a nerf is a nerf.
Now, You can actually test and work with a power and get to know it and understand it before you commit it to your character. And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
I have so many questions that this article doesn't answer.
1) Where was the sample taken? UK showers? World wide? Third world countries? 2) Is there an information on different kinds of shower heads? for example, is this more common on massaging heads, low flow/high pressure heads, etc? 3) Does hot water kill this bacteria? Is it more common for people who take colder showers than people who take hot ones? 4) I always start the shower first before getting under it, since it takes about 5+ seconds to warm up... any ideas if this affects infection? (Thats more of a study question than a question from the article). 5) Any real way to prevent the growth? Someone already asked if CLR kills it. If this is so common, mind telling me how I can help myself?
I've never read a BBC article that left me with more questions.
... the iPhone really does do more than a lot of Phones out there. It has way more apps than the Pre or Android, and can currently do more than either of them with these apps. There has been and continues to be a problem with Apple's approval process, along with the idea that Apple should even have an approval process, but claiming otherwise the iPhone is not a smart phone is simply karma whoring catering to iPhone haters.
One day, if Apple doesn't fix this process, the Pre and Android will surpass them, but not yet. Being able to run background apps when there aren't enough apps worth running in the background doesn't count as a killer feature.
The average iPhone user is not put out by the C64 emulator not being available and if they cry like babies for it, they should be slapped about. There's plenty more maintain their interest and far more important things than to rehash games from 20 years ago (oy why do you insist on reliving the past! OY!;)).
However, I really feel for the developers who are truly suffering here. Way too many apps are taking too long to be approved and are being rejected because Apple's secretive policies. How can you make money on a crap shoot of a policy? With tens of thousands of apps, any a rejection of say 1%, that's roughly hundreds of developers who keep getting rejected. To apple and the average user that's not much, but to a developer that's not something that can be relied on to sustain me if I can't get my apps out quickly.
And your citation please? I'm open minded about this and want to learn, but don't counter a hyperbole with an anecdote. If you want a citation, please provide one yourself if you make a counter claim.
In the media and communications, tweeting appears to me to be very useful. It's a type of "ticker" that might show important information. In the media people use it as a quick "blast" that everyone can see when something important happens. On the ground during a major event, like say an Iranian revolution, you can quickly tell lots of people something they need to do or some place they need to be, or alert someone to some goings on they might be interested in.
This is only about.01% of the tweets out there. In other words, it's just like the internet. Everyone can use it, most people post completely useless information, but a small percentage of the stuff you see on it is actually rather useful.
The reason why it's popular is a completely different matter. Most people on Twitter, like most people on the internet, are not using it for something that's generally considered "useful." Why it's popular is covered in other posts but I personally do see it has some usefulness.
I want to see Snow White vs Hulk. When that woman starts singing Led Zeppelin and the forest creatures start attacking, damn that is something freaky scary! I think the hulk would even turn a new color... yellow!
The problem with this attitude is that we don't acknowledge that something was done wrong. Sometimes an apology is all that is needed to mend ties to some wronged group, and then healing can begin. The Mongols and the roman empire are poor examples. No one has memory of the emotional impact of the Mongols and the Roman empire. But there is still plenty of emotions over the european impact over Africa, the middle east, and southeast asia. Hell, a lot of what's going on in those areas, mostly bad things, are a direct result of the actions that were taken by those imperial powers. And yet most governments go along like "Oh really we did something wrong? Well that wasn't my fault that was someone else. I'd never do that to you." Oh really, then why don't you just apologize and get on with life? What, no apology? Gee, I guess you don't think it was wrong huh?
I like the idea that someone else posted that apologies should be given to the entire community, and not just to Alan Turing. Alan in this case is a good poster child.
Western Countries still have plenty of people with lots of illogical hatred. I think that if Britain were to do this it would go a long way to further showing how backward the US is in it's own hatreds. If you tried this in the US there would actually be a huge political backlash. And an apology doesn't have to mean you are weak, an apology just has to mean you were too cruel in the past, and that the government by the people and for the people will try to do better to preserve your basic human rights.
Blizzard is not only good at borrowing from themselves, but also revamping the look and feel of whatever they are borrowing, and presenting it as something entirely new.
Now in Blizzard's defense, borrowing exactly from yourself and creating something wholy new are at opposite ends of a spectrum. To paraphrase an older well known quote, there are really only 7 original plots in computer games, and the rest are just copies. Same goes for the most part with skills, interfaces, graphics etc.
The Monk is similar in many ways as the assassin, but the Amazon in D2 was very similar to the rogue in D1, so why would this be a big deal? In Eastern history, monks and assassins weren't necessarily completely separate groups in all cases, so why the big deal here?
From a gaming standpoint, copying from old ideas is not a bad thing if those old ideas are successful. The best example is WC2 to StarCraft. Many people called it "orcs in space." It basically is. The interface is similar, the game play is similar, the mission structure is the same, the biggest difference are the graphics. However, the success of SC are it's subtle differences and it's changes in balance. The only major nongraphical change isn't even that major and that is the "three distinct races" which has been copied by every RTS since, including themselves (hello Warcraft 3). Despite this, SC is still being played to this day and is considered one of the greatest and most playable games of all time.
This concept of "completely different" is quite simply a messaging and marketing construct keep us interested. Of course Blizzard can't say "oh this is exactly like what we did before we only made some minor tweaks." That's not generating buzz for the game. On one has an interest in a boring demo. If you want to analyze it, yes there will be plenty of similarities. What's most important is that, when it's released, is there enough new and exciting content to make the overall game enjoyable and will it be balanced enough to make it an interesting challenge? The answer will most likely be yes, given blizzard's track record so far.
PS: what's funny is that the original demo said "7 sided strike" was more like chain lighting, not dragon strike, so they admit they copy stuff.
Sorry to interject an unrelated movie but I must make a comparision. This movie looks visually stunning, but I hope the writing and plot are as good as district 9 was. D9 was, by far, was one of the best sci fi films I've seen in decades and it did it on the cheap. And that's all that really needs to be said.
PayPal works with money like a bank or credit card, but they are treated like an internet Western Union on steroids, and yet most of the public is trusting them like a bank, which is a mistake.
PayPal needs controls like bank. The majority of their transactions may be okay, but that's like 95 to 99%... of billions. That's way too many bad transactions. They need to be made more secure, particularly for consumers.
I avoid PayPal like the plague because I don't want to become a statistic.
Slashdot Mirror
Just stop using sales tax. Most states already have income taxes of some kind, it's a simple matter of ratcheting down sales tax until it's eventually zero and ratcheting up income tax.
Sales tax is unfair because it's a regressive tax. It's base on how much you buy, not how much you make, and the poor are taxed more percentage wise than a rich person. A $20 shirt with 6% sales tax costs the same if you make $10,000 vs if you make $1,000,000. Income tax is the fair way to go.
**Commence flames from the other side of the political spectrum**
Russians who believe they single-handedly took down the Nazis are as foolish as Americans who think they single-handedly took down the Nazis.
As any reasonable historian will tell you, it was a combined effort. The Nazis lost because they were outnumbered. Had the Nazis not invaded Russia (or at least waited until the UK fell) or Japan hadn't bombed pearl harbor, the war would have been quite different. It's a testament to both the Russian and US soldiers for what they had endured, but to say simply that the only factor was how awesomely great one army was over the other discounts the thousands of factors that go into modern warfare.
Oh and by the way, we didn't get a whole lot of help from the Russians in the pacific theater. You like to take a lot of credit over the Nazis and you forget that the Italians and Japanese were allied with Germany and someone had to deal with them, and it sure wasn't the Russians.
And some bad metal band will actually write a song called "overclock my heart". I can see the tributes to Motley Crue now...
Next thing you know we'll take the same approach to murder, theft, gangs, drugs, etc and soon we'll end up with a utopia... then how will the billionaires get $100 bills to light their $500 cigars???
If you'd hired sharks, they would be used properly. They obviously hired mutated sea bass here.
Okay, we need to get moving faster on wireless networking oversight. It's getting worse than the cable/dsl nightmare of crappy service and quality they provide. How about we unbundle these wireless connections from their devices and simply allow us to select the right one and drop in the appropriate chip? Someone put some pressure on the US market to standardize on something. then have them compete on price, speed, service, and support. Right now they compete with lock in and fancy stupid commercials.
And it's not "free". At the very least, it's included with the price of the device. And how does one exactly subsidize that on a single device? It's $30 a month for the iPhone data plan, that's $360 a year in fees. Are they going to tack on $360 to the price of the device? And how do they expect to do this in multiple countries? And in the US will anyone accept the hit their network is going to take? They saw the iPhone, they should be wary of the nintendo with 3G wireless.
There are too many questions here, and so many fail points. The best way to serve consumers is to UNBundle the wireless component so we can all make choices. I'd love to be able to do that on all the networks, and I'd sacrifice visual voicemail to do it.
My intent by saying "people who program computers" was not to single out computer programmers, but designers, managers, and everyone else involved too. In military, this involves politicians, government contractors, and generals too, who all make huge piles of money even if the project is less than successful, like the Patriot missile and F-22.
A programmer was probably told to use that register size, even though he knew it would be flawed.
Translation: computers are only as smart as the people programming them... and there's plenty of stupid people out there.
We knew this. This is no great revelation. So why is this news?
I work the phone for support. If I spend one or two hours reading tech articles trying to increase my knowledge of my job when I was scheduled to be taking calls from customers, I'm not doing my job. If I go to my boss and schedule time to read those articles when I'm not supposed to be taking calls, that's the right way to handle that.
When you are a piloting an airplane, your job is to pilot the airplane!
This seems to be more educated guessing than analysis, because there's not enough evidence to say that the Android train has enough steam yet. However the possibility of this coming true does exist, but that's a gamble on a guess, not fact (not yet anyway). The mistake is understanding how Apple will work vs the rest of the market.
Apple makes the iPhone, and controls the hardware and software from top to bottom. This is just like how they handle macs. The trends here can be easily understood and traced.
Google is only releasing the software, and it's up to other people to make the hardware. According to Wikipedia (who appears to have gotten their info from google, as of the end of 2008 there were already 18 devices released that run Android with about 17 possible forthcoming devices. This entry is from last year, and now we have things like the myTouch coming out. Sony, Samsung, and Motorola are seriously looking at using Android.
Apple's OS is proprietary, and the OS only sees growth when the hardware has growth, and apple is the only manufacturer.
Android sees growth when multiple manufacturers get up and start building multiple phones. If Android phones become a commercial success, and most of the major phone companies start using it, then yes it's market share will skyrocket and could surpass Apple. I'm in fact an iPhone fan but I understand the potential of the division of labor here and accept that this is a possibility.
Now, there are two problems with the analysis. One is that Android is basically free, so it's yet to be seen how this would be a financial success to google yet. I'm sure they have leverage somewhere but it's basically an experiment. So increased marketshare doesn't immediately mean increased revenue, not yet anyway.
Second, this is the same mistake analysts made comparing Microsoft to Apple in terms of OS marketshare, and have oft proclaimed Apple dead by not understanding their core business. Compare Apple to hardware sellers, not software makers. Android's OS might overtake iphone OS... so? Apple makes money on the iPhone hardware. The major news you want to look for is if this company HTC which makes the myTouch makes a good quality Android phone for less than the iPhone and has all or more of the features and that new phone's marketshare overtakes Apple. That will be huge news and maybe the analysis should be that we should be looking to invest in HTC. I don't see that happening any time soon, and definitely not by 2012. I do see a whole bunch of manufacturers taking their own slice and sharing the market hardware wise.
If Ballmer says this isn't the release he wanted, then why didn't he kill it? It says a lot about a company if you "have" to release a product even though it's crappy, and all that it says is very bad. Not to draw yet another cliched Apple parallel, but look at Steve. Rumors abound that Apple has been working on this tablet mac since 2003, and that Steve has been unsatisfied with it and has refused to release it because he doesn't feel it's a product people want. Yet Apple's stock isn't tanking on this news. Why the hell can't Steve reign in something like this?
Thus continues the long slow decline of Microsoft, who can't even generated shit that smells like shit any more.
People vote for smarter representatives all the time... they are called Europeans.
In the US, our system is so corrupt from top to bottom. There's too much corporate money involved in elections and campaigns, and their are too many stupid Americans who vote based on things like abortion, banning gay marriage, being able to have prayer in schools, keeping guns unrestricted, and eliminating the IRS. They've been brainwashed to think that God will just make everything okay if they make sure all the "dirty sinful liberals" can't actually pass laws like economic and health reform. There is no logical discourse in our country any more as it's drowned out by illogical screaming, and that screaming is backed by corporate money because corporations don't like democracy. How can we vote smarter politicians into office when the ten idiots around you are voting for the idiot?
Yes I know European politicians aren't perfect but our idiots make their idiots pale in comparison in sheer ineptitude and corruption.
Do you live in the US? The US is a huge mix of people, who all don't really spend time mixing. Going from state to state, to a US citizen, it's often like venturing to a whole new world. Going from the suburbs to the inner cities is night and day. I live in Pennsylvania, and we have an old joke that PA is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between... it's 100% true! Socially and physically central PA is very "country." And to top it all off, we have violent and deep oppositions politically between our two major political parties. These type of differences have existed since 1776.
For most of our history, the US has had deep divisions between difference areas, races, and classes. I contest the assertion that the north "knew" the south and vice versa, and that the UK parliment "knew" the colonies on a personal level, especially since they were separated by such large distances. When it comes to politics, I myself have been annoyed at those "backwards uneducated hick southerners" and I'm sure there are plenty of southerners who are annoyed with "those rotten liberal hippie commie yankee northerners." This is just dehumanizing speech that makes us look at each other as obstacles to a goal rather than as humans with feelings and needs and rights.
We've done it to each other for years and we keep on doing it, because that's the one thing that unites us, our willingness to call each other names for our slanted political ideals.
I like how near the top of the article he practically answers his own question:
"Ah -- reading between the lines might make it seem that Microsoft sweetened the deal substantially. I have no direct knowledge of this particular situation, but it's not far-fetched to believe that Microsoft probably gave Nissan oodles of free licenses and support in order to get the company to run Hyper-V in production. It's a good thing, too, since it simply wasn't an enterprise-grade hypervisor then and isn't now. I can only imagine the hoops those admins have to jump through to maintain that infrastructure."
Did, for example, someone find a feature that VMware had that Hyper-V did not, but then after negotiation they find a scenario that Hyper-V didn't do, and then offered to make it up with a workaround and $500,000 in licensing? That's a perfectly common practice in most software shops and perfectly acceptable from a business standpoint. And who said the Admin would not like hyper-V if it meets all their needs? I use outlook at work, seems to work just fine for what I need.
Such a planet already exists... it's called Philadelphia.
I happen to be an inhabitant of said planet. My name is Adrian, I welcome you to my world.
Dead serious, yes, my name is Adrian, and in fact, in my high school there was a also a guy named Rocky, and we were both in marching band and our band once performed "Gonna fly now." Such is the life on my planet, even though I'm a guy.
*goes back to watching sports and eating cheesesteaks*
One of the really good innovations in Champions is what they call the Powerhouse. This is where you go to buy new powers, increase your stats, and upgrade existing powers -- the equivalent of a class trainer in other games. However, the Powerhouse is instanced, and it has a large testing area at the back. You can pick up your new powers, test them, and get rid of them if you don't like them. Changes aren't finalized until you leave the Powerhouse. It's great for trying out new things without worrying that they'll work poorly with your character. The game does have a re-specialization system, appropriately called "retcon," but at current it's ridiculously expensive. Recent power purchases aren't bad to change, but if you want to fix a mistake from early on (when you weren't that familiar with the game), it will likely cost you several times the wealth you've managed to accumulate.
This is huge. I remember playing Diablo 2 early on, and everyone was making a sorceress and loading her up with Blizzard, a level 24 spell. It was ridiculously powerful, and poorly balanced, and the first patch which came out a month later nerfed this skill into the stone age. In other words, not only was it less powerful, it was now less useful, because the skill above it, Ice Sphere, became the more powerful and useful spell. So now everyone with Blizzard was not the best Sorceress. this pissed off thousands of players who spent their time building a character they liked. Blizzard called this skill "broken" and passing it off as a a bug fix, trying to contain the outcry, but that of course didn't help. Gamers see thru BS like this, a nerf is a nerf.
Now, You can actually test and work with a power and get to know it and understand it before you commit it to your character. And they are owning up to the fine tradition of nerfing by admitting that they might nerf something, but offering some alternatives so that you don't have to start over from the very beginning. I expect every MMO will be watching this piece of code very closely and will probably immitate it in every MMO from here on out.
I have so many questions that this article doesn't answer.
1) Where was the sample taken? UK showers? World wide? Third world countries?
2) Is there an information on different kinds of shower heads? for example, is this more common on massaging heads, low flow/high pressure heads, etc?
3) Does hot water kill this bacteria? Is it more common for people who take colder showers than people who take hot ones?
4) I always start the shower first before getting under it, since it takes about 5+ seconds to warm up... any ideas if this affects infection? (Thats more of a study question than a question from the article).
5) Any real way to prevent the growth? Someone already asked if CLR kills it. If this is so common, mind telling me how I can help myself?
I've never read a BBC article that left me with more questions.
... the iPhone really does do more than a lot of Phones out there. It has way more apps than the Pre or Android, and can currently do more than either of them with these apps. There has been and continues to be a problem with Apple's approval process, along with the idea that Apple should even have an approval process, but claiming otherwise the iPhone is not a smart phone is simply karma whoring catering to iPhone haters.
One day, if Apple doesn't fix this process, the Pre and Android will surpass them, but not yet. Being able to run background apps when there aren't enough apps worth running in the background doesn't count as a killer feature.
The average iPhone user is not put out by the C64 emulator not being available and if they cry like babies for it, they should be slapped about. There's plenty more maintain their interest and far more important things than to rehash games from 20 years ago (oy why do you insist on reliving the past! OY! ;)).
However, I really feel for the developers who are truly suffering here. Way too many apps are taking too long to be approved and are being rejected because Apple's secretive policies. How can you make money on a crap shoot of a policy? With tens of thousands of apps, any a rejection of say 1%, that's roughly hundreds of developers who keep getting rejected. To apple and the average user that's not much, but to a developer that's not something that can be relied on to sustain me if I can't get my apps out quickly.
And your citation please? I'm open minded about this and want to learn, but don't counter a hyperbole with an anecdote. If you want a citation, please provide one yourself if you make a counter claim.
In the media and communications, tweeting appears to me to be very useful. It's a type of "ticker" that might show important information. In the media people use it as a quick "blast" that everyone can see when something important happens. On the ground during a major event, like say an Iranian revolution, you can quickly tell lots of people something they need to do or some place they need to be, or alert someone to some goings on they might be interested in.
This is only about .01% of the tweets out there. In other words, it's just like the internet. Everyone can use it, most people post completely useless information, but a small percentage of the stuff you see on it is actually rather useful.
The reason why it's popular is a completely different matter. Most people on Twitter, like most people on the internet, are not using it for something that's generally considered "useful." Why it's popular is covered in other posts but I personally do see it has some usefulness.
I want to see Snow White vs Hulk. When that woman starts singing Led Zeppelin and the forest creatures start attacking, damn that is something freaky scary! I think the hulk would even turn a new color... yellow!
The problem with this attitude is that we don't acknowledge that something was done wrong. Sometimes an apology is all that is needed to mend ties to some wronged group, and then healing can begin. The Mongols and the roman empire are poor examples. No one has memory of the emotional impact of the Mongols and the Roman empire. But there is still plenty of emotions over the european impact over Africa, the middle east, and southeast asia. Hell, a lot of what's going on in those areas, mostly bad things, are a direct result of the actions that were taken by those imperial powers. And yet most governments go along like "Oh really we did something wrong? Well that wasn't my fault that was someone else. I'd never do that to you." Oh really, then why don't you just apologize and get on with life? What, no apology? Gee, I guess you don't think it was wrong huh?
I like the idea that someone else posted that apologies should be given to the entire community, and not just to Alan Turing. Alan in this case is a good poster child.
Western Countries still have plenty of people with lots of illogical hatred. I think that if Britain were to do this it would go a long way to further showing how backward the US is in it's own hatreds. If you tried this in the US there would actually be a huge political backlash. And an apology doesn't have to mean you are weak, an apology just has to mean you were too cruel in the past, and that the government by the people and for the people will try to do better to preserve your basic human rights.
Blizzard is not only good at borrowing from themselves, but also revamping the look and feel of whatever they are borrowing, and presenting it as something entirely new.
Now in Blizzard's defense, borrowing exactly from yourself and creating something wholy new are at opposite ends of a spectrum. To paraphrase an older well known quote, there are really only 7 original plots in computer games, and the rest are just copies. Same goes for the most part with skills, interfaces, graphics etc.
The Monk is similar in many ways as the assassin, but the Amazon in D2 was very similar to the rogue in D1, so why would this be a big deal? In Eastern history, monks and assassins weren't necessarily completely separate groups in all cases, so why the big deal here?
From a gaming standpoint, copying from old ideas is not a bad thing if those old ideas are successful. The best example is WC2 to StarCraft. Many people called it "orcs in space." It basically is. The interface is similar, the game play is similar, the mission structure is the same, the biggest difference are the graphics. However, the success of SC are it's subtle differences and it's changes in balance. The only major nongraphical change isn't even that major and that is the "three distinct races" which has been copied by every RTS since, including themselves (hello Warcraft 3). Despite this, SC is still being played to this day and is considered one of the greatest and most playable games of all time.
This concept of "completely different" is quite simply a messaging and marketing construct keep us interested. Of course Blizzard can't say "oh this is exactly like what we did before we only made some minor tweaks." That's not generating buzz for the game. On one has an interest in a boring demo. If you want to analyze it, yes there will be plenty of similarities. What's most important is that, when it's released, is there enough new and exciting content to make the overall game enjoyable and will it be balanced enough to make it an interesting challenge? The answer will most likely be yes, given blizzard's track record so far.
PS: what's funny is that the original demo said "7 sided strike" was more like chain lighting, not dragon strike, so they admit they copy stuff.
Sorry to interject an unrelated movie but I must make a comparision. This movie looks visually stunning, but I hope the writing and plot are as good as district 9 was. D9 was, by far, was one of the best sci fi films I've seen in decades and it did it on the cheap. And that's all that really needs to be said.
PayPal works with money like a bank or credit card, but they are treated like an internet Western Union on steroids, and yet most of the public is trusting them like a bank, which is a mistake.
PayPal needs controls like bank. The majority of their transactions may be okay, but that's like 95 to 99%... of billions. That's way too many bad transactions. They need to be made more secure, particularly for consumers.
I avoid PayPal like the plague because I don't want to become a statistic.