Mohammed was evil and against every the Free World stands for (but not against what the political Left now stands for - destruction of the system of the Free World).
Hey fella, you know the Soviet Union died back in 1990 right? The Cold War's over. We've been drinking the authoritarian right kool-aid for quite some time now.
Snarkiness aside, what exactly would be a solution to the "Islamic problem"?
Don't forget that the US is a major backer of Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive Islamic countries in the region.
A US tactic in the past has been to keep Islamic parties from power by supporting secular dictatorships (though with Afghanistan, they destroyed a secular government for an Islamic party), mainly in Egypt, Iran and Libya. All of these have unravelled for one reason or another.
The reason then as now isn't ideological or humanitarian, it's because the hand picked dictators didn't nationalise their country's oil industry.
The west doesn't give a hoot about Sharia law cutting people's hands off, or the fact that in Saudia Arabia women are forbidden from driving. It's only painted as an ideological struggle by the thick-as-pigshit servile media.
It's a shame, because the humanitarian problems in the region are plentiful. If it wasn't for oil, no-one would give a shit about the middle east.
Only one problem is, the average price of games I buy on steam would be between 15 and 30$ and the average price of games I pay for on consoles is probably 40 to 50$, Steam games are _very_ regularly discounted to sensible prices.
I don't understand why simply being able to get the games cheaper suddenly makes Steam less evil than this alleged thing that Microsoft is cooking up. You're still losing the right to resale or to buy used or to play without any online connection.
Happily giving up your user rights in exchange for a few cheap games strikes me as a very unwise thing to do. In the end, it'll be us as gamers who suffer, not Valve.
Corporations that are poorly managed need to go bankrupt and the burden should not be placed on the tax payers. Yes, some people will lose their jobs. That's called life, sometimes it happens. The worst thing you can do is paper over it just to make everyone happy. Another company that is better managed will move in to fill the void, they always do.
The problem is that the void that is being filled is not equal to the one that is left. When the manufacturing industry died a death, what was it replaced with for the majority of the workforce? The service sector, or unemployment.
Wage increases havn't matched productivity increases since the early 1980's, which is disaster for an economy that relies mainly on consumer sales for economic growth. Inequality has skyrocketed. More and more of the economic assets are held by fewer and fewer individuals.
In real terms, wages for the average worker in the US are decreasing, not increasing. The average wage for a male US worker in 1970 was $48,000 adjusting for inflation. In 2010, it was $33,000.
Jobs are not being replaced like for like. We're in a race to the bottom.
Judging by the amount of debt the US has, sounds like par for the course.
That debt (consumer debt at least) has for the most part been caused by massive falls in real wages for the working and middle classes to the benefit of the rich. Assuming that you aren't part of the 1%, this means your wages as well.
But you go ahead, keep blaming it on the individual, just like you've been taught to.
I don't see how the prosecution of one person spells the end for a website, or an entire online trade.
It's a little bit like saying busting one dealer will bring down the entire drug trade in a country. The Silk Road, or other sites like it (which I imagine the savvier users will have switched to as soon as the Silk Road got media heat), will continue for as long as there's a demand.
The war on piracy is like the war on drugs. The arguments don't have to make sense, or even be of financial benefit to the aggressor (think of how many billions have been wasted busting and then jailing people for pot). It's all about setting this arbitrary goal, be it the eradication of piracy or the eradication of drugs, and throwing insane resources at it in the hope of achieving that goal.
Even if piracy greatly increased sales (and there's some suggestion with music at least that it does), all but a few smaller publishers will still fight the war.
We know it's futile, and they probably do too. They might even have evidence that it isn't harming their profit centres.
I imagine the only thing keeping the piracy wars fuelled is if they concede then the illusion that digital goods can still work within a economic model of scarcity (like physical media) is completely and utterly broken. Suddenly software, art, music, video, film and games are worth nothing but what someone is willing to pay for it. Of course, that doesn't sit well with their established $15 for a CD, $60 for a game etc. business model.
People are lobbying to allow 10%. This does not damage engines, but assuming it is done (and with bio-ethanol) it does put a 5 or 10% dent in the CO2 production.
There's quite a lot of debate about that. One thing that 10% ethanol does wreck havoc with is rubber fuel lines on older cars, eventually making them brittle. There's also complaints about it ruining valve seals, again on older cars. Of course these things can be replaced, but it isn't as harmless as the biofuel lobby would suggest, as it seems to dry out and degrade rubber quite quickly.
Biofuels are okay, but we shouldn't be thinking of them as anything more than a bridge from oil burning combustion to whatever will be the next dominant technology for car propulsion. Instead people act like we can replace fossils with biofuels and everything will be fine.
Could you imagine a more depressing human tragedy, letting people starve to death simply because we turned over all our arable land to power our cars.
The idea that people don't want to stretch their arms out for hours on end seems sort of obvious. At the end of the day, touchscreens are ill suited for real data entry.
I feel like people are jumping the gun though. I love MS bashing as much as anyone, but remember Windows 7 is still around. The longevity of XP proved that MS can procrastinate and fuck around and release a garbage OS like Vista without losing desktop market share. People just stick with the old one.
If 8 fails, which seems likely, MS won't lose that much sleep. Hell, judging by XP they could spin out 7 for another decade to get the next one right.
Diamond Stealth 3D card with Cirrus Logic chip. It doesn't suffer from latency spikes.
I know what you mean. I was annoyed my car had a flat spot when accelerating, so I ditched it and went and bought a Cutlass with the Olds diesel engine. Problem solved.
I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.
atter for servers on really old hardware. Recently, I've found Arch upgrading has become more and more of a pain in the ass, especially on rigs with ATI cards. I carried on with it, but the recent removal of the awesome little installation program (I'm lazy when it comes to installers) made me think twice about switching.
So I went with FreeBSD on an old ThinkPad A31. It's absolutely solid, and runs linux binaries happily if I need it to (such as Flash). I dare say that it has a slight performance advantage as well.
OMG! Imagine how many years have been wasted to like, fucking Atlas Shrugged man.. If everyone who read it took like, 30 hours to read it that'd be like, a million years in wasted man hours. Whaooo...
It reminds me of those anti piracy studies that take some figure out of their ass, multiply it by the number of downloads of Rihanna albums on a few BT trackers and then claims that's what they've lost in revenue this year.
I suggest a preemptive Vega strike to wipe out any aliens before they get us first!
Playing Vega Strike isn't going to wipe out any aliens, no matter how hard you try.
As a postscript, did anyone else glance at the submission and read the headline as "Vegas Older Than Thought: Mature Enough To Nurture Life." That'll be a relief to the people who live there, I thought.
Recent protest movements and the Arab Spring have shown that the ability to use the Internet anonymously is crucial to organising resistance and circumventing censorship or oppression. In light of that. have you modified your views on the "Internet ID"?
When was the last time you upgraded a CPU and didn't get a new motherboard? Never?
I'm still on LGA775, which is hardly new but still usable. Since Slot A, I've gone for boards where I can swap in newer processors as the price drops.
I've got a cheap Asus P5G41M LX which had a Pentium Dual Core left over from my previous dead ECS motherboard. It now has a Core 2 Duo and eventually I'll get round to using a Core 2 Quad.
Yeah, most people don't upgrade like that, but I bet a fair proportion on here have had motherboard failures. Bet you won't like it so much when you have to fork out for a new CPU every time your mobo fucks up.
This is the kind of daft shit Intel will implement in spades if AMD goes to the wall.
The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely. It's not even about the $16 Trillion debt. If the government ran honest accounts, it's about the $200 Trillion debt.
Or what? The sky will fall in and the US will go bankrupt? Civilisation will cease?
You've been fed the biggest, most damaging lie of the last four years, which is government debt works the same as personal household debt. It doesn't.
Deficits aren't the issue here. They go up, they go down, they have always been with us and always will be. That is the nature of the beast. Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves. The key is to keep growth as high as possible. That means investment and government spending during bad runs. Eventually, the ratio of deficit to GDP stabalises. This happened here in the UK post 1945, where government spending hit something like 70% of GDP. The sky didn't fall in then, and it sure as hell won't now.
The US is recovering a shedload faster than the Eurozone and the UK because so far it hasn't bought into the austerity argument. Austerity will do nothing except destroy the fragile recovery. The austerity idea that the private sector will bridge public sector spending cuts is an outright lie.
The budget cut argument is nothing more than a mechanism to transfer wealth to the rich. It is their argument and their ideas that you are parroting, for their benefit. To the rest of us it causes nothing but harm.
Apart from the Wii U, which is more a half generation on from the PS3 rather than the next generation, essentially you'll be replacing like for like. Another PS3 or 360 will seem like a bad choice a year down the line when the PS4 is coming up for release.
That said, if you want games for your kids, why not think about the original Wii? They'll be dirt cheap now the U is out, and there's plenty of games available.
Also wow, there's a fair amount of moralising here tonight.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got an angry bird and I'm not afraid to use him!
No, you throw the birds *at* the pigs.
Mohammed was evil and against every the Free World stands for (but not against what the political Left now stands for - destruction of the system of the Free World).
Hey fella, you know the Soviet Union died back in 1990 right? The Cold War's over. We've been drinking the authoritarian right kool-aid for quite some time now.
Snarkiness aside, what exactly would be a solution to the "Islamic problem"?
Don't forget that the US is a major backer of Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive Islamic countries in the region.
A US tactic in the past has been to keep Islamic parties from power by supporting secular dictatorships (though with Afghanistan, they destroyed a secular government for an Islamic party), mainly in Egypt, Iran and Libya. All of these have unravelled for one reason or another.
The reason then as now isn't ideological or humanitarian, it's because the hand picked dictators didn't nationalise their country's oil industry.
The west doesn't give a hoot about Sharia law cutting people's hands off, or the fact that in Saudia Arabia women are forbidden from driving. It's only painted as an ideological struggle by the thick-as-pigshit servile media.
It's a shame, because the humanitarian problems in the region are plentiful. If it wasn't for oil, no-one would give a shit about the middle east.
Are *nix developers bored or something? As if the udev/systemd/initscripts changes weren't enough. What possible good can come from messing with TTY?
Things being around for a while doesn't make them automatically needing replacement. That's Windows logic.
Oh well, there'll always be sensible fork.
Only one problem is, the average price of games I buy on steam would be between 15 and 30$ and the average price of games I pay for on consoles is probably 40 to 50$, Steam games are _very_ regularly discounted to sensible prices.
I don't understand why simply being able to get the games cheaper suddenly makes Steam less evil than this alleged thing that Microsoft is cooking up. You're still losing the right to resale or to buy used or to play without any online connection.
Happily giving up your user rights in exchange for a few cheap games strikes me as a very unwise thing to do. In the end, it'll be us as gamers who suffer, not Valve.
Corporations that are poorly managed need to go bankrupt and the burden should not be placed on the tax payers. Yes, some people will lose their jobs. That's called life, sometimes it happens. The worst thing you can do is paper over it just to make everyone happy. Another company that is better managed will move in to fill the void, they always do.
The problem is that the void that is being filled is not equal to the one that is left. When the manufacturing industry died a death, what was it replaced with for the majority of the workforce? The service sector, or unemployment.
Wage increases havn't matched productivity increases since the early 1980's, which is disaster for an economy that relies mainly on consumer sales for economic growth. Inequality has skyrocketed. More and more of the economic assets are held by fewer and fewer individuals.
In real terms, wages for the average worker in the US are decreasing, not increasing. The average wage for a male US worker in 1970 was $48,000 adjusting for inflation. In 2010, it was $33,000.
Jobs are not being replaced like for like. We're in a race to the bottom.
Judging by the amount of debt the US has, sounds like par for the course.
That debt (consumer debt at least) has for the most part been caused by massive falls in real wages for the working and middle classes to the benefit of the rich. Assuming that you aren't part of the 1%, this means your wages as well.
But you go ahead, keep blaming it on the individual, just like you've been taught to.
I don't see how the prosecution of one person spells the end for a website, or an entire online trade.
It's a little bit like saying busting one dealer will bring down the entire drug trade in a country. The Silk Road, or other sites like it (which I imagine the savvier users will have switched to as soon as the Silk Road got media heat), will continue for as long as there's a demand.
Just legalise it all already.
The war on piracy is like the war on drugs. The arguments don't have to make sense, or even be of financial benefit to the aggressor (think of how many billions have been wasted busting and then jailing people for pot). It's all about setting this arbitrary goal, be it the eradication of piracy or the eradication of drugs, and throwing insane resources at it in the hope of achieving that goal.
Even if piracy greatly increased sales (and there's some suggestion with music at least that it does), all but a few smaller publishers will still fight the war.
We know it's futile, and they probably do too. They might even have evidence that it isn't harming their profit centres.
I imagine the only thing keeping the piracy wars fuelled is if they concede then the illusion that digital goods can still work within a economic model of scarcity (like physical media) is completely and utterly broken. Suddenly software, art, music, video, film and games are worth nothing but what someone is willing to pay for it. Of course, that doesn't sit well with their established $15 for a CD, $60 for a game etc. business model.
And so we keep on fighting.
Give it a decade and the internals of every new electronic consumer device will magically dissolve when it gets to two years old.
Planned obsolescence, indeed.
People are lobbying to allow 10%. This does not damage engines, but assuming it is done (and with bio-ethanol) it does put a 5 or 10% dent in the CO2 production.
There's quite a lot of debate about that. One thing that 10% ethanol does wreck havoc with is rubber fuel lines on older cars, eventually making them brittle. There's also complaints about it ruining valve seals, again on older cars. Of course these things can be replaced, but it isn't as harmless as the biofuel lobby would suggest, as it seems to dry out and degrade rubber quite quickly.
Biofuels are okay, but we shouldn't be thinking of them as anything more than a bridge from oil burning combustion to whatever will be the next dominant technology for car propulsion. Instead people act like we can replace fossils with biofuels and everything will be fine.
Could you imagine a more depressing human tragedy, letting people starve to death simply because we turned over all our arable land to power our cars.
The idea that people don't want to stretch their arms out for hours on end seems sort of obvious. At the end of the day, touchscreens are ill suited for real data entry.
I feel like people are jumping the gun though. I love MS bashing as much as anyone, but remember Windows 7 is still around. The longevity of XP proved that MS can procrastinate and fuck around and release a garbage OS like Vista without losing desktop market share. People just stick with the old one.
If 8 fails, which seems likely, MS won't lose that much sleep. Hell, judging by XP they could spin out 7 for another decade to get the next one right.
Diamond Stealth 3D card with Cirrus Logic chip. It doesn't suffer from latency spikes.
I know what you mean. I was annoyed my car had a flat spot when accelerating, so I ditched it and went and bought a Cutlass with the Olds diesel engine. Problem solved.
I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.
God, I fucked that up.
I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.
atter for servers on really old hardware. Recently, I've found Arch upgrading has become more and more of a pain in the ass, especially on rigs with ATI cards. I carried on with it, but the recent removal of the awesome little installation program (I'm lazy when it comes to installers) made me think twice about switching.
So I went with FreeBSD on an old ThinkPad A31. It's absolutely solid, and runs linux binaries happily if I need it to (such as Flash). I dare say that it has a slight performance advantage as well.
Hardly dead.
Sure Nintendo has a bit of a reputation for being rather nannyish but come on, a 4 hour window for 18 rated games? It sounds completely absurd.
I'm guessing this is either complete bullshit, or there's some parental control enabled by default buried in the options somewhere.
OMG! Imagine how many years have been wasted to like, fucking Atlas Shrugged man.. If everyone who read it took like, 30 hours to read it that'd be like, a million years in wasted man hours. Whaooo...
It reminds me of those anti piracy studies that take some figure out of their ass, multiply it by the number of downloads of Rihanna albums on a few BT trackers and then claims that's what they've lost in revenue this year.
I suggest a preemptive Vega strike to wipe out any aliens before they get us first!
Playing Vega Strike isn't going to wipe out any aliens, no matter how hard you try.
As a postscript, did anyone else glance at the submission and read the headline as "Vegas Older Than Thought: Mature Enough To Nurture Life." That'll be a relief to the people who live there, I thought.
Recent protest movements and the Arab Spring have shown that the ability to use the Internet anonymously is crucial to organising resistance and circumventing censorship or oppression. In light of that. have you modified your views on the "Internet ID"?
When was the last time you upgraded a CPU and didn't get a new motherboard? Never?
I'm still on LGA775, which is hardly new but still usable. Since Slot A, I've gone for boards where I can swap in newer processors as the price drops.
I've got a cheap Asus P5G41M LX which had a Pentium Dual Core left over from my previous dead ECS motherboard. It now has a Core 2 Duo and eventually I'll get round to using a Core 2 Quad.
Yeah, most people don't upgrade like that, but I bet a fair proportion on here have had motherboard failures. Bet you won't like it so much when you have to fork out for a new CPU every time your mobo fucks up.
This is the kind of daft shit Intel will implement in spades if AMD goes to the wall.
The US government does not need to cut its budget by 3%. It needs to cut its budget by 50% or more. Many programs and federal departments need eliminated entirely. It's not even about the $16 Trillion debt. If the government ran honest accounts, it's about the $200 Trillion debt.
Or what? The sky will fall in and the US will go bankrupt? Civilisation will cease?
You've been fed the biggest, most damaging lie of the last four years, which is government debt works the same as personal household debt. It doesn't.
Deficits aren't the issue here. They go up, they go down, they have always been with us and always will be. That is the nature of the beast. Keynes taught us that deficits are structural, and more or less look after themselves. The key is to keep growth as high as possible. That means investment and government spending during bad runs. Eventually, the ratio of deficit to GDP stabalises. This happened here in the UK post 1945, where government spending hit something like 70% of GDP. The sky didn't fall in then, and it sure as hell won't now.
The US is recovering a shedload faster than the Eurozone and the UK because so far it hasn't bought into the austerity argument. Austerity will do nothing except destroy the fragile recovery. The austerity idea that the private sector will bridge public sector spending cuts is an outright lie.
The budget cut argument is nothing more than a mechanism to transfer wealth to the rich. It is their argument and their ideas that you are parroting, for their benefit. To the rest of us it causes nothing but harm.
In the UK, in our authoritarian wisdom, we made it illegal not to provide passwords or decryption to encrypted material.
GCHQ are now well within their rights to arrest the pigeon to learn it's secrets.
Where are the trade embargoes on Saudi Arabia? They're in contravention of the UN declaration of Human Rights.
Because oil.
Apart from the Wii U, which is more a half generation on from the PS3 rather than the next generation, essentially you'll be replacing like for like. Another PS3 or 360 will seem like a bad choice a year down the line when the PS4 is coming up for release.
That said, if you want games for your kids, why not think about the original Wii? They'll be dirt cheap now the U is out, and there's plenty of games available.
Also wow, there's a fair amount of moralising here tonight.
.... not to mention the fact that in 100 years when those plants die they'll release all that CO2 right back into the atmosphere.
I don't consider myself an expert on plants, but last I checked they didn't spontaniously combust upon death.
Is a synopsis of a story that reads like a cocaine monologue.