Warm fuzzy feelings far outweigh torture and genocide?
O.K. then. What makes you so sure you're going to like a world run by atheists? For the time being atheism is nothing more than a spiteful reaction to religion. People have often been wronged by religion, so they attempt to place atheism on a higher moral plane. But if you eventually reject the supernatural entirely, you will also come to the realization that human beings are nothing more than particles, and thus have no inherent value at all. Save the earth? Blow it up? It should all be the same to an atheist.
This wouldn't fix anything. The database can be built so that your own vote shows you who you really voted for, but the vote totals can still be skewed, since the total tallies can not be looked at person by person.
This would absolutely change things. One of the primary areas of vulnerability is the voting machine itself. If you can verify via website that your vote was counted, then you've essentially taken voting machine hacks out of the picture. Investigating the servers is a lot easier than investigating each and every individual voting machine.
A more interesting question might be what happens when Nintendo release their follow up to the Wii. Will my VC titles be transferable then?
I hate to say this but I doubt it. Not because Nintendo wants to rip us off (although they do), but rather because the lack of current transferability is evidence toward their general lack of technical capability in the area.
Do you refuse to buy normal games because if they are stolen/lost/destroyed you are screwed?
Of course you're right, but the parent makes a good point too. If someone steals my NES, they get my NES and whatever games are around the NES, but they might ignore my closet full of NES games. If you steal a Wii you automatically steal the closet full of VC games along with it. Why can't it be like iTunes where you can authorize and deauthorize playback?
P.S. Most insurance is there to cover relatively catastrophic losses. Theft of items such as a Wii usually won't exceed the deductible.
Don't you see? If MS waits long enough before moving to 64 bit, they will finally have another resurgence of their lifeblood: obsolescence. When we eventually get to the point where our apps are begging for 4+ GB of RAM, MS will have the ultimate selling point for their new operating system.
Think they don't need this? Just look at Vista: a pretty little operating system that nobody wants, because XP works just as good.
GPS-style monitoring is just silly, there are many ways to continue doping in spite of being monitored in that fashion. It won't be effective unless the device could detect and monitor levels of dope in the bloodstream, in real time.
And regardless, it's silly to be taking the countermeasures so far. Doping is bad for sports, but violating too many civil liberties to counteract it is even worse. These are human beings, not race horses.
Soap opera writers have been breaking away from the union and crossing the picket line.
The union's fight is not their fight - soap operas don't sell DVD's or get watched online.
But unless they want to do nothing but write for soaps all their life they should try to remain in good standing with the union, right?
What amazes me is not that someone is fired for telling the truth or expressing an opinion -- what amazes me is how many people EXPECT morals or ethics from profit-oriented entities.
Oh come on. Don't feed us that socialist garbage. There's a funny thing about profit-oriented entities: they rely on us to give them our time or money. Now, some of the misguided POEs forget this and instead think they rely on their advertisers. Those become trash publications and yes, one should not expect ethics in such a case. But there are plenty of POEs that cater to people who want the truth, and I think it's naive of you to pretend that such a thing can't exist. These types of businesses survive on a fragile symbiosis with their customers who expect morals and ethics. Break the code, and the whole thing comes tumbling down.
Gamespot may survive this in the short term, but in the long term they are either going to disappear, or become something else entirely. There is a large number of people, myself included, who will no longer give them the time of day. And if their fall should be grand enough, that should be a pretty good motivator for their competitors to be ethical.
And 6/10 should be 'a bit above average'. *Bad* games should be getting 2s, 3s and 4s. What's the point of a 1-10 scale where half of it is effectively out-of-bounds?
Ask the school system. Ask the Olympics. 1-10 scales are always like that. That's why I prefer the 1-5 scale (with no decimals). Two degrees of bad (1-2), three degrees of good (3-5). Are we seriously supposed to believe that opinions can be more precise than that?
Of course, snobs will tell you to ignore scores and just read the review. I think they are missing the point. The scores are there to help people decide what they want to read, and to help them filter out games they don't even want to bother with.
The only shocking thing here is that someone at Gamespot managed to get a negative review published before they were fired. It was really the publisher that was, I'm sure, taking the heat. So you think this guy Jeff has been trying to get a negative review published all these years, and has only just now succeeded? I suppose that's possible, but someone who is stubborn enough to write such a review in the first place would have probably stubborn enough to do it way back when it was much easier to do so, that is, way back when the conflict of interests first began. This guy Jeff has been around a long time, and he often doles out less-than-stellar reviews.
This is an excellent statement, and gets to the core of the whole Wii thing. Back in the day, parents paid hundreds of dollars to play Pac Man, or Breakout. And how many people are still addicted to Tetris? These are not easy games to make in the sense that they are not always easy to conceptualize, but like you said, they are terrifically easy to code.
One problem is that there is a proven mindset that if you trick up an existing product, making it glossier and adding features, it will sell almost as well as it did the first time around. This method has worked well enough in the past, and there are entire companies set up to do business this way. And why not? It works a lot of the time.
But "casual" games operate on slightly different principles:
They have to be eye-catching to nearly everyone, not just people familiar with games.
They have to make sense immediately.
They have to be easy enough for new players to enjoy, but challenging enough to keep veteran players playing.
It has been done many times in the past, but usually it's by one dude who just has a good idea. The problem is, that one dude (or group of dudes) may never have another idea as good as their first. From a studio perspective, that's not a solid bet at all. The suits would rather sell a sequel to the proven winner (and a lot of us ask for exactly that). But hopefully more suits are starting to realize that when the investment is so small, who cares about the odds?
I think people are forgetting about printed computer magazines - e.g. Linux Journal, APC, etc. They have a restricted column magazine format, and they often use TinyURLs when publishing links.
If they have the capacity to run a magazine, why don't they just host their own redirects?
I don't think this is anymore of a ripe off than the toy cellphones that look like a Razer.
Except for the fact that a Wiimote is about one thousand times more distinct looking than a Razer. To the uninitiated a Razer looks just like every other cell phone.
CSS is a collection of attributes in search of an architecture. Page layout with "float" and "clear" is too limited and doesn't work well. (The "three column problem" is well known, and workarounds using layers or absolute positioning often result in text on top of other text.)
Now wait a second. What exactly are you trying to do that can't be arranged using floats, or other CSS for that matter? We wouldn't have any "three column problems" if every browser would just adhere to the standard. That's a browser problem, not a CSS problem.
The price set by the venues IS the fair market price. They are the ones who do the market research, they are the ones with the customer relationship to maintain, and thus they set their ticket prices accordingly. When outside middlemen force their way into the equation it undermines not only the customer's best interests, but also the venues' as well.
especially with the Blu-Ray drive, which is looking like a better and better idea
It is? Specifically, how so? As far as I can tell, the only thing it was good for was raising the price into the stratosphere, which is where a lot of people place the blame for the system's lagging sales.
I've always wondered how churches like that can rationalize spending money on a 20 foot screen with a nice projector and 18" subwoofer when that money could be applied to more useful pursuits such as helping the poor.
People who belong to churches more often than not give a significant amount of money to the church, who, in turn, spend a lot of that on "helping the poor" and other worthy pursuits. While I understand your concern (and share it in some cases), it's important to remember that these more visible expenses are intended to grow participation in the church (often by increasing the quality of the worship experience), which also grows the contribution base and increases the charitable potential of the church.
Do you think people are more or less likely to be charitable when they belong to a church? I'm inclined to think more, much more. Personally I'd like to see more bare-bones churches (I too flinch when I see anything resembling excess), but who am I to say that would be more effective in the long run? Most of the bare-bones churches I've been to have membership in the dozens or lower hundreds, not the thousands. What does that say about their ability to recruit?
As long as the clergy aren't driving Jaguars I'm not going too much sleep over it, for now.
2) The highlights/shadows/fill light sliders aren't as flexible or as easy to use as the Gimp's curves tool for adjusting contrast.
Flexible, maybe. But curve graphs are completely counter-intuitive to a lot of people. I've never been able to adjust contrast as easily as I can in Picasa. Just raise the shadows. Too dark now? Raise the fill light. (I rarely raise the highlights on a digital photo because they blow out so easily.)
Look people, ala carte might sound good, until you realize that in order to remain revenue neutral the people who watch the popular channels will pay less, and those who watch the more obscure stuff will pay more.
Wait a minute, what? What happened to the law of supply and demand? The last time I checked, the very popular HBO was $15/month and the NASA channel was just bundled in. Most shows are not commodities (that is, there is no equivalent to the Sopranos; you're either watching it or you're not), so as popularity rises, so does the price. The only reason CNN isn't $15/month is because of the ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you see? If MS waits long enough before moving to 64 bit, they will finally have another resurgence of their lifeblood: obsolescence. When we eventually get to the point where our apps are begging for 4+ GB of RAM, MS will have the ultimate selling point for their new operating system.
Think they don't need this? Just look at Vista: a pretty little operating system that nobody wants, because XP works just as good.
Oh come on. Don't feed us that socialist garbage. There's a funny thing about profit-oriented entities: they rely on us to give them our time or money. Now, some of the misguided POEs forget this and instead think they rely on their advertisers. Those become trash publications and yes, one should not expect ethics in such a case. But there are plenty of POEs that cater to people who want the truth, and I think it's naive of you to pretend that such a thing can't exist. These types of businesses survive on a fragile symbiosis with their customers who expect morals and ethics. Break the code, and the whole thing comes tumbling down.
Gamespot may survive this in the short term, but in the long term they are either going to disappear, or become something else entirely. There is a large number of people, myself included, who will no longer give them the time of day. And if their fall should be grand enough, that should be a pretty good motivator for their competitors to be ethical.
Ask the school system. Ask the Olympics. 1-10 scales are always like that. That's why I prefer the 1-5 scale (with no decimals). Two degrees of bad (1-2), three degrees of good (3-5). Are we seriously supposed to believe that opinions can be more precise than that?
Of course, snobs will tell you to ignore scores and just read the review. I think they are missing the point. The scores are there to help people decide what they want to read, and to help them filter out games they don't even want to bother with.
This is an excellent statement, and gets to the core of the whole Wii thing. Back in the day, parents paid hundreds of dollars to play Pac Man, or Breakout. And how many people are still addicted to Tetris? These are not easy games to make in the sense that they are not always easy to conceptualize, but like you said, they are terrifically easy to code.
One problem is that there is a proven mindset that if you trick up an existing product, making it glossier and adding features, it will sell almost as well as it did the first time around. This method has worked well enough in the past, and there are entire companies set up to do business this way. And why not? It works a lot of the time.
But "casual" games operate on slightly different principles:
It has been done many times in the past, but usually it's by one dude who just has a good idea. The problem is, that one dude (or group of dudes) may never have another idea as good as their first. From a studio perspective, that's not a solid bet at all. The suits would rather sell a sequel to the proven winner (and a lot of us ask for exactly that). But hopefully more suits are starting to realize that when the investment is so small, who cares about the odds?
I find this rather interesting. Seven years of technological advancement, and THAT (PS3) is all we get? The same exact games with shellacked graphics?
I have nothing against the PS3, but it seems we are nearing some sort of graphical barrier here.
The price set by the venues IS the fair market price. They are the ones who do the market research, they are the ones with the customer relationship to maintain, and thus they set their ticket prices accordingly. When outside middlemen force their way into the equation it undermines not only the customer's best interests, but also the venues' as well.
I'd like to know this too. What happens when a company licenses technology based on a patent that is later rejected?
People who belong to churches more often than not give a significant amount of money to the church, who, in turn, spend a lot of that on "helping the poor" and other worthy pursuits. While I understand your concern (and share it in some cases), it's important to remember that these more visible expenses are intended to grow participation in the church (often by increasing the quality of the worship experience), which also grows the contribution base and increases the charitable potential of the church.
Do you think people are more or less likely to be charitable when they belong to a church? I'm inclined to think more, much more. Personally I'd like to see more bare-bones churches (I too flinch when I see anything resembling excess), but who am I to say that would be more effective in the long run? Most of the bare-bones churches I've been to have membership in the dozens or lower hundreds, not the thousands. What does that say about their ability to recruit?
As long as the clergy aren't driving Jaguars I'm not going too much sleep over it, for now.