Wow, you created an account just for posting fanboy wars from.... what, 5 years ago? I would think this was a troll, if it wasn't for the fact that I've read drivel like yours for the past 15 years. 20 if you start with magazines.
The cold, hard reality is that for all of the PS3s technical excellence, no one gives a fuck because no one can tell the difference. And with no one, I mean anyone who has better things to do than to hitch their personal self-worth to some bag of plastic, silicon and metal that is stamped with a particular brand.
Sort of. I have a Samsung Smart TV, and while they definitely have their flavor of apps only available for their TV, that's not really the main problem. The main problem is that the apps that do exist are slow, have a terrible interface, and are filled with bugs. For example: for the first 6 months or so, the Netflix app kept losing my login information. I was this close to just not watching Netflix on the TV anymore, and just go back either jerry-rigging it onto the TV via an extra-long DVI/HDMI cable or to just watch it on my laptop.
But yes, the Smart TVs are absolutely retarded and a waste of money (or at least, the Internet connectivity aspect is). They need to fix the following problems: * no useful apps available outside of Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus.. * requirements to use specific and approved USB cameras or widgets. * Buggy apps. * Very slow responsiveness. * Terrible, terrible interface.
The solutions: * Swallow your pride. Go Google Play Store or iTunes. * Invest into the connectivity, and throw some real processing power onto it. * Release a smartphone app that allows you to use its interfaces (voice recognition, touchscreen) to control the action on-screen. * Make the USB-connectivity more robust, and accept standard webcams, gizmos and widgets.
Until then, I will consider Smart TVs a waste of time.
Oh, and fair warning, dear TV makers: this isn't rocket science, and if Apple is indeed working on an Apple TV, it WILL eat your lunch. Because they will get it right, and people will fall over themselves to get a well-thought out, easy to use, pretty TV that integrates into the Apple eco-system.
Even if we assume that the market forces are able to work in Adam Smith's idealized way, market forces have to obey the laws of physics. Math is also a bitch to work around.
In other words, the free market is not a silver bullet even in the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, it is a botched free market that will prevent us from finding a workable solution. And we are far closer to a botched free market than a perfect free market. Draw your own conclusions.
Since we're talking about California: the HSR project is absolutely retarded, and a case-study in how not to create an HSR: - due to political issues, the rail line stops in the towns of Bumfuck and Nowhere, also known as Gilroy and Bakersfield. That adds cost and time to delivering it. - due to cost issues, a lot of the HSR tracks are actually shared with various existing rail authorities (Caltrain, for example), and therefore the trains will not hit the high speeds necessary to qualify as HSR in many locations.
The HSR we're getting is HSR in name only, is stuffed to the gills with pork to appease local politicians, and faces a ton of NIMBY opposition (or OIMBY even). The proper way to create an HSR line on the Pacific: have a dedicated rail-line built from Portland to San Diego. Have it stop in San Jose, Los Angeles and maybe Sacramento and a few towns cities in Washington and Oregon. Subsidize the rail building and rail maintenance with state funds, and have the trains operated by private train operators. Start with the California tracks, then expand once the lines are running.
Instead, we get an initial rail line that goes nowhere interesting and isn't high-speed. The problem here is political will, not technical aspects of HSR. If you'd remove the emotionalism from all the HSR projects, you'd get working HSR. The problem is that that is impossible, and we get an emotional mess.
With an ever increasing pressure to drop prices so that the numbers in the next quarter (or, for the long-term corporate leaders, next 2 years) are met. Screw the fact that we're raising a whole class of nasty bugs that will enable us to relive the glory of pre-penicillin times, when something as simple as a cut meant possible amputation of the affected limb.
Antibiotic resistance is probably one of the worst things we're facing down in the coming century or so, right next to AGC. Both have the ability to have a tremendous negative impact on our lives, and both are a long time off - in other words, they are things no politician or corporate owner will want to touch while they're still working.
Just curious - are you one of the people who always holds up Switzerland as an example of how gun laws protects the citizenry? Then why do you complain about the tracking that's being done, considering that Switzerland's gun tracking is far more thorough? Furthermore, what is the issue with having guns tracked?
I came from the 1990s, the final decade where we didn't let government tell us what to do, we all had individual thoughts and cared for the whole rather than ourselves
ROFL. Yeah, I remember the 90s. Clinton was in the office, Power Rangers and Grunge was all the rage, and Hillarycare was the boogeyman of the day. Your rose-colored glasses betray your youth, and your lack of perspective. Go learn something about the world before getting all apocalyptic.
Wait. I thought guns in the home increase the safety of the gun owners. The only way that is true if the criminals know that if they enter that home, they will face a gun owner. In other words, gun owners in the area should rejoice that criminals are now warned where not to go.
Or is this entire home safety thing a myth that is completely overshadowed by the fact that guns are actually high-value items, and that owning them makes a bigger target with little extra protection?
The gun lobby needs to make up their mind as to whether owning guns increases safety or increases the target value. They can't argue both ways when it suits them.
Wow. Seems I have a stalker on my hands with mod points. A single mod-down in some of the gun/AGC threads that I posted in over the last few days. Nice.
You fucking moron.... CO2 bubbling up in a limited area has close to zero impact on the temperature and the acidity of the ocean in that area. Which is what is driving the coral die-off.
Thank god that scientists are actually doing that, because otherwise they'd keep putting forward idiotic, wrong and self-serving ideas - like the ones being served up on that site. Quite honestly, when he started out, Watts was actually doing some fairly useful commentary. He was mostly wrong, but at least he was asking questions that needed answering in the public, instead of just in the scientific literature. Now.... he's just clinging to an incorrect idea that has been his meal ticket for years. He's not going to give up or change his mind, because he will have no purpose or income.
Somebody mod this guy up. He actually understands what kind of gun you want for hunting, and why assault-type rifles like the Bushmaster are terrible for it.
You hunt with a Bushmaster 223? Seriously? what the fuck do you hunt? Aborigines? The most you need for any serious hunting is a bolt-action rifle. That's it. Anything more and you have terrible aim (and shouldn't hunt or own a gun), are hunting cattle (and shouldn't hunt or own a gun) or are planning to get into a war (and are insane and shouldn't own a gun).
Since all the gun advocates love to bring up Switzerland - why not go all the way and implement their gun laws as well? They don't seem to live in a police state, they're nicely federal... really, what give? Does not being able to own as many semi-automatic rifles with large calibers and long barrels and high muzzle velocity really mean that you live in a police that? Is the next step after that really locking everyone in an underground bunker?
No. And making these arguments makes you sound like a nut job I need to ignore. Start being rational, acknowledge there are a wide range of options to deal with mass shootings, and stop with the paranoia.
protect every last human being from unpredictable freak occurrences
Strawman. No one is arguing that. However, we do argue about the wisdom of having large amounts of deadly weaponry available to anyone who asks.
At some point though, "Americans" becomes shorthand for "the majority of Americans", "the American government" or "a loud and significant minority of Americans". And that it stays that way is partially the fault of the others. I dislike this situation as much as the next rational American, but.... that's the reality. We can either deal with it, or just blame the messenger.
I would love to hear how you would see the telecoms market play out if government regulation is removed. Keep in mind that monopolistic rent-seeking is the most profitable state for a company, and that companies a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximize profit. Keep also in mind that there are currently large multinationals playing in the telecoms market.
Show your work, and pay attention to whether costs rise or fall and whether services rise or fall.
Facebook's problem is that my LinkedIn world and my Facebook world will forever remain separate. Furthermore, anyone who links their personal life and their work life is asking for a whole lot of trouble (yes, my LI and FB handles are different). I know that Facebook is looking to justify their $40 IPO, but this is just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping against all odds that it sticks.
Why are we the country that gave the world computers, space flight, airplace, nuclear physics,.... you know what, theres too many things to list.
Notice how all those things are in the past? Not to mention that space flight was given to you by German scientists, nuclear physics was developed mostly by Europeans (I know it's popular to think that Einstein was American when he had his Annus Mirabilis, but he wasn't), and the Wright brothers were building on stuff that had been worked on by Europeans for about 200 years. The Wright brothers beat the rest of the world by a few years, tops. Nothing to really brag about.
And people go to our graduate (and some undergraduate) schools because they are the best in the world. For now. In the meantime, a very large section of Americans poo-poos education, tries to cut its funding, and drags down the average education of America to an embarrassing level.
That's why people bash the US education. But, just like the Republicans just before and after the 2012 election, keep telling yourself that people are just using the wrong metrics, and the outcome was biased and bought anyway, so it wasn't "real". The rest of the world will move just along.
Jamaica has also a significant drug gang problem. Are we really at the point where we're gloating that we're better than some third-world nation? Lame.
Finally, the assumption is that knife deaths will not fully replace gun deaths, because it is harder to kill big masses of people with a single knife. So far, data bears out that assumption.
I don't think we have the same definition of open source. For one, IV and RPX are about as closed source as you can get - you can't even buy the things from them that they are suing over. At least Microsoft gives you something before it locks you into its OS or product suite. Furthermore, there's gotta be something in this for IV and RPX. Their lawyers don't get out of bed for less than 7 figures. As best as I can figure, the companies that bought the patents have perpetual license rights to them, and IV and RPX can sue everybody else for eleventy hojillion dollars for anything having to do with taking, storing, transforming and thinking about a picture.
On the upside, maybe the losers in the bidding war will lobby Congress to get IV and RPX off of their back.
The reach of the Somali "government" is Mogadishu and its suburbs. The rest is ruled by an ever-changing clique of Al-Qaeda groups, Somali warlords and pirates. Some of those groups receive help from other governments, but your description of Somalia as an actual nation-state is flat-out wrong. The biggest give-away is that you think that the last government that was toppled had any sort of popular legitimacy - it was the local band of Al-Qaeda affiliates.
As for convicted monopolists: Microsoft was the most recent one. I'll let you fill in Y and Z. The previous one was Standard Oil - again, I'll let you fill in Y and Z. And Google is really close to becoming the next one. The reason there aren't more is because of Anti-trust regulation during mergers (see ATT and T-Mobile, for example), and the actual break up of companies that become monopolies.
"Robber barons" is nothing but a catch-phrase, and the ones I know of fall mostly into category 2.
Clearly you know of the existence of monopolists who didn't fall into your second category, nor into your first. Why are you asking then?
Only an idiot would suggest that ISP pricing has any chance of behaving according to Adam Smiths' idealized and theoretical free market. All others realize that the barriers to entry are so huge that meaningful competition cannot possibly occur - especially when any current player is large enough to just buy out any upstart with any chance of upending the status quo.
The one common thread I've found among the gun nuts here is that they are absolutely incapable of seeing this situation in anything but a "everyone has guns/no one has guns" scenario. It's really quite hilarious - and depressing, because it means it's impossible to have an actual discussion with you people.
I never said I would run a fiefdom with my bare hands (if you were truly a martial artist, you'd know they trained with non-firearm weapons)
Fine. I'll spot you a sword, a spear and a bow with a quiver full of arrows. Now try running a fiefdom. Anywhere. I'm pretty sure that even Amazonian tribes will give you a run for your money.
Given how violent you are, its no wonder you don't want people to have guns - it levels the playing field for people without my training against people like you.
Snicker. Typical - get called out on your vague, implied threats, then weasel out by arguing "that's totally not what I was implying! Therefore it must be you who is doing it!" I'm quite peaceful. I also have no problems with taking the fight to someone who is threatening me, my friends and family, or wants to just lord over me for kicks. The only people who are bothered by this are bullies.
Real martial artists bow out of respect to one another before the first punch/kick/whatever is thrown.
You're now arguing about "real" martial artists? With... something completely unrelated to the current discussion? To any of your hypothetical scenarios? And quite far down on the list of Dos and Donts that are important to most martial arts? And to boot - you clearly missed the movie reference, and its context?
I'm not sure whether to take anything you said seriously, because there is no logic to it, and it sounds too much like a basic run-of-the-mill bully.
Try running a small fief dom with your bare hands. I double-dare you. I also double-dare you to kill 27 people with your bare hands before the police show up. You seriously have no clue what it takes to be a warlord.
FYI, I'm 6'4, 200 lbs, athlete, including martial arts, and will probably kick your ass. Make my day.
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Wow, you created an account just for posting fanboy wars from.... what, 5 years ago? I would think this was a troll, if it wasn't for the fact that I've read drivel like yours for the past 15 years. 20 if you start with magazines.
The cold, hard reality is that for all of the PS3s technical excellence, no one gives a fuck because no one can tell the difference. And with no one, I mean anyone who has better things to do than to hitch their personal self-worth to some bag of plastic, silicon and metal that is stamped with a particular brand.
Sort of. I have a Samsung Smart TV, and while they definitely have their flavor of apps only available for their TV, that's not really the main problem. The main problem is that the apps that do exist are slow, have a terrible interface, and are filled with bugs. For example: for the first 6 months or so, the Netflix app kept losing my login information. I was this close to just not watching Netflix on the TV anymore, and just go back either jerry-rigging it onto the TV via an extra-long DVI/HDMI cable or to just watch it on my laptop.
But yes, the Smart TVs are absolutely retarded and a waste of money (or at least, the Internet connectivity aspect is). They need to fix the following problems:
* no useful apps available outside of Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus..
* requirements to use specific and approved USB cameras or widgets.
* Buggy apps.
* Very slow responsiveness.
* Terrible, terrible interface.
The solutions:
* Swallow your pride. Go Google Play Store or iTunes.
* Invest into the connectivity, and throw some real processing power onto it.
* Release a smartphone app that allows you to use its interfaces (voice recognition, touchscreen) to control the action on-screen.
* Make the USB-connectivity more robust, and accept standard webcams, gizmos and widgets.
Until then, I will consider Smart TVs a waste of time.
Oh, and fair warning, dear TV makers: this isn't rocket science, and if Apple is indeed working on an Apple TV, it WILL eat your lunch. Because they will get it right, and people will fall over themselves to get a well-thought out, easy to use, pretty TV that integrates into the Apple eco-system.
Even if we assume that the market forces are able to work in Adam Smith's idealized way, market forces have to obey the laws of physics. Math is also a bitch to work around.
In other words, the free market is not a silver bullet even in the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, it is a botched free market that will prevent us from finding a workable solution. And we are far closer to a botched free market than a perfect free market. Draw your own conclusions.
Since we're talking about California: the HSR project is absolutely retarded, and a case-study in how not to create an HSR:
- due to political issues, the rail line stops in the towns of Bumfuck and Nowhere, also known as Gilroy and Bakersfield. That adds cost and time to delivering it.
- due to cost issues, a lot of the HSR tracks are actually shared with various existing rail authorities (Caltrain, for example), and therefore the trains will not hit the high speeds necessary to qualify as HSR in many locations.
The HSR we're getting is HSR in name only, is stuffed to the gills with pork to appease local politicians, and faces a ton of NIMBY opposition (or OIMBY even). The proper way to create an HSR line on the Pacific: have a dedicated rail-line built from Portland to San Diego. Have it stop in San Jose, Los Angeles and maybe Sacramento and a few towns cities in Washington and Oregon. Subsidize the rail building and rail maintenance with state funds, and have the trains operated by private train operators. Start with the California tracks, then expand once the lines are running.
Instead, we get an initial rail line that goes nowhere interesting and isn't high-speed. The problem here is political will, not technical aspects of HSR. If you'd remove the emotionalism from all the HSR projects, you'd get working HSR. The problem is that that is impossible, and we get an emotional mess.
With an ever increasing pressure to drop prices so that the numbers in the next quarter (or, for the long-term corporate leaders, next 2 years) are met. Screw the fact that we're raising a whole class of nasty bugs that will enable us to relive the glory of pre-penicillin times, when something as simple as a cut meant possible amputation of the affected limb.
Antibiotic resistance is probably one of the worst things we're facing down in the coming century or so, right next to AGC. Both have the ability to have a tremendous negative impact on our lives, and both are a long time off - in other words, they are things no politician or corporate owner will want to touch while they're still working.
Just curious - are you one of the people who always holds up Switzerland as an example of how gun laws protects the citizenry? Then why do you complain about the tracking that's being done, considering that Switzerland's gun tracking is far more thorough? Furthermore, what is the issue with having guns tracked?
I came from the 1990s, the final decade where we didn't let government tell us what to do, we all had individual thoughts and cared for the whole rather than ourselves
ROFL. Yeah, I remember the 90s. Clinton was in the office, Power Rangers and Grunge was all the rage, and Hillarycare was the boogeyman of the day. Your rose-colored glasses betray your youth, and your lack of perspective. Go learn something about the world before getting all apocalyptic.
Wait. I thought guns in the home increase the safety of the gun owners. The only way that is true if the criminals know that if they enter that home, they will face a gun owner. In other words, gun owners in the area should rejoice that criminals are now warned where not to go.
Or is this entire home safety thing a myth that is completely overshadowed by the fact that guns are actually high-value items, and that owning them makes a bigger target with little extra protection?
The gun lobby needs to make up their mind as to whether owning guns increases safety or increases the target value. They can't argue both ways when it suits them.
Wow. Seems I have a stalker on my hands with mod points. A single mod-down in some of the gun/AGC threads that I posted in over the last few days. Nice.
You fucking moron.... CO2 bubbling up in a limited area has close to zero impact on the temperature and the acidity of the ocean in that area. Which is what is driving the coral die-off.
Thank god that scientists are actually doing that, because otherwise they'd keep putting forward idiotic, wrong and self-serving ideas - like the ones being served up on that site. Quite honestly, when he started out, Watts was actually doing some fairly useful commentary. He was mostly wrong, but at least he was asking questions that needed answering in the public, instead of just in the scientific literature. Now.... he's just clinging to an incorrect idea that has been his meal ticket for years. He's not going to give up or change his mind, because he will have no purpose or income.
Somebody mod this guy up. He actually understands what kind of gun you want for hunting, and why assault-type rifles like the Bushmaster are terrible for it.
You hunt with a Bushmaster 223? Seriously? what the fuck do you hunt? Aborigines? The most you need for any serious hunting is a bolt-action rifle. That's it. Anything more and you have terrible aim (and shouldn't hunt or own a gun), are hunting cattle (and shouldn't hunt or own a gun) or are planning to get into a war (and are insane and shouldn't own a gun).
Since all the gun advocates love to bring up Switzerland - why not go all the way and implement their gun laws as well? They don't seem to live in a police state, they're nicely federal... really, what give? Does not being able to own as many semi-automatic rifles with large calibers and long barrels and high muzzle velocity really mean that you live in a police that? Is the next step after that really locking everyone in an underground bunker?
No. And making these arguments makes you sound like a nut job I need to ignore. Start being rational, acknowledge there are a wide range of options to deal with mass shootings, and stop with the paranoia.
protect every last human being from unpredictable freak occurrences
Strawman. No one is arguing that. However, we do argue about the wisdom of having large amounts of deadly weaponry available to anyone who asks.
At some point though, "Americans" becomes shorthand for "the majority of Americans", "the American government" or "a loud and significant minority of Americans". And that it stays that way is partially the fault of the others. I dislike this situation as much as the next rational American, but.... that's the reality. We can either deal with it, or just blame the messenger.
Funny. I clearly pissed off some republican with mod points. Some people just can't take the truth.
I would love to hear how you would see the telecoms market play out if government regulation is removed. Keep in mind that monopolistic rent-seeking is the most profitable state for a company, and that companies a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximize profit. Keep also in mind that there are currently large multinationals playing in the telecoms market.
Show your work, and pay attention to whether costs rise or fall and whether services rise or fall.
Facebook's problem is that my LinkedIn world and my Facebook world will forever remain separate. Furthermore, anyone who links their personal life and their work life is asking for a whole lot of trouble (yes, my LI and FB handles are different). I know that Facebook is looking to justify their $40 IPO, but this is just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping against all odds that it sticks.
Why are we the country that gave the world computers, space flight, airplace, nuclear physics, .... you know what, theres too many things to list.
Notice how all those things are in the past? Not to mention that space flight was given to you by German scientists, nuclear physics was developed mostly by Europeans (I know it's popular to think that Einstein was American when he had his Annus Mirabilis, but he wasn't), and the Wright brothers were building on stuff that had been worked on by Europeans for about 200 years. The Wright brothers beat the rest of the world by a few years, tops. Nothing to really brag about.
And people go to our graduate (and some undergraduate) schools because they are the best in the world. For now. In the meantime, a very large section of Americans poo-poos education, tries to cut its funding, and drags down the average education of America to an embarrassing level.
That's why people bash the US education. But, just like the Republicans just before and after the 2012 election, keep telling yourself that people are just using the wrong metrics, and the outcome was biased and bought anyway, so it wasn't "real". The rest of the world will move just along.
Jamaica has also a significant drug gang problem. Are we really at the point where we're gloating that we're better than some third-world nation? Lame.
Finally, the assumption is that knife deaths will not fully replace gun deaths, because it is harder to kill big masses of people with a single knife. So far, data bears out that assumption.
I don't think we have the same definition of open source. For one, IV and RPX are about as closed source as you can get - you can't even buy the things from them that they are suing over. At least Microsoft gives you something before it locks you into its OS or product suite. Furthermore, there's gotta be something in this for IV and RPX. Their lawyers don't get out of bed for less than 7 figures. As best as I can figure, the companies that bought the patents have perpetual license rights to them, and IV and RPX can sue everybody else for eleventy hojillion dollars for anything having to do with taking, storing, transforming and thinking about a picture.
On the upside, maybe the losers in the bidding war will lobby Congress to get IV and RPX off of their back.
The reach of the Somali "government" is Mogadishu and its suburbs. The rest is ruled by an ever-changing clique of Al-Qaeda groups, Somali warlords and pirates. Some of those groups receive help from other governments, but your description of Somalia as an actual nation-state is flat-out wrong. The biggest give-away is that you think that the last government that was toppled had any sort of popular legitimacy - it was the local band of Al-Qaeda affiliates.
As for convicted monopolists: Microsoft was the most recent one. I'll let you fill in Y and Z. The previous one was Standard Oil - again, I'll let you fill in Y and Z. And Google is really close to becoming the next one. The reason there aren't more is because of Anti-trust regulation during mergers (see ATT and T-Mobile, for example), and the actual break up of companies that become monopolies.
"Robber barons" is nothing but a catch-phrase, and the ones I know of fall mostly into category 2.
Clearly you know of the existence of monopolists who didn't fall into your second category, nor into your first. Why are you asking then?
Only an idiot would suggest that ISP pricing has any chance of behaving according to Adam Smiths' idealized and theoretical free market. All others realize that the barriers to entry are so huge that meaningful competition cannot possibly occur - especially when any current player is large enough to just buy out any upstart with any chance of upending the status quo.
The one common thread I've found among the gun nuts here is that they are absolutely incapable of seeing this situation in anything but a "everyone has guns/no one has guns" scenario. It's really quite hilarious - and depressing, because it means it's impossible to have an actual discussion with you people.
I never said I would run a fiefdom with my bare hands (if you were truly a martial artist, you'd know they trained with non-firearm weapons)
Fine. I'll spot you a sword, a spear and a bow with a quiver full of arrows. Now try running a fiefdom. Anywhere. I'm pretty sure that even Amazonian tribes will give you a run for your money.
Given how violent you are, its no wonder you don't want people to have guns - it levels the playing field for people without my training against people like you.
Snicker. Typical - get called out on your vague, implied threats, then weasel out by arguing "that's totally not what I was implying! Therefore it must be you who is doing it!" I'm quite peaceful. I also have no problems with taking the fight to someone who is threatening me, my friends and family, or wants to just lord over me for kicks. The only people who are bothered by this are bullies.
Real martial artists bow out of respect to one another before the first punch/kick/whatever is thrown.
You're now arguing about "real" martial artists? With... something completely unrelated to the current discussion? To any of your hypothetical scenarios? And quite far down on the list of Dos and Donts that are important to most martial arts? And to boot - you clearly missed the movie reference, and its context?
I'm not sure whether to take anything you said seriously, because there is no logic to it, and it sounds too much like a basic run-of-the-mill bully.
Keep telling yourself you will draw first. I'll laugh the day you get shot up by a tweaker because you didn't see him coming.
Try running a small fief dom with your bare hands. I double-dare you. I also double-dare you to kill 27 people with your bare hands before the police show up. You seriously have no clue what it takes to be a warlord.
FYI, I'm 6'4, 200 lbs, athlete, including martial arts, and will probably kick your ass. Make my day.