Or if they propose pieces of legislation that chip away at those rights. You don't take away rights all at once, you slowly erode them bit by bit. You don't push for legislation that prompts the "That's crazy" response, you push for the "Well that's not so bad" and lather rinse repeat about 100x. Sure maybe no one is proposing what you say right now, but if you think they won't be soon after this round of SOPA and PIPA plays out, you haven't been paying much attention.
If you're only looking out for a giant troll to come crashing through your castle gates, you're going to miss all the little thieves that sneak in the back door and cart out your treasury of rights piece by piece.
We've been cable free ever since me and my SO left college and moved in together. In the earlier days, before streaming services were what they are today, we had to rely pretty heavily on torrents to get what we wanted. We'd also occasionally visit our friend with the DVR and watch some shows with him on his couch while hanging out (I know, shocking). We watched the first 3 seasons of the Wire like that actually.
Then Netflix intro'd instant streaming to Xbox, and selection was terrible. It was hardly worth it if we weren't already subscribed anyway. But it has continuously improved over time and now makes up I'd say the bulk of what we watch now. The rest of our current viewing we'd get off Hulu (free version) streamed from my laptop to our TV via hdmi cable. There's so much available by those two alone now we haven't needed to download a show in almost 4 years.
There are still plenty of shows that we can't get (till they're available on Netflix disc), but at this point, if it isn't available through Hulu/Netflix instant, then it's not worth it for us to watch. Simple as that.
While there are many valid complaints about DLC out there, there is one major misconception that does get perpetuated rather unfairly, and that is of Day 1 DLC. The perception is that this was content that was deliberately withheld from the disk to be charged at a premium as a way to bilk consumers. While I can't speak for all companies' strategies I can say that in general this is simply untrue, and more a product of the nature of console development nowadays.
When a game goes into Cert for first party consoles, i.e. the game is complete, nothing else is to be added to the disk so that Nintendo, Sony, and MS can test the disk for compliance to be published on their systems, you're looking at a 4 to 6 month period between the disk entering Cert, going Gold, and then going to disk pressing and distribution and then actually hitting store shelves where nothing new is or ever will be added to the disk (except for major bug fixes found in the cert process). But this is still 6 months where you have developers on staff with all the tools and expertise of development still fresh and ready to go. So unless you've already scheduled the next product cycle (which you shouldn't while the game is still in Cert in case issues arise), you've got plenty of resources you can dedicate to turning around day one patches and DLC. Cert process for DLC is usually much shorter, because it's all building off the engine that was already tested on the disk, and since there's no manufacturing or distribution lead time, you can usually have some pretty high-quality DLC available in pretty short time alongside your disk's actual launch.
Day 1 patches also get a lot of flak, but are often a much more preferable solution (from the developer and publisher's perspective) for fixing issues that are turned up in cert that don't require you to restart the cert process and potentially delay your game's launch. It screws over the users who aren't online, but in today's console environment, that's such a non-vocal and shrinking minority of users that almost no one in the industry is any financial trouble for not going out of their way to cater to them (actually usually the opposite).
Not that a lot of Day 1 DLC (or DLC in general) isn't still not worthwhile, but the idea that it was content the devs were sitting on and decided to exclude to screw over the customers just doesn't jive with reality. No matter how much content may be included on a disk that may or may not have been relegated to DLC, there is always a huge chunk of time between the disk being locked and the disk hitting shelves where the devs can work on new material that may be ready in time for launch.
As a current game developer, while I can sympathize with a lot of your points on a general level, it sounds to me like you worked at some particularly shitty companies if all of those things were perpetually true at once.
Not saying that none of them happen anywhere, but they certainly don't all happen everywhere. And after that, change the details and the job titles in your description and you could be complaining about just about any industry in existence today.
That's a fair point, but we need to be able to compare the number of people who didn't pay for it but might have against the number of people who did pay for it but wouldn't have if they had not seen/heard/sampled it via word of mouth due to the increased exposure of the title due to piracy. If the latter outweighs the former, then there would appear to be a net gain.
Study after study has shown that the people who download the most music via p2p are also the segment that pay the most for music legally too. This isn't surprising because these are obviously the most avid music consumers (I know, I know, citation needed, but I forget which article I got that snippet out of, so feel free to take with a grain of salt). Same could, (and in my experience) does apply to gamers and moviegoers. People who have the highest demand for a material are willing to pursue as many avenues as are available to them to procure it, and don't necessarily always sink to the lowest cost option if it's less than legal (though often do). The question that would be nice to have answered is what the ratio of non-purchases to increased-purchases is, and if one outweighs the other.
This is neither an endorsement of piracy, nor of copyright laws as they stand or are enforced, merely a question about what the truth of the situation actually is, and what the net costs vs gains actually are (if any) vs what studios and infringers and researchers are claiming. It's possible that an entirely different model of content distribution is waiting to be discovered that doesn't rely so heavily on flat pricing or the current balance of large media publishers vs content developers.
No, Liability has been the way to punish people for doing wrong. Deterrence effects of liability measures has never been demonstrated to be significantly influential compared with simply providing legal alternatives for people to gain access to the goods and services they want, even if it means paying for it.
Most people are honest people and want to come by their goods honestly, and if you provide them with a competitive product for a competitive price, the numbers show the vast majority of people are willing to pay for it over getting it for free illegally (exceptions of course always apply). It's when you deliver (or don't even offer) an inferior product that the balance starts to tip the other way.
Don't forget that the candidates name was coincidentally very similar to that of popular singer Al Green (Alvin Greene), and since he never went out in public to campaign, no one knew who he actually was. Some voters have admitted to assuming it was Al Green himself who was running.
Even for those who may have known or suspected it wasn't him, familiarity played a role. There have been many cases where candidates have won seats on name recognition by association alone (they share the name with a celebrity or another popular politician who may or may not have been a parent or family member they are "inheriting" the seat from).
Doesn't speak well for the collective intelligence of the voting population.
our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur
You're about 62 million years off putting these or pretty much any other hominid species alongside real dinosaurs. Seriously, it might sound cool but it makes no sense, and the public believing stuff just because it sounds cool has lead to a lot of trouble in this field.
Wow, it's almost like you were able to read the subtext he was bludgeoning you over the head with so subtly. Now if you could just remind me which half of the founding fathers he's channelling, because if I remember my history at all, I seem to recall that they were pretty evenly split on this issue. Something about Federalist and ant-Federalist / Democratic-Republican parties in the early years after the formulation of the Constitution.
I'll see your Jefferson and raise you a Washington and a latter-day Jefferson.
Except in practice, there is plenty of evidence that a "suspect's" appearance will have a lot to do with how the police will treat them. One example while staying OT is that you are statistically much more likely to be pulled over for speeding if you are driving a car painted red, and/or looks like a fast car. If Cops are going to eyeball it, then subjectivity will play a role, and a cop may be more likely to decide you are in violation of something if they think you look like you should be.
So "you look like a speeder" is actually much closer to "it looked like you were speeding" than you suggest.
Oh, and since TFA seems primarily concerned with the child abuse scandal (obviously this is a despicable thing that has happened), it might also be worth mentioning that the Pope is the bishop of Rome, and his primacy is in matters of faith. He is *not* the CEO of the Church like you might find in an ordinary industry. If we want to find resolutions to the abuse scandal, we have to bring the local bishops to account.
That's all very nice except that this Pope used to be one of those Bishops you're talking about. Actually he was the Cardinal directly responsible for many instances of the coverups. Of course we only know this now due to all that pesky transparency that's been going around lately.
If somehow the Pope is removed, it will not get rid of the problem.
True
All it will do is make a few Atheists happy.
Because holding corrupt individuals and organizations accountable for atrocities is exclusively the concern of Atheists? I thought Atheists were the ones with a moral relativism problem.
I think you're overlooking something for the sake of making your point. For the first 3 films, there were plenty of adults and children who loved the films, whereas with the last 3 films there were only children who loved them. This is because, children have a much lower threshold for enjoyment, but are still capable of enjoying things that also appeal to older crowds. So it is possible to make something that appeals to all ages (Pixar have largely mastered this), but some filmmakers think that the only way to get to children is to patronize them. While this works, it effectively shuts out the older crowd.
You can make a good film, and children will like it without the need for inserting slapstick cartoon characters with the mental capacity of a 4 year old, but putting those in will turn away adults though. Children don't necessarily care about or appreciate good acting, coherent plots, and subtlety, but including those things doesn't necessarily turn kids away. The first three films had a lot of the former and only a bit of the latter, whereas the last three films had a lot of the former and almost none of the latter.
I doubt it, otherwise he should have said so. If the whole point of this whole language debate is that formal language is useful precisely because it can minimize ambiguity by using very precise terms and grammar, then the very least he should do is distinguish between his impression that spelling skills are improving vs. the observation that spell-checking allows for fewer spelling mistakes without actually improving spelling or grammatical skills.
I think about my municipal water and sewage service all the time. It's actually a real concern that I might get them.
You see, I live in the country, and paid quite a bit when I bought my house to put in a new septic system that should last me 30-50 years. However, the nearest city recently (against the wishes of anyone nearby) decided to put in a new water treatment plant a few miles down the road. Not close enough to really bother me, thankfully, but close enough that they might want to run lines to my house.
That's great, right? Government at work, getting better sewage system out to the country.
If the county runs sewer in front of your house, you are *required* to pay to be attached. That means thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of direct costs that you are required to pay, regardless of whether your current system still has 30 years of life on it, and for no real direct benefit to you.
Government-run utilities can do good things, provide good services, all that. But it's still government, and there's still a "must" attached to it that can really screw you over if you're caught on the wrong end of their plans.
Just out of curiosity, how much would you, or those who inherit your property, have to pay to replace this septic system in 30 years compared to the cost of connecting to the government run system then as opposed to now?
No kidding. It's hard enough to keep a decent sci-fi show on the air while they are entirely entertainment / plot / character-driven. If he wants them to shoehorn in more hard-science technobabble to replace all the soft-science technobabble (bearing in mind that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic anyway) then I fail to see how the entertainment value will be enhanced beyond a very niche demographic.
Because companies intentionally cripple games and then charge you extra to get the full game
Citation needed. I've never heard of a game that came deliberately broken and then forced you to pay to fix. Games do often come broken out of the box, but those are usually fixed with patches (often available on or soon after launch day) that have been universally free to my knowledge.
Regardless, any such game that came broken would quickly earn a reputation and would subsequently flop, so if such a game exists then the reason I've never heard of it is probably because it failed in the market. No one is forcing you to buy these games, much less the additional content they will sell you after the fact.
Sure, as a consumer you may have an interest in whatever suits you, but that interest is not in relation to your being a member of the "open source world". Any interaction you have with Whoppers and Whopper-related products are completely independent of your status as a member of the "open source world".
Of course, the fact that ingredients and recipes for hamburgers are widely available, and I can make my own burgers at home with tools available to the public might make Hamburgers somewhat open-source. I just can't go selling it while calling it a Whopper.
I'm not an American, don't know what it's really like there. It seemed a bit unlikely to me that a typical office would be so colour coordinated (except of course for white) but I didn't know. So I asked. Sorry if that offended you.
Fair enough, and no real offense. I apologize too, I came off a bit harsher in my response than intended.
Well, that issue is pennypinching. Ads are completely manufactured images, fake before during and after the actual photos are taken. In this case the faking was rather too obvious. For instance, it looks rather like the (formerly) black guy has an Apple laptop, though the logo seems to have disappeared....
Well, I would agree with this point on some levels, but I think there are different degrees to which ads may go to present their desired message (sure they're all lies, but some lies are bigger than others). Not wanting to get too deeply mired in details of selecting for and selecting against a target audience, let me just say that to me there is a difference between a magazine cover airbrushing a model to artificially "idealize" her physique (though I also find this annoying and wish they wouldn't) and artificially replacing an already present individual with someone else entirely to "idealize" their portrayed work environment. If one needs to go that far then again I'd say it would just be more prudent (if only from a PR standpoint, seeing the results this situation has generated) to find a completely different image to use. One instance is altering a person to make them "better", and another is rejecting a person saying another type of person is "better". Not really as big since, as you point out, the whole ad is fake to begin with, but there are instances where places have done this with candid photos that actually did portray a reality they weren't satisfied with.
98% of ads are insulting. Even more so the ones I see online. It's only because it's Microsoft that it's even slightly newsworthy -- that a large American company would do something bound to piss off people like yourself if it came to light.
Well, truth be told this is just a general pet peeve of mine, and contrary to how it may have sounded, I react the same when they're replacing a white guy with black faces, or shopping in extra women into a board-room to pretend they don't have a glass ceiling. My initial response to you though was to point out that this type of diversity isn't unheard of in the US, but when companies have to go out of their way to so obviously fake it (or in this case, double-fake it), it starts crossing some lines. The real insult here (even more so than the racial one really) is that they thought this really shoddy job was acceptable.
Some of the more obnoxious cheapskate ad campaigns like the "Adult Friendfinder" that presents me photos of skanky blonde bimbos with their legs gaping, while telling me that they live in my neighbourhood (determined by my IP). A neighbourhood where 99.5% of the people are Chinese. Those ads insulted me in so many different ways that it motivated me to set up an effective ad blocker on my PCs. That's all you can do with stupid ads, block them.
Well, here I just have to agree 100%. I find some forms of targeted ads to be less "offensive" than others (at least they're trying to show me things I might be interested in), but this form of targeted ad is just, as you say, stupid.
Its only insulting if you happen to be self loathing for some reason.
This comment would make sense only if I didn't have the same reaction several years ago when some college did the same thing in reverse with one of its brochures: they felt they needed more diversity so they photoshopped an extra black guy's head over a white guy's. The issue isn't that the guy they replaced in this instance was black per-se, the issue is that they ungracefully replaced a person with another person for racially motivated reasons.
Most of us aren't actually subjected to outright racism anymore and frankly don't give a fuck about something this trivial.
For something "this trivial" you seem to have taken about as much time out of your day to comment as I have. And yes, majority populations don't typically get subjected to outright racism, so this doesn't surprise me. Your point?
If you get all uppity over it than you need to consider how great your life is when the biggest 'bad thing' that happens in your day is some photo was changed to a guy with different skin color. If thats your 'bad day', then shut your pie hole and get a grip on reality.
Emphasis mine, but you appear to be having a pretty deep seated emotional reaction here. So who's having the bad day here? If you get all uppity over it then you need to consider how great your life is when the biggest 'bad thing' that happens in your day is some guy on the internet comments on some photo being changed. If that's your 'bad day', then shut your pie hole and get a grip on reality.
Give live where it is actually shitty to be black or where blacks are actually suffering.
Already did. Did I not mention the "born on the African Continent" bit in my first comment? Again, your point? Or were you just telling me to "go back to Africa you uppity negro"?
Contrary to your belief, the world doesn't revolve around you and your pathetic insecurities.
And contrary to your belief, my world doesn't revolve around your pathetic insecurities. But, this being an open forum, when a pet peeve comes up I feel free to comment on it honestly, and find great entertainment in seeing the closet ethnocentrists come crawling out of the woodwork and start screaming.
The funniest thing about this is that no one is even denying that this was a purely racially motivated shop-job, and yet people are still getting upset at the folks who are pointing out that it is.
You're right, they didn't air-brush his skintone to make him look white, they did the photoshop equivalent of putting a paper bag over his head with a photo of a white guy on it.
I see an ugly guy being photoshopped into a good looking one.
What does race have to do with it?
In an attempt to portray yourself as color-blind, what you've actually ended up suggesting is that you subconsciously see a black guy as ugly and a white guy as good looking.
The original showed an Asian guy, a black guy and a white woman. How tediously politically correct. Also completely unrealistic for Poland. (Is it even realistic for the US?)
Is it even realistic for the US? Are you serious? I'm a black guy born on the African continent sitting in an office with a white woman and a jewish guy. In the office right next to mine there's an asian woman and a guy from the UK. Just walking down the hall yields people from every ethnicity. Sure there are obvious majorities and minorities, but it's almost impossible to snap a candid photo of this office and not have a pretty colorful palette of skin-tones. I'm not exactly a fan of political correctness, but I think this recent anti-PC movement smacks of a type of reactionary bigotry I'm even less comfortable with (probably because it always seems to be coming from the same 'demographic' of people).
The issue isn't that they felt having white guys in their ad would be more appropriate for their intended audience, the issue is that they whitewashed a black guy out of an existing image (poorly), suggesting that the black guy would be unacceptable (but the asian and woman were fine?). If they found the orriginal image inappropriate, then find, buy, or cast and shoot another photo that more suits your demographic. Slapping a black guy in white face is just stupid (look at the results), and I can't see how it's not insulting, if to no one else but your intended audience; suggesting they can't handle the sight of a black guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Or if they propose pieces of legislation that chip away at those rights. You don't take away rights all at once, you slowly erode them bit by bit. You don't push for legislation that prompts the "That's crazy" response, you push for the "Well that's not so bad" and lather rinse repeat about 100x. Sure maybe no one is proposing what you say right now, but if you think they won't be soon after this round of SOPA and PIPA plays out, you haven't been paying much attention.
If you're only looking out for a giant troll to come crashing through your castle gates, you're going to miss all the little thieves that sneak in the back door and cart out your treasury of rights piece by piece.
We've been cable free ever since me and my SO left college and moved in together. In the earlier days, before streaming services were what they are today, we had to rely pretty heavily on torrents to get what we wanted. We'd also occasionally visit our friend with the DVR and watch some shows with him on his couch while hanging out (I know, shocking). We watched the first 3 seasons of the Wire like that actually.
Then Netflix intro'd instant streaming to Xbox, and selection was terrible. It was hardly worth it if we weren't already subscribed anyway. But it has continuously improved over time and now makes up I'd say the bulk of what we watch now. The rest of our current viewing we'd get off Hulu (free version) streamed from my laptop to our TV via hdmi cable. There's so much available by those two alone now we haven't needed to download a show in almost 4 years.
There are still plenty of shows that we can't get (till they're available on Netflix disc), but at this point, if it isn't available through Hulu/Netflix instant, then it's not worth it for us to watch. Simple as that.
While there are many valid complaints about DLC out there, there is one major misconception that does get perpetuated rather unfairly, and that is of Day 1 DLC. The perception is that this was content that was deliberately withheld from the disk to be charged at a premium as a way to bilk consumers. While I can't speak for all companies' strategies I can say that in general this is simply untrue, and more a product of the nature of console development nowadays.
When a game goes into Cert for first party consoles, i.e. the game is complete, nothing else is to be added to the disk so that Nintendo, Sony, and MS can test the disk for compliance to be published on their systems, you're looking at a 4 to 6 month period between the disk entering Cert, going Gold, and then going to disk pressing and distribution and then actually hitting store shelves where nothing new is or ever will be added to the disk (except for major bug fixes found in the cert process). But this is still 6 months where you have developers on staff with all the tools and expertise of development still fresh and ready to go. So unless you've already scheduled the next product cycle (which you shouldn't while the game is still in Cert in case issues arise), you've got plenty of resources you can dedicate to turning around day one patches and DLC. Cert process for DLC is usually much shorter, because it's all building off the engine that was already tested on the disk, and since there's no manufacturing or distribution lead time, you can usually have some pretty high-quality DLC available in pretty short time alongside your disk's actual launch.
Day 1 patches also get a lot of flak, but are often a much more preferable solution (from the developer and publisher's perspective) for fixing issues that are turned up in cert that don't require you to restart the cert process and potentially delay your game's launch. It screws over the users who aren't online, but in today's console environment, that's such a non-vocal and shrinking minority of users that almost no one in the industry is any financial trouble for not going out of their way to cater to them (actually usually the opposite).
Not that a lot of Day 1 DLC (or DLC in general) isn't still not worthwhile, but the idea that it was content the devs were sitting on and decided to exclude to screw over the customers just doesn't jive with reality. No matter how much content may be included on a disk that may or may not have been relegated to DLC, there is always a huge chunk of time between the disk being locked and the disk hitting shelves where the devs can work on new material that may be ready in time for launch.
As a current game developer, while I can sympathize with a lot of your points on a general level, it sounds to me like you worked at some particularly shitty companies if all of those things were perpetually true at once.
Not saying that none of them happen anywhere, but they certainly don't all happen everywhere. And after that, change the details and the job titles in your description and you could be complaining about just about any industry in existence today.
Actually, to be fair, Scientologists managed to con their way into the tax-break status too.
That's a fair point, but we need to be able to compare the number of people who didn't pay for it but might have against the number of people who did pay for it but wouldn't have if they had not seen/heard/sampled it via word of mouth due to the increased exposure of the title due to piracy. If the latter outweighs the former, then there would appear to be a net gain.
Study after study has shown that the people who download the most music via p2p are also the segment that pay the most for music legally too. This isn't surprising because these are obviously the most avid music consumers (I know, I know, citation needed, but I forget which article I got that snippet out of, so feel free to take with a grain of salt). Same could, (and in my experience) does apply to gamers and moviegoers. People who have the highest demand for a material are willing to pursue as many avenues as are available to them to procure it, and don't necessarily always sink to the lowest cost option if it's less than legal (though often do). The question that would be nice to have answered is what the ratio of non-purchases to increased-purchases is, and if one outweighs the other.
This is neither an endorsement of piracy, nor of copyright laws as they stand or are enforced, merely a question about what the truth of the situation actually is, and what the net costs vs gains actually are (if any) vs what studios and infringers and researchers are claiming. It's possible that an entirely different model of content distribution is waiting to be discovered that doesn't rely so heavily on flat pricing or the current balance of large media publishers vs content developers.
No, Liability has been the way to punish people for doing wrong. Deterrence effects of liability measures has never been demonstrated to be significantly influential compared with simply providing legal alternatives for people to gain access to the goods and services they want, even if it means paying for it.
Most people are honest people and want to come by their goods honestly, and if you provide them with a competitive product for a competitive price, the numbers show the vast majority of people are willing to pay for it over getting it for free illegally (exceptions of course always apply). It's when you deliver (or don't even offer) an inferior product that the balance starts to tip the other way.
Don't forget that the candidates name was coincidentally very similar to that of popular singer Al Green (Alvin Greene), and since he never went out in public to campaign, no one knew who he actually was. Some voters have admitted to assuming it was Al Green himself who was running.
Even for those who may have known or suspected it wasn't him, familiarity played a role. There have been many cases where candidates have won seats on name recognition by association alone (they share the name with a celebrity or another popular politician who may or may not have been a parent or family member they are "inheriting" the seat from).
Doesn't speak well for the collective intelligence of the voting population.
our ancestors could run when they hunt the might dinosaur
You're about 62 million years off putting these or pretty much any other hominid species alongside real dinosaurs. Seriously, it might sound cool but it makes no sense, and the public believing stuff just because it sounds cool has lead to a lot of trouble in this field.
Wow, it's almost like you were able to read the subtext he was bludgeoning you over the head with so subtly. Now if you could just remind me which half of the founding fathers he's channelling, because if I remember my history at all, I seem to recall that they were pretty evenly split on this issue. Something about Federalist and ant-Federalist / Democratic-Republican parties in the early years after the formulation of the Constitution.
I'll see your Jefferson and raise you a Washington and a latter-day Jefferson.
Except in practice, there is plenty of evidence that a "suspect's" appearance will have a lot to do with how the police will treat them. One example while staying OT is that you are statistically much more likely to be pulled over for speeding if you are driving a car painted red, and/or looks like a fast car. If Cops are going to eyeball it, then subjectivity will play a role, and a cop may be more likely to decide you are in violation of something if they think you look like you should be.
So "you look like a speeder" is actually much closer to "it looked like you were speeding" than you suggest.
Oh, and since TFA seems primarily concerned with the child abuse scandal (obviously this is a despicable thing that has happened), it might also be worth mentioning that the Pope is the bishop of Rome, and his primacy is in matters of faith. He is *not* the CEO of the Church like you might find in an ordinary industry. If we want to find resolutions to the abuse scandal, we have to bring the local bishops to account.
That's all very nice except that this Pope used to be one of those Bishops you're talking about. Actually he was the Cardinal directly responsible for many instances of the coverups. Of course we only know this now due to all that pesky transparency that's been going around lately.
If somehow the Pope is removed, it will not get rid of the problem.
True
All it will do is make a few Atheists happy.
Because holding corrupt individuals and organizations accountable for atrocities is exclusively the concern of Atheists? I thought Atheists were the ones with a moral relativism problem.
I think you're overlooking something for the sake of making your point. For the first 3 films, there were plenty of adults and children who loved the films, whereas with the last 3 films there were only children who loved them. This is because, children have a much lower threshold for enjoyment, but are still capable of enjoying things that also appeal to older crowds. So it is possible to make something that appeals to all ages (Pixar have largely mastered this), but some filmmakers think that the only way to get to children is to patronize them. While this works, it effectively shuts out the older crowd.
You can make a good film, and children will like it without the need for inserting slapstick cartoon characters with the mental capacity of a 4 year old, but putting those in will turn away adults though. Children don't necessarily care about or appreciate good acting, coherent plots, and subtlety, but including those things doesn't necessarily turn kids away. The first three films had a lot of the former and only a bit of the latter, whereas the last three films had a lot of the former and almost none of the latter.
I doubt it, otherwise he should have said so. If the whole point of this whole language debate is that formal language is useful precisely because it can minimize ambiguity by using very precise terms and grammar, then the very least he should do is distinguish between his impression that spelling skills are improving vs. the observation that spell-checking allows for fewer spelling mistakes without actually improving spelling or grammatical skills.
I think about my municipal water and sewage service all the time. It's actually a real concern that I might get them.
You see, I live in the country, and paid quite a bit when I bought my house to put in a new septic system that should last me 30-50 years. However, the nearest city recently (against the wishes of anyone nearby) decided to put in a new water treatment plant a few miles down the road. Not close enough to really bother me, thankfully, but close enough that they might want to run lines to my house.
That's great, right? Government at work, getting better sewage system out to the country.
If the county runs sewer in front of your house, you are *required* to pay to be attached. That means thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of direct costs that you are required to pay, regardless of whether your current system still has 30 years of life on it, and for no real direct benefit to you.
Government-run utilities can do good things, provide good services, all that. But it's still government, and there's still a "must" attached to it that can really screw you over if you're caught on the wrong end of their plans.
Just out of curiosity, how much would you, or those who inherit your property, have to pay to replace this septic system in 30 years compared to the cost of connecting to the government run system then as opposed to now?
If my local paper offered a good online subscription I would sign up. What I want to see is:
Revision history
Oh don't worry, with Rupert Murdoch's news agencies, you can be assured to get plenty of revisionist history.
No kidding. It's hard enough to keep a decent sci-fi show on the air while they are entirely entertainment / plot / character-driven. If he wants them to shoehorn in more hard-science technobabble to replace all the soft-science technobabble (bearing in mind that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic anyway) then I fail to see how the entertainment value will be enhanced beyond a very niche demographic.
I take it from the fact that you're posting now, that means you're a liberal then?
Because companies intentionally cripple games and then charge you extra to get the full game
Citation needed. I've never heard of a game that came deliberately broken and then forced you to pay to fix. Games do often come broken out of the box, but those are usually fixed with patches (often available on or soon after launch day) that have been universally free to my knowledge.
Regardless, any such game that came broken would quickly earn a reputation and would subsequently flop, so if such a game exists then the reason I've never heard of it is probably because it failed in the market. No one is forcing you to buy these games, much less the additional content they will sell you after the fact.
Sure, as a consumer you may have an interest in whatever suits you, but that interest is not in relation to your being a member of the "open source world". Any interaction you have with Whoppers and Whopper-related products are completely independent of your status as a member of the "open source world".
Of course, the fact that ingredients and recipes for hamburgers are widely available, and I can make my own burgers at home with tools available to the public might make Hamburgers somewhat open-source. I just can't go selling it while calling it a Whopper.
I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?
I'm not an American, don't know what it's really like there. It seemed a bit unlikely to me that a typical office would be so colour coordinated (except of course for white) but I didn't know. So I asked. Sorry if that offended you.
Fair enough, and no real offense. I apologize too, I came off a bit harsher in my response than intended.
Well, that issue is pennypinching. Ads are completely manufactured images, fake before during and after the actual photos are taken. In this case the faking was rather too obvious. For instance, it looks rather like the (formerly) black guy has an Apple laptop, though the logo seems to have disappeared....
Well, I would agree with this point on some levels, but I think there are different degrees to which ads may go to present their desired message (sure they're all lies, but some lies are bigger than others). Not wanting to get too deeply mired in details of selecting for and selecting against a target audience, let me just say that to me there is a difference between a magazine cover airbrushing a model to artificially "idealize" her physique (though I also find this annoying and wish they wouldn't) and artificially replacing an already present individual with someone else entirely to "idealize" their portrayed work environment. If one needs to go that far then again I'd say it would just be more prudent (if only from a PR standpoint, seeing the results this situation has generated) to find a completely different image to use. One instance is altering a person to make them "better", and another is rejecting a person saying another type of person is "better". Not really as big since, as you point out, the whole ad is fake to begin with, but there are instances where places have done this with candid photos that actually did portray a reality they weren't satisfied with.
98% of ads are insulting. Even more so the ones I see online. It's only because it's Microsoft that it's even slightly newsworthy -- that a large American company would do something bound to piss off people like yourself if it came to light.
Well, truth be told this is just a general pet peeve of mine, and contrary to how it may have sounded, I react the same when they're replacing a white guy with black faces, or shopping in extra women into a board-room to pretend they don't have a glass ceiling. My initial response to you though was to point out that this type of diversity isn't unheard of in the US, but when companies have to go out of their way to so obviously fake it (or in this case, double-fake it), it starts crossing some lines. The real insult here (even more so than the racial one really) is that they thought this really shoddy job was acceptable.
Some of the more obnoxious cheapskate ad campaigns like the "Adult Friendfinder" that presents me photos of skanky blonde bimbos with their legs gaping, while telling me that they live in my neighbourhood (determined by my IP). A neighbourhood where 99.5% of the people are Chinese. Those ads insulted me in so many different ways that it motivated me to set up an effective ad blocker on my PCs. That's all you can do with stupid ads, block them.
Well, here I just have to agree 100%. I find some forms of targeted ads to be less "offensive" than others (at least they're trying to show me things I might be interested in), but this form of targeted ad is just, as you say, stupid.
Its only insulting if you happen to be self loathing for some reason.
This comment would make sense only if I didn't have the same reaction several years ago when some college did the same thing in reverse with one of its brochures: they felt they needed more diversity so they photoshopped an extra black guy's head over a white guy's. The issue isn't that the guy they replaced in this instance was black per-se, the issue is that they ungracefully replaced a person with another person for racially motivated reasons.
Most of us aren't actually subjected to outright racism anymore and frankly don't give a fuck about something this trivial.
For something "this trivial" you seem to have taken about as much time out of your day to comment as I have. And yes, majority populations don't typically get subjected to outright racism, so this doesn't surprise me. Your point?
If you get all uppity over it than you need to consider how great your life is when the biggest 'bad thing' that happens in your day is some photo was changed to a guy with different skin color. If thats your 'bad day', then shut your pie hole and get a grip on reality.
Emphasis mine, but you appear to be having a pretty deep seated emotional reaction here. So who's having the bad day here? If you get all uppity over it then you need to consider how great your life is when the biggest 'bad thing' that happens in your day is some guy on the internet comments on some photo being changed. If that's your 'bad day', then shut your pie hole and get a grip on reality.
Give live where it is actually shitty to be black or where blacks are actually suffering.
Already did. Did I not mention the "born on the African Continent" bit in my first comment? Again, your point? Or were you just telling me to "go back to Africa you uppity negro"?
Contrary to your belief, the world doesn't revolve around you and your pathetic insecurities.
And contrary to your belief, my world doesn't revolve around your pathetic insecurities. But, this being an open forum, when a pet peeve comes up I feel free to comment on it honestly, and find great entertainment in seeing the closet ethnocentrists come crawling out of the woodwork and start screaming.
The funniest thing about this is that no one is even denying that this was a purely racially motivated shop-job, and yet people are still getting upset at the folks who are pointing out that it is.
You're right, they didn't air-brush his skintone to make him look white, they did the photoshop equivalent of putting a paper bag over his head with a photo of a white guy on it.
Yeah, that's much better.
I see an ugly guy being photoshopped into a good looking one. What does race have to do with it?
In an attempt to portray yourself as color-blind, what you've actually ended up suggesting is that you subconsciously see a black guy as ugly and a white guy as good looking.
The original showed an Asian guy, a black guy and a white woman. How tediously politically correct. Also completely unrealistic for Poland. (Is it even realistic for the US?)
Is it even realistic for the US? Are you serious? I'm a black guy born on the African continent sitting in an office with a white woman and a jewish guy. In the office right next to mine there's an asian woman and a guy from the UK. Just walking down the hall yields people from every ethnicity. Sure there are obvious majorities and minorities, but it's almost impossible to snap a candid photo of this office and not have a pretty colorful palette of skin-tones. I'm not exactly a fan of political correctness, but I think this recent anti-PC movement smacks of a type of reactionary bigotry I'm even less comfortable with (probably because it always seems to be coming from the same 'demographic' of people).
The issue isn't that they felt having white guys in their ad would be more appropriate for their intended audience, the issue is that they whitewashed a black guy out of an existing image (poorly), suggesting that the black guy would be unacceptable (but the asian and woman were fine?). If they found the orriginal image inappropriate, then find, buy, or cast and shoot another photo that more suits your demographic. Slapping a black guy in white face is just stupid (look at the results), and I can't see how it's not insulting, if to no one else but your intended audience; suggesting they can't handle the sight of a black guy.