Piracy = being just as much of an ass-hole as those who overcharge. You're not Robin Hood. If enough people pirate, it's likely to drive prices up for those that do pay. If everyone stops buying, it will drive prices down. Gas in the US is about half the price or less than it is here in the UK, yet you feel hard done by and think you can justify stealing because you can't afford something?
I don't have quite so much of a problem with the whole copyright violate issue (yet I still buy my own music and movies) because as has been pointed out it has become much cheaper to distribute music and movies these days, but oil still has the distribution network. The prices of oil have come back down recently anyway. It's the market that dictates the prices in the oil industry. Piracy will just build resentment from those that are producing the oil. Trying to start a fight is not always the best way to solve a problem you know. Well co-ordinated protests by simply *not buying* any fuel will drive the prices down much quicker than breaking the law, which will just end up costing you more in taxes, as it is the police's job to enforce the law, not the oil company's.
Besides, haven't the oil companies have already sold the fuel by the time it's at some gas stations? It's possible that you're just stealing from whoever owns that station and not directly from the oil companies. Some out of the way places do charge more than inner city ones, but it's still not a justification to steal. Starving of hunger is a pretty good justification, but whining about the price of gas it not.
I think it's more likely (or at least I hope so) that their game is just very realistic and that most 'gamers' wouldn't even enjoy it anyway. I've been playing GT: Prologue over the last week on 'professional' physics mode as opposed to the default 'standard' physics. While it is still fun, it can also be highly frustrating compared to most driving games. You have to be very controlled and sensible, just as with real racing.
In some cases (especially with the Ford GT on 'sports' class tyres rather than racing class) I think it was actually more difficult than driving the real car - if you didn't give the exact small amount of throttle required through the corners the car would just oversteer and spin out. If you gave a bit too much throttle through the corners, the car would oversteer and spin out. The traction control was no use as it just cuts out the power completely for any skid (as does the active stability management, so I just drive with all the aids switched off). I'm not sure if that's realistic as I've never driven a real Ford GT, but it seems it's pretty dangerous to cut power off altogether during a fast corner in a rear wheel drive sports car! I've now unlocked unlocked the 'S' class of races and they include the ability to tweak the suspension settings though, so I may try later to get the GT into a more drivable state where I'll be able to go more than 3 respectable laps without spinning out!
Anyway, after the whole Ford GT fiasco I was getting frustrated and tried the 'standard' physics to see the difference - instead of spinning out at every corner I could pretty much be as crazy as I wanted to, and would only spin out when I did something extremely stupid. I hardly even needed to follow proper racing lines to win a race. I lapped a couple of seconds faster than my best, most controlled time on one track in the GT-R and didn't even have to do any slipstreaming to get that time. IMO the 'standard' physics seems to involve making the tyres a lot more sticky,. Then it doesn't matter if you mess up your braking a little, and you can carry a lot more speed round the corners. Much more fun, but not very realistic.
So if they are wanting to leave out all the crap and just make a pure racing sim, good for them. They will be limiting their audience sure (I remember hearing complaints a few years ago about certain driving games being 'too hard'), but they will attract people that are actually interested in proper motor racing.
If they really want to make this serious the game will require a steering wheel. In most driving games you can use a keyboard without much fuss at all. But you definitely couldn't control a real 500HP rear wheel drive race car adequately with a keyboard, which is just a bunch of on/off inputs. Perhaps if the vehicle had extremely wide and slick tyres you'd be fine starting and stopping, but it would still suck for cornering. The latest PS3 joypad has all analog buttons (even on the 4 way d-pad) and is more workable, but a steering wheel and pedals is still the easiest control method. Even with a steering wheel I can still imagine a lot of gamers trying a realistic sim and crying because they can't powerslide around every corner and still end up in 1st place, despite starting at the back of the grid. That's not an elitist attitude, just a realistic one. The point is that only those who have done a bit of learning about vehicle handling and racing technique would be able to get anywhere on a true racing simulator (unless the AI was set to be just as poor as the player). That type of thing is meant to be for enthusiasts rather than gamers. In reality there will be a bit of overlap of course, but one style of game isn't likely to suit the extreme ends of both crowds. Real race drivers want to be able to finely tune suspension setups etc. Gamers want to ram into cop cars.
Well, never say never - no large enough group in current western society would accept this sure, but I still think something similar to my Junk Olympics idea will happen at some point in humanity's future. There have been groups of people and even whole societies that do things that we don't currently find acceptable. The Roman gladiatorial arenas as I already mentioned, some cultures are fine with capital punishment or amputation as punishment, some allow drugs that others don't allow, not to mention things like the concentration camps, death camps and other atrocities which some groups have found 'acceptable'. Saying that nobody will ever find it acceptable shows far too much faith in humanity! Generally we are moving in the right direction, but there will always be those that don't just drift along with everyone else (currently a few African nations as well as China and North Korea).
Maybe I've just watched too much of The Running Man though.
The thing is that combining the mindset and training of a professional athlete with performance enhancers could still be taken very seriously by some people. I don't take professional wrestling very seriously because most of it is just faked, and all the bravado is generally boring for me. I enjoy some horror films, but a lot of them seem pretty retarded and sadistic.
Yes, there should definitely be drug free versions of athletics and other sports. Having the alternative ones where you can dope as much as you want would probably make it easier to keep the 'real' versions drug free.
In reality I think this idea would be incredibly dangerous and result in a lot of death, and probably the whole thing would be outlawed again pretty quickly, but it's still an interesting concept. I expect it will happen someday, just as at one point having gladiatorial fights to the death as entertainment was considered acceptable.
I know._. A couple of friends and I are considering a 'trip' to Amsterdam later in the year.. one who is just curious like me, and another who has smoked pot before. I'm interested to try it out, but I wouldn't want to do anything that is more obviously damaging, like heroine or crack. I've was on anti-depressants for a few years before. It's interesting how radically you can change your personality with chemicals. I suppose it basically changes your whole concept of what emotions actually are, and what they mean.
when athletes take drugs, it completely alters the fundamental psychology of what makes watching sports appealing in the first place
and so, any sports authority that wants to retain an audience, will be waging war on drug use forever
Among the 'traditional' olympics watching crowd sure - people who understandably want to keep their sport pure and reward actual hard work. But then again, a lot of people in this world enjoy watching horror films, big brother and any amount of garbage. There are people who would watch a bunch of junked up crazies run the 100 metres in 8 seconds. I would be interested to see that at least.. it wouldn't be as impressive as what Usain Bolt did at the last olympics, but it would still be interesting. You mention that you wouldn't mind people using enhancers in the military, well I think that the Junk Olypmics could be a good testing ground for military applications;)
I'm not part of your problem, because I've used Firefox for all my web browsing since before the IE7 beta was available;) I now only use Windows in a virtual machine so that I can run Outlook and Delphi.
As I mentioned in the GP post, I've actually seen IE7 cause issues with the rest of Windows, which is yet another reason for me not to upgrade it. I sincerely hope Microsoft improve upon things with IE8, but I still haven't seen any good (in my opinion of course) Microsoft products outside of Windows Server, the Exchange/Outlook/DirectPUSH to Windows Mobile combo (though Windows Mobile itself is appalingly slow and glitchy looking), and Visual Studio.
Actually, I bet spam outnumbers even the pr0n. Imagine a world without spam! All the pretty butterflies playing tag, and cute puppies rolling in the sunshine! Ahhh:)
While amphetamines will improve reaction times, the good thing is that computer games are often not all about reactions. They help a lot, but even after I've not played CS for years I can come back to it and do okay simply because of better tactics. My reactions are still pretty fast, but my mouse moving muscle responses are no longer trained, so I can't really twitch-snipe as effectively as I once could, etc.
With physical sports it's a lot easier to directly improve performance with drugs, but for computer games it's not so cut and dried. That's part of the reason I find certain computer games so interesting. They start everyone off on a level playing field with characters of equal physical ability, and it's not all about the whole repetetive physical training aspect (unless you're playing RPGs and can have a better character just by spending time on it rather than actually being skillfull - I usually just see RPGs as a pointless timesink and only good if you are actively wanting to waste time or are just using them as a more interesting form of chat room). You can concentrate more on tactics and training your instincts, which are important to athletes as well, but they have to spend a lot of time on their actual physical fitness levels too. By contrast you can be a 500 pound slob, but still be good at Counter-Strike. I'm not saying it's good to avoid keeping fit altogether, but it's simply not much of a factor when it comes to gaming.
I don't actually think that accepting drug enhancement in a sport would drop its ratings. It depends on the audience's attitude to drugs and their respect for the purity of an athlete competing under their own abilities and training. It could be very interesting to see how fast humans can be with a bit of chemical enhancement though. I wouldn't want to do it to my own body considering the problems steroids and other drugs can cause, but if other idiots want to mess with their chemistry in such a way, that's up to them. I've seen comments from others that share that type of sentiment. Similarly, there could also be a 'cyborg olympics' where people use technology to make themselves faster. I mean we already have motor racing, so why not giant battle-mecha racing?:D
They just tried to stone Jesus and throw him off a cliff or something, but he walked away through the crowd:p Other guys in the bible were stoned, however. I used to go to a presbyterian church and yet I knew what 'stoned' meant. I'm sure all but some of the ancient old biddies knew. I did occasionally find it a little amusing that stoned means something else today, but at the same time, people getting pelted to death by rocks (still happens in some Islamic cultures) isn't really all that funny.
But yes, 'stoned' and 'baked' are both equally valid colloquialisms, same as being 'high' or 'wasted' (though to some people that just means drunk).
I've never been stoned (perhaps very mildly passively, but I've never done non-prescription drugs), but have played games for 12 hours straight a few times. I even took a couple of days off work for the release of GTA4. Then I went to see Iron Man after having no sleep the night before. I felt pretty crappy in the few days after that, but it was a lot of fun at the time:)
The most time I've ever played a game was when I got Operation Flashpoint 1. I completed it in 3 days, and I think I had something like 4-6 hours sleep in that time. No weed necessary.
Considering a lot of people will just be wanting to browse at work or whatever and be able to easily find things in the history, I don't see why it should be on by default. Isn't 'browser privacy' basically just a way of hiding your pr0n-browsing history?
And the thing is, he doesn't have any incentive to. If good reviews start coming back then maybe he will. But as far as Microsoft products are concerned, better to just leave them to rot and let others do the testing, rather than wasting time on what will still be a buggy product once it is released. Yes, I'm a little bitter. I don't let XP upgrade to IE 7. I don't like the interface and it still 'feels' wrong. Probably because as someone pointed out above, it is even slower than IE 6 (which I liked okay).
Pointless anecdote: the other day one of my users was having a problem accessing his shared drives, the machine was complaining about a lack of resources. He did have a few applications open, but nothing crazy, and the task manager claimed that he had plenty of free RAM. I scanned the apps that were open and suggested he tried closing IE as I know that IE and explorer probably use the same components. He closed it, and his shared drives were working again. I don't want to install software that is going to affect the underlying OS in such a fundamental way, especially if it's only in beta.
Besides, the new features are not worth it for me - I get better functionality out of Firefox 3 with a couple of plugins. I agree that we need to keep competition in areas where we want products to improve, but I've given up on MS products for now. I'm not going to help them with their testing until they make a better effort with their internal testing. Handing out wristbands isn't much of an incentive.
Earlier this week, our MD had an Excel 2007 spreadsheet (on Vista, if that matters) that wouldn't even get the result of a subtraction of two cells until after he rebooted. He used to be an accountant so he knows his way around spreadsheets, and yes the cells were set to auto-update and formatted correctly. But for some reason it wouldn't calculate the total until after he rebooted.
I pointed him to the service pack, hopefully the issue is now fixed, but WTF. MS have been making Excel for over a decade, how can they get something as simple as subtraction of two values wrong?
I have no idea how Microsoft are surviving. Well, I do have an idea, but it's depressing to admit how moronic humanity is.
I thought your post was going to turn out to be a sarcastic burn. But you appear to be serious. Sure the oil companies are making pretty big profits (though in the UK I think about 40% of the price of fuel is in taxes, maybe even more) - but if you don't like that, stealing is definitely not the way to go about solving the problem. It never is, and you're likely to end up in serious trouble in the end. I'm still hoping you were just kidding though.
I'd say it's more better for 'gamers' than 'gaming' simply because there are more games available. There isn't really anything getting in the way of actual gaming on Linux, even the 3D driver issue is pretty well covered these days and IMO that was the only real issue before.
I use OSX for computing at the moment, and my PS3 for most of my gaming. I never used to think I'd be a console man, but now that consoles can go online for patches and game add-ons, there aren't many reasons to stick with PC gaming unless you want to lay out cash every year to have the latest and greatest performance. I'm not a big fan of console controllers over mouse and keyboard for FPSes, but hopefully they'll sort that out eventually with some clever newfangled input device (or just a mouse;) ).
0.6% is a truly massive amount of public money for one organisation. I'm finding it hard to grasp how you could think otherwise. 0.6% of your taxes as an individual may not be very much, but 0.6% of all the nations taxes together is definitely 'a lot' of money. I'd expect there are far more than 200 things that the government has to spend money on as well, so that means that NASA is getting a percentage that must be well above average for a government department. What is so hard to understand about that? Compare for example the FBIs budget. Then there's Sandia National Laboratories etc, they get much less as well. Not to mention the other things the government has to spend money on, public education being another 'obvious example', though as I don't run a country I don't know all the hundreds of different things that need to be publically funded, or what percentage is necessary for minimum standards in those areas. I repeat, 0.6% of your national budget is truly massive.
P.S. in my original post I meant 'stuff like the war', not 'stuff the war', heh.
Sure, Steam only requires you to be connected to the net the first time you install, but it's still a pain in the ass if you have no access to a connection. The content is there, you've paid for it, but you can't play the game. Same if you're out and you don't have the game CD. The content is there, you've paid for it, but you can't use it because of DRM. So while Steam only requires you to validate once and then it is 'no CD' as long as you've set it up properly, they're still pointless DRM.
As for stealing, I wasn't talking about that at all, and neither was the GGP, so what is your point? He was talking about more convenient versions of games, and it doesn't sound like he pirates despite that (he only mentioned bittorrent for DRM-free updates, not original installations).
I'm basically in the same situation. When I was a student I downloaded a few songs and readily ripped CDs that I had borrowed, but now that I have a job, I just buy everything from Amazon with 'free' next-day delivery. I still find it practical to have a physical copy of my music, though I wouldn't mind very much if all my games were downloads only (as long as the distribution network was fast enough)
The arguments in court certainly are going to surround in what "state" Amazon.com is operating in.
Someone should just point out in court that HTTP interations by design are stateless. Then someone else could give that person a cookie. I doubt the judges would get any of this, but I'd giggle at least.
Wow, you are a perfect example of how Republicans shortchanging education makes Republicans who can't think.
I think there's some irony to be found in there, considering a person's current political alignment can't retroactively affect a change on their education. I'm sure this guy had exactly the same education that plenty of 'Democrats' (or whatever alignment you consider yourself) had.
Don't mind me, I just get fed up seeing people spout off 'republican this', 'democrat that' as if they are spitting out abominable insults. It would be funny, if there wasn't so much hate or ego involved. Reminds me of that Dr Seuss story about the star bellied sneetches.
I think the key test would be to stop taxing so much (therefore sending less back to all states)
I don't know much about taxes, especially American taxes, but seeing as not all tax goes directly back to the people (a lot of it goes to - using the obvious examples - stuff the war in Iraq and NASA), I really doubt anyone would complain if they had less taxes and at the same time 'less back', since what an individual gets back personally for their taxes is often vastly disproportionate from what they put in. The country as a whole may be benefitting though (then again, maybe not).
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Piracy = being just as much of an ass-hole as those who overcharge. You're not Robin Hood. If enough people pirate, it's likely to drive prices up for those that do pay. If everyone stops buying, it will drive prices down. Gas in the US is about half the price or less than it is here in the UK, yet you feel hard done by and think you can justify stealing because you can't afford something?
I don't have quite so much of a problem with the whole copyright violate issue (yet I still buy my own music and movies) because as has been pointed out it has become much cheaper to distribute music and movies these days, but oil still has the distribution network. The prices of oil have come back down recently anyway. It's the market that dictates the prices in the oil industry. Piracy will just build resentment from those that are producing the oil. Trying to start a fight is not always the best way to solve a problem you know. Well co-ordinated protests by simply *not buying* any fuel will drive the prices down much quicker than breaking the law, which will just end up costing you more in taxes, as it is the police's job to enforce the law, not the oil company's.
Besides, haven't the oil companies have already sold the fuel by the time it's at some gas stations? It's possible that you're just stealing from whoever owns that station and not directly from the oil companies. Some out of the way places do charge more than inner city ones, but it's still not a justification to steal. Starving of hunger is a pretty good justification, but whining about the price of gas it not.
I think it's more likely (or at least I hope so) that their game is just very realistic and that most 'gamers' wouldn't even enjoy it anyway. I've been playing GT: Prologue over the last week on 'professional' physics mode as opposed to the default 'standard' physics. While it is still fun, it can also be highly frustrating compared to most driving games. You have to be very controlled and sensible, just as with real racing.
In some cases (especially with the Ford GT on 'sports' class tyres rather than racing class) I think it was actually more difficult than driving the real car - if you didn't give the exact small amount of throttle required through the corners the car would just oversteer and spin out. If you gave a bit too much throttle through the corners, the car would oversteer and spin out. The traction control was no use as it just cuts out the power completely for any skid (as does the active stability management, so I just drive with all the aids switched off). I'm not sure if that's realistic as I've never driven a real Ford GT, but it seems it's pretty dangerous to cut power off altogether during a fast corner in a rear wheel drive sports car! I've now unlocked unlocked the 'S' class of races and they include the ability to tweak the suspension settings though, so I may try later to get the GT into a more drivable state where I'll be able to go more than 3 respectable laps without spinning out!
Anyway, after the whole Ford GT fiasco I was getting frustrated and tried the 'standard' physics to see the difference - instead of spinning out at every corner I could pretty much be as crazy as I wanted to, and would only spin out when I did something extremely stupid. I hardly even needed to follow proper racing lines to win a race. I lapped a couple of seconds faster than my best, most controlled time on one track in the GT-R and didn't even have to do any slipstreaming to get that time. IMO the 'standard' physics seems to involve making the tyres a lot more sticky,. Then it doesn't matter if you mess up your braking a little, and you can carry a lot more speed round the corners. Much more fun, but not very realistic.
So if they are wanting to leave out all the crap and just make a pure racing sim, good for them. They will be limiting their audience sure (I remember hearing complaints a few years ago about certain driving games being 'too hard'), but they will attract people that are actually interested in proper motor racing.
If they really want to make this serious the game will require a steering wheel. In most driving games you can use a keyboard without much fuss at all. But you definitely couldn't control a real 500HP rear wheel drive race car adequately with a keyboard, which is just a bunch of on/off inputs. Perhaps if the vehicle had extremely wide and slick tyres you'd be fine starting and stopping, but it would still suck for cornering. The latest PS3 joypad has all analog buttons (even on the 4 way d-pad) and is more workable, but a steering wheel and pedals is still the easiest control method. Even with a steering wheel I can still imagine a lot of gamers trying a realistic sim and crying because they can't powerslide around every corner and still end up in 1st place, despite starting at the back of the grid. That's not an elitist attitude, just a realistic one. The point is that only those who have done a bit of learning about vehicle handling and racing technique would be able to get anywhere on a true racing simulator (unless the AI was set to be just as poor as the player). That type of thing is meant to be for enthusiasts rather than gamers. In reality there will be a bit of overlap of course, but one style of game isn't likely to suit the extreme ends of both crowds. Real race drivers want to be able to finely tune suspension setups etc. Gamers want to ram into cop cars.
no one will ever find this acceptable
Well, never say never - no large enough group in current western society would accept this sure, but I still think something similar to my Junk Olympics idea will happen at some point in humanity's future. There have been groups of people and even whole societies that do things that we don't currently find acceptable. The Roman gladiatorial arenas as I already mentioned, some cultures are fine with capital punishment or amputation as punishment, some allow drugs that others don't allow, not to mention things like the concentration camps, death camps and other atrocities which some groups have found 'acceptable'. Saying that nobody will ever find it acceptable shows far too much faith in humanity! Generally we are moving in the right direction, but there will always be those that don't just drift along with everyone else (currently a few African nations as well as China and North Korea).
Maybe I've just watched too much of The Running Man though.
The thing is that combining the mindset and training of a professional athlete with performance enhancers could still be taken very seriously by some people. I don't take professional wrestling very seriously because most of it is just faked, and all the bravado is generally boring for me. I enjoy some horror films, but a lot of them seem pretty retarded and sadistic.
Yes, there should definitely be drug free versions of athletics and other sports. Having the alternative ones where you can dope as much as you want would probably make it easier to keep the 'real' versions drug free.
In reality I think this idea would be incredibly dangerous and result in a lot of death, and probably the whole thing would be outlawed again pretty quickly, but it's still an interesting concept. I expect it will happen someday, just as at one point having gladiatorial fights to the death as entertainment was considered acceptable.
I know ._. A couple of friends and I are considering a 'trip' to Amsterdam later in the year.. one who is just curious like me, and another who has smoked pot before. I'm interested to try it out, but I wouldn't want to do anything that is more obviously damaging, like heroine or crack. I've was on anti-depressants for a few years before. It's interesting how radically you can change your personality with chemicals. I suppose it basically changes your whole concept of what emotions actually are, and what they mean.
Fresh out of ligers, sorry. Would you accept leoplurodons?
when athletes take drugs, it completely alters the fundamental psychology of what makes watching sports appealing in the first place
and so, any sports authority that wants to retain an audience, will be waging war on drug use forever
Among the 'traditional' olympics watching crowd sure - people who understandably want to keep their sport pure and reward actual hard work. But then again, a lot of people in this world enjoy watching horror films, big brother and any amount of garbage. There are people who would watch a bunch of junked up crazies run the 100 metres in 8 seconds. I would be interested to see that at least.. it wouldn't be as impressive as what Usain Bolt did at the last olympics, but it would still be interesting. You mention that you wouldn't mind people using enhancers in the military, well I think that the Junk Olypmics could be a good testing ground for military applications ;)
I'm not part of your problem, because I've used Firefox for all my web browsing since before the IE7 beta was available ;) I now only use Windows in a virtual machine so that I can run Outlook and Delphi.
As I mentioned in the GP post, I've actually seen IE7 cause issues with the rest of Windows, which is yet another reason for me not to upgrade it. I sincerely hope Microsoft improve upon things with IE8, but I still haven't seen any good (in my opinion of course) Microsoft products outside of Windows Server, the Exchange/Outlook/DirectPUSH to Windows Mobile combo (though Windows Mobile itself is appalingly slow and glitchy looking), and Visual Studio.
Actually, I bet spam outnumbers even the pr0n. Imagine a world without spam! All the pretty butterflies playing tag, and cute puppies rolling in the sunshine! Ahhh :)
While amphetamines will improve reaction times, the good thing is that computer games are often not all about reactions. They help a lot, but even after I've not played CS for years I can come back to it and do okay simply because of better tactics. My reactions are still pretty fast, but my mouse moving muscle responses are no longer trained, so I can't really twitch-snipe as effectively as I once could, etc.
With physical sports it's a lot easier to directly improve performance with drugs, but for computer games it's not so cut and dried. That's part of the reason I find certain computer games so interesting. They start everyone off on a level playing field with characters of equal physical ability, and it's not all about the whole repetetive physical training aspect (unless you're playing RPGs and can have a better character just by spending time on it rather than actually being skillfull - I usually just see RPGs as a pointless timesink and only good if you are actively wanting to waste time or are just using them as a more interesting form of chat room). You can concentrate more on tactics and training your instincts, which are important to athletes as well, but they have to spend a lot of time on their actual physical fitness levels too. By contrast you can be a 500 pound slob, but still be good at Counter-Strike. I'm not saying it's good to avoid keeping fit altogether, but it's simply not much of a factor when it comes to gaming.
I don't actually think that accepting drug enhancement in a sport would drop its ratings. It depends on the audience's attitude to drugs and their respect for the purity of an athlete competing under their own abilities and training. It could be very interesting to see how fast humans can be with a bit of chemical enhancement though. I wouldn't want to do it to my own body considering the problems steroids and other drugs can cause, but if other idiots want to mess with their chemistry in such a way, that's up to them. I've seen comments from others that share that type of sentiment. Similarly, there could also be a 'cyborg olympics' where people use technology to make themselves faster. I mean we already have motor racing, so why not giant battle-mecha racing? :D
They just tried to stone Jesus and throw him off a cliff or something, but he walked away through the crowd :p Other guys in the bible were stoned, however. I used to go to a presbyterian church and yet I knew what 'stoned' meant. I'm sure all but some of the ancient old biddies knew. I did occasionally find it a little amusing that stoned means something else today, but at the same time, people getting pelted to death by rocks (still happens in some Islamic cultures) isn't really all that funny.
But yes, 'stoned' and 'baked' are both equally valid colloquialisms, same as being 'high' or 'wasted' (though to some people that just means drunk).
I've never been stoned (perhaps very mildly passively, but I've never done non-prescription drugs), but have played games for 12 hours straight a few times. I even took a couple of days off work for the release of GTA4. Then I went to see Iron Man after having no sleep the night before. I felt pretty crappy in the few days after that, but it was a lot of fun at the time :)
The most time I've ever played a game was when I got Operation Flashpoint 1. I completed it in 3 days, and I think I had something like 4-6 hours sleep in that time. No weed necessary.
I didn't say I had a problem with Betas.
Considering a lot of people will just be wanting to browse at work or whatever and be able to easily find things in the history, I don't see why it should be on by default. Isn't 'browser privacy' basically just a way of hiding your pr0n-browsing history?
And the thing is, he doesn't have any incentive to. If good reviews start coming back then maybe he will. But as far as Microsoft products are concerned, better to just leave them to rot and let others do the testing, rather than wasting time on what will still be a buggy product once it is released. Yes, I'm a little bitter. I don't let XP upgrade to IE 7. I don't like the interface and it still 'feels' wrong. Probably because as someone pointed out above, it is even slower than IE 6 (which I liked okay).
Pointless anecdote: the other day one of my users was having a problem accessing his shared drives, the machine was complaining about a lack of resources. He did have a few applications open, but nothing crazy, and the task manager claimed that he had plenty of free RAM. I scanned the apps that were open and suggested he tried closing IE as I know that IE and explorer probably use the same components. He closed it, and his shared drives were working again. I don't want to install software that is going to affect the underlying OS in such a fundamental way, especially if it's only in beta.
Besides, the new features are not worth it for me - I get better functionality out of Firefox 3 with a couple of plugins. I agree that we need to keep competition in areas where we want products to improve, but I've given up on MS products for now. I'm not going to help them with their testing until they make a better effort with their internal testing. Handing out wristbands isn't much of an incentive.
Earlier this week, our MD had an Excel 2007 spreadsheet (on Vista, if that matters) that wouldn't even get the result of a subtraction of two cells until after he rebooted. He used to be an accountant so he knows his way around spreadsheets, and yes the cells were set to auto-update and formatted correctly. But for some reason it wouldn't calculate the total until after he rebooted.
I pointed him to the service pack, hopefully the issue is now fixed, but WTF. MS have been making Excel for over a decade, how can they get something as simple as subtraction of two values wrong?
I have no idea how Microsoft are surviving. Well, I do have an idea, but it's depressing to admit how moronic humanity is.
I thought your post was going to turn out to be a sarcastic burn. But you appear to be serious. Sure the oil companies are making pretty big profits (though in the UK I think about 40% of the price of fuel is in taxes, maybe even more) - but if you don't like that, stealing is definitely not the way to go about solving the problem. It never is, and you're likely to end up in serious trouble in the end. I'm still hoping you were just kidding though.
I'd say it's more better for 'gamers' than 'gaming' simply because there are more games available. There isn't really anything getting in the way of actual gaming on Linux, even the 3D driver issue is pretty well covered these days and IMO that was the only real issue before.
I use OSX for computing at the moment, and my PS3 for most of my gaming. I never used to think I'd be a console man, but now that consoles can go online for patches and game add-ons, there aren't many reasons to stick with PC gaming unless you want to lay out cash every year to have the latest and greatest performance. I'm not a big fan of console controllers over mouse and keyboard for FPSes, but hopefully they'll sort that out eventually with some clever newfangled input device (or just a mouse ;) ).
QUAD DAMAGE!
0.6% is a truly massive amount of public money for one organisation. I'm finding it hard to grasp how you could think otherwise. 0.6% of your taxes as an individual may not be very much, but 0.6% of all the nations taxes together is definitely 'a lot' of money. I'd expect there are far more than 200 things that the government has to spend money on as well, so that means that NASA is getting a percentage that must be well above average for a government department. What is so hard to understand about that? Compare for example the FBIs budget. Then there's Sandia National Laboratories etc, they get much less as well. Not to mention the other things the government has to spend money on, public education being another 'obvious example', though as I don't run a country I don't know all the hundreds of different things that need to be publically funded, or what percentage is necessary for minimum standards in those areas. I repeat, 0.6% of your national budget is truly massive.
P.S. in my original post I meant 'stuff like the war', not 'stuff the war', heh.
Sure, Steam only requires you to be connected to the net the first time you install, but it's still a pain in the ass if you have no access to a connection. The content is there, you've paid for it, but you can't play the game. Same if you're out and you don't have the game CD. The content is there, you've paid for it, but you can't use it because of DRM. So while Steam only requires you to validate once and then it is 'no CD' as long as you've set it up properly, they're still pointless DRM.
As for stealing, I wasn't talking about that at all, and neither was the GGP, so what is your point? He was talking about more convenient versions of games, and it doesn't sound like he pirates despite that (he only mentioned bittorrent for DRM-free updates, not original installations).
I'm basically in the same situation. When I was a student I downloaded a few songs and readily ripped CDs that I had borrowed, but now that I have a job, I just buy everything from Amazon with 'free' next-day delivery. I still find it practical to have a physical copy of my music, though I wouldn't mind very much if all my games were downloads only (as long as the distribution network was fast enough)
The arguments in court certainly are going to surround in what "state" Amazon.com is operating in.
Someone should just point out in court that HTTP interations by design are stateless. Then someone else could give that person a cookie. I doubt the judges would get any of this, but I'd giggle at least.
Wow, you are a perfect example of how Republicans shortchanging education makes Republicans who can't think.
I think there's some irony to be found in there, considering a person's current political alignment can't retroactively affect a change on their education. I'm sure this guy had exactly the same education that plenty of 'Democrats' (or whatever alignment you consider yourself) had.
Don't mind me, I just get fed up seeing people spout off 'republican this', 'democrat that' as if they are spitting out abominable insults. It would be funny, if there wasn't so much hate or ego involved. Reminds me of that Dr Seuss story about the star bellied sneetches.
I think the key test would be to stop taxing so much (therefore sending less back to all states)
I don't know much about taxes, especially American taxes, but seeing as not all tax goes directly back to the people (a lot of it goes to - using the obvious examples - stuff the war in Iraq and NASA), I really doubt anyone would complain if they had less taxes and at the same time 'less back', since what an individual gets back personally for their taxes is often vastly disproportionate from what they put in. The country as a whole may be benefitting though (then again, maybe not).