Or you can be still more blunt about it: "My relationship with my previous employer is none of your f---ing business. Do you want to hear about my qualifications, or not?"
But then, I won't take drug tests either. "Only if I get to watch YOU pee in a cup along with me, lady."
Remind me again why ANY health-care activity should be for-profit. ANY. Band-aids to heart surgery.
Why is selling food to starving Africans profiteering (which it is), but selling healthcare to people in pain or danger of death, not profiteering?
It only takes one -- even anonymous -- accusation of being a kiddy-fiddler to destroy a teachers career, peace of mind, and possibly liberty.
It also doesn't seem to have occurred to most of the posters here that many of the students could be taking revenge on a perfectly decent teacher for giving the student a bad grade that they deserved.
...from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. If I went around claiming to be emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
... a very aggressive, pushy, and offensive person who will try to take maximum advantage of his trade partners in his business dealings. A company I was once affiliated with threatened to cancel a contract with Microsoft because of his behavior. Microsoft caved and cleaned up their act.
But if the rumors are true, he was only acting in the way his boss Gates taught him to.
Most game "AI" is smoke and mirrors. We have neither the programming skill to do real AI nor the time to do the research nor the CPU power required by crunch-intensive mechanisms.
Therefore Deep Blue, or whatever the latest incarnation is, is the most powerful game AI ever, hands down.
In old [real, proper] VWs -- back when they were air-cooled -- for some reason you could shift gears without using the clutch. I did this on more than one occasion when I had stripped the clutch. If you had to stop, e.g. at a stoplight, you slipped it into neutral, braked, and shut off the engine. Then you put it into first, and when the light turned green, started it up. Of course it lurched horribly, since it was in gear, but once the engine caught you could proceed on your way, shifting into higher gears when the engine sound was "just right." It required a certain amount of trial and error to find out when this was.
I learned this from the VW Idiot Book and was incredibly glad I had it. The trick was comparatively easy in highway driving, but much more awkward in towns.
Larry told me personally about ten years ago that he was starting to think about a successor. It just took a while to find one. His departure isn't in response to news stories, stock prices, or anything else. The man just wants to put his feet up. Considering how much money he has made for his shareholders, he's earned it.
EA is very strong, and unlike the console manufacturers, doesn't have to spend colossal amounts of money bringing out a new platform every five or six years, with the huge risks that that entails. Where's Sega nowadays?
They scare me a little too, and they generally can't deliver anything like the flow rate of a huge wasteful American hot water heater, since they have to heat the water as it goes. However, a lot of European houses use them for secondary showers, added in later. And they ARE cheap.
African-Americans play a BIG role in the music industry, unlike the game industry, so you have to wonder why so many of them persist in portraying themselves in such a negative fashion there. Gangsta rap has been the worst thing for race relations since the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King -- and for the most part it's not white musicians making it.
They tried, but the work was ongoing about the time of Dan Bunten's gender reassignment, and the personal upheavals in her life at the time prevented it from being completed.
Now that she's dead, I don't think we'll see another one.
Hawkins should know better than to spin such a ridiculous platitude. The public isn't stupid. I sincerely doubt that he used that line when he was talking to venture capitalists to raise money for EA, 3DO, and Digital Chocolate.
There's nothing intrinsically evil about making money; it all depends on how you make it. EA does it by being honest and ruthless, by taking advantage of every opportunity and every bit of leverage they can muster, and bargaining incredibly hard. A lot of naive early game developers ended up feeling very badly treated because of the way EA played hardball. EA brought professionalism and grown-up business practices to what was at the time an adolescent industry make up mostly of nerds. They made the game industry what it is today -- both for good and for ill. And in the process, they made their shareholders a hell of a lot of money.
There will be more, not fewer, hardcore gamers in the future, but only in absolute terms because the population is rising. As a percentage of the overall number of gamers, they are already a dwindling minority and increasingly irrelevant.
In five years' time, fifty zillion Indian and Chinese gamers will be playing games on their mobile phones. They are the market of the future. Hardcore gamers will become a niche just as audiophiles are a niche, or people who own full-bore home theater systems are a niche. Individually, they spend a lot, but there aren't enough of them to justify making a large number of products for them.
The age of copyright is coming to an end. Sooner or later, all information will freely distributable. (People may get paid for the labor of creating the information, but they won't be paid for the information itself.) Thus, even a non-irritating, non-intrusive DRM system is ultimately pointless.
However, such a DRM system -- if it could be created, which is debatable -- might stave off the eventual dissolution of copyright for several decades.
The probability that I would give a rat's ass about the opinions of people who just happen to be in physical proximity to me is vanishingly small. I don't even want to LOOK at the other people on the subway, much less know what they're thinking.
At least on an Internet forum I stand a reasonable chance of meeting people I actually want to talk to, and where they are physically located is irrelevant.
Moviemakers routinely put in gratuitous violence or a shot of a woman's breasts in order to GET an R rating. Lower ratings, especially G (General Audience) are the kiss of death, financially.
The game rating system does the opposite of what the moralists want -- it encourages developers to play chicken with the rating board, to see how much they can get away with.
Any kind of rating system necessarily distorts the creation of the artwork to which it is applied. That includes money, government labeling, industry labeling, or the views of influential critics. Only when an artist has the courage to follow his own vision without regard for anyone else's judgment do we get true works of art.
Yes, this is what I do too. I keep my Microsoft Outlook files [cue chorus of sneering, retching, etc. from the Linux fanboys] on a USB stick, and just yank it out of my desktop and take it along when I go someplace with my laptop. I discovered this after several unsatisfactory (and expensive) efforts to find software that would sync two Outlook files.
However, I know that Flash memory has a limited lifespan and I'm a little worried about how long I can count on it. I keep Outlook open all day every day, so it's probably hitting the Flash drive several hundred, or perhaps thousand, times a day. I back up the files on the USB stick to my hard drive once a day.
I'd switch to Thunderbird but I need my system to sync with my Pocket PC PDA, Plaxo, Cardscan, and my cell phone. So far Nokia doesn't offer a sync solution for Thunderbird.
Advertising corrupts. Anybody who sells advertising becomes beholden to the advertisers instead of to their customers. Newspapers, magazines, television -- all put the demands of their advertisers before the needs of the consumer. In-game advertising stinks. It won't be long before the advertisers start demanding changes to the content, just as they do to newspapers.
Why do you think so many newspapers soft-pedal the bad news about global warming, and still have huge sections devoted to buying and driving cars, including gas-guzzling sports cars and SUV's? It's not because the consumer really needs this information. It's because the automobile advertisers demand that they include it.
Years ago Ms. Magazine had to drop all advertising and go to a subscriber-only system. Why? Because Revlon threatened to cancel an ad contract with Ms. because -- get this -- some Russian dissident women had appeared on their cover without any makeup on! These women had been raped by KGB agents and eventually kicked out of their country, but God forbid they should appear in public without any makeup.
In-game ads are the worst trend to hit video games in their entire history.
So what if Sony puts a flash enabled web browser in the PS3? Grandmother doesn't own a PS3 and never will. Now, do you want the advertising dollars that you can get for her impressions, or don't you? If you, then you'd better support the machine she owns, a PC. And even if you don't, SOMEbody will.
There's no point in putting a keyboard on a console. The console doesn't sit on desk. You could put a keyboard on a Playstation 2, but how many people did?
Grandmother likes playing Word Racer for free on Yahoo. Grandmother wouldn't buy a console if her life depended on it.
MMORPGs are just a fraction of all the kinds of games played on PCs. Teaching games for little kids. Casual games on Pogo. High-end shooters that have real-money tournaments. If it needs a keyboard and a mouse, it's not gonna be on a console -- and certain games do and always will.
This idiotic discussion comes up every damn time we get a new generation of consoles. It's not true and it will never be true. Neither the PC nor consoles can push each other out of the market BECAUSE THEY SERVE DIFFERENT MARKETS.
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Or you can be still more blunt about it: "My relationship with my previous employer is none of your f---ing business. Do you want to hear about my qualifications, or not?" But then, I won't take drug tests either. "Only if I get to watch YOU pee in a cup along with me, lady."
Remind me again why ANY health-care activity should be for-profit. ANY. Band-aids to heart surgery. Why is selling food to starving Africans profiteering (which it is), but selling healthcare to people in pain or danger of death, not profiteering?
It only takes one -- even anonymous -- accusation of being a kiddy-fiddler to destroy a teachers career, peace of mind, and possibly liberty. It also doesn't seem to have occurred to most of the posters here that many of the students could be taking revenge on a perfectly decent teacher for giving the student a bad grade that they deserved.
My blog is NOT a public space, it's MY space. My blog, my disk space, my bandwidth, my rules. Obey them or fuck off.
Most game "AI" is smoke and mirrors. We have neither the programming skill to do real AI nor the time to do the research nor the CPU power required by crunch-intensive mechanisms.
Therefore Deep Blue, or whatever the latest incarnation is, is the most powerful game AI ever, hands down.
In old [real, proper] VWs -- back when they were air-cooled -- for some reason you could shift gears without using the clutch. I did this on more than one occasion when I had stripped the clutch. If you had to stop, e.g. at a stoplight, you slipped it into neutral, braked, and shut off the engine. Then you put it into first, and when the light turned green, started it up. Of course it lurched horribly, since it was in gear, but once the engine caught you could proceed on your way, shifting into higher gears when the engine sound was "just right." It required a certain amount of trial and error to find out when this was. I learned this from the VW Idiot Book and was incredibly glad I had it. The trick was comparatively easy in highway driving, but much more awkward in towns.
Larry told me personally about ten years ago that he was starting to think about a successor. It just took a while to find one. His departure isn't in response to news stories, stock prices, or anything else. The man just wants to put his feet up. Considering how much money he has made for his shareholders, he's earned it. EA is very strong, and unlike the console manufacturers, doesn't have to spend colossal amounts of money bringing out a new platform every five or six years, with the huge risks that that entails. Where's Sega nowadays?
They scare me a little too, and they generally can't deliver anything like the flow rate of a huge wasteful American hot water heater, since they have to heat the water as it goes. However, a lot of European houses use them for secondary showers, added in later. And they ARE cheap.
African-Americans play a BIG role in the music industry, unlike the game industry, so you have to wonder why so many of them persist in portraying themselves in such a negative fashion there. Gangsta rap has been the worst thing for race relations since the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King -- and for the most part it's not white musicians making it.
They tried, but the work was ongoing about the time of Dan Bunten's gender reassignment, and the personal upheavals in her life at the time prevented it from being completed.
Now that she's dead, I don't think we'll see another one.
There's nothing intrinsically evil about making money; it all depends on how you make it. EA does it by being honest and ruthless, by taking advantage of every opportunity and every bit of leverage they can muster, and bargaining incredibly hard. A lot of naive early game developers ended up feeling very badly treated because of the way EA played hardball. EA brought professionalism and grown-up business practices to what was at the time an adolescent industry make up mostly of nerds. They made the game industry what it is today -- both for good and for ill. And in the process, they made their shareholders a hell of a lot of money.
There will be more, not fewer, hardcore gamers in the future, but only in absolute terms because the population is rising. As a percentage of the overall number of gamers, they are already a dwindling minority and increasingly irrelevant. In five years' time, fifty zillion Indian and Chinese gamers will be playing games on their mobile phones. They are the market of the future. Hardcore gamers will become a niche just as audiophiles are a niche, or people who own full-bore home theater systems are a niche. Individually, they spend a lot, but there aren't enough of them to justify making a large number of products for them.
However, such a DRM system -- if it could be created, which is debatable -- might stave off the eventual dissolution of copyright for several decades.
The probability that I would give a rat's ass about the opinions of people who just happen to be in physical proximity to me is vanishingly small. I don't even want to LOOK at the other people on the subway, much less know what they're thinking.
At least on an Internet forum I stand a reasonable chance of meeting people I actually want to talk to, and where they are physically located is irrelevant.
Moviemakers routinely put in gratuitous violence or a shot of a woman's breasts in order to GET an R rating. Lower ratings, especially G (General Audience) are the kiss of death, financially.
The game rating system does the opposite of what the moralists want -- it encourages developers to play chicken with the rating board, to see how much they can get away with.
Any kind of rating system necessarily distorts the creation of the artwork to which it is applied. That includes money, government labeling, industry labeling, or the views of influential critics. Only when an artist has the courage to follow his own vision without regard for anyone else's judgment do we get true works of art.
Yes, this is what I do too. I keep my Microsoft Outlook files [cue chorus of sneering, retching, etc. from the Linux fanboys] on a USB stick, and just yank it out of my desktop and take it along when I go someplace with my laptop. I discovered this after several unsatisfactory (and expensive) efforts to find software that would sync two Outlook files.
However, I know that Flash memory has a limited lifespan and I'm a little worried about how long I can count on it. I keep Outlook open all day every day, so it's probably hitting the Flash drive several hundred, or perhaps thousand, times a day. I back up the files on the USB stick to my hard drive once a day.
I'd switch to Thunderbird but I need my system to sync with my Pocket PC PDA, Plaxo, Cardscan, and my cell phone. So far Nokia doesn't offer a sync solution for Thunderbird.
Why do you think so many newspapers soft-pedal the bad news about global warming, and still have huge sections devoted to buying and driving cars, including gas-guzzling sports cars and SUV's? It's not because the consumer really needs this information. It's because the automobile advertisers demand that they include it.
Years ago Ms. Magazine had to drop all advertising and go to a subscriber-only system. Why? Because Revlon threatened to cancel an ad contract with Ms. because -- get this -- some Russian dissident women had appeared on their cover without any makeup on! These women had been raped by KGB agents and eventually kicked out of their country, but God forbid they should appear in public without any makeup.
In-game ads are the worst trend to hit video games in their entire history.
So what if Sony puts a flash enabled web browser in the PS3? Grandmother doesn't own a PS3 and never will. Now, do you want the advertising dollars that you can get for her impressions, or don't you? If you, then you'd better support the machine she owns, a PC. And even if you don't, SOMEbody will.
There's no point in putting a keyboard on a console. The console doesn't sit on desk. You could put a keyboard on a Playstation 2, but how many people did?
Grandmother likes playing Word Racer for free on Yahoo. Grandmother wouldn't buy a console if her life depended on it.
MMORPGs are just a fraction of all the kinds of games played on PCs. Teaching games for little kids. Casual games on Pogo. High-end shooters that have real-money tournaments. If it needs a keyboard and a mouse, it's not gonna be on a console -- and certain games do and always will.
This idiotic discussion comes up every damn time we get a new generation of consoles. It's not true and it will never be true. Neither the PC nor consoles can push each other out of the market BECAUSE THEY SERVE DIFFERENT MARKETS.