Well, it's easy to reduce the budget by simply decreasing the amount by which existing funding for annual budget items is increased. Easy logically, that is, not necessarily politically. It's not like the choice is between eliminating Social Security and halving the federal budget, or increasing spending by adding services and creating new government. The third choice is to simply maintain current spending.
That said, as a "fiscal conservative", I would change Social Security at the very least by implementing means testing. And yes, I would begin to phase out Social Security. It wasn't intended to be used as a retirement fund so much as a safety net. Not everyone is supposed to get their money back out of it, and if you're relying on Social Security to provide for you in your old age, you're probably going to need a few other safety nets as well. I don't expect to get a dime back from Social Security, if it's even still around when I retire, and that's fine. I just look at it as another tax, frankly.
I would also cut defense spending, which I believe is one of the bigger line items in the federal budget. IMO, the State department is underfunded, while Defense is bloated. There's a massive military industrial complex that soaks up a lot of tax dollars, when we should be sending some of that money to State, and some of it elsewhere in the budget.
And I know this is unpopular, but I would eliminate the Department of Education, which I believe is more properly a state-level matter. And Homeland Security, which is totally unnecessary and has consistently failed to accomplish its overall mission since its inception. Also, I would take a look at stuff like agricultural subsidies, which are a pretty fair chunk of the budget.
Even if you make a quarter of those cuts, and only cut a quarter of those elements of the budget, you're already saving a lot of money. My point is that, just because you might not be able to find one single line item in a budget that is both unpopular enough to be cut without political danger, yet large enough to make a big dent in the budget by itself, does not mean that there isn't a problem with wasteful and/or unnecessary spending in the federal budget.
Ps. I would leave NASA alone, because more money gets spend on the food stamp program than gets sent to NASA. And NASA is a model of efficiency within the Fed, frankly, before we even start talking about all the useful technology and research we gain from that particular agency.
If you're talking about the Libyan army, last I checked the Russians made T-72's and T90's. Also, we don't exactly have a warm and fuzzy relationship with Libya. Bahrain has some US hardware, but the M60 Patton and the M113 APC aren't exactly the cutting edge of armor; they both came out in the 60s. And if you think Bahraini protesters should hate the US on the basis of military hardware, might I suggest that they also hate the British, French, Swiss, Swedish, and Germans for the same.
I'm not sure, but I think the tanks that the Egyptian army did not turn on protesters are a combo of American and old Soviet tanks.
Secret police, being secret, don't advertise whatever tech you think they might be using, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the CIA did not provide any help to Libya in that regard, either, seeing as this is the country led by a dictator whose house we bombed in the 80s for general naughtiness, among other notable diplomatic fun-facts.
Although "people don't like us" is a deliciously vague phrase, I'm going to translate that as, "the US is unpopular in the Middle East". Then I would say that we're actually not as unpopular as you might think, or as we might seem at times. Also, the Middle East encompasses a large enough area and diverse enough population that it is probably a gross oversimplification to assign one opinion to all people in the entire region. Then you have the problem of how to accurately measure opinions of populations who might not have the freedom to speak openly, in countries led by hostile regimes, and who may or may not be truly random selections (i.e. not government plants). Finally, it seems that most people in the Middle East are quite capable of separating a distaste for American foreign policy from a dislike for the United States as a country or Americans as people.
When you say plethora of games, what exactly are you referring to? Honest question, not trying to be snarky. I ask because my experience has generally been that people who say, "Platform X has plenty of games," don't really care that much about games. Sort of like telling someone who drives a Bugatti Veyron that the Toyota Prius has plenty of horsepower. Also, that you refer to "lifestyle apps" implies to me that, when you mention games, you're talking about casual games rather than FPS or the like.
Angry Birds HD? Apple ceded the gaming field to Microsoft many moons ago, and hasn't done anything to position itself to compete in that environment since. Besides which, does Apple TV even have enough of a foothold for Apple to use it as a wedge into console gaming? Granted, this is anecdotal, but no one I know has Apple TV, and I have a couple of friends who would buy anything with a lower-case 'i' in the front. In fact, those same people use competing products which aren't handicapped by Apple's antagonism towards third-party developers.
I mean, I'm sure there are Apple fans who will buy anything Apple releases for gaming, and then tell everyone they know about how much better Apple TV is for gaming purposes than a PS3, Xbox360, or Wii, but I just don't see console gamers flocking to Apple TV. Nor do I believe that Apple TV will gain enough of a footprint as a media device to give Apple a foothold for gaming. Other multipurpose devices do what Apple TV does, only better, cheaper, and without the limitations. I don't own one, but I'm assuming that, like most Apple products, you only see the full functionality when you combine it with other Apple products.
Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and they just ensured that a console version of Angry Birds will show up on the Xbox and PS3 downloadable market things. They like their own brand, they don't like opening it up to external developers, and they don't like following someone else's lead. Thank God, because if Nintendo made Angry Birds, it would be $40, have birds with Mii faces, and involve Mario or anime children or something. And be called "Flappy Bird Slingshot Adventures Party", or some s. And be a rail shooter.
Sorry, I'm a little bitter after buying a Wii and finding that, in exchange for no hard drive and crappy graphics, I got a controller that doesn't quite track motion accurately, a library of games suitable for a ten year old girl ("Say fellas, let's buy a case of beer and play Cooking Mama tonight!"), and a DVD drive that doesn't play DVDs, but does sound like a tiny gnome is attempting to cut his way free with a miniature Sawzall. I exaggerate, but not too much.
What's especially bizarre about Fils-Aime's statement is that the Wii Market channel carries an s-ton of casual games in the $5-$15 range. Thanks to their scam "Nintendo points" purchasing system (similar to Microsoft's Live point system), you can't get a game for anywhere between free and $5, but most people buying games via the Wii would have no problem dropping $5 on an Angry Birds-type title.
Frankly, there are some pretty terrible games for download that cost more than $5 for the Wii; for that matter, there are some pretty horrible games on disc for the Wii that are well in excess of that price. I doubt highly that the availability of cheap games on mobile phones will make an appreciable dent in Nintendo's market share, although Fils-Aime is more than welcome to suggest that consumers ought to be paying $25 a pop for games on a mobile phone. Preferably during an outdoor press conference after handing overripe tomatoes to the spectators.
Well, yeah, yay free market! It's a privately-managed list, opted into by private businesses. Nobody is forcing bar owners to use the system, and nobody's forcing patrons to go to bars that do. If you don't like the idea of your biometric data floating around in some private database, tracking bars you frequent and maintaining records of your (mis-)behavior, vote with your feet: only go to bars that don't use biometrics. If you really, really care, start a campaign to convince other people to avoid biometric bars.
Notice that people are rushing to sign up. That tells me that Australians are more interested in continuing to go to bars and pubs than they are about any privacy issues that might be relevant. And, as someone who's spent six years in the bar/restaurant business, this is just making electronic a system that has traditionally been word-of-mouth. People who work in the bar/restaurant industry hang out with other people in the business, and they swap war stories. By day two of working at a bar you know the problem people: angry drunks, people who've been kicked out of some other place, people who skipped out on a tab from the bar down the street, etc.
What would you prefer, that the Aussie government enacts a bill requiring bars to serve Australians anonymously? The Beer Act of 2011? Yeah, nobody'll make a joke about that on late-night tv...
Dangerous power? Don't you think that's going a bit far? I would point out that it takes a comparable number of steps to install something from a website as it does to install something from the Market. Granted, you lose the Market's update checking, but there isn't anything preventing individual apps from checking for their own updates outside of the Market AFAIK. As long as you've enabled the option to install non-Market apps, that is, which hardly demands technical expertise on the part of the user. And honestly, I'm not entirely clear on how this decision violates the principles of open source, but I'm no expert in the field.
Now, forcing a private business to violate their own terms of use with regard to their own app is more dangerous, IMO. Google owns, develops, and maintains the Market, and users access it with the understanding that they neither own nor rent any part of it. In other words, Google offers the Market on its own terms, neither forcing users to make use of it, nor conceding the right to decide what is and isn't offered through it. Forcing Google to offer a competitor to Market (which the Kongregate app is, in terms of game distribution) from the Market itself would be like forcing HH Gregg to maintain a Best Buy within all of its stores.
I might be going out on a limb here, but coming from a Windows background (a DOS background, if you go back far enough) it took me a little while to get used to the idea of using an app to install something, rather than just going to the website and downloading it. Is this maybe a bigger deal for Linux folks? From my several abortive attempts with Ubuntu I recall my options being Synaptic, or some command line stuff involving apt-get. Steam came out of my ears the first time I found out that I couldn't double-click on an executable to install something.
PS. Just installed the app from the browser by going to the Kongregate website. There's a download link that takes you to GetJar, and the whole process took less than a minute. The world continues to be safe for freedom, democracy, and small, furry animals.
Thank God it's doomed to failure! Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "plugging in" to a freeway and doing a steady 65 mph (faster than you'd be going in rush-hour traffic, and without the headache), but I also want the option to drive myself, however I want to. I like the feeling of driving a car. I like shifting. I like the visceral feeling of becoming in tune with a machine, and knowing all of its funny little quirks. I like knowing exactly how far I can push a car, and then getting right up to the edge. Granted, I'm not talking about doing 105 mph past an ambulance and a schoolbus on a crowded street, but when conditions are safe, I like driving fast and taking corners hard. I also like just seeing how an '84 Volvo stationwagon runs when I've tuned it up and restored it to new(ish) condition.
You know, people don't need beer or ice cream, and indeed, both can contribute to numerous social ills. Surely everyone who spends money on beer and/or ice cream would save that money by not buying either one. However, a lot of people happen to like beer and/or ice cream. There are a lot of things you don't need, but that you buy, eat, drink, or do anyway. That's sort of what makes life enjoyable.
Good luck selling this to anyone from the Washington, DC area. The Metro is, rightly or wrongly, notorious in the DC area for being dangerous. The WMATA is notorious for everything from ignoring safety recommendations, running old cars, and skipping maintenance, to promoting a culture of hostility within its workforce. Metro employees are underpaid, overworked, and, to put it delicately, benefit from a somewhat lenient hiring process. Now, who would you propose will be driving the lead car around the Capital Beltway? Unless you pick this one segment of public transportation to be contracted out to a private company, it's gonna be the WMATA in the DC area. If I wanted some surly bastard with no professional training who hates his job and hasn't slept in a day to drive, I'd do it myself, thanks.
First of all, hasn't this sort of article been done before, or at least posted on Slashdot?
Second of all, the title is just a tad misleading...it's an MIT study, not a Microsoft study, even though accepting funding from Microsoft sort of belies any claims of purity in the study.
And finally, I'd like to see the actual survey. Logically, if you take a business that doesn't own a single computer, wouldn't it be equally difficult (or easy) to equip and train the business on any software platform, open or not? For example, I have a hard time with Linux because I've used Microsoft all my life, not because Linux is more difficult to learn. Naturally, in a business setting, I would have an easier time learning how to use a Microsoft product since I'm already familiar with them. Same could be said for someone who grew up with Linux.
I see several people have replied to this saying that, for all intents and purposes, the Internet is the same as public, and that one should assume everything one does in public will end up on the Internet. "If you didn't want pictures of you doing shots at the bar to show up on Facebook, you shouldn't have been doing them," is the thrust of the argument, I believe.
The problem with that concept of "public" is that real-life "public" is limited by both time and space. Let's say I get blind, stinkin' drunk one night and, in a paroxysm of bad judgement, strip naked and run around my block. I have certainly abandoned the expectation of privacy, because I'm out of my own house and in a public space. But, I can also reasonably assume that, if no one sees me (let's say it's 3:00 AM on a weeknight), the incident will remain unwitnessed. Also, let's assume I'm totally wrong, and everyone on the block is awake, and they're all having huge parties in their front lawns. There is still a limit to the number of people who could see me (based on height, for instance, the density of the crowd, and visual obstacles like trees and cars), and there is a limit to the duration of the, erm, exposure. In other words, once I've done my lap, they're not still seeing me naked.
Let's add a complicating factor. Let's say one person is taking a picture of someone in the front yard and I run through the shot as it's taken. Time is now no longer a factor, because there will be a picture of me running around naked effectively forever. Still, it's one picture, and only so many people can look at it at a time. Even if copies are made, there is a limit to how many people can see it at once.
And finally, the Internet. Let's say the picture winds up on the Internet. Now, not only is there no limit as to the number of people who can see it, but there's no limit to the amount of time it can be seen. This is the least amount of privacy one can possibly have.
The importance in the distinction between "regular public" and "Internet public" is that the Internet provides an unnatural amount of exposure, beyond what one would reasonably expect in the normal conduct of daily life. One might reasonably anticipate walking down the street and being watched by other people on the street, or even winding up accidentally in someone's photograph. It's a far different thing to be photographed or videoed and have the results on the Internet for posterity. Sort of like being under constant surveillance by everyone with a Internet access. That's beyond public.
We've got two cars. One, which we just bought, is a Toyota Highlander Hybrid. We live in a small city, in the downtown historic area, where streets are small and parallel parking is the norm. However, we camp often, go on road trips, are planning on having kids, and have a large dog we bring around with us pretty often. Also, my wife, who drives the car most, has an hour long commute. So, when her Jetta gave up the ghost, we got the Highlander mostly for her, but also for the aforementioned things. Having the backup camera basically just makes parallel parking the car--which is pretty big, much bigger than the Jetta--much easier. And when it's loaded up to the point where there's no visibility out the back window, it's nice to still have a rear view besides the side mirrors.
On the other hand, my car is a 1999 Honda Prelude. I can see anything anywhere near my car pretty much all the time. Despite having a crappy turning radius for a coup, and being longer than most cars in that class, I can park it pretty much anywhere and see anything behind me without a problem. The space between the bottom of the rear window and the street is less than three feet.
When the 'lude dies--God forbid--I'm planning on getting something very similar, just newer. How exactly will a backup camera add to the safety of a car of that size? Or a Mini, for example? Here's a thought: maybe a one-size-fits-all law isn't the answer here.
Giving state money to a religious group isn't unconstitutional. Giving state money to one religious group and not another is unconstitutional. The 1st Amendment and the separation of church and state guideline boils down to forbidding the government from establishing a state religion--by giving preferential treatment to one over another, for example--not forbidding the expression of religion with government money. For example, the whole "moment of silence" in schools to allow for multidenominational prayer. Now, if Kentucky subsequently denied a similar claim for the "How big was that ark again?" atheist theme park, you've got a 1st Amendment case.
Not to be picky, but scubamage didn't actually post a potential solution. If you catch fire, your problem is being on fire. "Not having caught on fire in the first place" is not a viable, actionable solution for someone who is currently aflame. See what I'm saying? Scubamage was being trollish and knows it.
If he's never been hard up, or caught short, or happened to become subject to debt collection by accident, then God love him. Doesn't mean he should be self-righteous about it.
Yeah, it's impressive in comparison to previous Rockstar games, maybe the best facial animation I've ever seen in a retail game. Still, there's something wrong with the eyes, and I can't quite put my finger on it. It's almost as if they're not connected to the rest of the expression, if that makes sense.
Also, the animation of the body as a whole is still too stilted to look real. To be fair, I've never seen any game get that right. People are constantly in motion, making tons of small movements such as blinks, twitches, shifting their weight from foot to foot, breathing, etc. No one isolates movement to the "relevant" parts without fairly intense training and concentration. This game gets pretty close, but not quite. Also, the edges of the characters are too crisp. Everyone looks like very detailed paper cut-outs on top of a realish-looking background.
Of course, none of this matters to me since it's only being released on console, apparently. I guess that's fine; I already know the Irish captain is in on it, and when you go to his house to tell him about the case he's gonna plug you in the kitchen.
I've got about 80 hours logged on the PC version of New Vegas, which I prepurchased because I'm a huge fan of both the series and of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. Also, I'm from Maryland, so there's a little bit of regionalism, too. I absolutely love the game, and don't regret buying it (other than the catastrophic loss of productivity), but it shipped buggier than hell. Patched to date, it still CTDs on average once every two hours, and there are graphic glitches from time to time. I have solved most of my gripes with the game with the help of mods, such as the custom.dll (ATI in my case), and a couple good graphic and UI mods.
Do I like that the game was buggy when released, and still is post-patch? No, of course not. But, in my case, it hasn't outweighed my enjoyment of the game. This has nothing to do with game reviews. Generally I don't buy new games because I don't like the massive pricetag they seem to come with these days, nor do I like the fact that most of them are released with less than 10 hours of SP content to be augmented by DLC (at additional cost to the user), and that oftentimes it seems that the side-effect of widespread Internet access is that games are released to work on 51% of PCs, with the rest getting patches as problems arise. Honestly, if you don't like games requiring at least one patch post-sale to be a complete and functioning product, blame the Internet.
But I digress.
What sales of this game tell you is that people like it, bugs and all. What continued support of Bethesda tells you is that consumers accept a certain risk of bugginess because they believe that the game itself will be worth it. If FNV was boring, or if the gameplay stank on ice, it would be in the $20 bin this week. No amount of Bethesda pressure on reviewers (which I suspect is overblown, frankly) would be able to suppress the righteous indignation of irate consumers posting 1-star reviews on Amazon, or crushing the game on Metacritic. For that matter, major news outlets now routinely review games (USAToday, Washington Post); good luck to any game company leaning on an actual newspaper to print a favorable review. What this tells us is that you can release a game that isn't 100% functional as long as the experience of playing the game is positive enough to outweigh the negative feelings generated by it not working correctly. If your game has bugs, I may still buy it and feel good about it as long as the net experience is positive. When something goes funky in FNV, I try to fix it, or I restart the game. I do this because I was having fun before the game crapped out, and expect to have fun once it's working again.
Counterexample: I recently bought STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and found that it was so buggy, clunky, unpolished, and boring that I didn't bother trying to fix any of the problems. I just uninstalled it. Why? I played the first game and recall it being fun, but not so fun that I would go out of my way to play it. There wasn't a balance of positive experiences and expectations against which the game could draw when it started to crap the bed. And I should note that the game received pretty good reviews, and there are a lot of people who really like both the game and the series.
First, NBC and all the major networks already present programming in full on the Internet via their websites. As of two minutes ago, SyFy does, too.
Second, the author grossly overestimates the pervasiveness of broadband Internet.
Third, most people do not use their computers as their primary media outlet; generally, people watch actual television, usually with cable, and supplement regular television viewing with "On Demand", DVR, and/or movie purchase and rental (either from brick-and-mortar stores or increasingly via services like Netflix and Vudu).
Fourth, advertising revenue doesn't just magically appear. If I'm a company looking to advertise, I'm not going to pay you a premium for advertising time if it's going to be easily ignored by the viewer. That's why the most expensive commercial time is half time during the Super Bowl. If the viewer can easily ignore the ad, then the advertiser isn't getting their message across, and they won't pay for more commercial time.
Fifth, if you remove the references to Caprica, this could've been written ten years ago, and would have been about as accurate. Yes, media consumption is moving away from conventional television and paper news, but it isn't killing them off. People are supplementing traditional media with online, mobile, and on-demand media. The subscription model seems to work best because it can be supplemented with minor advertising to keep consumer costs down, but still provide a high enough quality to beat totally free media.
Sixth, the author is too caught up on the Internet angle. The key to keeping ahead of the wave here is not for networks to make increasingly more media-rich websites, but to improve accessibility to media in general. If I'm already paying for cable, I don't want to buy a series of devices to link media accessed via my computer to my television if I can instead buy a single device which allows me to access media at will with a minimum of effort. That's why the real future of media is stuff like Blu-ray players that can access Netflix and Hulu, not an ad-based torrent service (which I believe has been done before, IIRC).
Seventh, sometimes shows fail because they're not profitable, and sometimes they're not profitable because they're not that interesting.
Eighth, and finally, someone who cares about the author needs to tell him that a Lester Molester sparse moustache is worse than a bad combover. If you can't grow it right, do yourself a favor and don't grow it wrong. Seriously. It just looks creepy and gross.
This isn't an example of a "libertarian paradise", as some extraordinarily well-read and informed people have said. This is an example of the time-honored principle of "shit costs money". Homeboy lives in a rural area where there aren't municipal services like sewer, garbage collection, etc. So, he pays to have those services provided. Since there isn't a county fire department, he has to pay for fire protection since his taxes aren't going to fund it. Yes it's crappy that the firefighters didn't put out his house, but you know what would be even worse? If the guy down the street who paid called the fire department and was turned down because they were already on a call, putting out some Johnny-Come-Lately's fire who didn't pay but had a good sob story. Resources are finite. You do not have a right to have your own screw-ups or accidents fixed by virtue of being born here. You have to pay for it, either through taxes, fees, or private exchange via the market. Meanwhile, if the son wanted to kick the ass of the person responsible he should've saved himself a trip and whupped the grandson's ass.
For those unfamiliar, it's basically GTA but slightly more tongue-in-cheek, with a heavy emphasis on character customization, a la Def Jam: Fight for New York, or The Godfather. It's a blast to play. It's really one of my favorite games. Which makes it all the more bitter that THQ did such a crap-ass job of porting it.
I suspect that Ctrl and left-Shift are mapped as shoulder buttons, because that's how you scroll through the in-game menu, not with the arrow keys or the mouse. Despite having graphics that are really about five years behind the times, it chugs along at about 30 FPS (I run Crysis on highest settings at 1280 x 1024 at 60 FPS), dipping down to the 20s when there's a lot of drawing on screen. That's tolerable, except for the fact that a bug that only exists on the PC causes the frame rate to hover around 10 whenever you drive a car past a certain speed. No patch for this, of course.
You drive a lot during the game, like most GTA-style games, and you can't steer with the mouse. There are two radial menus, one mapped to an analog stick, and one mapped to the D-pad. The stick menu, for weapons, is also mapped to number keys. (Good port!) The D-pad menu, for health items, is bound to the arrow keys. (BAD PORT!) Consider that the time you most need to use health items is generally when one hand is holding the "run the hell away" button and the other hand is using the mouse to shoot or steer. These cannot be remapped to any other keys. Also, nothing can be mapped to mouse buttons other than the wheel or left-/right-click.
It's maddening, because all of these things tarnish what it otherwise a great game, and the control aspects at the very least could be fixed easily.
I'll go a step further and say, in the 14 years I've...had a friend who knows a guy who has downloaded warez, said guy has encountered one malware, and that was in a keygen. Not only do the various distributors have reputations to maintain, but people just in the scene tend to point out any malware pretty quickly.
Would you live in a house for free if the walls had to be transparent?
And this might be an even more pertinent question: when was the last time you clicked on an ad in Gmail?
I'm sure there's a market for this among the stereotypical little old ladies emailing their grandchildren, etc., but I don't think it would take off. People like owning things, not using them with Google's permission.
Well, console purchases go through the roof, for one.
I keep my PC and scratch CA off the list of states I'd like to live in, for another. Although, I must confess, it wasn't very high on the list to begin with.
Whenever there's something about CoS it seems like there's a crowd of people who chime in with, "But ALL religions are corrupt, criminal, and commercial." Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that, if you happen to not have a problem with religion in general, you must accept anything which calls itself a religion, or become an atheist.
Here's the problem. We'll put aside my Pollyanna-esque belief that most of the time religions really are about a genuine and sincere effort to understand the metaphysical aspects of existence. Yes, the Catholic church is responsible for suppression of science and learning, set up the "indulgence" system, and a host of other sins. Keep in mind, however, that the Catholic church was the last vestige of Roman-style socio-political organization after the fall of the empire. While the West dissolved, the Catholic church was the closest thing to a stable government that was able to provide legitimacy to regional and local rulers, preserve some measure of learning, and mitigate internal conflict. Not until the Treaty of Westphalia does the modern concept of the state enter into Western thinking, and that was well after the Inquisition's height. So, yes, the Catholic church has done some nasty things, but compare it to any other nation-state if you want an appropriate ethical comparison.
CoS, on the other hand, actively seeks to defraud individuals through a deliberate pyramid-scheme. It is felonious by any legal standards, and does no charitable work to speak of. Churches, synagogues, and mosques routinely collect money from followers as a sign of devotion and as a means of maintaining themselves (literally, as in a "building fund").
Some Slashdotters appear to be confused as to the concept of nonprofit. A nonprofit organization is allowed to raise money through sales and donations in order to pay it's employees and maintain itself; it only has to show that, at the end of the day, it doesn't have any money.
1. Easiest and most effective: stop fixing their problems. Sometimes, the best way to learn how to use something is to figure it out on your own. Also, it raises the stakes when they're faced with the option of clicking on the flashing "Click here for a free thingummajig!" button.
2. Set up accounts and limit permissions, just like a business environment. If they don't like it, explain that it's a security issue, and if that doesn't work, go to option 1. above.
3. Encourage them to only use their own computers. It sounds like there are several users and several computers in this environment, right? Well, enforce a one-computer-per-user rule and forbid sharing. Again, if it doesn't go over well, see 1.
I do NOT recommend as others have switching platforms. As it stands, you're the resident tech guy when there's a problem, right? Well, if you turn them on to Linux or Mac, now you're the resident tech guy who knows EVERYTHING about Linux/Mac, and who now has the training responsibility. You won't get calls about virii anymore; you'll get calls like, "How do I check my email," or, "I tried to install something and now there's only a command prompt!"
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Well, it's easy to reduce the budget by simply decreasing the amount by which existing funding for annual budget items is increased. Easy logically, that is, not necessarily politically. It's not like the choice is between eliminating Social Security and halving the federal budget, or increasing spending by adding services and creating new government. The third choice is to simply maintain current spending.
That said, as a "fiscal conservative", I would change Social Security at the very least by implementing means testing. And yes, I would begin to phase out Social Security. It wasn't intended to be used as a retirement fund so much as a safety net. Not everyone is supposed to get their money back out of it, and if you're relying on Social Security to provide for you in your old age, you're probably going to need a few other safety nets as well. I don't expect to get a dime back from Social Security, if it's even still around when I retire, and that's fine. I just look at it as another tax, frankly.
I would also cut defense spending, which I believe is one of the bigger line items in the federal budget. IMO, the State department is underfunded, while Defense is bloated. There's a massive military industrial complex that soaks up a lot of tax dollars, when we should be sending some of that money to State, and some of it elsewhere in the budget.
And I know this is unpopular, but I would eliminate the Department of Education, which I believe is more properly a state-level matter. And Homeland Security, which is totally unnecessary and has consistently failed to accomplish its overall mission since its inception. Also, I would take a look at stuff like agricultural subsidies, which are a pretty fair chunk of the budget.
Even if you make a quarter of those cuts, and only cut a quarter of those elements of the budget, you're already saving a lot of money. My point is that, just because you might not be able to find one single line item in a budget that is both unpopular enough to be cut without political danger, yet large enough to make a big dent in the budget by itself, does not mean that there isn't a problem with wasteful and/or unnecessary spending in the federal budget.
Ps. I would leave NASA alone, because more money gets spend on the food stamp program than gets sent to NASA. And NASA is a model of efficiency within the Fed, frankly, before we even start talking about all the useful technology and research we gain from that particular agency.
If you're talking about the Libyan army, last I checked the Russians made T-72's and T90's. Also, we don't exactly have a warm and fuzzy relationship with Libya. Bahrain has some US hardware, but the M60 Patton and the M113 APC aren't exactly the cutting edge of armor; they both came out in the 60s. And if you think Bahraini protesters should hate the US on the basis of military hardware, might I suggest that they also hate the British, French, Swiss, Swedish, and Germans for the same.
I'm not sure, but I think the tanks that the Egyptian army did not turn on protesters are a combo of American and old Soviet tanks.
Secret police, being secret, don't advertise whatever tech you think they might be using, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the CIA did not provide any help to Libya in that regard, either, seeing as this is the country led by a dictator whose house we bombed in the 80s for general naughtiness, among other notable diplomatic fun-facts.
Although "people don't like us" is a deliciously vague phrase, I'm going to translate that as, "the US is unpopular in the Middle East". Then I would say that we're actually not as unpopular as you might think, or as we might seem at times. Also, the Middle East encompasses a large enough area and diverse enough population that it is probably a gross oversimplification to assign one opinion to all people in the entire region. Then you have the problem of how to accurately measure opinions of populations who might not have the freedom to speak openly, in countries led by hostile regimes, and who may or may not be truly random selections (i.e. not government plants). Finally, it seems that most people in the Middle East are quite capable of separating a distaste for American foreign policy from a dislike for the United States as a country or Americans as people.
When you say plethora of games, what exactly are you referring to? Honest question, not trying to be snarky. I ask because my experience has generally been that people who say, "Platform X has plenty of games," don't really care that much about games. Sort of like telling someone who drives a Bugatti Veyron that the Toyota Prius has plenty of horsepower. Also, that you refer to "lifestyle apps" implies to me that, when you mention games, you're talking about casual games rather than FPS or the like.
Angry Birds HD? Apple ceded the gaming field to Microsoft many moons ago, and hasn't done anything to position itself to compete in that environment since. Besides which, does Apple TV even have enough of a foothold for Apple to use it as a wedge into console gaming? Granted, this is anecdotal, but no one I know has Apple TV, and I have a couple of friends who would buy anything with a lower-case 'i' in the front. In fact, those same people use competing products which aren't handicapped by Apple's antagonism towards third-party developers.
I mean, I'm sure there are Apple fans who will buy anything Apple releases for gaming, and then tell everyone they know about how much better Apple TV is for gaming purposes than a PS3, Xbox360, or Wii, but I just don't see console gamers flocking to Apple TV. Nor do I believe that Apple TV will gain enough of a footprint as a media device to give Apple a foothold for gaming. Other multipurpose devices do what Apple TV does, only better, cheaper, and without the limitations. I don't own one, but I'm assuming that, like most Apple products, you only see the full functionality when you combine it with other Apple products.
Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and they just ensured that a console version of Angry Birds will show up on the Xbox and PS3 downloadable market things. They like their own brand, they don't like opening it up to external developers, and they don't like following someone else's lead. Thank God, because if Nintendo made Angry Birds, it would be $40, have birds with Mii faces, and involve Mario or anime children or something. And be called "Flappy Bird Slingshot Adventures Party", or some s. And be a rail shooter.
Sorry, I'm a little bitter after buying a Wii and finding that, in exchange for no hard drive and crappy graphics, I got a controller that doesn't quite track motion accurately, a library of games suitable for a ten year old girl ("Say fellas, let's buy a case of beer and play Cooking Mama tonight!"), and a DVD drive that doesn't play DVDs, but does sound like a tiny gnome is attempting to cut his way free with a miniature Sawzall. I exaggerate, but not too much.
What's especially bizarre about Fils-Aime's statement is that the Wii Market channel carries an s-ton of casual games in the $5-$15 range. Thanks to their scam "Nintendo points" purchasing system (similar to Microsoft's Live point system), you can't get a game for anywhere between free and $5, but most people buying games via the Wii would have no problem dropping $5 on an Angry Birds-type title.
Frankly, there are some pretty terrible games for download that cost more than $5 for the Wii; for that matter, there are some pretty horrible games on disc for the Wii that are well in excess of that price. I doubt highly that the availability of cheap games on mobile phones will make an appreciable dent in Nintendo's market share, although Fils-Aime is more than welcome to suggest that consumers ought to be paying $25 a pop for games on a mobile phone. Preferably during an outdoor press conference after handing overripe tomatoes to the spectators.
Well, yeah, yay free market! It's a privately-managed list, opted into by private businesses. Nobody is forcing bar owners to use the system, and nobody's forcing patrons to go to bars that do. If you don't like the idea of your biometric data floating around in some private database, tracking bars you frequent and maintaining records of your (mis-)behavior, vote with your feet: only go to bars that don't use biometrics. If you really, really care, start a campaign to convince other people to avoid biometric bars.
Notice that people are rushing to sign up. That tells me that Australians are more interested in continuing to go to bars and pubs than they are about any privacy issues that might be relevant. And, as someone who's spent six years in the bar/restaurant business, this is just making electronic a system that has traditionally been word-of-mouth. People who work in the bar/restaurant industry hang out with other people in the business, and they swap war stories. By day two of working at a bar you know the problem people: angry drunks, people who've been kicked out of some other place, people who skipped out on a tab from the bar down the street, etc.
What would you prefer, that the Aussie government enacts a bill requiring bars to serve Australians anonymously? The Beer Act of 2011? Yeah, nobody'll make a joke about that on late-night tv...
Dangerous power? Don't you think that's going a bit far? I would point out that it takes a comparable number of steps to install something from a website as it does to install something from the Market. Granted, you lose the Market's update checking, but there isn't anything preventing individual apps from checking for their own updates outside of the Market AFAIK. As long as you've enabled the option to install non-Market apps, that is, which hardly demands technical expertise on the part of the user. And honestly, I'm not entirely clear on how this decision violates the principles of open source, but I'm no expert in the field.
Now, forcing a private business to violate their own terms of use with regard to their own app is more dangerous, IMO. Google owns, develops, and maintains the Market, and users access it with the understanding that they neither own nor rent any part of it. In other words, Google offers the Market on its own terms, neither forcing users to make use of it, nor conceding the right to decide what is and isn't offered through it. Forcing Google to offer a competitor to Market (which the Kongregate app is, in terms of game distribution) from the Market itself would be like forcing HH Gregg to maintain a Best Buy within all of its stores.
I might be going out on a limb here, but coming from a Windows background (a DOS background, if you go back far enough) it took me a little while to get used to the idea of using an app to install something, rather than just going to the website and downloading it. Is this maybe a bigger deal for Linux folks? From my several abortive attempts with Ubuntu I recall my options being Synaptic, or some command line stuff involving apt-get. Steam came out of my ears the first time I found out that I couldn't double-click on an executable to install something.
PS. Just installed the app from the browser by going to the Kongregate website. There's a download link that takes you to GetJar, and the whole process took less than a minute. The world continues to be safe for freedom, democracy, and small, furry animals.
Thank God it's doomed to failure! Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "plugging in" to a freeway and doing a steady 65 mph (faster than you'd be going in rush-hour traffic, and without the headache), but I also want the option to drive myself, however I want to. I like the feeling of driving a car. I like shifting. I like the visceral feeling of becoming in tune with a machine, and knowing all of its funny little quirks. I like knowing exactly how far I can push a car, and then getting right up to the edge. Granted, I'm not talking about doing 105 mph past an ambulance and a schoolbus on a crowded street, but when conditions are safe, I like driving fast and taking corners hard. I also like just seeing how an '84 Volvo stationwagon runs when I've tuned it up and restored it to new(ish) condition.
You know, people don't need beer or ice cream, and indeed, both can contribute to numerous social ills. Surely everyone who spends money on beer and/or ice cream would save that money by not buying either one. However, a lot of people happen to like beer and/or ice cream. There are a lot of things you don't need, but that you buy, eat, drink, or do anyway. That's sort of what makes life enjoyable.
Good luck selling this to anyone from the Washington, DC area. The Metro is, rightly or wrongly, notorious in the DC area for being dangerous. The WMATA is notorious for everything from ignoring safety recommendations, running old cars, and skipping maintenance, to promoting a culture of hostility within its workforce. Metro employees are underpaid, overworked, and, to put it delicately, benefit from a somewhat lenient hiring process. Now, who would you propose will be driving the lead car around the Capital Beltway? Unless you pick this one segment of public transportation to be contracted out to a private company, it's gonna be the WMATA in the DC area. If I wanted some surly bastard with no professional training who hates his job and hasn't slept in a day to drive, I'd do it myself, thanks.
First of all, hasn't this sort of article been done before, or at least posted on Slashdot?
Second of all, the title is just a tad misleading...it's an MIT study, not a Microsoft study, even though accepting funding from Microsoft sort of belies any claims of purity in the study.
And finally, I'd like to see the actual survey. Logically, if you take a business that doesn't own a single computer, wouldn't it be equally difficult (or easy) to equip and train the business on any software platform, open or not? For example, I have a hard time with Linux because I've used Microsoft all my life, not because Linux is more difficult to learn. Naturally, in a business setting, I would have an easier time learning how to use a Microsoft product since I'm already familiar with them. Same could be said for someone who grew up with Linux.
I see several people have replied to this saying that, for all intents and purposes, the Internet is the same as public, and that one should assume everything one does in public will end up on the Internet. "If you didn't want pictures of you doing shots at the bar to show up on Facebook, you shouldn't have been doing them," is the thrust of the argument, I believe.
The problem with that concept of "public" is that real-life "public" is limited by both time and space. Let's say I get blind, stinkin' drunk one night and, in a paroxysm of bad judgement, strip naked and run around my block. I have certainly abandoned the expectation of privacy, because I'm out of my own house and in a public space. But, I can also reasonably assume that, if no one sees me (let's say it's 3:00 AM on a weeknight), the incident will remain unwitnessed. Also, let's assume I'm totally wrong, and everyone on the block is awake, and they're all having huge parties in their front lawns. There is still a limit to the number of people who could see me (based on height, for instance, the density of the crowd, and visual obstacles like trees and cars), and there is a limit to the duration of the, erm, exposure. In other words, once I've done my lap, they're not still seeing me naked.
Let's add a complicating factor. Let's say one person is taking a picture of someone in the front yard and I run through the shot as it's taken. Time is now no longer a factor, because there will be a picture of me running around naked effectively forever. Still, it's one picture, and only so many people can look at it at a time. Even if copies are made, there is a limit to how many people can see it at once.
And finally, the Internet. Let's say the picture winds up on the Internet. Now, not only is there no limit as to the number of people who can see it, but there's no limit to the amount of time it can be seen. This is the least amount of privacy one can possibly have.
The importance in the distinction between "regular public" and "Internet public" is that the Internet provides an unnatural amount of exposure, beyond what one would reasonably expect in the normal conduct of daily life. One might reasonably anticipate walking down the street and being watched by other people on the street, or even winding up accidentally in someone's photograph. It's a far different thing to be photographed or videoed and have the results on the Internet for posterity. Sort of like being under constant surveillance by everyone with a Internet access. That's beyond public.
We've got two cars. One, which we just bought, is a Toyota Highlander Hybrid. We live in a small city, in the downtown historic area, where streets are small and parallel parking is the norm. However, we camp often, go on road trips, are planning on having kids, and have a large dog we bring around with us pretty often. Also, my wife, who drives the car most, has an hour long commute. So, when her Jetta gave up the ghost, we got the Highlander mostly for her, but also for the aforementioned things. Having the backup camera basically just makes parallel parking the car--which is pretty big, much bigger than the Jetta--much easier. And when it's loaded up to the point where there's no visibility out the back window, it's nice to still have a rear view besides the side mirrors.
On the other hand, my car is a 1999 Honda Prelude. I can see anything anywhere near my car pretty much all the time. Despite having a crappy turning radius for a coup, and being longer than most cars in that class, I can park it pretty much anywhere and see anything behind me without a problem. The space between the bottom of the rear window and the street is less than three feet.
When the 'lude dies--God forbid--I'm planning on getting something very similar, just newer. How exactly will a backup camera add to the safety of a car of that size? Or a Mini, for example? Here's a thought: maybe a one-size-fits-all law isn't the answer here.
Giving state money to a religious group isn't unconstitutional. Giving state money to one religious group and not another is unconstitutional. The 1st Amendment and the separation of church and state guideline boils down to forbidding the government from establishing a state religion--by giving preferential treatment to one over another, for example--not forbidding the expression of religion with government money. For example, the whole "moment of silence" in schools to allow for multidenominational prayer. Now, if Kentucky subsequently denied a similar claim for the "How big was that ark again?" atheist theme park, you've got a 1st Amendment case.
Not to be picky, but scubamage didn't actually post a potential solution. If you catch fire, your problem is being on fire. "Not having caught on fire in the first place" is not a viable, actionable solution for someone who is currently aflame. See what I'm saying? Scubamage was being trollish and knows it.
If he's never been hard up, or caught short, or happened to become subject to debt collection by accident, then God love him. Doesn't mean he should be self-righteous about it.
Yeah, it's impressive in comparison to previous Rockstar games, maybe the best facial animation I've ever seen in a retail game. Still, there's something wrong with the eyes, and I can't quite put my finger on it. It's almost as if they're not connected to the rest of the expression, if that makes sense.
Also, the animation of the body as a whole is still too stilted to look real. To be fair, I've never seen any game get that right. People are constantly in motion, making tons of small movements such as blinks, twitches, shifting their weight from foot to foot, breathing, etc. No one isolates movement to the "relevant" parts without fairly intense training and concentration. This game gets pretty close, but not quite. Also, the edges of the characters are too crisp. Everyone looks like very detailed paper cut-outs on top of a realish-looking background.
Of course, none of this matters to me since it's only being released on console, apparently. I guess that's fine; I already know the Irish captain is in on it, and when you go to his house to tell him about the case he's gonna plug you in the kitchen.
Hey! Get off my keyboard, you!
I've got about 80 hours logged on the PC version of New Vegas, which I prepurchased because I'm a huge fan of both the series and of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games. Also, I'm from Maryland, so there's a little bit of regionalism, too. I absolutely love the game, and don't regret buying it (other than the catastrophic loss of productivity), but it shipped buggier than hell. Patched to date, it still CTDs on average once every two hours, and there are graphic glitches from time to time. I have solved most of my gripes with the game with the help of mods, such as the custom .dll (ATI in my case), and a couple good graphic and UI mods.
Do I like that the game was buggy when released, and still is post-patch? No, of course not. But, in my case, it hasn't outweighed my enjoyment of the game. This has nothing to do with game reviews. Generally I don't buy new games because I don't like the massive pricetag they seem to come with these days, nor do I like the fact that most of them are released with less than 10 hours of SP content to be augmented by DLC (at additional cost to the user), and that oftentimes it seems that the side-effect of widespread Internet access is that games are released to work on 51% of PCs, with the rest getting patches as problems arise. Honestly, if you don't like games requiring at least one patch post-sale to be a complete and functioning product, blame the Internet.
But I digress.
What sales of this game tell you is that people like it, bugs and all. What continued support of Bethesda tells you is that consumers accept a certain risk of bugginess because they believe that the game itself will be worth it. If FNV was boring, or if the gameplay stank on ice, it would be in the $20 bin this week. No amount of Bethesda pressure on reviewers (which I suspect is overblown, frankly) would be able to suppress the righteous indignation of irate consumers posting 1-star reviews on Amazon, or crushing the game on Metacritic. For that matter, major news outlets now routinely review games (USAToday, Washington Post); good luck to any game company leaning on an actual newspaper to print a favorable review. What this tells us is that you can release a game that isn't 100% functional as long as the experience of playing the game is positive enough to outweigh the negative feelings generated by it not working correctly. If your game has bugs, I may still buy it and feel good about it as long as the net experience is positive. When something goes funky in FNV, I try to fix it, or I restart the game. I do this because I was having fun before the game crapped out, and expect to have fun once it's working again.
Counterexample: I recently bought STALKER: Call of Pripyat, and found that it was so buggy, clunky, unpolished, and boring that I didn't bother trying to fix any of the problems. I just uninstalled it. Why? I played the first game and recall it being fun, but not so fun that I would go out of my way to play it. There wasn't a balance of positive experiences and expectations against which the game could draw when it started to crap the bed. And I should note that the game received pretty good reviews, and there are a lot of people who really like both the game and the series.
Lord, where to begin?
First, NBC and all the major networks already present programming in full on the Internet via their websites. As of two minutes ago, SyFy does, too.
Second, the author grossly overestimates the pervasiveness of broadband Internet.
Third, most people do not use their computers as their primary media outlet; generally, people watch actual television, usually with cable, and supplement regular television viewing with "On Demand", DVR, and/or movie purchase and rental (either from brick-and-mortar stores or increasingly via services like Netflix and Vudu).
Fourth, advertising revenue doesn't just magically appear. If I'm a company looking to advertise, I'm not going to pay you a premium for advertising time if it's going to be easily ignored by the viewer. That's why the most expensive commercial time is half time during the Super Bowl. If the viewer can easily ignore the ad, then the advertiser isn't getting their message across, and they won't pay for more commercial time.
Fifth, if you remove the references to Caprica, this could've been written ten years ago, and would have been about as accurate. Yes, media consumption is moving away from conventional television and paper news, but it isn't killing them off. People are supplementing traditional media with online, mobile, and on-demand media. The subscription model seems to work best because it can be supplemented with minor advertising to keep consumer costs down, but still provide a high enough quality to beat totally free media.
Sixth, the author is too caught up on the Internet angle. The key to keeping ahead of the wave here is not for networks to make increasingly more media-rich websites, but to improve accessibility to media in general. If I'm already paying for cable, I don't want to buy a series of devices to link media accessed via my computer to my television if I can instead buy a single device which allows me to access media at will with a minimum of effort. That's why the real future of media is stuff like Blu-ray players that can access Netflix and Hulu, not an ad-based torrent service (which I believe has been done before, IIRC).
Seventh, sometimes shows fail because they're not profitable, and sometimes they're not profitable because they're not that interesting.
Eighth, and finally, someone who cares about the author needs to tell him that a Lester Molester sparse moustache is worse than a bad combover. If you can't grow it right, do yourself a favor and don't grow it wrong. Seriously. It just looks creepy and gross.
This isn't an example of a "libertarian paradise", as some extraordinarily well-read and informed people have said. This is an example of the time-honored principle of "shit costs money". Homeboy lives in a rural area where there aren't municipal services like sewer, garbage collection, etc. So, he pays to have those services provided. Since there isn't a county fire department, he has to pay for fire protection since his taxes aren't going to fund it. Yes it's crappy that the firefighters didn't put out his house, but you know what would be even worse? If the guy down the street who paid called the fire department and was turned down because they were already on a call, putting out some Johnny-Come-Lately's fire who didn't pay but had a good sob story.
Resources are finite. You do not have a right to have your own screw-ups or accidents fixed by virtue of being born here. You have to pay for it, either through taxes, fees, or private exchange via the market. Meanwhile, if the son wanted to kick the ass of the person responsible he should've saved himself a trip and whupped the grandson's ass.
For those unfamiliar, it's basically GTA but slightly more tongue-in-cheek, with a heavy emphasis on character customization, a la Def Jam: Fight for New York, or The Godfather. It's a blast to play. It's really one of my favorite games. Which makes it all the more bitter that THQ did such a crap-ass job of porting it.
I suspect that Ctrl and left-Shift are mapped as shoulder buttons, because that's how you scroll through the in-game menu, not with the arrow keys or the mouse. Despite having graphics that are really about five years behind the times, it chugs along at about 30 FPS (I run Crysis on highest settings at 1280 x 1024 at 60 FPS), dipping down to the 20s when there's a lot of drawing on screen. That's tolerable, except for the fact that a bug that only exists on the PC causes the frame rate to hover around 10 whenever you drive a car past a certain speed. No patch for this, of course.
You drive a lot during the game, like most GTA-style games, and you can't steer with the mouse. There are two radial menus, one mapped to an analog stick, and one mapped to the D-pad. The stick menu, for weapons, is also mapped to number keys. (Good port!) The D-pad menu, for health items, is bound to the arrow keys. (BAD PORT!) Consider that the time you most need to use health items is generally when one hand is holding the "run the hell away" button and the other hand is using the mouse to shoot or steer. These cannot be remapped to any other keys. Also, nothing can be mapped to mouse buttons other than the wheel or left-/right-click.
It's maddening, because all of these things tarnish what it otherwise a great game, and the control aspects at the very least could be fixed easily.
I'll go a step further and say, in the 14 years I've...had a friend who knows a guy who has downloaded warez, said guy has encountered one malware, and that was in a keygen. Not only do the various distributors have reputations to maintain, but people just in the scene tend to point out any malware pretty quickly.
Would you live in a house for free if the walls had to be transparent?
And this might be an even more pertinent question: when was the last time you clicked on an ad in Gmail?
I'm sure there's a market for this among the stereotypical little old ladies emailing their grandchildren, etc., but I don't think it would take off. People like owning things, not using them with Google's permission.
Well, console purchases go through the roof, for one.
I keep my PC and scratch CA off the list of states I'd like to live in, for another. Although, I must confess, it wasn't very high on the list to begin with.
Whenever there's something about CoS it seems like there's a crowd of people who chime in with, "But ALL religions are corrupt, criminal, and commercial." Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that, if you happen to not have a problem with religion in general, you must accept anything which calls itself a religion, or become an atheist.
Here's the problem. We'll put aside my Pollyanna-esque belief that most of the time religions really are about a genuine and sincere effort to understand the metaphysical aspects of existence. Yes, the Catholic church is responsible for suppression of science and learning, set up the "indulgence" system, and a host of other sins. Keep in mind, however, that the Catholic church was the last vestige of Roman-style socio-political organization after the fall of the empire. While the West dissolved, the Catholic church was the closest thing to a stable government that was able to provide legitimacy to regional and local rulers, preserve some measure of learning, and mitigate internal conflict. Not until the Treaty of Westphalia does the modern concept of the state enter into Western thinking, and that was well after the Inquisition's height. So, yes, the Catholic church has done some nasty things, but compare it to any other nation-state if you want an appropriate ethical comparison.
CoS, on the other hand, actively seeks to defraud individuals through a deliberate pyramid-scheme. It is felonious by any legal standards, and does no charitable work to speak of. Churches, synagogues, and mosques routinely collect money from followers as a sign of devotion and as a means of maintaining themselves (literally, as in a "building fund").
Some Slashdotters appear to be confused as to the concept of nonprofit. A nonprofit organization is allowed to raise money through sales and donations in order to pay it's employees and maintain itself; it only has to show that, at the end of the day, it doesn't have any money.
1. Easiest and most effective: stop fixing their problems. Sometimes, the best way to learn how to use something is to figure it out on your own. Also, it raises the stakes when they're faced with the option of clicking on the flashing "Click here for a free thingummajig!" button.
2. Set up accounts and limit permissions, just like a business environment. If they don't like it, explain that it's a security issue, and if that doesn't work, go to option 1. above.
3. Encourage them to only use their own computers. It sounds like there are several users and several computers in this environment, right? Well, enforce a one-computer-per-user rule and forbid sharing. Again, if it doesn't go over well, see 1.
I do NOT recommend as others have switching platforms. As it stands, you're the resident tech guy when there's a problem, right? Well, if you turn them on to Linux or Mac, now you're the resident tech guy who knows EVERYTHING about Linux/Mac, and who now has the training responsibility. You won't get calls about virii anymore; you'll get calls like, "How do I check my email," or, "I tried to install something and now there's only a command prompt!"