Dr. Dre is a highly accomplished producer, sound engineer, studio musician and audio programmer. For that matter, so is will.i.am. Your personal taste in music is not terribly relevant to whether or not either of them are good at what they do, and given the amount of respect they command within the community of professionals within their field(s) it doesn't strike me as far-fetched that they have some pretty meaingful skills and knowledge.
That's not to say that their respective collaborations with HP and Intel are anything more than a gimmicky marketing ploy, merely to point out that they very well *could* be something more... though I don't think there's any doubt that marketing gimmickry played a large part in any event.
A good test of your hypothesis would be to compare movies made now, after internet piracy has gone fully mainstream, and those made 10+ years ago.
A glossary analysis informs me that 10+ years ago, the majority of movies were safe, unartistic dreck intended to maximize returns and minimize risk. The same glossary inspection tells me that during the last 10 years, indeed, even the last 1 year, there have been a respectable well-made, thought-provoking, highly artistic and envelope-pushing films, enough that it is not clear this practice has dropped off any post-piracy. It would almost seem that nothing has really changed, and that Hollywood has continued to make movies at roughly the same 99:1 crap to good ratio as though nothing at all happened.
In short, if your premise was accurate, we wouldn't have "Inception".
Except "doj's mandatory data retention reason" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm pretty sure OP meant precisely what he said... and I'm with GP on their need for a new dictionary.
Or the documented non-citizens. The only thing more obnoxious than asshats who constantly bring up illegal aliens for no fucking reason are asshats who constantly insinuate that all immigrants are illegal.
Actually, I shouldn't say that, because they're largely the same asshats, and even the most obnoxious asshat cannot, technically, be more obnoxious than themselves. Hopefully you get the idea I'm trying to put across despite the logical contradiction, though. In case you didn't: you're an obnoxious fuckwit of an asshat.
Their big selling point has always been Outlook/Exchange compatibility. Actually, that might well be the only real selling point they've ever had. The latest incarnation is an attempt to make their products "cool" so they would appeal to people who don't care about Outlook (read: people who purchase phones for themselves rather than receive them from their employer), and to catch up a bit on some of the corner business uses they didn't think of but could implement easily (including some which don't need implementing, as they can be done from anything with an Internet connection)
Anyway, I suspect that the enterprise slate market is Microsoft's for the taking once they deliver a working product. They're the only ones who can really do Outlook/Exchange integration, not to mention the rest of Office. I don't pretend to understand why so many people have such tremendous hard-ons for MS Office (I think that there are perfectly functional free and Free alternatives which are just as good at anything that isn't best done on far more intensive software anyway...), but the fact remains that few corporations are willing or able to just ditch it altogether, and unless your product is compatible it's unlikely to make much headway.
How sinister of them, trying to compete with a proprietary codec by releasing free plugins for other vendors' browsers to play their unencumbered format.
Look out Lex Luthor, Eric Schmidt is stealing your schtick.
Next-Gen *anything* is always 3 months away... but with something like tablets where they are really just coming into their own as a viable, meaningful product, the next-gen is going to be a far more substantial improvement over the last than, say, with a desktop video card.
If my mobo blows tomorrow, I'll just get whatever is current and call, it a day, because frankly I don't care what minuscule incremental improvements they'll have for the next generation... I'd rather have a working computer now than one which is only hypothetically better in a few months. If waiting a few months brought about an exponential improvement, however, I'd at least have to consider holding out a bit longer and maybe visiting the library or whatever in the mean time.
Yeah, they're practically irrelevant. California isn't driving away businesses, that's just a line rich people use to argue for more tax breaks. California could cut corporate tax rates and fees to 0 and it would change nothing.
Maybe her polls indicated that "the healthcare bill" polled poorly, but that everything actually contained in the bill did not. There is a stunning level of misconception out there on this issue, leading to overwhelming opposition to legislation that mostly, albeit with some flaws, does what people want.
And early cyber-stalking reports indicate that his favorite author is Adolf Hitler, and that he has devoted significant time and effort to rambling incoherently about the Constitution and how socialists are destroying it.
So yeah, that pretty much puts him in the category of "people who are likely in the Tea Party movement".
Because his identity is already known, and he is not. I guess somebody could suggest it, but they would simply, flat-out entirely incorrect. Oh, hi there...
Except that doesn't work, because nobody carries a loaded, ready weapon with them at all times, and even if they did an attacker will generally have theirs aimed and unsafe before you could even draw. Unless you walk around with a pistol in hand at all times, in which case you're a nutjob.
If having a gun makes you feel safer, then fine, knock yourself out, but thinking about it for a few moments in rational, realistic terms will generally drive home that there is absolutely no reason to conclude it really does. Fraction of a percent fantasy-land movie scenarios just don't count for much.
We have Neo-Nazis gunning down members of congress, mainstream political candidates superimposing crosshairs onto the districts (and occasionally likenesses...) of political opponents, and small armies of people toting effigies of the president and making overt threats to take up arms against the legitimate government if it doesn't make relatively minor policy changes... often without any clear or rational statement of precisely what changes they want.
While the European colonists might have viewed the native population as a homogeneous ethnic group, that population viewed itself as a patchwork of competing and often warring groups. Further, the notion that the European Americans didn't recognize those differences is given the lie by their apparent, well-documented willingness to deal individually with these groups along acknowledged political, linguistic, cultural and geographic lines.
If we accept that the standard for being a discrete ethnic group is the same for all such groups regardless of continent, then the US has participated in hundreds, if not thousands, of genocides spanning a region comparable in size and ethnic diversity to the entirety of Europe.
Now THAT'S what I call "American Exceptionalism"./sarcasm
"And see it the other way - if you have a forum and there aren't any opinions at all about what you have made that may mean that nobody really uses what you have done."
Actually, it means that nobody has anything good to say about it *on your forums*. There are so many layers of selection bias and other distortion that can occur between the step where a person buys/uses an item and a person posts on the creators forum about it, up to and including those being entirely different people, that it's a total crapshoot trying to gauge much of anything by it. If a game creator wants to see what people think about their game, they are better served checking reviews (including those on independent, reputable forums), analyzing their distribution info (if the game is selling/downloading like hotcakes, it stands to reason that people like it), or actually soliciting opinions from a random swath of customers.
Option 3 is that the game is a flawed recreation of actual driving mechanics, and the wheel/pedal setup is a flawed recreation of an actual car interface, such that it is easier to just use a different input better optimized for what you're operating.
I'd actually guess that is precisely the situation the GP has found themselves in.
"But then that government would have to set a price, which means the government is now in the internet business whether they like it or not. '
I actually, I think that would put them into the rent extraction business. I suppose that the utility poles could become so heavily wired as to run out of space or lose structural integrity if enough businesses were to lease space on them... but frankly that seems more than a little unlikely.
As an added bonus, FCC taxes and the like could simply be rolled into the rent, streamlining the billing cycle and saving money for business and government alike.
Of course, I also favor 1-page tax return forms and an end to employer-paid payroll taxes to make the system simpler and more transparent. I'm obviously a loon.
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Dr. Dre is a highly accomplished producer, sound engineer, studio musician and audio programmer. For that matter, so is will.i.am. Your personal taste in music is not terribly relevant to whether or not either of them are good at what they do, and given the amount of respect they command within the community of professionals within their field(s) it doesn't strike me as far-fetched that they have some pretty meaingful skills and knowledge.
That's not to say that their respective collaborations with HP and Intel are anything more than a gimmicky marketing ploy, merely to point out that they very well *could* be something more... though I don't think there's any doubt that marketing gimmickry played a large part in any event.
A good test of your hypothesis would be to compare movies made now, after internet piracy has gone fully mainstream, and those made 10+ years ago.
A glossary analysis informs me that 10+ years ago, the majority of movies were safe, unartistic dreck intended to maximize returns and minimize risk. The same glossary inspection tells me that during the last 10 years, indeed, even the last 1 year, there have been a respectable well-made, thought-provoking, highly artistic and envelope-pushing films, enough that it is not clear this practice has dropped off any post-piracy. It would almost seem that nothing has really changed, and that Hollywood has continued to make movies at roughly the same 99:1 crap to good ratio as though nothing at all happened.
In short, if your premise was accurate, we wouldn't have "Inception".
Except "doj's mandatory data retention reason" doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'm pretty sure OP meant precisely what he said... and I'm with GP on their need for a new dictionary.
Or the documented non-citizens. The only thing more obnoxious than asshats who constantly bring up illegal aliens for no fucking reason are asshats who constantly insinuate that all immigrants are illegal.
Actually, I shouldn't say that, because they're largely the same asshats, and even the most obnoxious asshat cannot, technically, be more obnoxious than themselves. Hopefully you get the idea I'm trying to put across despite the logical contradiction, though. In case you didn't: you're an obnoxious fuckwit of an asshat.
Their big selling point has always been Outlook/Exchange compatibility. Actually, that might well be the only real selling point they've ever had. The latest incarnation is an attempt to make their products "cool" so they would appeal to people who don't care about Outlook (read: people who purchase phones for themselves rather than receive them from their employer), and to catch up a bit on some of the corner business uses they didn't think of but could implement easily (including some which don't need implementing, as they can be done from anything with an Internet connection)
Anyway, I suspect that the enterprise slate market is Microsoft's for the taking once they deliver a working product. They're the only ones who can really do Outlook/Exchange integration, not to mention the rest of Office. I don't pretend to understand why so many people have such tremendous hard-ons for MS Office (I think that there are perfectly functional free and Free alternatives which are just as good at anything that isn't best done on far more intensive software anyway...), but the fact remains that few corporations are willing or able to just ditch it altogether, and unless your product is compatible it's unlikely to make much headway.
Unless an alchemist finds some way to transmute gold and silver into food or useful goods, they're pretty much just shiny metal with little utility.
Frankly, at least paper money can be burned as fuel... gold has no such auxiliary purpose.
How sinister of them, trying to compete with a proprietary codec by releasing free plugins for other vendors' browsers to play their unencumbered format.
Look out Lex Luthor, Eric Schmidt is stealing your schtick.
Next-Gen *anything* is always 3 months away... but with something like tablets where they are really just coming into their own as a viable, meaningful product, the next-gen is going to be a far more substantial improvement over the last than, say, with a desktop video card.
If my mobo blows tomorrow, I'll just get whatever is current and call, it a day, because frankly I don't care what minuscule incremental improvements they'll have for the next generation... I'd rather have a working computer now than one which is only hypothetically better in a few months. If waiting a few months brought about an exponential improvement, however, I'd at least have to consider holding out a bit longer and maybe visiting the library or whatever in the mean time.
My kingdom for a mod point... sadly, I think most people missed the joke...
Sounds like you just answered your own question...
Yeah, they're practically irrelevant. California isn't driving away businesses, that's just a line rich people use to argue for more tax breaks. California could cut corporate tax rates and fees to 0 and it would change nothing.
Maybe her polls indicated that "the healthcare bill" polled poorly, but that everything actually contained in the bill did not. There is a stunning level of misconception out there on this issue, leading to overwhelming opposition to legislation that mostly, albeit with some flaws, does what people want.
And early cyber-stalking reports indicate that his favorite author is Adolf Hitler, and that he has devoted significant time and effort to rambling incoherently about the Constitution and how socialists are destroying it.
So yeah, that pretty much puts him in the category of "people who are likely in the Tea Party movement".
Because his identity is already known, and he is not. I guess somebody could suggest it, but they would simply, flat-out entirely incorrect. Oh, hi there...
Except that doesn't work, because nobody carries a loaded, ready weapon with them at all times, and even if they did an attacker will generally have theirs aimed and unsafe before you could even draw. Unless you walk around with a pistol in hand at all times, in which case you're a nutjob.
If having a gun makes you feel safer, then fine, knock yourself out, but thinking about it for a few moments in rational, realistic terms will generally drive home that there is absolutely no reason to conclude it really does. Fraction of a percent fantasy-land movie scenarios just don't count for much.
We have Neo-Nazis gunning down members of congress, mainstream political candidates superimposing crosshairs onto the districts (and occasionally likenesses...) of political opponents, and small armies of people toting effigies of the president and making overt threats to take up arms against the legitimate government if it doesn't make relatively minor policy changes... often without any clear or rational statement of precisely what changes they want.
Holy fuck, what are you talking about?
Only 1?
While the European colonists might have viewed the native population as a homogeneous ethnic group, that population viewed itself as a patchwork of competing and often warring groups. Further, the notion that the European Americans didn't recognize those differences is given the lie by their apparent, well-documented willingness to deal individually with these groups along acknowledged political, linguistic, cultural and geographic lines.
If we accept that the standard for being a discrete ethnic group is the same for all such groups regardless of continent, then the US has participated in hundreds, if not thousands, of genocides spanning a region comparable in size and ethnic diversity to the entirety of Europe.
Now THAT'S what I call "American Exceptionalism". /sarcasm
"Guns don't kill people. People kill people"
Yeah, but the gun helped.
"And see it the other way - if you have a forum and there aren't any opinions at all about what you have made that may mean that nobody really uses what you have done."
Actually, it means that nobody has anything good to say about it *on your forums*. There are so many layers of selection bias and other distortion that can occur between the step where a person buys/uses an item and a person posts on the creators forum about it, up to and including those being entirely different people, that it's a total crapshoot trying to gauge much of anything by it. If a game creator wants to see what people think about their game, they are better served checking reviews (including those on independent, reputable forums), analyzing their distribution info (if the game is selling/downloading like hotcakes, it stands to reason that people like it), or actually soliciting opinions from a random swath of customers.
Why exclude the monitor just because you're using the old one?
Much better to include the TV.
Option 3 is that the game is a flawed recreation of actual driving mechanics, and the wheel/pedal setup is a flawed recreation of an actual car interface, such that it is easier to just use a different input better optimized for what you're operating.
I'd actually guess that is precisely the situation the GP has found themselves in.
"how health care works in the US"
The first thing to remember is that it doesn't. From there, it's pretty much a study of how badly we're getting fucked from all angles.
Protip: if your parents can't afford you, don't get born.
I can see that one working out pretty well.
Data != property.
There may be some law prohibiting Wikileaks' actions on this, but it certainly isn't one dealing with receipt of stolen property.
"But then that government would have to set a price, which means the government is now in the internet business whether they like it or not. '
I actually, I think that would put them into the rent extraction business. I suppose that the utility poles could become so heavily wired as to run out of space or lose structural integrity if enough businesses were to lease space on them... but frankly that seems more than a little unlikely.
As an added bonus, FCC taxes and the like could simply be rolled into the rent, streamlining the billing cycle and saving money for business and government alike.
Of course, I also favor 1-page tax return forms and an end to employer-paid payroll taxes to make the system simpler and more transparent. I'm obviously a loon.