The international affairs of the state of Israel are specifically mentioned, for instance. So are things like the fiery destruction of Earthly nations. It's hardly a stretch to imagine that some would interpret a nuclear war as fulfillment of those prophecies.
Say she does.
At which point do the ICBMs go flying? You still haven't made your case, all you're saying is she might interpret world events a certain way, but you don't tell us why that certain way would lead to launching nukes.
If you're not going to actually respond to the argument, why bother typing another post?
Oh, so you think she'll be able to predict the exact millisecond of the rapture and hit the launch button right before she's assumed into heaven?
Seriously? Look, there's no connection whatsoever between believing in the rapture and controlling nuclear weapons. None.
I'm not defending belief in the rapture; I think it's retarded, as belief in any doomsday story is retarded. But don't make shit up about Palin just because you disagree with her beliefs. The fact is, a person can have vastly different beliefs than you, and still do good in the world.
Yeah, I agree. Most of the people who support deletion give arguments like, "well the fancruft infiltrates legitimate articles," which is a valid point, but it's also an organizational problem. If you just fix the organizational problem, then there'd be no reason to delete all those articles.
But the real problem, IMO, is that there's a lot of a-holes in the world that just like to destroy other people's works, and many of them are on Wikipedia.
Well, Vexorian made it sound as if that information was posted in the wrong place initially. I was just pointing out that that's not the case.
But look at it this way, let's say Wikipedia was a business. By letting Wookiepedia take all the Star Wars traffic, Wikipedia just lost a decently large chunk of readers; if they were a TV network they'd be kicking themselves for it.
(Of course, most of the alternative wikis are hosted on Wikia, which *is* a business and makes boffo ad revenue... so maybe that's why those dumb notability rules exist in the first place. OMG CONSPIRACY!)
I'd do it if I had the money to set up servers/etc. The key is to have hardly any editors, just enough to respond to copyright claims or DCMA notices, everything else is free game-- jerks don't delete articles because there won't be anybody with deletion permissions. IPs get the same permissions as logged-in users, and any of them can post an article on "things Joe Blow ate for breakfast on 4/12/2009" if they like.
Wikipedia has the problem that... well, tons of things have both virtual and real:
It's a lot easier to delete work than to create it.
I mean, it took God-knows how many dozens of people to write that Warhammer guide after God-knows how many man-hours of work researching, typing, and editing it all. And it takes an editor 30 seconds to delete it all, poof, gone.
And of course, there are lots of a-holes who basically get their only joy in life from deleting somebody else's work; there's more than a little truth in those BOFH jokes. Some of those a-holes are Wikipedia editors, alas.
If I were Wikipedia, I'd solve this one of two ways: 1) Nothing gets *really* deleted; instead you can put Wikipedia accounts into "deleted articles mode" where it'll let you browse things that anonymous viewers don't see. This could be off by default, but it should definitely exist.
2) Deleting an article should require as much work as creating it in the first place. I don't know how this would be implemented.
Anyway, I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore unless I'm working on an article that basically has absolutely no reason to be deleted. I don't create new articles as much, because I'm deathly afraid that the hours I put into writing it would disappear in seconds if some a-hole didn't like that I, for example, referenced the online version of a media source instead of digging through the library stacks.
I have no degree at all, and (at the risk of sounding full of myself) I can wrap my head around Javascript and SQL better than anybody else on my team. Of course, I know jack about math, but it never comes up anyway. I also take pride in the fact that most of my knowledge is self-taught and practical, less theory and more "let's finish it up."
A lot of the developers with qualifications get into these "modes"... we have one developer who loves XML so much, he even wanted to parse a 900-character URL using an XML parser! Basically, any problem that exists, the answer is XML.
Of course, I'm not "supposed" to be working here, being degree-less, but my manager says basically don't rub the little fact in everybody's face and it's fine. (We got acquired by a larger company that's really really anal about requiring 4-year degrees from every employee. I'm grandfathered in.)
I haven't read anything funny yet, despite the massive number of posts with +5 Funny at the top of them. All I've seen is the same old cliched Star Wars and Hitchhiker's Guides we've all seen a million times before, you know the same jokes you yourself came up with in the first 5 milliseconds after reading the headline.
No, that means the *installer* needs admin privileges.
And if it were actually correct, it would ask whether to install for All Users or just the current user. So the only time, ever, a video game should need administrative permissions is while being installed after the user selected "install for all users."
That said, most actual games released require administrative permissions when run for various reasons:
* Punkbuster is a piece of shit and requires admin; therefore, all games utilizing Punkbuster need to run as admin.
* Most DRM schemes involve fiddling with other running software and drivers in such a way that they need admin access. For example, to determine if a "banned" virtual CD program is installed before the game runs.
* A lot of game developers are fucking terrible at their jobs, and just don't give a shit whether the game runs as a normal user or not.
What's really upsetting is the games that get it SO CLOSE to being perfectly correct, then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For instance, World of Warcraft, which is 95% there, except Blizzard then decided to put the Add-Ins folder in the Program Files folder! Fail, Blizzard.
We're talking about a Xbox 360/PC game being ported to the PS3. How is the Wii in any way, shape, or form even relevant to this discussion?
Are you just hurt that the Wii has shitty hardware and couldn't even come close to running Bioshock even if they wanted to port it? And pointing out the number of exclusives is misguided some way of saving face? Because we're not falling for it.
It's such an excellent game there's... hardly anybody playing it. Of course, I could spent hours personally ranting about how broken the balance is (why do humans get 4 times the vehicles as the aliens?), about their idiotic game decisions (what's the point of vehicles if you can run almost as fast as a vehicle and never run out of endurance?) etc. But let the server populations speak for themselves.
ETQW was effective at getting me to miss Tribes Shifter v1 mod. Other than that, it's a waste of money.
Is DVD Jon a black hat for hacking the CSS system allowing us easier DVD access on Linux now?
Yes.
What answer were you expecting? "No, because in that case, what he did actually benefits me personally when I use his crack!"
Linux would be far better off if Linux distribution licensed the software legally, like everybody else does. Of course, Linspire *did* do exactly that, but the rest of the "information wants to be free!" crowd basically pretends they don't exist.
Really, who doesn't want to use the right tool for the job? But that isn't the entire picture. Microsoft may have a few competitive products, but if you want to go anywhere near them, you're forced to take half a dozen other half-baked products that they forced down your throat. Then in order to interoperate properly you have to outfit your entire network with Microsoft technologies that you didn't want.
And despite all that, companies still find they get much more ROI and productivity from MS SQL, IIS, Visual Studio,.Net, etc.
If they didn't, they wouldn't use it; it's not like only huge slow-to-react multinational corporations are the only Microsoft users, small.coms use Microsoft the same amount.
And let's not forget the way they use their big money and market position to force preloads, manipulate international standards bodies such as ISO,
This falls quite clearly in my "who gives a fuck?" file. Does this affect me in any way, shape, or form? No. Has being an ISO standard helped OpenOffice topple Microsoft Office one iota? No. Why would I give a shit? Why would anybody?
No, it's not just about the product. If they succeeded on merit alone they would deserve to win.
Are you even capable of judging the merits of Microsoft products without foaming at the mouth and starting to yell about the ISO? I doubt it.
Rather, it is to convince the customer to buy a Vista computer. This isn't a "softer" approach: it is another avenue for them to continue their usual (monopolistic?) tactics.
Now plain ol' fashioned marketing counts as "monopolistic?" It's official: the word has lose all meaning.
Microsoft's Zune/Xbox 360 store and Amazon's Unboxed have pulled it off, too. (Well, I dunno how you define "long-lasting", but I don't see either of those services failing any time soon.)
Re:Will you ever learn?
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LHC Success!
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It turns out the life support system was faulty, so they didn't actually launch the men to Mars-- they were broadcasting from Arizona and bouncing it off a local satellite! (Also, OJ Simpson is an astronaut.) But don't worry, the hillbilly profiteering crop duster will save them in the end.
More seriously, I think the movie Capricorn One is actually the reason there are so many moon landing hoax believers out there.
Boy do I agree with you about how much easier it is with console games. I wanted to go buy Spore until I found out how restrictive its copy restriction is. WTF. I just want to play the game, not 'register' it. To answer your question, CD-ROM drives in PCs server different duties from consoles. It's a much bigger pain to swap out discs on a PC for a game when other things are going on. It's the nature of the beast.
No, it's because PC games companies don't give half-a-shit about the quality of their product. If a console with significantly wimpier hardware than my desktop computer can do it, then there's NO reason a PC can't also do it. And since most PC gamers have been beat-down over the years by low-quality products, they don't demand any better.
BTW you're not missing anything: 1) Spore is an EA game, and therefore practically guaranteed to suck 2) Spore is a highly-hyped high-concept game which is also a year late; I've been a gaming fan long enough to know that games like this are also guaranteed to suck. (See: Black and White or Fable, for example.)
That isn't what I said. By the time 2 years have gone by, the game is typically no longer availble for sale. Many of the people will no longer be able to easily dig up their copy of it. Etc. There's really a number of reasons why somebody'd go download it later. Settle down.
It's still piracy, regardless of how much time has gone by! (Well, until the game is put in the public domain.) I'm unsettled because you are justifying the piracy of software by saying it's "ok" to take if the game is two years old. Wrong. It's legally wrong, and it's morally wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is the EXACT kind of weak-ass justifications that pirates tell themselves while they rob game developers of income. Which was the grandparent's entire point: if you're going to pirate games, don't waste our time and yours coming up with weak-ass justifications that wouldn't convince a kindergarten, and just admit you're pirating games because you're cheap.
Not buying it sends the message to game publishers that people don't want the game. It's no more informative than that. If the game is highly pirated but sales are low, they'll start asking questions like if the price was too high. If it's a given that copy protection won't work, they won't have much other choice than to find out why.
If people don't buy it, but tons of people pirate it, it sends the message that gamers are crooks who don't give a shit about paying for goods they consume. The fact that people pirated it means you're coming to the wrong conclusion; obviously people willing to break the law to get the game actually *do* want it. Duh.
If people didn't buy it, and people didn't pirate it, that would indicate that people don't want it. But that's basically the opposite scenario to the one we're talking about.
It's not a given that copy protection doesn't work; you have to be pretty uber-nerd to even attempt to break copy protection on a PC game. You have to actually mod hardware to break copy protection on most consoles, and throw away your ability to play online. (I dunno about the PS3, actually, I just have an Xbox.)
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The phone company called, they want to upsell you on international long distance.
Or... something?
then she has little incentive to try and avert that war, doesn't she?
That's not the same thing as "she will personally launch nuclear weapons."
You're still not addressing the point at all. Christ, I give up.
The international affairs of the state of Israel are specifically mentioned, for instance. So are things like the fiery destruction of Earthly nations. It's hardly a stretch to imagine that some would interpret a nuclear war as fulfillment of those prophecies.
Say she does.
At which point do the ICBMs go flying? You still haven't made your case, all you're saying is she might interpret world events a certain way, but you don't tell us why that certain way would lead to launching nukes.
If you're not going to actually respond to the argument, why bother typing another post?
Oh, so you think she'll be able to predict the exact millisecond of the rapture and hit the launch button right before she's assumed into heaven?
Seriously? Look, there's no connection whatsoever between believing in the rapture and controlling nuclear weapons. None.
I'm not defending belief in the rapture; I think it's retarded, as belief in any doomsday story is retarded. But don't make shit up about Palin just because you disagree with her beliefs. The fact is, a person can have vastly different beliefs than you, and still do good in the world.
Yeah, I agree. Most of the people who support deletion give arguments like, "well the fancruft infiltrates legitimate articles," which is a valid point, but it's also an organizational problem. If you just fix the organizational problem, then there'd be no reason to delete all those articles.
But the real problem, IMO, is that there's a lot of a-holes in the world that just like to destroy other people's works, and many of them are on Wikipedia.
Maybe not, but if she's getting the launch codes, I sure as hell care about whether she is counting on the Rapture.
I don't get the link. You mean if she believes the rapture is happening, she'll launch nukes? Why?
Well, Vexorian made it sound as if that information was posted in the wrong place initially. I was just pointing out that that's not the case.
But look at it this way, let's say Wikipedia was a business. By letting Wookiepedia take all the Star Wars traffic, Wikipedia just lost a decently large chunk of readers; if they were a TV network they'd be kicking themselves for it.
(Of course, most of the alternative wikis are hosted on Wikia, which *is* a business and makes boffo ad revenue... so maybe that's why those dumb notability rules exist in the first place. OMG CONSPIRACY!)
I'd do it if I had the money to set up servers/etc. The key is to have hardly any editors, just enough to respond to copyright claims or DCMA notices, everything else is free game-- jerks don't delete articles because there won't be anybody with deletion permissions. IPs get the same permissions as logged-in users, and any of them can post an article on "things Joe Blow ate for breakfast on 4/12/2009" if they like.
But there's already a bunch of strict rules against violating copyrights, so that doesn't really fit into this discussion.
The vast majority of those specialized wikis exist *because* Wikipedia kicked them out.
Wikipedia has the problem that ... well, tons of things have both virtual and real:
It's a lot easier to delete work than to create it.
I mean, it took God-knows how many dozens of people to write that Warhammer guide after God-knows how many man-hours of work researching, typing, and editing it all. And it takes an editor 30 seconds to delete it all, poof, gone.
And of course, there are lots of a-holes who basically get their only joy in life from deleting somebody else's work; there's more than a little truth in those BOFH jokes. Some of those a-holes are Wikipedia editors, alas.
If I were Wikipedia, I'd solve this one of two ways:
1) Nothing gets *really* deleted; instead you can put Wikipedia accounts into "deleted articles mode" where it'll let you browse things that anonymous viewers don't see. This could be off by default, but it should definitely exist.
2) Deleting an article should require as much work as creating it in the first place. I don't know how this would be implemented.
Anyway, I don't contribute to Wikipedia anymore unless I'm working on an article that basically has absolutely no reason to be deleted. I don't create new articles as much, because I'm deathly afraid that the hours I put into writing it would disappear in seconds if some a-hole didn't like that I, for example, referenced the online version of a media source instead of digging through the library stacks.
Well, considering it has zero presence on Google, my guess is, "not very good."
Seriously, what is dilbrito? Do you have a link?
I have no degree at all, and (at the risk of sounding full of myself) I can wrap my head around Javascript and SQL better than anybody else on my team. Of course, I know jack about math, but it never comes up anyway. I also take pride in the fact that most of my knowledge is self-taught and practical, less theory and more "let's finish it up."
A lot of the developers with qualifications get into these "modes"... we have one developer who loves XML so much, he even wanted to parse a 900-character URL using an XML parser! Basically, any problem that exists, the answer is XML.
Of course, I'm not "supposed" to be working here, being degree-less, but my manager says basically don't rub the little fact in everybody's face and it's fine. (We got acquired by a larger company that's really really anal about requiring 4-year degrees from every employee. I'm grandfathered in.)
I haven't read anything funny yet, despite the massive number of posts with +5 Funny at the top of them. All I've seen is the same old cliched Star Wars and Hitchhiker's Guides we've all seen a million times before, you know the same jokes you yourself came up with in the first 5 milliseconds after reading the headline.
Could we please stop referring to programming as "innovating"? Not every single piece of code anyone writes is a breakthrough.
Especially when you're talking about Linux. :) Innovation-- hell! You're lucky if they've managed to duplicate the features of Windows 95.
No, that means the *installer* needs admin privileges.
And if it were actually correct, it would ask whether to install for All Users or just the current user. So the only time, ever, a video game should need administrative permissions is while being installed after the user selected "install for all users."
That said, most actual games released require administrative permissions when run for various reasons:
* Punkbuster is a piece of shit and requires admin; therefore, all games utilizing Punkbuster need to run as admin.
* Most DRM schemes involve fiddling with other running software and drivers in such a way that they need admin access. For example, to determine if a "banned" virtual CD program is installed before the game runs.
* A lot of game developers are fucking terrible at their jobs, and just don't give a shit whether the game runs as a normal user or not.
What's really upsetting is the games that get it SO CLOSE to being perfectly correct, then snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. For instance, World of Warcraft, which is 95% there, except Blizzard then decided to put the Add-Ins folder in the Program Files folder! Fail, Blizzard.
So what?
We're talking about a Xbox 360/PC game being ported to the PS3. How is the Wii in any way, shape, or form even relevant to this discussion?
Are you just hurt that the Wii has shitty hardware and couldn't even come close to running Bioshock even if they wanted to port it? And pointing out the number of exclusives is misguided some way of saving face? Because we're not falling for it.
It's such an excellent game there's... hardly anybody playing it. Of course, I could spent hours personally ranting about how broken the balance is (why do humans get 4 times the vehicles as the aliens?), about their idiotic game decisions (what's the point of vehicles if you can run almost as fast as a vehicle and never run out of endurance?) etc. But let the server populations speak for themselves.
ETQW was effective at getting me to miss Tribes Shifter v1 mod. Other than that, it's a waste of money.
Is DVD Jon a black hat for hacking the CSS system allowing us easier DVD access on Linux now?
Yes.
What answer were you expecting? "No, because in that case, what he did actually benefits me personally when I use his crack!"
Linux would be far better off if Linux distribution licensed the software legally, like everybody else does. Of course, Linspire *did* do exactly that, but the rest of the "information wants to be free!" crowd basically pretends they don't exist.
And then what?
The average person can't buy MythTV, or install it. There's no point advertising stuff when the product is virtually unusable.
Really, who doesn't want to use the right tool for the job? But that isn't the entire picture. Microsoft may have a few competitive products, but if you want to go anywhere near them, you're forced to take half a dozen other half-baked products that they forced down your throat. Then in order to interoperate properly you have to outfit your entire network with Microsoft technologies that you didn't want.
And despite all that, companies still find they get much more ROI and productivity from MS SQL, IIS, Visual Studio, .Net, etc.
If they didn't, they wouldn't use it; it's not like only huge slow-to-react multinational corporations are the only Microsoft users, small .coms use Microsoft the same amount.
And let's not forget the way they use their big money and market position to force preloads, manipulate international standards bodies such as ISO,
This falls quite clearly in my "who gives a fuck?" file. Does this affect me in any way, shape, or form? No. Has being an ISO standard helped OpenOffice topple Microsoft Office one iota? No. Why would I give a shit? Why would anybody?
No, it's not just about the product. If they succeeded on merit alone they would deserve to win.
Are you even capable of judging the merits of Microsoft products without foaming at the mouth and starting to yell about the ISO? I doubt it.
Rather, it is to convince the customer to buy a Vista computer. This isn't a "softer" approach: it is another avenue for them to continue their usual (monopolistic?) tactics.
Now plain ol' fashioned marketing counts as "monopolistic?" It's official: the word has lose all meaning.
Microsoft's Zune/Xbox 360 store and Amazon's Unboxed have pulled it off, too. (Well, I dunno how you define "long-lasting", but I don't see either of those services failing any time soon.)
It turns out the life support system was faulty, so they didn't actually launch the men to Mars-- they were broadcasting from Arizona and bouncing it off a local satellite! (Also, OJ Simpson is an astronaut.) But don't worry, the hillbilly profiteering crop duster will save them in the end.
More seriously, I think the movie Capricorn One is actually the reason there are so many moon landing hoax believers out there.
Boy do I agree with you about how much easier it is with console games. I wanted to go buy Spore until I found out how restrictive its copy restriction is. WTF. I just want to play the game, not 'register' it. To answer your question, CD-ROM drives in PCs server different duties from consoles. It's a much bigger pain to swap out discs on a PC for a game when other things are going on. It's the nature of the beast.
No, it's because PC games companies don't give half-a-shit about the quality of their product. If a console with significantly wimpier hardware than my desktop computer can do it, then there's NO reason a PC can't also do it. And since most PC gamers have been beat-down over the years by low-quality products, they don't demand any better.
BTW you're not missing anything:
1) Spore is an EA game, and therefore practically guaranteed to suck
2) Spore is a highly-hyped high-concept game which is also a year late; I've been a gaming fan long enough to know that games like this are also guaranteed to suck. (See: Black and White or Fable, for example.)
That isn't what I said. By the time 2 years have gone by, the game is typically no longer availble for sale. Many of the people will no longer be able to easily dig up their copy of it. Etc. There's really a number of reasons why somebody'd go download it later. Settle down.
It's still piracy, regardless of how much time has gone by! (Well, until the game is put in the public domain.) I'm unsettled because you are justifying the piracy of software by saying it's "ok" to take if the game is two years old. Wrong. It's legally wrong, and it's morally wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is the EXACT kind of weak-ass justifications that pirates tell themselves while they rob game developers of income. Which was the grandparent's entire point: if you're going to pirate games, don't waste our time and yours coming up with weak-ass justifications that wouldn't convince a kindergarten, and just admit you're pirating games because you're cheap.
Not buying it sends the message to game publishers that people don't want the game. It's no more informative than that. If the game is highly pirated but sales are low, they'll start asking questions like if the price was too high. If it's a given that copy protection won't work, they won't have much other choice than to find out why.
If people don't buy it, but tons of people pirate it, it sends the message that gamers are crooks who don't give a shit about paying for goods they consume. The fact that people pirated it means you're coming to the wrong conclusion; obviously people willing to break the law to get the game actually *do* want it. Duh.
If people didn't buy it, and people didn't pirate it, that would indicate that people don't want it. But that's basically the opposite scenario to the one we're talking about.
It's not a given that copy protection doesn't work; you have to be pretty uber-nerd to even attempt to break copy protection on a PC game. You have to actually mod hardware to break copy protection on most consoles, and throw away your ability to play online. (I dunno about the PS3, actually, I just have an Xbox.)
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/09/yahoo-music-to-recor.html
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hooray-for-no-drm/amazon-jumps-headfirst-into-drm+free-music-download-market-with-12000-record-labels-260898.php
^^ Three major music distributers stopped using DRM. This is despite all of the MP3 files floating around on the internet. Success.
Music store... music store... music store... this is relevant to video games, how?