1) You joined a HOA? What did you THINK was going to happen? The only point of those organizations is to let petty-minded morons get a kick by ordering people around with the BS incentive of increased property values.
2) You're ok pirating TV programming (i.e. breaking federal/international law), but you're not OK violating pointless HOA rules? You got some pretty backwards priorities.
My problem with Psychonauts is that most games that are lauded for their "originality" turn out to be pretty damned boring and uninteresting when I actually sit down to play them. This happened to me with Beyond Good and Evil-- I tried to complete that game three times, and each time I just gave up when it got super-boring. Same deal with Knights of the Old Republic, which is supposed to be some great RPG, but just bored me. Given this, I'm more inclined to deliberately avoid games that people talk about the way they talk about Psychonauts.
Bioshock is good, but it's mostly because it does a good job of reproducing the gameplay mechanics and environment of System Shock II, which is excellent. It's a sequel to a series of innovative games, but it's not all that innovative by itself.
That all said, after watching that video, if they had, JUST ONCE, in the commercials and ads for the game mentioned that you play a Godzilla-like character smashing through a city of talking fish, I would have bought it right away.
However, in today's era of Internet purchases, this usually partially/fully disconnects you with the stuff you bought on the console. For example, if you replace your 360 in Best Buy, you have to submit documentation to Microsoft detailing this exchange before they'll reimburse you for any purchases for your paid downloads.
BS for 2 reasons:
1) If your HD/memory card is still good, (not the failing part, which is likely), you can simply keep it and exchange it with the HD/memory card on the new unit.
2) If your HD/memory card is bad, you can transfer your Live account to the new console (you need the username, password and CC# used to pay for the account, IIRC), and you'll have free access to all the downloads you paid for. Sure, you'll have to re-download them, but that doesn't take more than a few hours. (However, transferring a Live account from an original Xbox to Xbox 360 will not transfer any purchases, again IIRC.)
Unfortunately, the GPL fails explicitly to mention the use of Reasonable Force in pursuit of your entitlements. Maybe in v4..... things could get quite interesting in the USA where guns are legal.....
Oh yeah, murder (or at least attempted murder) is an appropriate response to a minor licensing issue. Wacko.
As an aside, I note that this could be eliminated entirely by a requirement for every piece of software, whether it be sold or given away gratis and whether or not it be intended for redistribution, to be accompanied by its Source Code.
Wipe that foam off your mouth and try to follow my logic here a bit:
My NAS is located in my bedroom. Ok? Following me so far? And yet, the other computers in my house are (this is the incredible part, make sure you're still with me), NOT located in my bedroom. Therefore, it I want to watch a movie in my bedroom, I watch it on the monitor attached to the NAS machine. See how that works? Wow.
What flaw? What prevents you from watching those movies at a different box even though they're stored on the NAS?
Nothing prevents me. You made that up.
Why do you have to watch them ON the NAS?
I don't, and I never said I did. You made that up as well, for some strange reason.
Watching media on a remote viewer is pretty much the definition of how a media server works
That's how mine works, too. But what you're missing is that it doesn't HAVE to be a remove viewer. Hell, if I couldn't watch video directly off the NAS I'd probably just buy another HD for my desktop and do it there-- there'd be no point in wasting the power for it, and my desktop has the same networking features that the NAS does.
May I humbly suggest: 1) Toning down the hostility just a notch 2) Working on your reading comprehension skills? Or at least not completely making-up about 3 things I never actually said, then yelling at me for the made-up stuff.
I really don't care what your opinion of the quality of those products is, the point is that saying that Microsoft doesn't give free compilers is misleading.
Apple and Microsoft made customers happy with computers that frankly weren't stable, didn't perform well, but were easy to use. Mac OS had co-operative multitasking, and zero memory protection, and it was proclaimed the best GUI for years. Windows 95 crashed constantly, and yet it sold tons more computers than anything that came before.
Linux is already stable enough, work on other stuff. When it starts to get unstable, then shelve the GUI stuff and go back to the stability.
What bothers me is that all of this discussion, all these constant debates on Slashdot over which license says what, all of the millions of comments on the GPLv3... that all represents time *not spent writing actual code*.
The compiler doesn't come on the disk, but it is free. Anybody running a Windows OS can install any of the "Express" IDE/compilers on their computer for free. Anything from C++ to VisualBasic to SQL Server.
I use my "NAS" as a home media server. It has a monitor so I can use it to watch movies on if I feel like. But go ahead and assume that there's no possible reason to ever want a monitor on a storage server. I apologize for pointing out a flaw in your tidy little worldview.
I don't think GE got into making railroad locomotives until the conversion from steam and direct-drive diesel to diesel-electrics. To be fair. But you still make a good point.
Sorry, I know I already replied, but I missed a few points.
(How many indie games are made for consoles? That's right, ZERO)
WHA!? How do you define "indie game?" You're seriously telling me that, say, Marble Blast Ultra on Xbox Live Arcade isn't an "indie game?" Or that Outpost Kaloki isn't an "indie game?"
Methinks you're defining "indie game" as "game not on consoles." Because otherwise, you're either extremely ignorant of Xbox Live Arcade or a blatant liar.
Players of FPS's (at least since Quake) have always wanted to be on the cutting edge of gaming tech, and the cutting edge is PCs.
I'm not saying that people don't want to be on the cutting edge. I'm saying people don't want shitty quality games. In fact, I never said anything about the cutting edge, you brought that up. (And then claimed BF2142, a game almost entire ripped-off of 1997's Tribes was cutting edge!)
If you don't think the annoyances exist on consoles, you're a little inexperienced. Some PS2 titles don't work on the slim PSTwo due to copy protection issues. Ditto for certain XBOX games.
I'm pretty sure no Xbox games work in the slim PSTwo.;)
This is one of the big reasons I modded my PS2 and XBOX. To load games off the hard drives. If I couldn't get the same functionality out of a XBOX360 (I can) I wouldn't even consider buying one.
You can't play games off the HD on PC, either. They all require the disk in the drive.
And achievements and rankings on XBOX Live can get you Marketplace Points AKA MONEY. Let me repeat that. On XBOX Live you get MONEY for cheating. This provides a much stronger incentive.
Uh, link?
You don't get marketplace points for achievements or rankings on Xbox Live. I've never heard of this before.
And most of the bugs you're talking about are Vista-specific, BF2142 was released long before Vista and wasn't tested on it. It's like complaining that games written for the XBOX are buggy on the XBOX360 (Oh wait, they are!).
One of the supposed "advantages" of PC gaming is that patching games is easier. I don't think it's unreasonable to get at least 1 OS upgrade's worth of support for BF2142 via a patch. Tribes was supported for years after it was released, as was Starcraft and a bunch of other games. I'm not giving EA/Dice a pass on this one: they knew Vista was coming, they should have dedicated resources to it.
(And most of the Vista problems were also problems on XP, for example, running as admin. The only difference is that Vista is more strict in demanding that applications be correct.)
Yes, some games for original Xbox are buggy on the Xbox 360. This doesn't give EA/Dice a pass either.
doesn't work on widescreen monitors This isn't true. You can set an arbitrary res in the ini files. At least you could in BF2.
Yes you can actually set an arbitrary res in the program shortcut on the commandline. But: 1) EA Support tells you that the game doesn't support widescreen monitors. I can email you my transcript with them if you're interested. 2) The game UI doesn't have any widescreen resolutions listed, so if you didn't know how to change a.ini file, or how to change the desktop shortcut like most users, you'd be screwed. (Wait, why are they using an.ini file in 2006 anyway? Those were obsolete a decade ago!)
And while 1680x1050 actually does "work" if you know how to change the shortcut, it doesn't "work" in that it obviously wasn't tested. Some of the fonts and icons are ridiculously small at that resolution and nearly impossible to make out/target.
So if you want a good display, and don't already have a HDTV, that 360 will cost you $1150. And you can get a pretty good gaming PC for $1150.
Oh yeah, I forgot that computer monitors are all free now. (Apples to apples, please!)
The BF2142 experience is better because it actually exists. The player cap is much higher than Halo or any other console game.
True for an FPS, given.
There are more play types.
There are two play types. "Conquest" and "Titan." Unreal Tournament had more play types when it came out. Hell, Tribes 1 in 1997 (the game BF2142 is 'inspired' from) had more play types.
I don't play BF2142 much, but I liked it better than Halo (on the PC) for multiplayer.
Except Halo PC multiplayer actually worked. You weren't randomly booted from servers for no reason. It didn't require Admin access to play a game. There weren't any exploits that let the enemy commander throw artillery barrages every 10 seconds. The buddy list actually worked all the time. It didn't crash every hour or so.
In short, Halo falls firmly into the "it works" category while BF2142 falls firmly into the "it sometimes works a little bit if you look at it just right" category.
Maybe you don't care at all about quality; that's fine. But I think that most people do, and I think that the vast majority of people you talk to about BF2142 will complain about the bugs.
In any case, BF2142's bugginess is unacceptable simply because Battlefield 2 was a polished game with very few or no play-affecting bugs in it.
The "floating fortress" levels are bad ass.
Yeah; they were in 1997, too, when Tribes 1 did it.
PC users are willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience to be on the cutting edge.
By "cutting edge" you mean "what Tribes did in 1997, except buggier" I suppose.
But we're not talking about convenience here. We're talking about bugs that affect the security of my computer (a internet-capable app that performs no administrative tasks yet requires administrative access), we're talking about bugs that make it simply impossible for some of their customers to actually play the game (the punkbuster issue.)
An inconvenience is "the buddy list is sometimes out of date." If that was the only problem, I could accept it. But it's not, and EA/Dice need to be taken to task about how shitty their product is. PC users don't take them to task; console users would never accept a product this shitty.
The problem is their huge gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro. You used to be able to buy a G5 tower for about $1600, now the cheapest you can get $2500. Most people don't need the huge tower, or the 16 Xeons (or whatever the hell Apple's putting in them that costs so much.) I just want the iMac hardware in a case that can be used to add HDs or video cards.
Because of this, I actually moved from Apple to Dell. Dell gave me the exact hardware I wanted for a good price, and Windows Vista isn't bad enough to make it worth moving back to Mac.
You have redefined creationism to mean just the creation of the very first few bacteria etc.
No, that's a perfectly valid meaning of the word "creationism."
There's a post further down in the main thread that basically asks, "what do you mean when you ask 'do you believe in evolution?'" which about a dozen possible meanings of this question. I'm choosing to use a different one than you do. The real point is that the discussion will no nowhere unless people define their terms. Otherwise, I'll sit here and go "evolution and creationism are not mutually-exclusive and there's nothing strange about believing in both" and you won't and nobody will go anywhere.
When you say "evolution" do you mean "natural selection?" (A position many people object to.) Then say so. Do you mean "genetic change over time?" (A position almost nobody objects to.) Then say so! When you say "creationism" do you mean "intelligent design?" Then say so! Etc. But you can't sit here and tell me that creationism and intelligent design are the same thing, because they simply aren't.
It's labeled as "optional" in the HTML specs, and Firefox seems to not support it at all. For IE, it might be a valid solution, but it's no good for other browsers.
The point is that if a candidate actually believes in nonsense like creationism he is unfit to lead a technological, industrial society.
Creationism is the belief that the universe was created by an intelligent being. It doesn't conflict with belief in evolution in any way, shape, or form. I believe most churches have an official position that evolution is fact, and that the initial impetus starting it up was God. It is a stupid question, for exactly that reason.
Creationism and evolution are not mutually exclusively. In fact that don't even really cover the same topics. Evolution says nothing about how life came to be; in fact, the definition I was given in biology class was that evolution is "change in allele frequency over time," which is hard to argue against.
What most people *mean* when they say evolution is the process of natural selection. Which, again, says nothing about how life came to be in the first place and therefore does not conflict in any way, shape, or form with Creationism.
Why not ask the candidates what they'll do to stop misinformation? Like framing debates as if they were mutually-exclusive when they're not?
Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet manages to pay the bills. Curious...
Slashdot has a few advantages over other sites:
1) It had a large presence before ad-blocking became easy enough for the average user to do. 2) It's extremely targeted, so its advertising space is more valuable. 3) It's part of a large network of other, similarly-targeted, sites which gives it more clout when negotiating sales of ad space.
For a site without those advantages, say one just starting out, people costing bandwidth without contributing ad hits might make the difference between being in the black and being in the red.
Ok, your post is a bit confusing and I think a bit misleading. Let's be fair to the discussion and ask a few questions here.
The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power.
Do you have any evidence of this whatsoever? As a devil's advocate, let's assume that the author writing this article has done research showing that Firefox users indeed do not represent a significant amount of purchasing power, what do you have to counter that?
They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric.
I wouldn't say that advertising is "mostly" about brand awareness, especially on the Internet where the ad can easily lead to a direct conversion. (For traditional media, I agree with you.) In fact, I would guess (note: guess. I don't have data) that the majority of the advertising spend on the internet is for ads intended to create click-through. In any case, for the proportion of advertising that isn't branding, click-through is pretty much the best measure we have at the moment for judging their effectiveness.
A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share.
But a business that would exclude a class of people who are historically known to not contribute to the success of that business seems perfectly sensible to me.
It's fairly obvious to me that the class of people who own a Bentley is a lot different than the class of people who own a Chevy. There's no reason to believe it would be any different with the software people choose. (Look at the stereotypes Apple software has attached to it, for instance.)
Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue.
What the hell does Microsoft have to do with anything? Christ, some people are so obsessive they can't go five paragraphs without bringing in Microsoft or Bush. Leave the conspiracy theories at home and let's have a rational discussion, please.
Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
I don't see how. If the sites don't get served to Firefox users, I doubt that Firefox user would then switch browsers to view the site, then make a note of all the advertisers on it for later use. They'd probably just move on to another site.
I'm not saying that the plan proposed in this article is a good idea in any way, shape, or form, but your rebuttal to it is a little short on... rebuttal.
Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.
The real deal is this: the 'royalty' controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains' disinformation campaigns.
Well, at least he's not emotionally invested or anything.
(Seriously... holy christ. If you're a global warming believer, keep this guy FAR away from the press please. He sounds like the guy standing at the subway entrance with 3 suitcases full of cans and lice in his shaggy beard.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, WTF.
1) You joined a HOA? What did you THINK was going to happen? The only point of those organizations is to let petty-minded morons get a kick by ordering people around with the BS incentive of increased property values.
2) You're ok pirating TV programming (i.e. breaking federal/international law), but you're not OK violating pointless HOA rules? You got some pretty backwards priorities.
My problem with Psychonauts is that most games that are lauded for their "originality" turn out to be pretty damned boring and uninteresting when I actually sit down to play them. This happened to me with Beyond Good and Evil-- I tried to complete that game three times, and each time I just gave up when it got super-boring. Same deal with Knights of the Old Republic, which is supposed to be some great RPG, but just bored me. Given this, I'm more inclined to deliberately avoid games that people talk about the way they talk about Psychonauts.
Bioshock is good, but it's mostly because it does a good job of reproducing the gameplay mechanics and environment of System Shock II, which is excellent. It's a sequel to a series of innovative games, but it's not all that innovative by itself.
That all said, after watching that video, if they had, JUST ONCE, in the commercials and ads for the game mentioned that you play a Godzilla-like character smashing through a city of talking fish, I would have bought it right away.
However, in today's era of Internet purchases, this usually partially/fully disconnects you with the stuff you bought on the console. For example, if you replace your 360 in Best Buy, you have to submit documentation to Microsoft detailing this exchange before they'll reimburse you for any purchases for your paid downloads.
BS for 2 reasons:
1) If your HD/memory card is still good, (not the failing part, which is likely), you can simply keep it and exchange it with the HD/memory card on the new unit.
2) If your HD/memory card is bad, you can transfer your Live account to the new console (you need the username, password and CC# used to pay for the account, IIRC), and you'll have free access to all the downloads you paid for. Sure, you'll have to re-download them, but that doesn't take more than a few hours. (However, transferring a Live account from an original Xbox to Xbox 360 will not transfer any purchases, again IIRC.)
I guess the woman could have murdered a man before being raped. OooOOOooo take THAT, sig!
Unfortunately, the GPL fails explicitly to mention the use of Reasonable Force in pursuit of your entitlements. Maybe in v4 ..... things could get quite interesting in the USA where guns are legal .....
Oh yeah, murder (or at least attempted murder) is an appropriate response to a minor licensing issue. Wacko.
As an aside, I note that this could be eliminated entirely by a requirement for every piece of software, whether it be sold or given away gratis and whether or not it be intended for redistribution, to be accompanied by its Source Code.
Bye-bye software industry!
Wipe that foam off your mouth and try to follow my logic here a bit:
My NAS is located in my bedroom. Ok? Following me so far? And yet, the other computers in my house are (this is the incredible part, make sure you're still with me), NOT located in my bedroom. Therefore, it I want to watch a movie in my bedroom, I watch it on the monitor attached to the NAS machine. See how that works? Wow.
What flaw? What prevents you from watching those movies at a different box even though they're stored on the NAS?
Nothing prevents me. You made that up.
Why do you have to watch them ON the NAS?
I don't, and I never said I did. You made that up as well, for some strange reason.
Watching media on a remote viewer is pretty much the definition of how a media server works
That's how mine works, too. But what you're missing is that it doesn't HAVE to be a remove viewer. Hell, if I couldn't watch video directly off the NAS I'd probably just buy another HD for my desktop and do it there-- there'd be no point in wasting the power for it, and my desktop has the same networking features that the NAS does.
May I humbly suggest:
1) Toning down the hostility just a notch
2) Working on your reading comprehension skills? Or at least not completely making-up about 3 things I never actually said, then yelling at me for the made-up stuff.
I really don't care what your opinion of the quality of those products is, the point is that saying that Microsoft doesn't give free compilers is misleading.
Apple and Microsoft made customers happy with computers that frankly weren't stable, didn't perform well, but were easy to use. Mac OS had co-operative multitasking, and zero memory protection, and it was proclaimed the best GUI for years. Windows 95 crashed constantly, and yet it sold tons more computers than anything that came before.
Linux is already stable enough, work on other stuff. When it starts to get unstable, then shelve the GUI stuff and go back to the stability.
What bothers me is that all of this discussion, all these constant debates on Slashdot over which license says what, all of the millions of comments on the GPLv3... that all represents time *not spent writing actual code*.
The compiler doesn't come on the disk, but it is free. Anybody running a Windows OS can install any of the "Express" IDE/compilers on their computer for free. Anything from C++ to VisualBasic to SQL Server.
I use my "NAS" as a home media server. It has a monitor so I can use it to watch movies on if I feel like. But go ahead and assume that there's no possible reason to ever want a monitor on a storage server. I apologize for pointing out a flaw in your tidy little worldview.
Ah, the standard Slashdot reply:
"Well, Linux might be bad, but Microsoft is worse!!!"
I don't think GE got into making railroad locomotives until the conversion from steam and direct-drive diesel to diesel-electrics. To be fair. But you still make a good point.
Sorry, I know I already replied, but I missed a few points.
;)
.ini file, or how to change the desktop shortcut like most users, you'd be screwed. (Wait, why are they using an .ini file in 2006 anyway? Those were obsolete a decade ago!)
(How many indie games are made for consoles? That's right, ZERO)
WHA!? How do you define "indie game?" You're seriously telling me that, say, Marble Blast Ultra on Xbox Live Arcade isn't an "indie game?" Or that Outpost Kaloki isn't an "indie game?"
Methinks you're defining "indie game" as "game not on consoles." Because otherwise, you're either extremely ignorant of Xbox Live Arcade or a blatant liar.
Players of FPS's (at least since Quake) have always wanted to be on the cutting edge of gaming tech, and the cutting edge is PCs.
I'm not saying that people don't want to be on the cutting edge. I'm saying people don't want shitty quality games. In fact, I never said anything about the cutting edge, you brought that up. (And then claimed BF2142, a game almost entire ripped-off of 1997's Tribes was cutting edge!)
If you don't think the annoyances exist on consoles, you're a little inexperienced. Some PS2 titles don't work on the slim PSTwo due to copy protection issues. Ditto for certain XBOX games.
I'm pretty sure no Xbox games work in the slim PSTwo.
This is one of the big reasons I modded my PS2 and XBOX. To load games off the hard drives. If I couldn't get the same functionality out of a XBOX360 (I can) I wouldn't even consider buying one.
You can't play games off the HD on PC, either. They all require the disk in the drive.
And achievements and rankings on XBOX Live can get you Marketplace Points AKA MONEY. Let me repeat that. On XBOX Live you get MONEY for cheating. This provides a much stronger incentive.
Uh, link?
You don't get marketplace points for achievements or rankings on Xbox Live. I've never heard of this before.
And most of the bugs you're talking about are Vista-specific, BF2142 was released long before Vista and wasn't tested on it. It's like complaining that games written for the XBOX are buggy on the XBOX360 (Oh wait, they are!).
One of the supposed "advantages" of PC gaming is that patching games is easier. I don't think it's unreasonable to get at least 1 OS upgrade's worth of support for BF2142 via a patch. Tribes was supported for years after it was released, as was Starcraft and a bunch of other games. I'm not giving EA/Dice a pass on this one: they knew Vista was coming, they should have dedicated resources to it.
(And most of the Vista problems were also problems on XP, for example, running as admin. The only difference is that Vista is more strict in demanding that applications be correct.)
Yes, some games for original Xbox are buggy on the Xbox 360. This doesn't give EA/Dice a pass either.
doesn't work on widescreen monitors
This isn't true. You can set an arbitrary res in the ini files. At least you could in BF2.
Yes you can actually set an arbitrary res in the program shortcut on the commandline. But:
1) EA Support tells you that the game doesn't support widescreen monitors. I can email you my transcript with them if you're interested.
2) The game UI doesn't have any widescreen resolutions listed, so if you didn't know how to change a
And while 1680x1050 actually does "work" if you know how to change the shortcut, it doesn't "work" in that it obviously wasn't tested. Some of the fonts and icons are ridiculously small at that resolution and nearly impossible to make out/target.
So if you want a good display, and don't already have a HDTV, that 360 will cost you $1150. And you can get a pretty good gaming PC for $1150.
Oh yeah, I forgot that computer monitors are all free now. (Apples to apples, please!)
The BF2142 experience is better because it actually exists. The player cap is much higher than Halo or any other console game.
True for an FPS, given.
There are more play types.
There are two play types. "Conquest" and "Titan." Unreal Tournament had more play types when it came out. Hell, Tribes 1 in 1997 (the game BF2142 is 'inspired' from) had more play types.
I don't play BF2142 much, but I liked it better than Halo (on the PC) for multiplayer.
Except Halo PC multiplayer actually worked. You weren't randomly booted from servers for no reason. It didn't require Admin access to play a game. There weren't any exploits that let the enemy commander throw artillery barrages every 10 seconds. The buddy list actually worked all the time. It didn't crash every hour or so.
In short, Halo falls firmly into the "it works" category while BF2142 falls firmly into the "it sometimes works a little bit if you look at it just right" category.
Maybe you don't care at all about quality; that's fine. But I think that most people do, and I think that the vast majority of people you talk to about BF2142 will complain about the bugs.
In any case, BF2142's bugginess is unacceptable simply because Battlefield 2 was a polished game with very few or no play-affecting bugs in it.
The "floating fortress" levels are bad ass.
Yeah; they were in 1997, too, when Tribes 1 did it.
PC users are willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience to be on the cutting edge.
By "cutting edge" you mean "what Tribes did in 1997, except buggier" I suppose.
But we're not talking about convenience here. We're talking about bugs that affect the security of my computer (a internet-capable app that performs no administrative tasks yet requires administrative access), we're talking about bugs that make it simply impossible for some of their customers to actually play the game (the punkbuster issue.)
An inconvenience is "the buddy list is sometimes out of date." If that was the only problem, I could accept it. But it's not, and EA/Dice need to be taken to task about how shitty their product is. PC users don't take them to task; console users would never accept a product this shitty.
The problem is their huge gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro. You used to be able to buy a G5 tower for about $1600, now the cheapest you can get $2500. Most people don't need the huge tower, or the 16 Xeons (or whatever the hell Apple's putting in them that costs so much.) I just want the iMac hardware in a case that can be used to add HDs or video cards.
Because of this, I actually moved from Apple to Dell. Dell gave me the exact hardware I wanted for a good price, and Windows Vista isn't bad enough to make it worth moving back to Mac.
You have redefined creationism to mean just the creation of the very first few bacteria etc.
No, that's a perfectly valid meaning of the word "creationism."
There's a post further down in the main thread that basically asks, "what do you mean when you ask 'do you believe in evolution?'" which about a dozen possible meanings of this question. I'm choosing to use a different one than you do. The real point is that the discussion will no nowhere unless people define their terms. Otherwise, I'll sit here and go "evolution and creationism are not mutually-exclusive and there's nothing strange about believing in both" and you won't and nobody will go anywhere.
When you say "evolution" do you mean "natural selection?" (A position many people object to.) Then say so. Do you mean "genetic change over time?" (A position almost nobody objects to.) Then say so! When you say "creationism" do you mean "intelligent design?" Then say so! Etc. But you can't sit here and tell me that creationism and intelligent design are the same thing, because they simply aren't.
It's labeled as "optional" in the HTML specs, and Firefox seems to not support it at all. For IE, it might be a valid solution, but it's no good for other browsers.
Bullshit.
The point is that if a candidate actually believes in nonsense like creationism he is unfit to lead a technological, industrial society.
Creationism is the belief that the universe was created by an intelligent being. It doesn't conflict with belief in evolution in any way, shape, or form. I believe most churches have an official position that evolution is fact, and that the initial impetus starting it up was God. It is a stupid question, for exactly that reason.
Creationism and evolution are not mutually exclusively. In fact that don't even really cover the same topics. Evolution says nothing about how life came to be; in fact, the definition I was given in biology class was that evolution is "change in allele frequency over time," which is hard to argue against.
What most people *mean* when they say evolution is the process of natural selection. Which, again, says nothing about how life came to be in the first place and therefore does not conflict in any way, shape, or form with Creationism.
Why not ask the candidates what they'll do to stop misinformation? Like framing debates as if they were mutually-exclusive when they're not?
Could somebody please explain to me why my post is "flamebait?" Thank you.
Funny example, that - Slashdot probably has one of the highest ratios of users capable of ad-blocking of any site on the entire web, yet manages to pay the bills. Curious...
Slashdot has a few advantages over other sites:
1) It had a large presence before ad-blocking became easy enough for the average user to do.
2) It's extremely targeted, so its advertising space is more valuable.
3) It's part of a large network of other, similarly-targeted, sites which gives it more clout when negotiating sales of ad space.
For a site without those advantages, say one just starting out, people costing bandwidth without contributing ad hits might make the difference between being in the black and being in the red.
Ok, your post is a bit confusing and I think a bit misleading. Let's be fair to the discussion and ask a few questions here.
The site authors are misinformed if they think Firefox users are not affluent decision makers with significant if not majority of on line purchasing power.
Do you have any evidence of this whatsoever? As a devil's advocate, let's assume that the author writing this article has done research showing that Firefox users indeed do not represent a significant amount of purchasing power, what do you have to counter that?
They might get more click through from the IE crowd, but advertising is mostly about brand awareness and click through is a misleading metric.
I wouldn't say that advertising is "mostly" about brand awareness, especially on the Internet where the ad can easily lead to a direct conversion. (For traditional media, I agree with you.) In fact, I would guess (note: guess. I don't have data) that the majority of the advertising spend on the internet is for ads intended to create click-through. In any case, for the proportion of advertising that isn't branding, click-through is pretty much the best measure we have at the moment for judging their effectiveness.
A business that would exclude one in twenty of it's customers for having the wrong brand of anything is insane, and Firefox has way more than that kind of market share.
But a business that would exclude a class of people who are historically known to not contribute to the success of that business seems perfectly sensible to me.
It's fairly obvious to me that the class of people who own a Bentley is a lot different than the class of people who own a Chevy. There's no reason to believe it would be any different with the software people choose. (Look at the stereotypes Apple software has attached to it, for instance.)
Only a few M$ partners are going to do this and they will be punished with lower market share and revenue.
What the hell does Microsoft have to do with anything? Christ, some people are so obsessive they can't go five paragraphs without bringing in Microsoft or Bush. Leave the conspiracy theories at home and let's have a rational discussion, please.
Their advertisers will have their brands further besmirched by association with the lowest of the low and dishonest business practices.
I don't see how. If the sites don't get served to Firefox users, I doubt that Firefox user would then switch browsers to view the site, then make a note of all the advertisers on it for later use. They'd probably just move on to another site.
I'm not saying that the plan proposed in this article is a good idea in any way, shape, or form, but your rebuttal to it is a little short on... rebuttal.
Ah, a reasoned and intelligent reply. And modded up, to boot!
From the article (boldface his!):
Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.
The real deal is this: the 'royalty' controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, with the ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains' disinformation campaigns.
Well, at least he's not emotionally invested or anything.
(Seriously... holy christ. If you're a global warming believer, keep this guy FAR away from the press please. He sounds like the guy standing at the subway entrance with 3 suitcases full of cans and lice in his shaggy beard.)