bluedanieru

How many makers of car stereos control 90% of the car stereo market, and use that market share to force makers of cars to put their stereos in every car they manufacture? Oh, none? Well then your analogy fucking sucks and you should stop using it.

I think it's rather that there is another totally reasonable and historically accurate assumption that catastrophic environmental costs need not factor into the projection.

Because everyone has a slightly different take on what rights who should have. House divided against itself and all that. It's not so much respect for freedom, or lack of it, but rather no respect for fellow citizens.

You need to have some balance though. It's good to do things to make yourself more attractive to women, but you also need to evaluate - quickly - whether a woman finds you attractive. If you think she doesn't, if you suspect she doesn't, even if you think maybe she might be interested but you're not sure, drop her like a sack of dirt and don't look back.

Most women will make up their mind about you within 10 minutes after meeting you. Often even less than that. You have to do the same.

>And so founders who want to have the best chances at "winning" have to create an aura of momentum, of inevitable success, around themselves and their companies. That's perfectly understandable too.

Well, we can't all be Bill Fucking Nguyen thank goodness. I suppose it's expecting too much for people who are responsible for investing millions of other people's dollars to realize that sometimes people who appear "driven" and "visionary" are actually "full of shit" and "criminally insane".

There's a reason you had to capitalize it.

And yet their tomatoes taste like shit. I disagree.

How about just stop growing shitty tomatoes? Fuck.

The tomatoes I eat taste great, because I don't buy tomatoes grown by ignorant assholes who don't understand how plants work.

What the fuck are they thinking with that name. Wii as well, for that matter.

I took the statement to indicate a lack of passion in programming in general rather than a particular domain. Re-reading I can see the intent. But, thanks for the downvotes anyway.

I don't know why you have to shit on developers outside the games industry as you've done here (perhaps it wasn't intentional?).

I love games, and I have plenty of passion both for them and for programming in general. But the games industry is saturated with developers who got into programing solely to make games, and who only want to make games, and is famous for taking advantage of that. I'd rather not be taken advantage of, and 'passion' has nothing to do with it.

Okay okay, we get it, you're an autocrat. You love power and the powerful. You wrap your lips around the cock of the state. Nice work.

This article is nonsense full of blatant half-truths, e.g.

"a respected corporation such as Oracle"

Give me a break.

Well, you can at least count me as someone who didn't buy Diablo 3 for absolutely no other reason than the ruckus that followed its release - due entirely to their bullshit DRM.

And I didn't pirate it, either. I've never really got into any of the Diablo games, but there was so much hype around 3 and so many people looking forward to it that I figured I'd give it a shot. But then even two weeks after the release there were still problems with it and I just sort of lost interest.

There are so many good games on so many platforms these days that to buy something you can't play because of artificial limitations just seems colossally stupid. Yeah, so I missed out on Diablo 3. No big deal.

Has anyone ever really done a proper study into lost sales via DRM? It seems like half the industry has just accepted it as something they have to do, and they don't want to know or even care if it affects their bottom line positively or negatively.

I have a feeling I won't be playing the new Simcity either. In the past, I may have tried to pirate it. Now? I'll just ignore it.

Warn your friends! On Facebook!

You're limiting the definition of democracy to 100% pure direct democracy i.e. literal mob rule. I struggle to imagine what such a government would even look like (on a large scale, at least).

I tend to think of a republic as opposed to a principality (it's right there in the name, even!). That is, the machine of government is thought to be held publicly rather than privately, in a republic. Suffrage has nothing to do with it, although democracy is a common implementation of a republic. (Other examples might be a military government, a religious oligarchy, or a corporate oligarchy). It is a rather broad term.

Constraining what the citizens are allowed to do, or how they are allowed to do it, via fair voting representation in their government (that is to say, limiting the powers of their duly-elected government by a constitution) does not to my mind diminish the fact that it is a democracy. Nor does it diminish if they elect representatives rather than participating in endless referendums.

My thinking on this seems clear and objective enough to me.

Also, there's a billion dollars and then there is a billion dollars. A billion dollars of oil is a valuable commodity. A billion dollars of start-up stock is not necessarily such a great thing unless you can find someone willing to buy all of it, right now.

I've never understood why some people insist that republic and democracy are mutually exclusive terms. Can you define your terms for me?

To me, what you're saying isn't different from saying "no, it's not feudalism, because there's a monarch".

So what, then, do you think the purpose of technological advancement is? Quality of life and wages have more-or-less flat-lined while productivity is way, way up. We are producing heaps more wealth per person than at any point in history, and yet we don't have much to show for it. Nowhere near proportional to the productivity increases, that's for certain.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not a Luddite by any stretch and I'm not suggesting we should go back to an agrarian society, but we have a serious economic and political problem where the benefits of technological advancement are going in overwhelming proportion to a very small subset of the population. If something isn't done about that, and soon, the resulting upheaval may force us back to pre-industrial living anyway (or more likely, much worse).

I heard a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the national government commissioned a study a few years back to investigate ways to curb this practice.

The committee was disbanded after a minor scandal when it was discovered that they were making everyone come in on Saturdays to work.

Flagged for what? Illustrating an important point with imagery rather than a wall of text?

This isn't as worrying as when they start suing blackberry (as in, the actual fruit) stands.

>Morse initially suspended Frederick for five days for violating the school district's anti-drug policy, but later increased the suspension to ten days after Frederick quoted Thomas Jefferson.

What an asshole.

>It's much more likely to have something to do with the console we know they're working on.

Which, by all accounts, will be more-or-less a Linux PC.

And Linux-on-the-desktop seems healthier now than a couple years ago. The reason it's harder to recommend one single Linux distro, is that even casual users have more than one good choice. I don't see "Unity/Gnome 3/Mint/etc." as a "mess". If you want a single, monolithic platform, we already have that. It's called "Microsoft Windows".

Valve doesn't have any business muscling developers into this or that platform. It's wrong if Microsoft does it, and it's wrong if Valve does it. Let the better platform win, in an open and competitive way. (I'm confident Linux would win out in such a contest, btw.)

And all that without making anything anyone gives a shit about :-)

>or even make it a requirement to get onto Steam

Let's hope not.

Smuggling firearms by the tens of thousands would do a lot more good.

Because your representatives are old and suspect email isn't a real thing, or that the same person could just email 50 times (and that somehow the same can't be done with the regular post). They are also looking for any excuse to totally ignore your ass so they can get back to abdicating power to special interests.

We have mostly solved the energy crisis, in the sense that we have the technical means to supply ourselves with power we can use, and in a sustainable way. Implementing that solution will require rather sweeping political and economic upheaval though, so the question remains for how much longer we'll continue to fuck the Earth's ecosystem before we get around to it (if indeed we ever get around to it at all).

As usual, mankind's biggest problems arise from our inability to scale social interaction well, not from technical prowess (or lack thereof).