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Comment Re:Eliminate Daylight Wasting Time (Score 1) 170

This hits the nail on the head exactly. In past years, there have been multiple (apparently serious) proposals in the UK to move to year-round DST. People seriously want to change their clocks so that it no longer matches an obvious and unmissable astrological phenomenon that they see every day.

Nobody ever seems to point out that this is functionally identical to just getting up an hour earlier every day. Instead, it seems that people would genuinely prefer to still get up an hour earlier anyway, but deliberately set their clocks wrong to pretend that they're not getting up earlier. There's some bizarre mental contortions going on there.

Comment Re:First pirate! (Score 1) 762

The problem with the data we have here is that we don't know if the game was actually any good. Maybe they all played it and decided it wasn't worth the money.

FTA, the author responding to a comment making a similar point to yourself:

No problems man. It's definitely something that we've considered. But these guys are playing it for hours at a time and dominating the high score list. It's not that they are playing it for 5 minutes and deleting it.

Comment Re:Misses The Point (Score 1) 339

I can't imagine that the belt is going to make a big difference in how long you end up waiting stuck in traffic.

I think it would -- because if the person is wearing a seatbelt, they're either not injured (possibly in conjunction with airbag(s)), or less injured and can easily be taken to a hospital and the crashed cars easily moved out of the way. While I have no proof, in a brains splattered over the roadway incident, I presume they'll leave it in place longer for an investigation since there aren't two sides to interview.

Comment Everything (Search Engine) (Score 2, Informative) 232

I guess it could work, although you can't index the files directly. You have to run a local copy and one on the server as an EPT Server. www.voidtools.com, although it seems to be down at the moment, so here's a link to the FAQ on Google's Cache: http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:fcYHcEJKH3UJ:www.voidtools.com/faq.php

Comment Re:For totalitarian government everywhere (Score 1) 122

Cuba couldn't afford the surveillance technology. Big government have been mining signals data for spying and counter spying since the second world war, and that doesn't bother me much. Its when the legal system/internal security, starts using this massive surveillance that I feel my privacy slipping away. INDECT sound like another massive government computing contract that will overrun its budget and fail its supposed purpose.

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Privacy vs Surveillance Feed @ Feed Distiller

Comment Re:Still can't uninstall? (Score 2, Interesting) 275

Perhaps not "as bad as the registry hell", but I would still prefer if Firefox blocked both of them until they were deletable like all other addons. I mean, have some backbone mozilla, if people don't do things properly, give them a nice big "FAIL" and send them on their merry way.

Given that the Ubuntu addon is installed system-wide and has root:root owner (as a result of being installed via APT), how, exactly, would you go about enabling the button when the user in question may or may not have root privileges?

Comment Re:All mine were cheap! (Score 1) 1259

What the hell are you talking about? If its free, why do they have school taxes up for vote on every ballot to try and get everyone to pay for it?

In the context of the article, it is free to the student. Not magically and completely free. Try reading the whole post. Especially that part where I say I am willing to pay the taxes to make higher education free for the student, just as K-12 is free for the student already.

Reading the whole post, and actually comprehending the whole post, might possibly stop you from having that question.

Comment Re:yep, but it's not politically correct (Score 1) 1259

I have no problems with anything you say, but you need to understand that academia is working with a different set of value system than you are. Obviously you think yours is better. They aren't interested in advancing your career just in advancing knowledge. How much money something will make is not what they really care about. Universities do not see it as their job to prepare you for your future job. They also don't see you as a "customer". The fact that you think they should shows a deep misunderstanding of the role Universities see themselves in. Arguing that they should conform to your value system makes no more sense then you conforming to theirs. Except that they have what you want, the diploma that will increase your salary.

Comment Re:Well, (Score 1) 241

Actually, that is not necessarily true. We can reasonably assume* that this DLC was created after the game was put into content-freeze for testing and QA. It was created after the game's production, but since DLC requires a lot less post-production fiddling, it's possible for them to publish both at the same time.

* and by that, I do of course mean "that's Bioware's story and they're sticking to it".

Comment Re:Since when is Bioware going hardcore? (Score 2, Informative) 49

Just in case anyone reads the original comment and thinks it's accurate, it's not. I'm not sure if the poster dislikes WoW and just likes to trash talk it, or if he's never played WoW and is speaking out of ignorance, but basically the comment couldn't be more wrong.

The term "hardcore" does not have anything to do with absurdly grindy loot rules, or anything of the sort. Hardcore refers to the game mechanics, and to how tightly tuned the boss encounters in the game are. A "hardcore" MMO is one that would require to min-max your character to get the most damage/healing/whatever out of it, to get the best gear available to you, and would give you very little margin for error during the boss fights. It is this last point which people usually point to as an example of player skill. I think it would be fairly self-evident that overcoming whatever challenge the boss encounter throws at you while not making any mistakes must surely require some manner of skill, no? At the end of the day, you're playing for the challenge. If there's little challenge to the boss fights, they're less fun.

Contrary to the assertions of the OP, the prestige associated with certain hard-to-get gear is not the fact that you have "be very lucky on the rolls", but in the challenge associated with the boss fights. In fact, as far as I can tell, the first five paragraphs of that post are literally flat-out lies. I have no idea how it's been modded +5 interesting, since it seems to be pretty much entirely a troll to me. Bosses in WoW have never dropped only one piece of loot, even at release, when the game was considerably more hardcore than it is now. As others have already pointed out, WoW was never as hardcore as some oldskool MMOs like Everquest, and it has been made considerably more friendly to casual players over time. New boss encounters have consistently been tuned to be easier, and are considerably more forgiving of mistakes. WoW has actually done an excellent job of catering to both the casual and hardcore crowds. There are still some boss fights that are quite challenging, and beyond that there are even optional hard-modes that give extra rewards.

As to the OP's claim of "[The hardcore crowd] get upset when normal people with jobs and responsibilties can get as far in the game as them. If everyone can achieve the same, then they are no longer special." This has never been true. And I'm speaking here as a non-hardcore player. It took me the better part of two years to get my character to level 60, for example. The argument has never been about "getting as far" or "achieving the same". In an ideal game, everybody with the skill to succeed would be able to make the same progress, see the same content, get the same loot, regardless of if they have a busy schedule and only have a few hours a week to put into the game. The complaint that was made comes about because the players themselves (and I mean pretty much all the players, not just "hardcore" players or whatever) use the level of gear as a measure of the players progress. The problem was that a few years back, it was possible to obtain the top quality gear without possessing any skill, and in fact without any input of effort in the slightest. If you need to group with some people to accomplish something in the game, it helps to know if they're competent, right? Well, there are few enough ways to tell this in a game like WoW. Previously, gear could be used as a sort of check for that. But if everyone is wearing top of the line gear, you might bring along someone on the assumption that they're competent, only to spend hours fruitlessly banging your head against a wall. Thankfully that situation was eventually remedied, and the complaints have been significantly quieter since.

The OP has gone to significant lengths to try to portray the hardcore crowd as nothing but whiny kids. In fact, some of the more hardcore players I've known have been adults in their late 20s and early 30s with lives and even kids of their own. These people have never said that "WoW has failed because it only attracts the kiddies". Why would kids complain about WoW attracting kids? Another lie by the OP, methinks. In fact, the hardcore players merely said that WoW was not the game that they wanted. It's a perfectly valid opinion. And it's undeniable that WoW has been courting the more casual players. Different games for different people. It's never about the loot or the in-game rewards. It's about the challenge of playing, and having fun. Some people like a game with a little challenge.

Comment Re:Before the arguments start? (Score 1) 517

Please read these posts within the appropriate context.

Every single one of those questions you asked either has an answer so obvious as to make the question meaningless, or is implicitly answered by the context of this discussion thread. If you're going to use Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a defence against the unauthorised distribution of copyrighted creative works, then I think you'll find it's you who is in for a judicial arse kicking.

Comment Re:Obligatory (Score 1) 1376

So essentially what you're saying is that if a people or a country happens to have an opinion on what is normal or morally right that differs from what you believe or what your country touts as right, then ultimately you are always right, and they are always wrong?

Look, I personally don't agree with this law, but, from TFA, the Irish saw fit to include provisions against blasphemy in their constitution when they originally wrote it. It was their choice to do that, and it's not your place to say that they can't. This legislation is merely maintaining the status quo. If the Irish people really felt strongly enough about it to want to change it, well that's what elections are for.

Comment Re:Non-electronic spam (Score 1) 268

Cold calling is not and has not ever been a legitimate marketing communication tool. So yeah, too bloody right they should never do it. You are quite correct in pointing out that it is no different from spam email.

Honestly, if anything cold calling is far worse than spam email. At least with email you can sort out spam filters and such, so that you never see the damned stuff. With cold calling, some faceless company is interrupting my work/free time/dinner/whatever and wasting my time so that they can pester me about some questionable product that I don't even need and would never buy. And I essentially have to get up to answer the phone in case it's a call from someone I actually want to hear from. It is nothing short of arrogant and rude of these companies to even dare to presume that they have any kind of right to my time or attention.

Comment Re:The next WoW Expansion... (Score 1) 259

Actually, even assuming that all of the Chinese players just stopped playing WoW, that still leaves Blizzard with in the region of 6 million subscribers. And why would they just stop playing? They've all moved over to the Taiwanese servers now, so the drop in subscriber numbers isn't nearly as large as people make it out to be.

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