I think one of the major problems in IT is "professional" IT people. What we really need to do is drain the swamp. Get rid of all these experts with their alphabet soup acronyms... MSCNE? CSM? LINUX? It's all BS, believe me. What we're gonna do, is we're gonna get rid of the sys admin establishment and give the Internets back to the common folks. Believe me, folks, we're gonna make the Internet so winning, you'll be tired of all the winning. Once Crooked Linus and Dopey Tim are out of the picture, we're gonna have some real innovation. We don't need the people who "know what they're doing." You, and me, we can all make IT great again!

Spoken like a crook. And there are a lot of crooks and snake oil salesman out there, and this is clearly within that particular genre. But the purpose of advertising is to connect people with a product they might need or want, and to convince them that they need or want it. At the end of the day, if I want to sell you product X, all I can do is talk about its advantages, and how it might help you personally, and I can do all of that without ever telling you a lie. You must decide if you need it / want it or can or can't afford it.

On the other hand, if I do lie to you, and tell you product X will do something it won't, then I have committed a form of fraud, and you have a reasonable civil tort against me. But a reasonable degree of photo manipulation may be expected due to the nature of the medium. Breakfast cereal, for example, is filmed with glue instead of milk because milk goes bad REALLY fast under the heat of a studio light. An image may be photo-shopped to restore definition or color lost in the process of photography. That doesn't mis-represent the product so much as it helps present the best-face of the product. I might reasonably want to show my video game sprites rendered by the best commercial hardware available, but if I render that at colors and resolutions impossible to achieve with currently available hardware, than I have committed fraud. And it seems the NMS developers have done that. /P.

The role of a college or university is to provide education, not necessarily job training, and I don't know of any not-for-profit institutions of higher education that are being dishonest about that. ITT Tech, and its ilk, by contrast, explicitly promise to provide vocational training that will give you the skills needed to be able to get, keep, and excel at certain jobs, and they have clearly failed to do that, while engaging in predatory admissions processes.

Oh! I saw that movie! It was pretty cool the way Captain America took down Gary Shandling and Hydra.

Are they doing away with the annual cost of living increases, too?

It's not misleading consumers if you're not paying to use it. It can't be fraud if you haven't lost anything.

with the rest of my class. Space Shuttle launches were something they stopped classes for back then, but we were all excited about this one because we knew a teacher was on the flight, and we would actually be taught LESSONS FROM SPACE. That was probably one of the most exciting things I could have imagined back then.

I tend to agree it's probably too little too late for SimCity, but hopefully EA and other game companies will learn a lesson from this disaster. The fact that they are willing to release an offline mode hints that such hope is not completely unrealistic.

I hate it when those damn kids start playing on my lawn.

Point of fact, that's how the real money is made right now. What most people still don't realize is that a recording contract with a major studio is not a payday, it's a loan; all of that studio time and promotion is something the artist has to pay back through album sales. Where the artist really makes bank is in touring and merchandise sales while on tour.

Is there money to be made from a recording contract? Absolutely, but just like in TV and Hollywood, not much for most of the people who sign one. Big stars can set more favorable terms for themselves, of course. This is where the real shift is coming in: once upon a time, it was completely possible to be a working musician without ever signing a recording contract, you just had a very small chance of achieving elite status and popularity. Ever since the Napster days, artists have gotten more savvy about how to produce and promote their own work and make enough a name for themselves that, when the time comes to talk to a larger studio, they have better leverage going into the negotiating room. It's much harder to pressure someone into unfavorable terms when they're doing pretty well on their own.

Why would you find minimal long distance travel hard to believe? Also, since in the years following the black death, in England at least, laws were passed to tie workers to the land and punish masterless men and vagabonds: there were so few peasants to work the land that the lowest classes could demand higher wages and buy their way into the yeoman class, but the anti-vagabond laws were designed to put an end to that. This is well documented, but even before then few people would have left the immediate vicinity of their farms if they had any say about it.

I recommend they publish this in Duh: The Journal of the Insipidly Obvious. Does anyone really believe you need to be a medievalist to know that communication and travels was much slower in the middle ages than it is in the modern day? Simulations of how the disease spread are interesting from a historical point of view, but it's not even like we're talking about a time when humanity was on the cusp of "small world" connectiveness.

Do you mean a "butt load?"

I don't doubt the lights may factor in to it, but depending on the model of phone, carrier, and location in the theatre, if someone has their cell phone on, you will hear it in my rig. Fortunately the PA system is more forgiving than our comms because we get interference on those almost every show; there's always someone who "forgets" to turn it off.