And pirating because of DRM is fundamentally flawed is that it only affects the suffering devs, and not the publisher for whom the fault of including the DRM lays squarely at the feet of.
Not playing/buying the game at all has exactly the same effect. If I'm not willing to pay for DRM'd content then the developers get $0 from me if I don't play, and still $0 if I do.
I agree, the developers get the shitty end of this. But that's how it works. If a company has a poor business model and lose money, it's always the staff that get screwed. It won't help anyone in the long run to pay for content that comes with invasive DRM.
A former head economist at the IMF, after having to deal with smaller nations with corrupt leadership and banks, has some stern warnings for the US. The rise of the financial "industry" to unprecedented levels as a percentage of the economy is the main reason for the economic downfall of the US, as it takes more and more of the profits out of the true wealth creation system built up over generations, and shifts this wealth into fewer hands. He has seen it so many times before, that he warns t
[T]he nVidia binary-only driver will only get worse (binary bit rot has a half-life of say 1.5 years), while the ATI OSS driver will only get better with time and is not locked to yesterday's Linux kernel or X11.
And yet my old laptop with an ATI Xpress still can't handle compiz with the open source drivers. I'd love to support the FOSS solution, but it is not adequate for my needs. In other news, the Windows 7 ATI driver has worked flawlessly for me
Maybe composing in standard grammar has been deemphasized (obviously a bad thing) and replaced with more education on critical reading (obviously a good thing). We could fix this if we wanted to by deemphasizing critical reading (obviously a bad thing) and emphasizing standard grammar more (obviously a good thing).
I would argue that to do critical reading at all you need some grammar knowledge, whether formalized or not. The ELPE does not test much more than that.
The firm film, in the extended version, was quite good. I don't think it suffered from the lack of Bombadil - he was a walk-on from Tolkien's other writings anyhow, and the bit of Arwen thrown in didn't really hurt anything. The standoff with the Balrog in the extended version was just the sort of eye-candy I was looking for in a LOTR movie.
Jackson's increasing arrogance in the later films was tragic, really. There was plenty in the source material to make for good eye-candy without adding skateboarding elves and the like. What annoyed me the most was that half of Gollum's character got lost in the visual gimmickry - the half that knew the destruction of the Ring meant his own destruction, and sought that release. The (first) ending is just awkward if interpreted as "oops, I slipped and fell into a volcano" instead of Gollum finally uniting his desire to have the ring with his desire to see the ring destroyed.
Well, it remains to be seen whether Jackon can best the Rankin-Bass The Hobbit.
He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion