Given how they approached the reception problems by giving away bumper cases, I would have fully expected them to give away black cases to cover up the white plastic.

With how heroics work now, getting 5k gear score can be done relatively quickly. And no, you can't level up to 80 and join an ICC raid on your first day. But you know what, ICC isn't the first tier of raid instances. It's the last tier. When the weekly raid is Patchwork, no one is checking your gear score. You CAN do VOA with crappy gear. He never claimed you can do ALL raid content while wearing all green sub-80 gear.

Making it easier to get into raiding and trivializing the requirements for the final raid instance in the game are not the same thing.

I was really looking forward to SC2. I was busy when it first came out, but I was going to pick it up least week until I saw the stories about Blizzard banning users for cheating in the single player campaign. I believe it was a story on /. as well. Frankly, I'm tired of software developers doing an end around on copyright laws by basically renting you software instead of selling it to you.

I'm boycotting SC2 and Diablo 3 until Blizzard stops acting like an asshat.

You must own an iPhone :).

But seriously, the idea that "integrated" gives the app developer the ability to be more innovative is simply not true when the reality is Apple is the gatekeeper and any app they don't like they just remove from their "integrated" marketplace. His response was not reasoned, it was a marketing ploy. A "reasoned response" would be "We at Apple feel like the users get a better experience when we have full control over what you can and can't do with a device. Since most people are idiots, the average user is happier when we make decisions for them. True freedom results in a worse experience, so we don't believe in freedom." At least that would be intellectually honest.

If you look at China's achievements, they are mainly construction achievements. They build massive skyscrapers (Shanghai for example, already has a 100 story building, and is in the middle of constructing a 128 story one). Any Chinese citizen living in a major city in China will brag about their city's skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, subways, railways, etc. And, having visited a lot of those cities, I will admit they are really impressive.

The primary reason for this though, is that China is taking the massive amount of money flowing into the country and they're choosing to spend it on improving the economy through public works projects. Building skyscrapers, subways, etc. require lots of unskilled manpower, something that China has in abundance. Any problem, like digging a hole, laying pipe, or other manual labor tasks, that can be accomplished in greater scale by simply throwing raw manpower at it.... well, China is unsurpassed in its ability to throw raw manpower at something.

Why can infrastructure like this not be built in the U.S.? Because we don't have 300 million unskilled laborers who will work their ass off for a few bucks a day. We don't have a government that has the authority to just displace hundreds of people in order to build a subway station without going through a lot of red tape. In order to keep up with China in this area, we'd have to give up a lot of the values we treasure for the sake of progress, which is something most of us here on ./. wouldn't do.

You can like or hate the policies in China all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that their massive overpopulation of unskilled labor is getting employed and their infrastructure is developing extremely fast.

Couldn't they just send a rover to like Nevada or something? I read on the internet that's where the moon landings happened, so it must be true.

I have no doubt that they've been put to rest as far as we know, but when it comes to medicine and health, our science has always been imprecise. Something that is good and safe this year will be bad and will kill you the next. This is the problem when half the conclusions being drawn are along the lines of "We have no idea how or why this works, but in a double blind trial of 300 people, we show a 15% improvement."

Not that I believe there are health concerns with wireless technology, just saying that there was a time the people were convinced the world was flat.