You don't need artists and writers and a disc full of content if you make multiplayer-only games. I think this is more of what EA execs want rather than what the current reality is. The highest rated games are still single player (Mass Effect, Assasin's Creed, Fallout, etc.) because they immerse you into story and give you many hours of play.

If everything becomes a Call of Duty experience then I suppose I'll be purchasing a lot less games. Running around on tiny maps hoping my twitch reflexes and ping time is faster than the timmie who plays 8 hours a day is not my idea of engaging entertainment. In fact, it's just Pac-Man with guns.

At what point don't they just buckle down and rewrite the apps to use standards-based methods? They put their money on a losing horse. Suck it up and move on.

I understand that Microsoft encouraged folks to write their apps with Active X and all that but they learned a valuable lesson - don't trust mission-critical operations to a single-vendor solution.

Yes, I know Exchange and Active Directory ft into this category as well but the only difference is that Microsoft hasn't dropped support for them. I mean, why is going 100% Microsoft a rational decision but if your CIO said "We're going 100% Apple." he'd be fired in a heartbeat?

There are many large companies and governments that seem to make things work without Microsoft technologies and I'm sure you can too.

Panic, maker of (excellent) Mac software has some Atari 2600 boxes for their current lineup of products.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

Unless you ascribe to the belief that government, even democratic forms eventually end up becoming an oligarchy of some form. It's not hard to imagine that the US is currently heading in that direction given the figures you cite.

Is it so far-fetched to think that if given enough time, unimpeded, the Republican party would structure government in a manner that corporations would be self-regulated, all-powerful entities and that government's purpose is to protect wealth rather than people? Look at how the fringe in today's GOP believe BP is the victim in the Gulf disaster. Is the war in Iraq truly taking place to protect the citizenry of Iraq or is it to secure/institute a US-friendly oil producer/port in a time where oil reserves are declining and China and India's oil consumption will only increase given their current state of economic development? Why does New Orleans, a city with a large poverty base situated in one of the poorest states still look like a disaster zone? Because to fix it would require a transfer of wealth with no reward for doing so that the wealthy aren't willing to endure. That's why we're pouring billions into a war rather than rebuilding a city.

The weak always cede power in times of perceived crisis and fear until the point in which so much power has been ceded that revolt, be it internal or external, is needed to get it back.

Anyway, the point is guess that I think we are moving beyond the point at which our government is solely dedicated to protecting the weak and that many of our policies are now crafted for maintaining and acquiring wealth. And I'm not singling out Republicans to be partisan - they're simplyt actors in the natural pro(re)gression of democractic forms of government and the more crises like terrorism and depressions we experience the faster it will happen.

I guess this means a new round of ALL CAPS EMAIL CHAIN LETTER WARNINGS IN 48 PT COMIC SANS TELLING ME TO SEND THIS TO ALL MY FRIENDS AND NOT TO LET THEM TAKE THIS COUNTRY AWAY FROM US WITHOUT A FIGHT. TEA PARTY FTW!!!

What's strange is that the all caps part bothers me more than the crazy far-right subject material of those things.

So if a person had never bothered to put up any curtains and failed to install doors in their house and Google snapped a photo of the street in which you can see inside the house should Google be tried for invasion of privacy? Can such a person who leaves his or her house in that state have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Do people that can't be bothered to put up electronic versions of curtains and doors for their wireless networks have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

If you throw out incriminating evidence in the garbage, took it to the curb and investigators went through to get it and used it against you do you have any expectation that they shouldn't be able to use that evidence?

Seriously, if you make your life available to the public, whether it be failing to install curtains and doors in your home, putting sensitive documents in the trash and taking it out to the curb, posting your marital indiscretions on Facebook or allowing the public to connect to your publicly broadcasted and open network you have no reasonable expectation of privacy at those points.

At worst, Google can be accused of being creepy for picking through the "virtual" trash left at the curb and snapping photos of your doorless and curtainless home.

What is scary is that congresspersons involved with this investigation had no clue about securing consumer routers and are currently making decisions guiding the Department of Homeland Security . If there's anything alarming and scary to take away from this story that would be that, not Google.

I think Bill Nye should redo his entire show episodes filmed from a cave with a couple of bodyguards and AK-47's behind him.

C'mon people - when did we forget what it was like to be a boy? It's how we learn. Are taping several bottle rockets together to make it multi-stage and seeing what lights on fire with a magnifying glass going to be terrorist activities too? Do we need a 3-day waiting period for building a potato gun?

It's amazing what a little bit of fear and fear-mongering (I'm talking to you the Fox News) will do to the way people interact with the world.

Someone mentioned that we need to vote for candidates that have detailed plans for everything rather than voting for those with slick ad campaigns. So put yourself in the situation of someone running for office. Are you expert enough to lay out detailed solutions to issues concerning telecommunications, agriculture, commerce, defense, transportation, welfare, immigration, international relations and all the myriad sub-fields they contain? Nobody can possibly be a competent expert in all of these areas yet congress has to regularly make long-lasting decisions that impact these fields. How can they possibly make an informed decision for every bill? Enter the lobbyist. The lobbyist is an expert in his or her particular field and is more than happy to inform a congressperson what the important issues are regarding House Bill 714.

We don't need "informed" politicians because nobody will ever exist that can make competent decisions on every or even some of the issues he or she will face in their political careers. We need to somehow neutralize the power and influence a lobbyist holds in our government without removing the essential service they provide - access to expertise and the ability to provide a cliff note summary of the topic at hand. What the answer to that is I don't know but it's clear why corporations seem to run the show - because they have all the experts. How did you gain the expertise in whatever vocation you decided to practice? More than likely you gained it by working for someone, maybe even a large corporation or two.

...but just having it sit idle on a static HTML page with no flash or video makes my CPU fan come on. I hate that. Why the hell is FF using enough CPU cycles to require CPU cooling when it's just SITTING THERE AT IDLE.

Get your crap together Mozilla or you're going to lose everything you worked so hard to accomplish. Extensions are the only thing saving your bacon and Chrome is making some real progress in that area - plus it doesn't tax my CPU.

I completely understand where you are coming from. However, I believe that plugins would go against the spirit of the HTML5 video tag where browser plugins should not be a requirement in order to watch the video.

Certainly, the browser can be made to support various codecs but HTML5 is attempting to reduce browser feature fragmentation and avoiding the current practice of constructing sites in a manner that requires dedicating time and resources to supporting multiple browsers. Why as a site owner, should I have to encode h.264 for WebKit, Flash for legacy and Theora for Firefox for each video? It's a waste of time and resources and serves only the plugin/browser creator agendas and not the end-user's agenda which is simply to watch the video. Yes, yes - I understand that DRM and licensing serves agendas that aren't the end-user's but HTML5 wants a plugin-less web and is leaving browser manufacturers to determine what that standard is. You think they would have learned their lesson but to the credit of the browser manufacturers they are playing nice for the most part with the HTML5 spec.

If Theora was competitive on a technical level to h.264 there might be a more compelling argument to standardize on Theora but the facts are it's an obscure codec with no widespread support for hardware decoding, it fails on measurements of frame quality, filesize and CPU usage, and much of world's existing videos are already encoded using h.264 (including much of Flash). Also, does the license of Theora allow for DRM wrappers? I honestly don't know but if so, then that's unfortunately a real issue going against Theora as well.

I too want an open web and wish Theora could fit that bill better than it does but I can understand why it is being dismissed by most browser manufacturers.

The obvious reason Microsoft has standardized on h.264 is its support for DRM. However, Ogg Theora is inferior to h.264 by any standard of measurement except for licensing.

Ars has a good article summarizing a comparison study between Theora and h.264. Basically, Theora produces much lower quality videos with larger filesizes and higher CPU utilization when compared to h.264 videos with identical bitrates.

I've heard Theora advocates say "just jack up the bitrates until it looks good - we're in the age of Hulu so no big deal." I find that unacceptable. Theora will have to up its game if it wants to be a true competitor to h.264. All it has going right now is an open license.

You're a computer guy, right? My cousin's kid been trying to help us with this TV station thing we're doing but I don't think he knows what he's doing. Plus he's starting soccer now and he doesn't have much time anymore. It's not like you don't, eh? Heh heh.

Anyway, can you help? We use The Windows and all that so it's pretty standard.

You will? Thanks buddy - I'll see that you get some extra "unmonitored" visits from the little lady this month.

So you are implying that Republican charitable donations are enough to meet the needs of the poor. So do they plan on giving more charity in the future so that they can afford health care?

Typical conservative tripe - throw some scraps from the table to salve the conscience.

This article refutes your claim
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009253657_charity23.html

Because the Republican party puts money first and people second.

Average Joe followers of the Republican party tend to have a deep personal connection with that party that defines much of their identity as a person. They tend to be older, empty-nesters with high-income, white-collar jobs.

For many, they wake up to Fox News in the morning (a right-wing news media outlet) listen to conservative talk radio (e.g. Rush Limbaugh) in the afternoons and come home from work to watch more Fox News programming until bedtime. This is not an exaggeration - many people I know personally live like this daily...a voluntary daily indoctrination to the party line.

As a result of the daily routine, they tend to adopt their ideologies and values to whatever they've heard on the radio/tv. The Republican party knows this - the Republican sweep of the mid-nineties owed much to the newly-created conservative media outlets.

Post 9/11, the Republican Party has used scare tactics to great effect and so the "socalism" tactic is just another way for their demographic to recall negative memories of the Soviet Union. I'd venture to say that the word "socialism" has a much more negative connotation to folks that had to undergo nuclear attack drills (hide under your desk!) in grade school than those that were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Honest to God, if the Republican party started labeling libraries as institutions of socialized reading you'd suddenly see ordinary people protesting your local library and demonizing the librarians that work there.

So in a nutshell, many that oppose the healthcare initiatives are a willingly brainwashed mass manipulated by a party that largely employs fear as a tool and whose motivations basically distill down to greed.

He claims to be a web developer, which one can assume that he's writing code (be it PHP, Ruby, ASP or even Javascript.) How is this not programming? Because you don't have to hit "compile" when you want to test code? Because you don't mess with C-type memory pointers or track down potential buffer overflows?

Have you been paying attention to the web lately? The lines between application as an OS-bound executable are being blurred more and more by the web each day and these type of web services all employ object-orientation, design patterns, APIs, unit-tested frameworks, algorithm optimization, security hardening, database design, etc. Proper usage any of these tools and concepts are normally beyond the casual script writer. They require a good understanding of what it takes to make a modern web-app.

Is the code necessary to implement Gmail any less complex than code used to write an email app?

Why do OS app programmers seem to think no one else programs but them and everybody else is a self-taught hack?