This is ridiculous. You might need more power to maintain speed, but peak power is consumed while accellerating, which cannot be brisk on snow or ice. And peak power is what we're talking about here; not cruising power.

You cannot use more peak power in the winter. Even on clear pavement, you get less traction with most tires, end of story.

Normal film had the best dynamic range in the middle of the spectrum with shadows and highlights washing out. I'm pretty sure this was a technical limitation. Racial issues need not be brought into this.

Sweet!

Agreed. Implying a racial bias here is a crock. If film is racially biased, so are our eyes. Specifically, when I'm driving at night in a certain predominantly indian country, the poor bastards on the side of the road wearing black with dark skin are friggn hard to see. Clearly this has to do with my eyes being biased against dark clothed and skinned poor people.

If you want to solve the dark skin problem in shooting pictures, you have to develop some fantastic dynamic range on your capture device. Modern DSLRs are better than film ever was, but you still should do a bit of post processing to bring out the shadows. Perhaps NOW is the time to "racially tune" photography, since it became at all possible.

Argument by innuendo right here.

Unfortunately, there will be supporters of all types for the party and SuperKendall's idea of who the tea party should be has been successfully hijacked by its enemies and tea partiers probably do include a lot of idiots by now both as supporters and as members. Sorry SuperKendall, but you have bigger hill to climb than you thought was possible.

You have to differentiate between party heads and supporters. Among supporters of any party are all kind of cooks, who happen to think that the particular party will get their issues resolved. I don't know much about tea partiers, because I don't live in the US and never have except for a brief 4 month period, but I'll draw a parallel with a situation I do know:

A certain party that is economically conservative, anti-corruption, and socially liberal is being flambasted by mainstream media for being populist, ultra-conservative, and destructive. It's a long discussion on why it is so, but you'll have to trust me on this, because my point is what follows. Because this party was marginalized by mainstream media and mainstream politicians and big business (hint: they really are anti-corruption), the marginalized elements of society who are indeed ultraconservative socially and feel marginalized ended up being the strongest supporters of this party as a social group. These ultracons really are quite dumb, but they have noone else to vote for and they really want to vote for someone, because they're undeniably patriotic.

My evidence for the party being socially liberal is that when it was in power and could easily ban all types of abortion (as its ultra-conservative constituent would like), it did not. And it did this to such an extent that it tolerated a number of MPs leaving the party to form a new socially ultraconservative party based on this abortion issue alone. My conclusion on this is that when media manipulate the image a political movement wants to project, they end up recruiting for that movement a group of people who identify with the marginal viewpoints while deterring the ones who really should be supporting the movement. This actually mutates the movement and renders it sterile. It's sad, but mainstream politics and media probably know very well that they are doing this and they will continue to do it.

If you want some hints on where I have my example from, I'll tell you that the current party leader's brother died in a plane crash while serving as president of the country.

I see both sides.

If I witness a good friend who I think is about to walk off of a cliff (metaphorically or literally) then I usually say something, but it has to be pretty serious because otherwise I don't think it is my place. I'm sure the person posting the question to /. does think this is serious, as he is worried his friend is turning down a lot of money and an excellent opportunity for something that won't pan out. Yet at the same time, if this person wants to go work for a game studio that kind of implies "that is my dream" to me. And the type of friend who would discourage someone's dream is the antithesis of someone I would want to a call a "friend."

That's the question that needs to be answered. If the programmer / student wants to work for a game studio because he thinks the game industry is growing and it's his best bet at securing a solid financial future there is no harm in presenting facts to the contrary. But if, on the other hand, he is akin to a musician who dreams of becoming a rock star and is perfectly content pumping gas and sleeping on couches trying to carve out a career and has no ambitions of getting married, starting a family and having a comfortable middle class retirement then it is a very big asshole move to step into the role of father and say "No don't do that because there's no money in it." He's probably already had to put up with enough of that bullshit from his parents already. What he needs from his friends is support in that case.

1) No one, not even the most "hard core" fiscal conservatives / libertarians, claim the free market is "infallable." The free market is individual human beings making individual economic decisions without coercive interference from others. Human beings are fallable, thus the free market is "fallable."

2) 3rd party reviews = free market. What is not free market is when government creates oversight organizations / watchdogs through taxation and uses them to enforce laws and regulations. Examples are the FCC, FDA etc.

3) As imperfect as it may be, at least when a company releases a major catastrophe of a buggy product they get penalized with support and replacement costs, bad PR and a market that will think long and hard before buying another product from that company.

4) There is nothing stopping anyone from implementing your suggestion for creating better cellphone reviews. That's the beauty of the free market. The fact that no one has done it (as far as we know) does not hint to the free market's imperfections, it means there is a business opportunity waiting to make someone some money.

I've tried to follow this discussion. Let me see if I've gotten it right.

First, someone says that studies have found that pornography causes no psychological or ill effects.

You respond with information to the contrary.

You get a response which basically said "So what? Some people get addicted, they also get addicted to TV and other things, and I take objection to your 'nothing good comes out of it'" and he makes some points.

Now you're saying "OK well I guess some good comes out of it but wouldn't you agree that there's more negative than good?"

My response to that is: "Citation needed."

I am really interested in why you are "anti-porn." Why are you fixated on whether it's largely good or bad ? We're talking about something that people do in private for themselves. Now, I don't tend to look at things in collectivist ways, meaning I don't judge something based on it's "contributions to society" because I am an individualist. However, I can make the argument that "society" is a collection of individuals and so if porn provides some sort of positive service to any individual then I would judge it to be good. And if you're looking at things in terms of "how many numbers of individuals does it hurt v.s. how many numbers of individuals does it help" then given that the overwhelming majority of people who consume porn do not get addicted (and we can be very broad with the word "addicted" by defininig addiction as "when the activity begins to interfere with your day to day life") then even looking at it in collectivist / "greater good" terms then you would have to come to the conclusion that it actually does more good than harm.

Ballmer might be a horrible CEO (I don't really care enough to know), but you would think a CEO should have some idea of what parts of the company are "important", and "important" should not be a matter of opinion, but of objective profit measurement.

Books have been written about why companies that focus do better than companies that try to get their hands into everything. PepsiCo owns everything from Frito-Lay to KFC to East Side Marios restaurants, but both Coca Cola and McDonald's each have PepsiCo beat in terms of net asset value despite each corporation focusing tightly on only beverages or a single fast food chain.

It's not against anyone's best interests for Microsoft to cut the fat and sell off divisions and brands that aren't integral to it's core focus. What the core focus is, if it has one, I don't know. My guess is it should probably be Windows and related products like Office. XBox should at the very least drop the Microsoft brand and be treated as a separate company, if not actually spun into a completely separate company. There's really no reason not to. The shareholders can spin off divisions or brands held by Microsoft corp into completely new companies and still retain ownership in those new companies. They would just elect a new Presidents for those new corps, hire a new executive team (preferably by promoting experts within those divisions who know what they're doing), and let them be run as tightly focused companies that don't need to compete for capital and resources with all of the other divisions under the currently bloated umbrella corp that is Microsoft. The shareholders continue to profit from their holdings as long as the new company is profitable, and the employees working in those divisions benefit from working for a company that is dedicated solely to achieving the success of the products they actually work on, rather than being treated "unimportant" compared to the other divisions (i.e: no more infighting). As long as there is any hope for those products they stand to do much better as stand-alone companies.

Another reason defocused companies are at a disadvantage is that often they need to sell to their competitors. Pepsi actually outsells Coca Cola in super markets, but in restaurants Coca Coca destroys them, and as a result Coca Cola wins in terms of net profits. The reason is because McDonald's and others don't want to buy from PepsiCo when Pepsi owns Taco Bell, KFC and other competitors.