http://www.geek.com/articles/games/ea-wont-green-light-any-single-player-only-games-2012095/

Frank Gibeau:
"We are very proud of the way EA evolved with consumers. I have not green lit one game to be develped as a single player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365." Fire him, too, please.

I would like to point out that I went to Hebrew school, and was summarily bullied by the same people -- and more -- who were bullying me in the public school I also went to.

Basically, you're bullied if you're outside the norm. It doesn't matter who it is doing the bullying, although I might agree that some groups may be more likely to be bullies based on how closely they value tradition or how afraid they are of individualism. Unfortunately for me, I am socially awkward and way outside the norm. Delightfully weird, but outside the norm.

I like to think my personality traits make me a creative thinker but they do me no favors in other situations. Unfortunately, I wasn't aware of the pluses of the things that made me different until late high school.

This article disturbs me because I would do anything I could to encourage people to be different. I wouldn't change. I like different. Different stands out. I like people who stand out. I seek it out. I like creative free thinkers. Homogenization is bad for the species. It's unfortunate because bullies only encourage people to be clones of one another. I hated every last one of the bullies because they wanted to group everyone into one of two groups: the jocks and the skaters. I was neither. If you didn't fit, you had no identity and were game from either group.

This country needs to stop punishing the different and intelligent. Maybe when that happens we'll see a push towards science and people who are less religious. (I went to Hebrew school but it went in one ear and out the other.) The smart (and benevolent) people should be the ones running the country, not the politicians and religious people.

Whether they like it or not, cell phone companies are slowly turning into Internet service providers. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

If you are for net neutrality, the FCC can't mandate it and Congress has bigger problems to deal with, where is the net neutrality mandate going to come from? You are against Internet regulations so I assume you are against it as an actual mandate. I assume then that you simply hope ISPs will operate under it. The number of ISPs in the US has already shown that this will not happen naturally. Providers are gobbling up content creators, creating a conflict of interests that goes against net neutrality.

I see where your "I am against the FCC mandating it but I am for it" comes from.

I want the Internet to remain (mostly) as it was 10 years ago, before all this garbage with throttling, usage based billing and caps started, which has the net effect of slowly pushing out companies that rely on bandwidth increases. Someone else said throttling and usage-based billing is absurd anyway and that anyone with half a brain knows the technical reason why: because usage-based billing and caps aren't going to force people to stop using bandwidth during peak times, when it's at its rarest, and at which point the provider's lack of capacity is actually a problem. I'll argue usage based billing is also crap: charge people in tiers, like they already do.

A large number of applications are just waiting in the wings to be developed but can't be because bandwidth is not yet where it needs to be for them to work. If the Internet develops speed lanes, and you have to pay your ISP extra for Hulu to work, it will be a sad day. I'm sure some ISP somewhere is already working out the technical aspects to charge tiers, bundling the Internet into websites and declaring Hulu and Netflix to be "premium" websites (and their own streaming video website is standard). How do you think the customers of that ISP are going to react when their $7 subscription to Netflix suddenly stops working? And now they have to pay $10 more per month to their ISP to activate their $10 subscription to Netflix. They're probably going to drop Netflix and use their ISP's service. Netflix just lost customers to strong-arming. ISPs have already talked about this. Comcast is already sort of doing it. It is not enough to hope that they will follow the spirit of net neutrality on their own, because they won't. Someone has to step it in and force it on them.

Federal Communications Commission. I would like to believe the Internet is a form of communication. By all rights it should have jurisdiction to regulate businesses that deal with the Internet in the US. The only people that don't want the FCC do have any authority over the Internet are the ones that are against net neutrality. Congress doesn't care. Thankfully the FCC does.

I think it's easy to see that most internet providers are not gravitating towards net neutrality. ISPs in certain areas of the US marketplace are becoming monopolies. AT&T and Comcast seem to be going the complete opposite direction of net neutrality and are just vultures on their customers as far as I'm concerned, making new policies that are more and more ridiculous. AT&T's shared data plans and Facetime, anyone?

Net neutrality is a negative affect on a provider's bottom line. They won't practice it unless it helps them.

Getting rid of government regulation is just what we need. There was no government regulation involved when the banks fucked up the economy. There was also no government regulation involved when Comcast said we will charge you by the byte but if you use our video service, it doesn't count against your data usage, only if you use Hulu or Netflix. Remember that regulations were in place to prevent the economic collapse we're experiencing, and that they were taken away. Also remember what happens to Netflix and Hulu when ISPs across the world start charging by the byte and give you their video service for free. Some regulation is bad. Some regulation is good. It's not wise to regulate everything and it's not wise to have no regulations. I will not argue what causes the prices of things to go up or down in regards to regulations but if profit is involved, you can bet someone will try to fuck you over unless the rules prevent it. US economics is teaching us that lesson over and over.

Mass Effect 3. I was depressed for about a week after playing the original ending. (Hey, you never said it had to be good, just depressing.)

You can usually see people riding bikes where I live. Apologies, but I saw some asshole riding a recumbent one day while driving to get a haircut. This was on a very busy four-lane street with very few left-turn lanes and so traffic is often hectic in either direction. What with people trying to make rights from the left lane or people trying to get out of the left lane because someone wants to make a left, even in a car you sometimes almost get hit or almost hit someone probably once a week. I'm kind to bicyclers. They ride as close to the parked cars as possible and generally don't disrupt traffic.

So when I saw this guy on a weird ass bike taking up most of the right lane to the point where people have to move into the left lane to avoid running over him, I couldn't help but honk my horn at him after passing him for the 3rd time and think to myself: "I know you like to ride your bike but get the fuck out of my lane." He waved his arm at me as if to say, "Whatever. I'm driving in the middle of the right lane because this way you can't hit me."

I wouldn't say I hate recumbents just because of one individual who chose to ignore traffic laws but it doesn't inspire confidence when someone starts a post titled "Poll obviously written by an upright rider" who clearly has something against all regular bikes. Then again, just today there was some idiot on a regular bike driving in the middle of the road on a side street. If he was just 100 feet further up the road I would have smashed head on with another car because two guys decided to park their trucks on either side of a very narrow street and there was another car coming through it at the same time I was.

I think some people are missing the point. A monitor could do tv in from a cable box. Most providers DON'T have the app Cablevision has to view live tv on an iPad. Plus I think a bigger screen would be nice, 32" or something. If your hands are messy, you don't want to have to hold the tablet, or move it from table to counter so you don't have to keep moving to see its tiny print. A giant touchscreen pc could get more uses than a tablet.

Yeah, his example only works on things like Viagra, which are completely optional.

Look at the opposite way. I don't want to live anywhere without 3G or broadband. Few people do. It's like having a city without electricity or running water these days. It might even be more important since this is the way people share ideas and news.

You can argue that they should move, but that's easier said than done, and how are they to know what they're missing if they've lived without it? Yes, you can also argue that isolated communities should remain isolated communities, but then their ideas do not align with the rest of the nation at the very fundamental level, causing all sorts of unnecessary strife. I would prefer a nation that is more connected and in tune with itself.

I typed "where" and the suggestion was "where is my house in whiterun".

You can't explain that.

Yes. It's kind of amazing when Google knows that I'm playing Skyrim and I only have to type one word (not a proper noun) to get the suggestion of what I needed. That blew my mind.

Not to mention, the self-documenting nature of Objective-C is fantastic. If you name your methods like Apple does, you'll never need to write comments. ;)