Will our sun collide directly with another star? Not likely. Will there be earth-like planets in the aftermath? Certainly so. Will those be the same planets as before the collision? I sincerely doubt it.

I still love the game, and I still want to be able to log on a few hours a week and play my character, but it really is now a fact that unless you can dedicate 8-12 hours a week, you aren't going to come close to being able to complete content before it's replaced.

Further, you have to split those required 8-12 hours into seven days. If you have a chunk of time on Saturday but nothing in the weekday evenings you're screwed.

I find myself not logging in any longer. Or, more accurately, logging in - and then looking at the same stale dungeons with no reward, the forty five minute LFR queues or the enormous pile of dailies and deciding to fire up that copy of Alpha Centauri I picked up for $6 instead.

These reality shows aren't contests at all. They're very carefully orchestrated bits of entertainment designed to engage the audience and make them feel involved.

Sounds pretty much like the Web 2.0 + model of the internet.

Or politics.

No, I'm basing it entirely on knowledge of things like this where the $64,000 question and other shows were rigged.

These reality shows aren't contests at all. They're very carefully orchestrated bits of entertainment designed to engage the audience and make them feel involved. Look at American Idol: the 'contestants' don't win anything - unless the producers decide to give them a recording contract at the end. Sometimes that's the winner, sometimes it's one of the losers, sometimes it's multiple people and sometimes it's nobody.

The long and the short of it is that the contestants sign onto a contract that will pretty much say 'the producers will pay you for being on the show, and will own any potential performing career you may have, but aren't required to ever do anything with those rights'. It's a talent hunt by the producers, but instead of having to do it themselves on their own dime, they televise it and MAKE money.

The whole voting thing is schtick for the audience. Oh, I'm sure the producers look at the vote counts to make sure popular performers come back, but they're only one factor in the decision. In that context, it's pretty clear that Telescope claiming that the missing votes "left no impact" on the outcome is accurate.

Learn an instrument and get back to us. Rap is computer generated for the most part, at best someone beats it out on a drum. I play the guitar, if you did you'd understand that Nirvana is orders of magnitude more complex than rap and Nirvana (for those who cant play) is at the braindead simple end of guitar (in fact you cant get much easier than Nirvana). I could knock out a rap song in about 1/2 an hour. That wont even be long enough for you to perfect Smoke on the Water.

The complexity of art has nothing to do with its relevance or quality.

I'm sure there were quite a few Rothko haters exchanging pamphlets claiming "Blobs of paint aren't real art!" and "That Rothko guy isn't even doing anything - hell, I could knock that out in half an hour. Try painting a Da Vinci. Even a Monet, which is brain dead simple!"

I'm not saying I like rap, but I'm certainly not going to claim it has no artistic merit. It may not resonate with you, but it doesn't have to. And feel free to express your opinion all you want - just don't try to dismiss the entire genre as irrelevant just because they use instruments you don't understand.

It's odd to find this here just two days after I discovered that for the low, low price of $5.99 GOG would allow me to once again effortlessly lose track of an entire weekend. I had forgotten how great that game was.

Yeah, but the difference is, if something breaks, you can fix it.

I used to feel the same way as you and ran my own mail server. Over time, I realized that I was spending a tremendous amount of time playing email administrator cat and mouse with spammers and script kiddies.

Since I wasn't being paid for any of this, at some point I realized that paying* Google to manage it for me was actually a good deal. They're significantly more reliable than I ever was, it's some other admin frantically fixing problems at three in the morning instead of me, and most importantly, I didn't have that 'something could go wrong' feeling hanging over my head all the time.

* With information about me, naturally. For years I gave far too much value to maintaining privacy, and protected it rabidly. The reality is that you're being tracked/profiled no matter what you do. The world has reverted back to a village, and everyone knows who the town whore is. Trying to hide seems quaint and infeasible barring engagement of 'full hermit' mode. /endcynic

I've been calling mine a hand computer. Rolls off the tongue a bit better than 'handheld digital multipurpose device'.

I'm always slightly startled when I get a call on my hand computer...

Because mass-market pablum will be the only thing produced?

You know, they said the same thing about music a decade ago - but today I have to go out of my way to hear mass marketed audio pablum that doesn't appeal to me. The volumes of DRM free independent music I've purchased after discovering it via innumerable streaming options makes it difficult.

The reality is that a lot of people are clamoring for this kind of niche content, and there are a lot of people who want to make that content. Luckily, with modern technology, these two parties are starting be be able to negotiate how to make that work without having to go through archaic middle men who don't care about anything but the next quarter profit numbers.

Which is, basically, what all of these conversations are actually about: A dying industry doesn't get it and wonders how to get more money. The population eventually moves on to what they actually want and different people get the money. Previous industry engages in teeth gnashing and law suits.

You may be the only other person I've heard of to use <blink> in a legitimate fashion.

About 8 years ago, I was writing a web based application for a public facing help desk department. Appointments were limited to 15 minutes per customer, and to serve as a reminder we provided a timer right in the ticket system. At a certain threshold, the timer would turn red to indicate hurry up mode - and for the last minute, it would blink. One of my coworkers set out to write a JS timer to handle it until I reminded him of <blink>*.

* Technically, it was done with CSS, but <blink> is nothing but a <span> with a default style, so same thing.

Well will you look at this bullshit. There wasn't an App Store in the 1.x era. If you must shill or be a fanboy at least try to keep your facts straight.

Whoops - I meant 2.x days. It was when the store first opened. Settle down, puppy.

Companies have been free to choose not to use it, and do try to drive people to web sites for purchasing for as long as there have been iOS apps.

It's certainly not true that this has always been the way it worked.

Back in the iOS 1.x days, I was involved with developing an app that attempted to generate revenue using a 3rd party site. The app sat in 'waiting for approval' for months with no response from Apple no matter who we contacted. As soon as we removed that functionality and resubmitted, the app was approved within a week.

Basically, if they thought you were trying to get around their revenue stream, you'd find yourself in Limbo without recourse or notification.

The absolute worst a corrupt corporation out to get you can do to you is to refuse to sell you their product. Perhaps fire you if you happen to work for them. A corrupt government is only limited by exactly HOW corrupt it is, in what it can do to you. From making you unemployable by ANYONE who doesn't want trouble with the govts, denying you the freedom to travel, all the way up to indefinite imprisonment, torture, killing - AND going after your family and loved ones and doing the same to them, after they're done with you. Ever seen a FUCKING corporation do ANY OF THAT?! Or maybe you never read a history book in your whole life?!

Have you? Why don't you let go of that corporate teat for a moment and take a good, hard look at how much evil corporations have done in the world to further their own ends. Read up about the tragedy of the commons. Read up on blood diamonds, child labor, slavery, pollution, etc. Those things are far worse than 'not selling me a product'.

The reality is that it's the same power and money hungry tyrants drawn to the tops of both of those institutions. My initial comment simply pointed out that at least I get to elect the guy whose screwing me in the government. I have no such recourse when it comes to, say, the CEO of BP after his greed ruins an entire ecosystem.

I'm not saying that we should trust everything to the government. I'm saying that for critical services necessary to maintain civilization trusting a corporation to do the right thing is asinine. What qualifies as 'critical services' has been changing over the years and is open to debate. It used to be 'protection from those assholes next town over' was the extent of it. These days, we're up into far more abstract areas like health care, retirement and wireless spectrum.

It's really too bad that it doesn't seem possible for two people with different viewpoints to have a conversation these days without someone turning into a blind raving preacher. It makes discourse and compromise, two cornerstones of civilization, terribly frustrating.

Finally, I wasn't sure you'd get the point without a bit of colorful language thrown in. I didn't know where to put it, so I collected it all for the end: Fuck, Goddamn, Jesus Chris Fucking Moron, Shitstorm, Uneducated little shit, etc.

Because state-run monopolies are famous for low prices, excellent customer service, and being at the forefront of technological advance.

My utilities board is a 'state run monopoly' and does a fantastic job of keeping prices low, customer service responsive and is constantly looking at new technical ways to save me even more money. They provide incentives to motivate people to adopt higher efficiency heating and insulation, driving overall demand down and reducing the environmental footprint of the entire community. A private company would have no incentive whatsoever to do any of that.

I guess I don't see the advantage to having a corrupt corporation not looking out for me over a corrupt government not looking out for me. I can't change the corporation, but I can at least try to change the government. Both options seem to have roughly the same success rate overall, so why not support the one that gives me a voice?

I hate to say it but web developers need to stop using "frameworks" and "libraries" to do simple things.

People using the wrong tools for the wrong jobs is the problem - not frameworks in general.

There's so many websites that load jQuery or TinyMCE for no good reason other than the developer was lazy.

Laziness is one of the hallmarks of a good programmer. It's also an incredibly useful trait for aligning with management and/or a client. A programmer who saves himself having to reimplement tedious and repetitive things is a programmer that is saving money.

I code everything by hand, if it doesn't work in some browser, then that browser's implementation is broken. There should be no need to write against jQuery and assume that the underlying browser isn't braindead or futureproof. If you're writing against the standards for HTML5, CSS3 and the DOM, then you're better off writing your own code.

Eight years ago for an internal project, I wrote all my own DOM wrappers from scratch. It was fast, I knew every inch inside and out, and it worked in all DOM compliant browsers. It took a bit of foresight and prep work to get there, but the payoff was sound. There weren't a lot of options out there at the time, so this was pretty much the only option.

A year ago I started a contract job for a client. I elected to use jquery as a standardized DOM manipulation tool. The actual application code from a developer/client perspective all worked roughly the same as the hand-tooled code from before - except I didn't have to write, and more importantly bill the client, for any of that time. The jquery element traversal utilities alone will save you so much time you won't even believe it.

In the end, both projects ended up with chunk of code being loaded by the browser to make fiddling the DOM in a cross platform manner easier and more reliable for the application code. In the first case, that cost the company money. In the second case, it was 'free'. In both cases, the browser is downloading a dependency 'framework' in order for the application to function.