Same thing, I guess. Poor Russians.

"continued imprisonment would be legal only if there was some likelihood that ultimately he would comply with the order" you mean that after twelve years, or hell, two, it was still unclear that he committed to his story?

...personal encounter with a second decimal point in a version number. Although I was just a high school kid at the time I can still remember all the geeks on the other side of the Mac/PC divide claiming it was aberrant and wrong.

Thus my general disrespect for proponents of the Windows operating system was born.

I think you're still missing the point. That's like only punching someone in the left hand because that's the one that stole your wallet.

...is that prison will be able to provide true justice in this case. There comes a time where you have to cut your losses. There's no way to make things right, so we have to try to make him truly understand what he's done and to feel remorse for what he's done to people who had just as much of a right to be happy as he did, and from whom he stole that possibility.

What better path to that realization than buttsecks? Lots and lots of sweaty buttsecks.

Why you're wrong is as simple as the difference between advanced research funded by the government in the hopes of advancing science and narrow research funded by corporations in order to keep their profit margins at an acceptable level while not falling behind their competitors.

The really big gains over the past 50 years have seldom been privately funded because that is simply not their goal. If they make a breakthrough it's either by accident or because they've pushed their current capability to the point which requires a breakthrough to avoid stagnation.

(you people spend far too much time complicating what should be such a simple comment)

I'm no WoW expert and have only logged a few hours total before being turned off by the game, and it's exactly the things that turned me off that make the game addictive. It takes a long....long time to even be competent at it, let alone good. Then there's the sense of losing ground to other players if you stop playing, the constant chance of getting that next best loot on your next dungeon run. The whole experience is designed to keep you coming back both from expectations of advancement and fear of losing your status.

Talent at playing the game is only worth something as long as you're willing to put in hundreds of hours to attain levels and gear.

...can I get some government cheddar and have my student loans forgiven by a court because I have a mental illness? That would be nice. Kthnx.

The only advantage you have with a company over the government is you can always count on the company to be actively trying to screw you out of as much money as possible. The government is a bit more unpredictable because you can never be sure in whose name they're screwing you over, but every once in a while they can't find someone to pay them to screw you, or they have too many people screaming at them to get away with it. That almost never happens with a company.

You're making the assumption that government is more likely to refuse you than a private company.

You're kinda missing the point of the free market. You're thinking of wild west I can gun any man down sort of freedom. The free market is free as in freely competed within. Which is why the US and EU and many other governments have groups that are supposed to maintain exactly that, the ability for anyone to enter and compete within the market based on their goods. Not on their ability to pay people to use them.

Free markets aren't the natural progression of capitalism but something that has to be enforced.

My point being it wouldn't be worth it for Apple to buy the whole company outright essentially for a few core creative people, gaming marketing people, some intellectual property, and a few multiplayer servers. Everything else Apple already has or would need to build from scratch in order to make full-fledged Mac games. I don't think this company, which likes simplicity enough to have a grand total of six computer models, would waste that much money in severance packages or get into the windows game development business simply to buy their way into more Mac games.

Or at least not only EA. My reason is simple, EA doesn't make Mac games. They make PC games and then shove them into Transgaming's Cider, which is great for productivity and justifying the cost of delivering a Mac version to the market but not so great for making games which run as fast and as bug-free as they can. If they're going to buy a company outright I'd like to see Apple buy a smaller but established company who specializes at least at some level in making or porting games to the platform and then buy franchises and the talent to go along with those titles from other companies to jump-start their gaming division.

Of course, maybe a better solution to the lack of gaming problem would be to subsidize or incentivize game publishing on the platform, but I pay little attention to the details of these things and have no idea what the best first step would be.

There are only three reasons I hear anymore for someone not purchasing a Mac. Price, specific software (AutoCad anyone?), and games. Only one of those three is both an impediment to the computer's usefulness and can in almost no way be remedied. I'd think that solving the most valid and objective argument one can generally have against buying an Apple computer would be something worth putting some major cash into.

Before anyone says anything I run XP in Boot Camp for gaming and it works wonderfully, but you have to admit it's not as elegant a solution as having the game run in your OS of choice.