Cardboard box? You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.

Yeah I mean the thought of a cartoon person in jail is a bit much for me to believe.

Yes, I can imagine how that would be true if Wolfram Alpha were COMPETING WITH GOOGLE. Except it's not. Not as a search engine at least. Jesus. Why don't you try a few typical searches on WA before you say stupid crap that ill-informed modmins will mod up?

Try "cheap plane tickets", or "what are pennies made of" in WA. Look at the results. There are none. That's because WA does not do what Google Search does. It wasn't meant to. You know what else it doesn't do? What ebay does. That's right, you can't buy and trade anything with Wolfram Alpha. It's like Wolfram Alpha is this steaming pile of crap that doesn't do anything but what it was designed to do!

Wolfram Alpha is a super calculator with some databases that it references. You can't search the web with it. You can't buy movie tickets with it. You can't order tires with it. You can only use it in the way it was intended.

Correct. Gone are the days when a company could make a game that was actually appealing enough that the vast number of honest gamers out there willing to pay full price offset the lost sales at the hands of pirates. In order pull off something like that, a company would have to:

-care about its customers
-actually have an original idea BEFORE deciding to make the game
-know what makes a fun game and actually care enough to work toward creating one

But that's completely unheard of. Gamespot should really give the shitty companies the money they couldn't entice consumers to give them in the first place. I mean really, come on gamestop, stop support a culture that actually demands a worthy product, and hop on the gravy train to mediocrity.

yeah when i figured out how easily you can tune the results, i was pretty impressed.

It is of course a little clumsy and lacking in features, but when they get this cleaned up, it will be a very useful tool.

Uh... because then you have more of a chance of completely missing letters like i and numbers like 1 entirely...

This matter is overly confusing for far too many people...

Whoa epic reply. What level OT do you have to be to pull off something like that?

Well technically, what you're describing *IS* marketing. Creating buzz through advertizing and branding are but one facet of the big picture of marketing.

MS is better at marketing in the opposite direction. They sneak their products in under your nose so that all you know is their products. When this strategy is not an option, they try to do the whole branding thing, and fail miserably at that.

I'm not sure it matters either way though. I hate when companies get too much selling power through any marketing techniques, be it MS, Apple, or Google.

What seems more important to me, though, is that Bing is supposed to be a 'decision engine'. I feel like Google's search is so successful because they largely keep it simple in terms of 'making decisions' for the user. I think a huge flaw in a lot of the design of MS products is that they tend to insult the user by making a lot of decisions for him. Windows does it all the time by hiding known extensions, hiding system files, etc. I think they might be headed in the wrong direction if they think they can help users use search engines better than they have been for the past 10 years. I think we know how to find what we need.

I wonder if you can use it to search for Holy Grails?

I like how you just completely overlook the fact that once a board is created, the people on that board might have a slight interest in keeping their jobs, and that just *might* involve exaggerating the need for the board. Oh, and let's not forget the fact that there is a 100% chance that the board will contract work out to some company that does climate-related work.

Hm. Seems like that might create a bit of an industry based around the need to watch the climate! And there is no way that said industry will do ANYTHING unethical or dishonest to keep itself afloat. The words "conflict of interest" come to mind...

It's funny that you should say this because the whole reason why corporations as legal entities exist is because of the belief that corporate self-interest ultimately helps society thrive. The reasoning behind them is that if all businesses' liability were placed on the individuals running them, the incentives of making profits would be prohibitively outweighed by the dangers of individual liability for damage done by the business.

With a corporation, you can run it into the ground, accidentally destroy public property, etc., and you the business owner are protected because the corporation has its own legal identity, independent of its owner. Then when you have to fold that company, you can start a new one up the next day and with the hopes of not failing so miserably. And the generally accepted principal is that enough businesses will be created that people will always be able to get jobs because entrepreneurs will be less afraid that starting company will bankrupt them. That's how I understand it anyway.

So you can act like that "bottom line" is going to be the end of us all, but your government believes that the bottom line is what keeps food on the table for you and everyone you know

By treating the term retard as offensive, you are only feeding into its offensiveness. Retard means slow. If retard has any negative connotation at all, it is because being mentally slow is something that is inherently undesirable, and no matter what window dressing you do to it, the window dressing will always become an insult.

If you had any depth to you, you would be more focused on trying to emphasize to as many people as possible that being a retard is not something worthy of being hated or abused. The word retard is not harmful at all, and it never will be. It is how people react to people who are retarded. When you focus on something as shallow as a word, you are hurting retards worldwide by misdirecting public attention from their cause.

The 'Hobbits' are retards. And so are you for getting butthurt over the word retard.

You can patent "a single online store that sells games, media, and video"?????

Help me out here. How the hell is this something that needs to be patented? Selling shit at a store seems like a pretty easily conceived/implemented idea. I'm pretty sure Amazon is doing this already.

I'm already on the iFork mailing list for pre-order updates!

Never.

That's right! They like it. The people as a whole like it when you take their rights away and screw them. The first thing the general public does when you even the playing field is falls on its face, and then it begs for somebody to come and protect it from itself. Then any oppressor that wants to can just rape them all to hell.

I'm so sick of it. Everybody is so happy to put tons of laws in place that restrict them from doing anything. So you know what? You can't let them decide. Democracy does not work. We gave it a good run, but it really turns out that the world population would really be better off with warlords running around hacking off limbs. At least then, even the very stupid can tell when their leaders are doing something wrong. Because it physically hurts.

As sarcastic as it sounds, I'm serious. People really really don't seem to want to make any decisions for themselves, or make any effort to watch their own backs. Every time any kind of personal responsibility or vigilance is required, people let their guard down and get screwed, and then demand that somebody else help them. So you know what I say? Take advantage of all the helpless losers while you can before the entire world is baby-proofed. They will screw *you* by voting all your rights out the window.