Half the words in the dictionary can "cause offense and hurt feelings or other psychological harm", if used the right way.

I run a small-medium sized web site that targets K-12 teachers. We started out small with very targeted ads, advertising on Google with a budget of $10/day and started making decent sales. We were doing so well that we decided to try Yahoo. We used the exact same ads and the exact same keywords as the ones for Google that were doing well. We put $100 in our Yahoo ads account to start with, and burned through the whole amount in 4 days without a single sale. Needless to say, we turned it off immediately and have never tried it again. Now we are making many more sales from our Google ads. I don't see how Yahoo's search marketing can be so inefficient and terrible. BTW, we also tried MSN/Live search and it's been active for about a year with a $20/day budget. The amount of money we give Microsoft every month is about $5. In other words, Microsoft search has absolutely no volume at all.

Quoted For Truth.

Also I wanted to add, like you, I've wasted a lot of money on junk CDs or junk DVDs. I have tapes/discs laying around collecting dust that, if I had been able to hear them FIRST before buying, I never would have bought them. And of course taking them back to the store does no good, because there's no "satisfaction guaranteed or money back" warranty like virtually all other products have.

Now that the internet is fast enough to transfer this stuff, I throw away virtually no money. I can hear or watch the product first before I buy it. That's how it should be:

- Let the customer try a product before throwing away his/her money
-or-
- Don't let the customer try a product, but be able to return it if they don't like it (like a candybar or other food products)

Guilty as charged ;-)

More exact it was a vote of over 100.000 people in Switzerland about the fate of their nation which was 'threatened' by a total of 4 (you read it right, four) minarets. A mayor factor why these people voted for the ban is the christian party in the country... Exactly like the ban on violent games the ban on minarets was engineered by a few conservatives who use fear to get a lot of people to vote their way. In the case of minarets they even had propaganda-posters like this: http://warincontext.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/swiss-anti-minaret-campaign1.jpg

Maybe it's tyranny, but the majority is just cattle...

Maybe he'd be singing "Walk Like An Egyptian"....

I used to be a fan of my C64 games as a kid and I loved playing PC games for years. So much in fact I tried breaking into game development and ran the local IGDA chpater for some years. My heart is still with games and I think they are a wonderful extension to the artforms of literature, cinema and storytelling. When I see how the game dev industry treats its customers these days, I really get the feeling they are way beyond stretching their welcome. Games (especially console games) are so icredibly overpriced and lacking of creativity and intellectual depth that I wonder why gamers are still interested in buying/playing them. I haven't upgraded my gaming pc for almost 8 years now and I only have a Wii because my wife like the balance board games (and admittedly I love being her audience). The only games I occassionaly play are the really old ones, like Civ II/III Baldur's Gate stuff, the good old Sierra point and clicks (Larry, 2D King Quest) because of the humor and fun in these games. Also I really love firing up the C64 emulator for a quick round of classics. When will they stop squeezing customers for every penny and drop the incredible graphics/hardware performance race that has been polluting the game content for the past decade. I don't give a damn about 3D performnace or yet another FPS, come up with something new, interesting exciting. Something that doesn't insult my intelligence and challenges and entertains me in a more subtle way. Dear Douglas Adams I miss you, you were well on your way to solve this problem but you passed too soon. Oh god, is no one going to change this rotten game dev industry we're having? Perhaps I'm just an old fool blabbering about the lost good old days, but doesn't anyone agree that it's not supposed to be like this? *sigh*

Exactly, that's what true democracy is about. It's about the public regulating what I can do on my own property and even inside my own home. It's about things that are harmless being banned just because some guy convinced the masses that that's the way to go. I would much rather live in a country with a constitution that secures certain basic rights even against every other person in the country. But yes, tyranny of the minority is worse than tyranny of the majority, it's just that both are pretty bad.

midicolorians! ... and it's not because I feel the crushing defeat of never again being able to pirate an Ubisoft title. Because lets face it, the protection will either be patched out OR an auth emulator will be written. Then it's left to Ubisofts pointy haired bosses to try to scheme something even more sinister to visit upon their paying customers.

If the RAM is filled with a lot of crap, such that the OS must keep loading of the HDD to get information, that slooooows system performance not speed it up.

Actually in modern operating systems RAM can be used as a disk cache is such a way as it can be "freed" at little to no cost when needed by programs. This in effect means you get quick access to often used programs as they are already cached in RAM.

The only situation in which "RAM is filled with crap and the OS goes to disk" (paraphrased) is when RAM is full - with programs. In this situation yes, it has to go to disk.

You're forgetting rule #1 of law: He who has enough money to buy off a judge, decides what the legal opinion will be.

I'm sure the judge is enjoying his new Wii-shaped swimming pool.

First post, *and* common sense ? I wish I had a +1 WhatAreYouDoingHere mod.

Well... there's actually a fair amount of malware, but if you're running AdAware / Spybot / Antivirus fully patched it mitigates most of it.

"It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too -- worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past."

correct me if i'm wrong, but rickrolling implies its just rick astley singing about how he won't let you down, right?

so what the heck is he referring to in the quote above? did they distribute 1080p video of ballmer in his underwear singing karaoke and throwing chairs?

speaking of which, a GIS for ballmer is not exactly flattering

http://images.google.com/images?q=ballmer

who would have guessed a GOOGLE image search wouldn't be flattering to steve ballmer?

i wonder what a bing image search for ballmer would... jesus what am i doing, better stop now before i run into rule 34

Now how the hell could you add on top of that? We are already at "stay connected to the internet and have the game send data to us for as long as you play". Data you, of course, do not get to review or even know the contents of.

What do you want to add on top of that? Handing over your firstborn as a hostage while you're playing with them getting the right to slaughter him should you only think of making a copy?