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Comment Re:I won't be back (Score 1) 156

Well, that's sad. WoW under Wine used to be extremely stable and run at substantially higher FPS than it ran on Windows. This included high settings, far viewing distance, and raids. That was back during WotLK, though.

I haven't played much since then, much less participated in raids. Running poorly on Linux is a dealbreaker for me, if indeed things have declined substantially since I last logged-in. For a stale franchise that's well past its peak, it seems to me that improving Linux support might unlock some additional player base. If they did such a thing deliberately and well, I'd think about returning. But what do I know?

Comment Re:line of SIGHT (Score 1) 395

This homonym-misspelling was driving me crazy, too. It's only reason I cared to read the comments, in fact. It seems to be a really common error in the telecom industry, so common it's possibly becoming the next "I could care less", which also drives me crazy.

Whether it's morons endlessly repeating "socialism" when they are referring to "welfare state" policies, misused expressions, misused words, or fabricated definitions for existing terms, I've been feeling a lot like Inigo Montoya recently. It's almost like I'm speaking a different language.

Comment Re:Absolutely! Down with 'used' products! (Score 1) 276

Scarcity only leads to slightly increased cost; however, with computer games, scarcity is rarely a factor except during the first couple weeks of release, and only with the physical store-bought copies of the game. There's essentially an infinite supply of digitally-delivered copies. Even in the first few months after release, the value is high due to the novelty and cutting-edge factor, but once the novelty and "prestige" of being one of the first to complete the game wears off, their prices tend to fall quickly because another game with better technology is going to be capturing everyone's attention.

In that regard, one could almost consider software to be consumable even if the license and media is transferable. If it's obsolete, it has negligible resale value when its owner upgrades.

This is even more true of Steam games. Since they are not transferable, they have no resale value even if not completely obsolete, and their retail value generally drops precipitously. The new releases may be at retail for a couple of months, then they drop off to the sub-$10 range by about the 1-year mark.

There's just no way to compare objects with some scarcity and high residual value (a used car's value or utility isn't diminished all that much by advances in technology and novelty) & one of the highest-scarcity commodities on the market (real property), to ephemeral, semi-tangible goods like computer games or software.

Comment This is not surprising at all... (Score 5, Insightful) 1237

...considering it's coming from someone whose view of science is something that you believe on faith, ignore inconvenient research, and consider even the slightest doubt or margin of error that an opposing viewpoint has to completely debunk it. It's not science to believe that since you have 100% confidence in your faith-based theory that has no evidence, but you can imagine a miniscule source of error in an opposing theory, that the person with the fewest doubts "wins". But just try telling a "Creation Scientist" that...or someone who believes on faith that there is not any possibility that there is human-caused global climate changed. They hold their views on faith, their minds will not be changed no matter how much evidence they're presented with.

Comment Re:Study shows... (Score 1) 630

I don't think it's simply "over age 45", but rather the "have 1 (or 2, or 3) kid [from failed marriage(s)] who is the most important thing in my life!" that is typical of that age group that makes for invisibility.

At least that's my perspective. That describes what seems like a majority of the profiles I've seen in my half-assed online dating attempts over the years. I'm just not interested in chasing that situation, and am not terribly likely to respond even if a single mother initiated contact. I'm going to be judgmental when it comes to something like living my life, and most of the causes of single motherhood boil down to regrettable choices on her part.

"Ugly" is highly relative and in the eye of the beholder. Singles who don't go through the effort to look their best probably won't do so well, and posting rubbish photos taken on phones at parties or from webcams in poorly-lit bedrooms, or not posting a photo at all really isn't putting one's best foot forward. This applies to singles of both genders. Yes, someone who comes across as slovenly or lazy is going to be invisible to almost everyone.

Comment Re:Study shows... (Score 1) 630

You do realize, don't you, that there's more to life than staying on your pre-programmed biological rails and doing every last thing your 'nads tell you to?

I'd go so far as to say the human race would be better off with the offspring of those who are self-aware and self-deterministic enough to decline to procreate for whatever reason, because at least they put some thought into it and aren't subject to the base impulses that invariably bring out the worst humanity has to offer. There's nothing more pathetic than the fools who follow their programming to the letter while rationalizing and attempting to claim that they are thinking for themselves and fulfilling a higher purpose.

Comment Re:Wrong (Score 1) 807

RMS is right, but he just expressed his opinion in the wrong way.

It's much better to quantify and qualify what makes something wrong. If the only justification against something like homosexuality is "because the Good Book (tm) said it is!", then more research ought to be done. Note that I didn't say "pedophilia" as the example there, because the Good Book (tm) doesn't really have a problem with that. Wrong is not wrong just because it's wrong or because someone says it is. There needs to be evidence collected to back-up the assumption and do more to hammer out the nuance.

Comment Re:WINAMP! (Score 1) 152

Exactly.

It's easy enough to look additional details up when you want to. A good music player plays the music in the background, and provides very basic information if you want it. It's hard to say what exactly is wrong with the current Amarok package in the Kubuntu repository, but it can't even do that. The entire UI is taken-up with its failure to retrieve the Wikipedia article on the song or album, the lyrics, and album covers (which I didn't want anyway), but an even more fundamental failure to correctly populate the metadata provided by streams such as those from Soma FM. It also lost the ability to display Cyrillic characters correctly since version 2 came out. Just when I've come to terms with my disappointments and am getting along with whatever I can't do with it anymore, Amarok somehow manages to surprise me with an all new disappointment.

Song: Streaming Data. Artist: Streaming Data. Album: Streaming Data.

Amarok: Broken. :-(

Comment But can it play CDs? (Score 2) 152

I might give it a try, I liked 1.4...the 2.* versions have sucked powerfully. A music player that can't play CDs? Seriously?

I really hate to criticize things people are making for the common good, but Amarok is pretty bad. It's super-bloated, but with basic functionality lacking or broken. It seems that as versions advance, more and more is broken. The interface becomes more and more cluttered and less and less usable, and the display elements that they ostensibly changed the whole thing over so they'd work in KDE 4 have been perpetually screwed-up too. The most used part of a media player, the controls, almost seem like an afterthought.

Sometimes, the time comes in a product's development cycle where maybe the folks working on it should just realize it took a very wrong turn and scrap it.

Comment Re:Discouraging thinking (Score 1) 433

If there is a compelling reason to run the light, talk your way out of it in court. If you have a tailgater, the camera will catch them in-frame too. A properly-configured red light camera won't catch people by surprise (short yellow, instantaneous-tripping when someone enters the intersection as the light turns red), it'll only light-up on those who deliberately are running red lights after they've had ample opportunity to behave and really have no excuse for breaking the law.

The net of it is, people should be aware of stale green lights and be prepared to stop or accelerate slightly to get through the intersection before the signal changes. They should be driving for the conditions, too. Mistakes happen, but when the camera issues the ticket, it's not that costly of a lesson to learn. The problem I have with some red light cameras are those cities that use them solely to drum-up revenue, shortening the yellow phase to the bare minimum. That is unsafe and encourages drivers to slam on their brakes and otherwise do risky things.

As I babble about in my comment farther down, I think properly-implemented red light cameras are great. I'll freely admit that I push things a bit when I'm driving-- I frequently drive about 5-10mph over the posted limit (except in construction and school zones) and I don't stop for yellow lights if I think I can get into the intersection in time. But I've only been lit-up by a red light camera once, and I really would've deserved the ticket and knew it, since it was me just being impatient and exercising really poor judgement...but the ticket never came, I guess because I had the temp tag inside the tinted rear window and the camera just couldn't see it clearly enough for anyone to make out. That's one offense out of thousands of times driving through camera-enforced intersections with my driving habits.

Comment I never really noticed how Denver implemented them (Score 1, Troll) 433

...but driving quite a bit nearby in Boulder, CO, I LOVE the red light cameras. They're one of the only things the traffic engineers and enforcement folks have done right.

The yellow lights are as long as they've ever been as far as I can tell, but there were a few problem intersections in town where 4-5 cars per lane would continue on through after the light had turned red. It was really out of control, frequently making folks who were turning left at a green arrow signal miss their opportunity to turn. The problem has been almost nonexistent since those cameras were put in around those intersections. They are very conspicuous and there are plenty of big signs warning drivers of the red light camera ahead, and they also don't trip unless someone enters the intersection a couple seconds after the light turns red, making it pretty obvious the city isn't out just to surprise motorists & drum-up revenue with tickets, but want to make sure that people just start heeding the signals. I can't even remember the last time I saw someone trigger one.

If they were evaluating the efficacy of the cameras here, I'd be attending the meetings and voicing my support. It's the way this sort of enforcement should be done, it targets only those scofflaws who misbehave because they think their hurry is more important than everyone else driving the roads and it's okay to break the law when they don't think there's a cop watching. Has it made the intersections safer? Almost certainly. Does it keep traffic flowing more smoothly? You bet. Does it reduce road rage? I'd wager it does.

Comment Re:KDE? (Score 1) 798

I've been using KDE for years, while it took me a while to adopt KDE 4 because it was shaky and 3.5 was nice and mature, I guess I do like where the KDE 4 line is now. Almost everything else is cartoonish, clumsy, locked-down, or crude by comparison. I can see KDE rising to more dominance on real computers as all the other distros, and Microsoft, and Apple all fight over tablet UIs.

But where's Konqui been lately? He's been kind of scarce over the past few years.

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