elle

In a year or two this'll be bundled with the Shadowrun game.

This is inappropriate, and I'm sorry, but I can't be the only person who sees that photo and thinks "donkey punch."

Follow the money. Who stands to gain or lose the most?

Leach, if guilty, gains nothing from suing Tech and egging them into firing him. If he had tucked his tail, admitted doing something wrong, apologized and took his suspension, Tech would look even worse for firing him, and Leach would have another job pretty quickly. Either way, he's out $800,000 bowl bonus that Tech no longer has to pay him. The accusations alone damage his chances of getting a job somewhere else that pays as well and gives him a shot at the BCS - the NFL might take him, but there's no telling if his bizarro system would work as well on that level.

On the other hand, Tech saves millions by voiding the contract of a coach who's been successful, but not successful enough - beating Texas is fine, going 11-1 is great, being ranked in the top 5 during a season is fantastic, but doing so by stepping on booster, media and administration toes while never securing any big prize isn't enough in major-conference ball. Tech wants to move on but weren't smart enough to do so before Leach signed a long, big-money extension. Someone got buyer's remorse along the way, wanted to pull the plug, and heard that the Joneses had an ax to grind over Adam's playing time. Match made in heaven.

Meanwhile, Adam Jones gets a tour of the talk-show circuit, maybe a book deal. His dad and ESPN get to help promote the whole thing. Everyone there makes a dime, probably many more dimes than Adam Jones would ever make from his dim football career prospects. They had nothing to lose - Leach clearly wasn't going to cave in to Papa Jones' phone stalking and play Adam more.

Was Texas Tech right to fire Mike Leach? Depends on what your definition of "right" was. If it's to maybe try to lure a higher-profile coach now that Tech has national name recognition off Leach's success, with the aim of improving the program while saving some cash off a tilted contract that Leach milked from them, then finding the clause that lets them fire Leach without significant financial burden is the tactically "right" choice.

The only way Tech is ethically right, however, is if Adam Jones actually was abused by Mike Leach. And if all the Jones family can do with a PR firm and Papa James' ESPN ties is barf up an undated, unverifiable cell phone cam clip onto YouTube months after the fact, then Tech had better have something they're holding back on for the ensuing lawsuits, or the lawsuits against them could turn into money pits of their own - and if Tech really bones things, could get the NCAA involved and blow a hole into their program far bigger than the fallout of a non sequitur coach who pitches fits.

You guys are yelling at him and saying his credibility is hosed because he's waiting to upgrade a mission-critical system that's already stable and functional because he's afraid of undocumented changes destabilizing it? I hope I never work where you run IT.

Since Apple didn't document the change, the only way to find out about it is for it to break something that worked in 10.5. That's Aron's complaint about 10.6 - for him, there's too many _undocumented_ changes, whether for good or bad, in 10.6 for him to trust it with mission-critical services.

You didn't have a problem? That's great, good for you. Is it a PEBKAC on Aron? Because of the lack of documentation, not really. He may not be following "best practices in computing," but by not documenting a fundamental change to how a critical system utility works, neither is Apple. That's the point of this post, which looks like it went straight over everybody's head.

Fourth Amendment, child please. There are bigger violations of the 4th Amendment that you don't care about because they only happen to poor people or brown people, but some moron college babies get caught doing something you once did and it's OH GOD CALL THE COURTS

How much does it cost to open a Facebook profile? Nothing. To send a friend request? Nothing. To view the photos? Nothing.

So the time it took? Maybe an hour? Two, tops? At cop wages, that's, what, $50 at most? The fines would cover that a few times over.

Take the rest and give a bonus to the cop who came up with this, for getting these dumb-ass kids to understand that posting public photos of stupid behavior is a bad idea. Call me when cops use this to bust people who aren't breaking the law OH WAIT, that ALREADY happens for every major political protest about things that ACTUALLY MATTER.

You kids need to learn to focus your rage better. It's why nobody takes you seriously. Why aren't you all this angry about the drinking age? You really want to do something about this? GET THE DAMN DRINKING AGE LOWERED.

It hurts me that Cynical Bastard Dan is a fan of Dinosaur Comics' over-imaginative optimist T-Rex.

Good on them - veterans need all the help they can get.

Hopefully EA also considers a charitable donation to organizations helping civilians killed by terrorist acts, considering that MW2 insinuates military vets and intel agents assist or abet in them.

"We have 14 million players on Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The hardcore gamers make up a smaller core of that, and PC gamers are the smallest group of that core. It is a very vocal community and they are all online."

In a nutshell, this represents how much IW doesn't understand its user base, or how gaming communities operate, or the potential ramifications of pissing off that "smallest group."

Yes, of the millions of CoD 4 owners, no more than a few percent of them are really hardcore on any platform - people who are active in clans, play in competitions, and log more time in CoD 4 than the vast majority of gamers log in all games.

But a much more significant slice of gamers _identify_ with these hardcore gamers, even though they don't _game_ like them. The ex-hardcores who reminisce about old clans, the STFU NOOB adolescents, the weekend warriors who watch videos of the game at work more than they play at home - they very closely follow hardcore gamers in every genre, and more importantly, they consider themselves part of hardcore gamer culture.

And they're predictable. When that tiny, loud hardest-core segment of gamers complains, these peripherally hardcore gamers listen. They are, or at least want to be, considered part of that community - even if these gamers aren't as directly affected by hardcore PC gamers, they empathize. They see IW turn on a community to which they're sympathetic and it doesn't look good to them.

Most of these gamers won't join the PC hardcore boycott. But IW is betting heavily that the game will exceed these gamers' expectations and override their concerns. If the game is good enough, then yes, the hardcore PC gamers ultimately won't matter, and their word of mouth will carry MW2 to its $750M of expected revenue.

But if MW2 falls short - and especially if it trips in the quality of online play or balance - those PC hardcore role models that IW calls a loud, insignificant minority will be ready, waiting and anxious to whip them into a frenzy. MW2 will still make hundreds of millions of dollars off preorders and launch-week and holiday retail sales, but new-copy sales on consoles won't last past December - the cool kids within the society will be trumpeting the next thing instead of ignoring it.

All of this PC-gamer PR hassle, the insignificant number of sales IW's already lost, and the preloaded negative word of mouth it's generated, already could be silenced by IW releasing dedicated server software. They'd silence it tomorrow if Bowling jumps out and says, "Dedicated servers a week after launch, guys! Sorry!"

Instead, they just keep dropping bags of crap on PC gamers (Bowling dumping on dedicated server operators, "stuff like mouse control," "PC gamers are the smallest") and laughing while they watch the firestorm because they already know that no matter what, they're all going to make a ton of money.

That's what it all boils down to - they don't have any reason to care because the check's in the mail. As long as they try to act like they do, they keep their jobs. Stockholders get their revenue numbers and everyone who matters goes home happy.

Knowing Weisman, he'll finish a great game, sell the rights for it to Activision with a horrible contract, Activision will cancel it, and five years from now we'll be doing this all again.

Technology can't fix stupid.