Disqus - Latest Comments for phineaspoe

Re: Ranking the Ten Best Scrooge Movies

phineaspoe — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 20:37:09 -0000

You got #1 right but #3 belongs above #2 and Scrooged deserves to be much higher.

Re: Did the Fujifilm X-H2S do the Trick? Or Investigating if Fuji’s PSAM Dial Cameras Brought New Customers into the X System – SURVEY

phineaspoe — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:40:57 -0000

Same. I couldn't care less if the camera does video or not. I don't want to shoot video and I certainly don't want to edit video, so all of these video additions are lost on me. It's the reason I didn't upgrade to the XT4 - most of the improvements were in video. I have no interest in the H line cameras at all because they are pushed as video cameras.

Re: Pixel Phones Finally Getting Under-Display Fingerprint Reader?

phineaspoe — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 16:26:20 -0000

Why do tech writers push this stuff so hard. A quick look through the comments will show you that most end users don't like this. There is nothing wrong with the rear fingerprint reader. It is tried and true, it is ergonomically positioned to be comfortable to use, and it is a feature that companies know how to make work. I had an under-screen reader on a OnePlus, and it sucked. It was slow and temperamental. You had to position your finger perfectly for it to work. I turned it off and just started using the pin because it performed so poorly. Hopefully the companies listen to the users instead of the writers when they are deciding what to include and eliminate.

Re: Shut Up & Sit Down | Review: Concordia

phineaspoe — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 09:19:17 -0000

Actually, it is true. I traded my copy because I was frustrated by never knowing who was winning. The end game bonuses based on god cards are huge. Unless you can keep in your head exactly how many of each god everybody has so you can do the math of what everybody's end game bonus for each god will be each turn, which I couldn't do, then you really don't know who is winning.

Re: It’s On! National Review Goes After Trump, Trump Swings Back

phineaspoe — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 12:05:41 -0000

In what way has Trump demonstrated any commitment to conservative principles? He certainly espouses populism and nationalism/protectionism, but I see no commitment to conservatism. Or, put better, where does he espouse a commitment to liberty?

Show me where he is proposing to cut government and reduce its power over our lives. Show me where he is worried about restoring the Constitution and dismantling the non-Constitutional powers the government has assumed for itself. As far as I can tell, he is willing to completely disregard the Constitution to achieve his ends. As far as I can tell, his policies are all about sustaining, or even growing, government so he can use its power to achieve his ends. If I'm wrong, show me. I'm willing to listen.

But, as far as I can tell, I'm not wrong. True isn't a conservative. Trump isn't about personal liberty. And it hurts the cause of those who believe in a minuscule government that lets people determine the course of their own lives to hold him out as the standard bearer.

I understand all of the anger people have toward government, but electing a narcissistic bully who will "punish" the "other side" isn't the answer. We have to get back to actually espousing real conservative principles. We have to educate the populace at large why they are better than the socialist principles the other side wants to impose. It's a hard sell because everybody loves "free", and it is easy to be taken in by politicians promising to hand out all kinds of stuff that they've taken from others, but it is a lesson we desperately need to teach so we as a nation don't have to learn it through the dreadful experience of living under it. The populist anger and nationalism prevalent in this election cycle is a digression the cause of liberty can't afford.

Re: Donald Trump -- Conservatives Should Stand against Him

phineaspoe — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 12:02:37 -0000

This isn't an answer, it is a red herring. You didn't show how Trump is actually a conservative, you just tried to denigrate his competition. I didn't ask about his competition. I want to know what Trump's conservative credentials are. I want somebody to sell me on his promotion of freedom and liberty. I want somebody to point out instances of Trump's devotion to the Constitution. I want somebody to show point out a Trump promise to substantively curb federal power.

I'm not interested in answers about the alternatives. I'm not going to buy into Trump because of the negatives of his opponents, I want somebody to try to sell me Trump based solely on his positives.

Re: Donald Trump -- Conservatives Should Stand against Him

phineaspoe — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:39:57 -0000

Re: Shut Up & Sit Down | Review: Trajan

phineaspoe — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 16:43:56 -0000

I would much rather play Trajan than Village any day of the week.

Re: Is Evangelical Worship Headed for a HUGE Crash?

phineaspoe — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 08:59:16 -0000

Honestly, I could copy and paste this reply to roughly 90% of the dissenters. It is interesting to me that what they seem to have gotten from the article is that someone is attacking the "modern" music they prefer. The author does no such thing. The author is just trying to facilitate an environment that draws people into the heart of worship instead of shutting them down and having them tune out. It isn't about a certain kind of music, it is about making worship an event that engages the entire church body instead of a performance that they sit back for.

Re: Is Evangelical Worship Headed for a HUGE Crash?

phineaspoe — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 08:40:27 -0000

This article is not about a certain style over another, it is about the heart of the worship taking place. It is a caution to not let worship become a performance by the worship team that excludes the congregation. The church is not an audience, they are the body of Christ, and they need to be involved in the worship of our Lord. It is an exhortation to get people involved in worship, to not teach them to sit back and watch the "professional worshipers" do it for them.

Re: Is Evangelical Worship Headed for a HUGE Crash?

phineaspoe — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 08:39:28 -0000

It is a astounding that two people can read the same article and draw two vastly different conclusions. This article is not about a certain style over another, it is about the heart of the worship taking place. It is a caution to not let worship become a performance by the worship team that excludes the congregation. The church is not an audience, they are the body of Christ, and they need to be involved in the worship of our Lord. It is an exhortation to get people involved in worship, to not teach them to sit back and watch the "professional worshipers" do it for them. I think it is a timely message.

Re: Is Evangelical Worship Headed for a HUGE Crash?

phineaspoe — Sun, 22 Jun 2014 08:31:25 -0000

The article clearly states the author attended the National Worship Leader Conference, hosted byWorship Leader Magazine. It is in the first sentence. This article is a response to what he saw there.

Re: Ron Paul Launches Home-School Curriculum, No 'Compromises with Tyranny' Included

phineaspoe — Wed, 29 May 2013 09:49:36 -0000

I really don't understand how some one could make this statement. Elite colleges are now actively recruiting homeschooled kids because they perform better. It has been found that homschooled kids graduate with a degree at a significantly higher rate than public school educated kids, and with a higher grade point average to boot. They also, on average, do better on the SAT, ACT, and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Homeschooled children also do very well at the Scripps Spelling Bee, the National Geographic Bee, the Apangea Math Contest, the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, and the USA Mathematical Olympiad, being significantly over represented as a percentage among the winners. On average, homeschoolers outperform their publicly educated peers in every standardized metric used to evaluate performance and achievement. This includes socialization. The public school system is a failure.

Re: Ron Paul's Home Schooling Curriculum Will Turn Your Kid into a Little Ron Pau

phineaspoe — Wed, 29 May 2013 09:07:32 -0000

Actually, elite colleges are now actively recruiting homeschooled kids because they perform better. It has been found that homschooled kids graduate with a degree at a significantly higher rate than public school educated kids, and with a higher grade point average to boot. They also, on average, do better on the SAT, ACT, and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Homeschooled children also do very well at the Scripps Spelling Bee, the National Geographic Bee, the Apangea Math Contest, the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, and the USA Mathematical Olympiad, being significantly over represented as a percentage among the winners. On average, homeschoolers outperform their publicly educated peers in every standardized metric used to evaluate performance and achievement. The public school system is a failure.

Re: Halla - Quadrotors Create ‘Star Trek’ Insignia During...

phineaspoe — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:22:56 -0000

I heard about this. They said it moved throughout the night. Would have been cool tos ee in person.

Re: SimCity, I Deserve Better Than What You’re Not Giving Me

phineaspoe — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:34:44 -0000

Crappy DRM aside, my biggest issue with this new iteration of the game is they completely transformed the game from the experience I fondly remember. I had a friend comment on a SimCity article I posted on Facebook not long ago, asking if I remembered playing on the SuperNES. And I do. I remember it really well. I loved that game. I loved building my city, my sprawling metropolis, watching it grow, putting out fires here and there to keep people happy and the taxes rolling in. I would separate my cities into districts and start them in different corners of the map, growing them together until my city covered every square inch of space I was afforded before starting over with a new city.

As time went on and new versions came out the duties associated with running my cities became more varied and complex but that only made the experience better. The game was my sandbox, the cities were my empires. Majestic mountain ranges of glass and steel that I had planned, mapped out, and executed. To me a friend sitting in my living room while I showed off my cities was as social as SImCity got. And my enjoyment of the game didn't rely on them at all.

This new version of SimCity seems too much like a Facebook game by Zynga. Your city can't exist on it's own. Maxis programmed the game so cities are much smaller and have to count on each other for different services. To me, this is a huge flaw in the game. I understand this makes it more like real life but it's not the game long time fans want to play. We're used to enormous self-contained kingdoms that we rule over alone. The idea of making deals with another player (or play multiple linked cities on your own)"You take care of schools, police & fire depts and I'll take care of power and sewer." is just anathema to us.

This arrangement has a couple of flaws. The first is that you have to trust your neighbor. There seems to be much too much opportunity for things to go wrong here. Griefing is a problem in most online games and, a game where my city's power (or whatever service) is being provided by my neighbor, seems perfectly designed to facilitate it. The worst situation I can think of is a person being a jerk and leaving a neighbor basically stranded for the fun of it. But I can also imagine getting hooked up with someone that turns out to be completely incompetent and ending up in a situation that is functionally the same. And, as far as I know, Maxis still has not provided a way for you to disengage from a city whose owner has left it, and yours too, to die.

The other flaw is that you, because of the nature of this persistent system, the way your actions have consequences not just your cities but those around you, players are no longer allowed to have access to their save data. It's all stored in a cloud somewhere. And while that is problematic for the reasons you already outlined, it also means you can't be as creative as you once would have been. For instance, I have been 10 or 15 hours into building a city when a situation came up. Instead of playing it safe I went for it all, secure in the knowledge that if it didn't work I could just reload a save and try again. That is no longer the case. No more playing around trying different things to see what happens. The harshest penalty before was you waste a couple of hours, see it isn't going to work, and you reload your last save. Now you might ruin your whole region.

A side note to this would be the people who like to destroy their cities for fun, again secure in the knowledge that they could put everything right again by simply reloading their last save. It's analogous to saving your game in Skyrim or Fallout before massacring a city. You don't want it to screw up all of the progress you've worked on but it is a fun way to spend an afternoon. And it's ok because you can just reload that last save...

Maxis seemingly changed or removed almost everything about the game that veteran players enjoyed. They made the cities smaller, less self-sufficient, added a social aspect nobody asked for, and took away our safety net that allowed us to play around in the game and not take it so seriously. And again, all of that is without mentioning all of the bugs, shoddy AI, and the horribly intrusive DRM. It really is a shame. I really wanted to like this game, was really excited about it a year ago when I saw it was being made. But I keep finding reason after reason to be disappointed.

Re: Maxis has 'no intention' of making SimCity offline

phineaspoe — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:40:56 -0000

My question is: What happens in two or three years when EA decides the game isn't profitable enough and kills the servers?

Re: In Praise of CNN - Atlantic Mobile

phineaspoe — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:10:57 -0000

I tried flipping around the usual media outlets but finally settled on Al Jezeera English and BBC World Service, both available on my Roku. I thought both were better, more informative and at the same time much less partisan, than their American counterparts. Knowing now that those channels are available to me, I'll probably choose them over the big American media outlets in the future.

Re: It’s Elementary: Why a Female Watson Isn’t a Bad Idea for Latest Holmes Series

phineaspoe — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 07:37:33 -0000

Ultimately this is all extraneous fluff because your initial reaction (The truth is, I was all set on Sherlocks...Other Holmeses need not apply....) was the correct one.

Re: 5 alternatives to Instagram for Facebook haters

phineaspoe — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:04:08 -0000

You forgot Camera 360 and Vignette.

Re: WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin tweets venom about Newt’s win, Romney’s defeat in SC

phineaspoe — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:38:07 -0000

Definitely not a Romney fan, in fact I think the Republican field is again very weak this cycle, but it amazes me that people think Newt is such a hardcore conservative. He's not:

1) He is for an individual mandate which forces every American to buy health care insurance. He attempts to draw a distinction between his mandate and Obama’s mandate but the explanation begs more questions than it answers.

2) Gingrich both championed and voted for the massive prescription drug benefit that George Bush added to the Medicare program. The result of his vote was trillions of dollars of federal government spending layered on the backs of our children and grandchildren. Newt’s explanation that you must have a drug benefit if you are going to have Medicare is double-speak of the first order right out of Orwell.

3) He voted to continue the Department of Education when we had the only vote in the last generation that had a chance to close the department.

4) He identifies himself as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. Roosevelt was the father of the modern progressive movement which in its present incarnation is occupying our city centers with tents and chants.

5) In 2007 Gingrich advocated no changes to Freddy Mac and Fanny Mac. Their collapse two years later occurred because those changes were not made, and the result is the fiscal crisis and enduring recession all American are suffering through today.

6) Gingrich is for federal government subsidies in a variety of ways, including agriculture and bailouts. But get this. To reclaim a conservative mantle he says that he is “against subsidies that do not work.”

7) Gingrich has been a huge global warming alarmist for many years in his books, infomercial advocacy, and debate performances, something that he did not back down from during his interview but attempted more double-speak to talk his way past it. Over the last decade, Newt Gingrich has advocated radical government spending and massive societal change to combat his fantasy that man-made global warming is both real and an imminent threat to civilization.

8) Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth, slammed Gingrich in a statement. “It is highly disturbing that Newt Gingrich would equate the success of private-equity firms like Bain Capital to ‘rich guys looting companies,’” Chocola said. “The fact is, private-equity firms are a critical component of the free-market economy, increasing economic growth, and creating prosperity. Speaker Gingrich knows better, and the fact that he would stoop to economically ignorant class warfare rhetoric to promote his own political campaign is downright Obamaesque.

9) He labeled Paul Ryan’s plan ‘right-wing social engineering’.

Re: WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin tweets venom about Newt’s win, Romney’s defeat in SC

phineaspoe — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 10:24:05 -0000

I don't understand why Ron Paul is thought of this way. He is the only candidate in the field that truly wants to gut the federal government and return liberty to the people. All the other candidates want the government to get more involved with peoples' lives in one way or another.

Re: Your iPad Should Be in An Incase Magazine Jacket [GIVEAWAY]

phineaspoe — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 10:04:59 -0000

I have an OtterBox Defender Series and a DodoCase for my iPad. While I love the looks of the DodoCase the spine has become loose from use so it doesn't prop up very well. It's also been dropped and the wood cracked in the corner and I had to superglue it back together so my iPad doesn't slip out of it. The DodoCase is very stylish but very fragile.

The OtterBox does a wonderful job of protecting the iPad, and I love the faceplate/stand that comes with it, but it does restrict access to ports a little bit. I can't get any headphones to connect through the case except the crappy iPod ones. Forget using any of your nicer headphones with a thicker wire with the OtterBox because they seem to have sized the port just for the iPod headphones. Other than that it's a great case though.

Still haven't found the perfect solution yet. I was interested in the Happy Owl Studio Wallet Lite but they took forever to get them in production. I really like the looks of the Hard Graft Tilt. It's beautiful but very expensive. I'll probably end up sticking with the OtterBox.

Re: The Going Viral Myth

phineaspoe — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:27:14 -0000

I would submit 42 Entertainment's ad campaign for the Dark Knight as an example of someone aiming for a viral marketing campaign and hitting their mark. Also, Will It Blend. It can work but you write about it like it's horrible and unattainable.

Re: http://hallakol.tumblr.com/post/1231455127

phineaspoe — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 19:39:11 -0000

Sounds like something we should definitely do.