Laws being worded a specific way does not prevent them from being re(mis)interpreted by well- or ill-meaning lawyers and judges. If this reading of the law goes through, it becomes precedent (hi lawyers!), and that opens the door for more nefarious things, like *actually* being prosecuted for providing fake info in an attempt to create anonymity, or later on, the outlawing of anonymous posting in toto. Regardless of the facts in this case, do you really want it to be established law that making a fake myspace profile is the legal equivalent of hacking a bank account? Just so my analogy is clear, it is in fact illegal to hack a bank account, even if you don't take any money. It's prosecuted as "accessing a computer without authorization".
I understand (vaguely), the need for "justice", but this is being made a criminal ex post facto, which is not allowed under our constitution. I'm sure many laws will be passed that makes harassing someone using an alias over the internet a crime, but right now, wherever Lori Drew resides, it is not a crime, or else she would be charged with it. In her district, anyway, she has not "performed an act of criminal harassment", as you say. If she had, this would be a pretty open and shut case, and this discussion would not be happening.
Given that you work with coax all day, I find it hard to believe you've never heard of impedance matching, which will take care of your little problems with reflections in a jiffy.
Also, you're completely wrong about HDMI and "error control". All digital transmissions are subject to some kind of error correction. I mean, I suppose you could have a receiver that didn't bother, but that would be stupid. Either way, the cable doesn't and can't perform that error correction anyway. No cables do; it all happens at the receiver. I've come to the conclusion that you have no idea what you're talking about.
It shows that the rate of driver deaths in a Ford Explorer is twice that of a Volkwagen Jetta. However, it also shows that the Dodge Neon is the most dangerous car on the road for the driver, so we really can't make too many generalizations just according to body type. I imagine (and so does the above article) that maneuverability is a huge component in avoiding or mitigating the damage in accidents. The difference is between "active safety" and "passive safety". It's almost like people buying SUVs assume that they will get into a serious accidents, and therefore plan for that contingency, whereas people who buy small, agile cars like the Jetta want to do everything they can to avoid the accident.
No one seems to be asking the obvious question, so I'll do it. Why in the world would the game need to phone home every 10 days to function? TFA doesn't have an explanation, and everyone here just assumes it's some sort of anti-piracy method. Isn't a one-time activation good enough? You send the server your CD-key and some sort of hash of your system information, and you're good to go. That hash is stored locally (encrypted, natch), and compared to a recalculated version at runtime. If they don't match, then you have to activate at the server again, conceivably using up one of your alloted activations.
What do the publishers hope to achieve by having this check? I can't fathom a situation where the first activation would succeed, but 50 days later, the fifth activation would fail. Can someone enlighten me?
All right, that's going too far. Creative is obviously a terrible company with infuriating anti-consumer practices, but it is not true that their add-in cards are worse than onboard RealTek chipsets. That is demonstrably not true, per TFA.
The actual problem with Creative cards for all these years is that they had a monopoly on features because of EAX. Gamers who also like to record had no other choices (and still don't, until Asus or someone else offers something like the X-Fi platinum). Monopolies breed bad practices, but the hardware itself is high quality. The software leaves much to be desired, but there is a healthy modding community to make up for it(check out driverheaven.net for examples of this).
I don't think most sound cards actually include any appreciable amount of onboard memory, so this is not really true. I may be confused by Creative's marketing for it's highest-end cards, though (which included up to 64MB of RAM). I took their ads to mean that sound cards generally did not have memory and used system RAM for buffering. In that case, the only function they provide is post-processing. Asus's argument is that with multicore processors being nearly standard equipment, and most of the processing power going under-utilized in the higher-end machines that would have sound cards, the extra hardware processing is not useful (Microsoft obviously thinks this is true as well.)
Of course, I might be wrong about the RAM thing, but I do know that the Creative X-Fi XXXTREMEMusicXXX card I bought two years has at most 2MB of RAM onboard. I am certain its presence will have no affect on my FPS.
As someone in nearly exactly the same boat (change wife for girlfriend, watching tv for staring at my cat), I must wholeheartedly agree. I just started playing about 2 months ago, and I haven't gotten a character above level 30, the reason for me, at least, being that NO ONE has characters in the middle range, so a lot of the harder quests are off-limits. Most people seem to not bother getting alts that high, and all other characters are at endgame. Forget the mid-range dungeons as well -- no one's there to run them. Blizzard is making this game beatable for me and others like the parent poster. Yes, I said beatable. When I get to level 60 and beat all the quests, I've beaten the game. That's how games work for me and I'm sure plenty of other people who have various and sundry interests (wives, cats), outside of MMOs. I don't care about the endgame raids nor PvP, and I think Blizzard knows they've attracted many people like me recently. Without this patch, though, I might have stopped playing. Point to Blizzard.
You must understand, there is a huge difference between having perfect pitch and being so bad at singing that you have to lipsync. In fact, most people with perfect pitch have a very difficult time singing in tune along with a group, because they base the notes they produce on some absolute standard, and not on the notes being produced around them. For example, let's say Mr. Elton John generally tunes his instruments to A = 440Hz. If it's a particularly humid day out, the pitch of the instruments might sneak a little bit higher after they've been tuned, say to A = 442Hz. Because he has perfect pitch, or so you imply, Elton will have a very difficult time singing A = 442Hz, because that would effectively be out of tune for him. He would probably be so bothered by this discrepancy that he might even consider lip-syncing for his own sanity. It's actually a fairly useless skill for a singer or composer of tonal music to have, and it has no correlation with one's musical talent at all.
It's all about the Teenagers, with their part time jobs, no responsibilities and lots of disposable income.
I for one am pleased that it's teenagers and not 40-year-old housewives who are anointing today's musical trends (c.f. my next post about Debbie Boone).
Also, at $6/hr it still takes a while to buy a $20 CD. I'm not really sure teenagers are to blame for price inflation.
But it's a disaster in the making for the long term. RIAA has made fortunes selling "Greatest Hits Of The Beatles" with every format change (LP, cassette, CD) and every discovery of a lost tape in some recording studio manager's attic. But you can only make those kinds of repeat sales to people who still want to listen to the Beatles 40 years later. How many of today's kids - raised on a diet of music as a disposable "listen-once-throw-in-trash-can" commodity - are going to be interested in "Britney: The Lost Tracks" from a bunch of.WAV files on a hard drive found in a surplus store in 2028, let alone "Titney's Pears, 2031 Edition" when he uses a sector editor to piece together a sixth track out of a FAT full of lost file chains?
OK, so you're not wrong, but you're also making kind of a stupid point. You're right, nobody will care about Britney Spears 40 years from now, blah, blah, blah.......it doesn't matter. You're acting like "if it wasn't for these damn kids, we'd have another Beatles!". You know what? The Beatles were a complete and total fluke. No one has ever been even remotely as critically and commercially successful as they were. Judging the state of the music industry at any time by their standard won't work.
Do you know what the #1 song was in 1977? It was "You Light Up My Life", by Debbie Boone. It was HUGE. It was number #1 on the US charts for 10 weeks. No one cares about Debbie Boone now. Pop singers come and go. It's not a new thing. Everyone really and truly needs to stop using Britney Spears as an argument about the quality of Pop music today. Debbie Boone sucked more than you could possibly know.
The story does say that he embedded his trojan program into "several usenet groups used by pedophiles". This may not be the only place he hid the thing to be downloaded, the story's unclear there, but I think that could be considered "reasonable search and seizure".
The "news story" is a bit light on content and heavy on hagiography, but he may have legitimately have been trying to catch bad guys here.
The world's different these days. It's been mentioned already above, but deserves reiteration: the widely available free/downloadable porn has been eating away at the porn industry's bottom line for several years. The market for porn DVDs is smaller than the market for porn vhs tapes as a result. Presumably the market for HD porn media will be even smaller, and therefore the porn industry will not be a deciding factor in the format wars. VHS was so popular with porn consumers mostly because they didn't have to jack off in porn theatres anymore. That's not really a problem right now.
We've already seen the lack of fervor in public over the DVD-Audio/SACD that the music industry tried awhile back as attempt to not only recreate the buying spree that followed the release of CDs, but also to try and lure consumers away from online distribution. It didn't work, and DVD-A/SACD can no longer be found in most stores. I can see no reason why the same thing won't happen with HD-DVD/Bluray. Vast numbers of the DVD-watching public have never even seen a DVD in its best light anyway, what with their general lack of progressive scan players and TVs, and they don't seem to care, so HD media will be a tough sell to any but the home theatre enthusiasts.
I know I don't have to summarize the story again for you. The controversy here is plenty real. What you suggest amounts to the paper of record ignoring possibly criminal (that's right, fraud is illegal) action by our elected government. What is wrong with you? Yawn as much as you want, it won't make this go away.
OK, the parent comment was stupid. But since when do bullshit speculations get modded as "insightful"? Leave the bogus alternative history at the Free Republic forums, please.
Yes, I've played with a Zune (though not the software I'll admit). I was underwhelmed. It seemed a little kludgy to me to get where I wanted in the interface (though I'll admit I am an iPod owner and therefore used to that interface)This brings up an interesting idea: one of the main reasons always cited for the small number of people that successfully switch from PC to Mac is difference in interface, i.e. they're used to windows and MacOS is different. This kind of turns that whole thing on its head. The consumer block that buys Mp3 players, which is large and getting larger, is used to the interface of the iPod, and now it's Microsoft with the market penetration problem. I think this qualifies as irony.
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Laws being worded a specific way does not prevent them from being re(mis)interpreted by well- or ill-meaning lawyers and judges. If this reading of the law goes through, it becomes precedent (hi lawyers!), and that opens the door for more nefarious things, like *actually* being prosecuted for providing fake info in an attempt to create anonymity, or later on, the outlawing of anonymous posting in toto. Regardless of the facts in this case, do you really want it to be established law that making a fake myspace profile is the legal equivalent of hacking a bank account? Just so my analogy is clear, it is in fact illegal to hack a bank account, even if you don't take any money. It's prosecuted as "accessing a computer without authorization".
I understand (vaguely), the need for "justice", but this is being made a criminal ex post facto, which is not allowed under our constitution. I'm sure many laws will be passed that makes harassing someone using an alias over the internet a crime, but right now, wherever Lori Drew resides, it is not a crime, or else she would be charged with it. In her district, anyway, she has not "performed an act of criminal harassment", as you say. If she had, this would be a pretty open and shut case, and this discussion would not be happening.
Given that you work with coax all day, I find it hard to believe you've never heard of impedance matching, which will take care of your little problems with reflections in a jiffy.
Also, you're completely wrong about HDMI and "error control". All digital transmissions are subject to some kind of error correction. I mean, I suppose you could have a receiver that didn't bother, but that would be stupid. Either way, the cable doesn't and can't perform that error correction anyway. No cables do; it all happens at the receiver. I've come to the conclusion that you have no idea what you're talking about.
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html
It shows that the rate of driver deaths in a Ford Explorer is twice that of a Volkwagen Jetta. However, it also shows that the Dodge Neon is the most dangerous car on the road for the driver, so we really can't make too many generalizations just according to body type. I imagine (and so does the above article) that maneuverability is a huge component in avoiding or mitigating the damage in accidents. The difference is between "active safety" and "passive safety". It's almost like people buying SUVs assume that they will get into a serious accidents, and therefore plan for that contingency, whereas people who buy small, agile cars like the Jetta want to do everything they can to avoid the accident.
What do the publishers hope to achieve by having this check? I can't fathom a situation where the first activation would succeed, but 50 days later, the fifth activation would fail. Can someone enlighten me?
All right, that's going too far. Creative is obviously a terrible company with infuriating anti-consumer practices, but it is not true that their add-in cards are worse than onboard RealTek chipsets. That is demonstrably not true, per TFA. The actual problem with Creative cards for all these years is that they had a monopoly on features because of EAX. Gamers who also like to record had no other choices (and still don't, until Asus or someone else offers something like the X-Fi platinum). Monopolies breed bad practices, but the hardware itself is high quality. The software leaves much to be desired, but there is a healthy modding community to make up for it(check out driverheaven.net for examples of this).
I don't think most sound cards actually include any appreciable amount of onboard memory, so this is not really true. I may be confused by Creative's marketing for it's highest-end cards, though (which included up to 64MB of RAM). I took their ads to mean that sound cards generally did not have memory and used system RAM for buffering. In that case, the only function they provide is post-processing. Asus's argument is that with multicore processors being nearly standard equipment, and most of the processing power going under-utilized in the higher-end machines that would have sound cards, the extra hardware processing is not useful (Microsoft obviously thinks this is true as well.)
Of course, I might be wrong about the RAM thing, but I do know that the Creative X-Fi XXXTREMEMusicXXX card I bought two years has at most 2MB of RAM onboard. I am certain its presence will have no affect on my FPS.
As someone in nearly exactly the same boat (change wife for girlfriend, watching tv for staring at my cat), I must wholeheartedly agree. I just started playing about 2 months ago, and I haven't gotten a character above level 30, the reason for me, at least, being that NO ONE has characters in the middle range, so a lot of the harder quests are off-limits. Most people seem to not bother getting alts that high, and all other characters are at endgame. Forget the mid-range dungeons as well -- no one's there to run them. Blizzard is making this game beatable for me and others like the parent poster. Yes, I said beatable. When I get to level 60 and beat all the quests, I've beaten the game. That's how games work for me and I'm sure plenty of other people who have various and sundry interests (wives, cats), outside of MMOs. I don't care about the endgame raids nor PvP, and I think Blizzard knows they've attracted many people like me recently. Without this patch, though, I might have stopped playing. Point to Blizzard.
You must understand, there is a huge difference between having perfect pitch and being so bad at singing that you have to lipsync. In fact, most people with perfect pitch have a very difficult time singing in tune along with a group, because they base the notes they produce on some absolute standard, and not on the notes being produced around them. For example, let's say Mr. Elton John generally tunes his instruments to A = 440Hz. If it's a particularly humid day out, the pitch of the instruments might sneak a little bit higher after they've been tuned, say to A = 442Hz. Because he has perfect pitch, or so you imply, Elton will have a very difficult time singing A = 442Hz, because that would effectively be out of tune for him. He would probably be so bothered by this discrepancy that he might even consider lip-syncing for his own sanity. It's actually a fairly useless skill for a singer or composer of tonal music to have, and it has no correlation with one's musical talent at all.
OK, so you're not wrong, but you're also making kind of a stupid point. You're right, nobody will care about Britney Spears 40 years from now, blah, blah, blah.......it doesn't matter. You're acting like "if it wasn't for these damn kids, we'd have another Beatles!". You know what? The Beatles were a complete and total fluke. No one has ever been even remotely as critically and commercially successful as they were. Judging the state of the music industry at any time by their standard won't work.
Do you know what the #1 song was in 1977? It was "You Light Up My Life", by Debbie Boone. It was HUGE. It was number #1 on the US charts for 10 weeks. No one cares about Debbie Boone now. Pop singers come and go. It's not a new thing. Everyone really and truly needs to stop using Britney Spears as an argument about the quality of Pop music today. Debbie Boone sucked more than you could possibly know.
The story does say that he embedded his trojan program into "several usenet groups used by pedophiles". This may not be the only place he hid the thing to be downloaded, the story's unclear there, but I think that could be considered "reasonable search and seizure". The "news story" is a bit light on content and heavy on hagiography, but he may have legitimately have been trying to catch bad guys here.
The world's different these days. It's been mentioned already above, but deserves reiteration: the widely available free/downloadable porn has been eating away at the porn industry's bottom line for several years. The market for porn DVDs is smaller than the market for porn vhs tapes as a result. Presumably the market for HD porn media will be even smaller, and therefore the porn industry will not be a deciding factor in the format wars. VHS was so popular with porn consumers mostly because they didn't have to jack off in porn theatres anymore. That's not really a problem right now.
We've already seen the lack of fervor in public over the DVD-Audio/SACD that the music industry tried awhile back as attempt to not only recreate the buying spree that followed the release of CDs, but also to try and lure consumers away from online distribution. It didn't work, and DVD-A/SACD can no longer be found in most stores. I can see no reason why the same thing won't happen with HD-DVD/Bluray. Vast numbers of the DVD-watching public have never even seen a DVD in its best light anyway, what with their general lack of progressive scan players and TVs, and they don't seem to care, so HD media will be a tough sell to any but the home theatre enthusiasts.
I know I don't have to summarize the story again for you. The controversy here is plenty real. What you suggest amounts to the paper of record ignoring possibly criminal (that's right, fraud is illegal) action by our elected government. What is wrong with you? Yawn as much as you want, it won't make this go away.
OK, the parent comment was stupid. But since when do bullshit speculations get modded as "insightful"? Leave the bogus alternative history at the Free Republic forums, please.
Yes, I've played with a Zune (though not the software I'll admit). I was underwhelmed. It seemed a little kludgy to me to get where I wanted in the interface (though I'll admit I am an iPod owner and therefore used to that interface)This brings up an interesting idea: one of the main reasons always cited for the small number of people that successfully switch from PC to Mac is difference in interface, i.e. they're used to windows and MacOS is different. This kind of turns that whole thing on its head. The consumer block that buys Mp3 players, which is large and getting larger, is used to the interface of the iPod, and now it's Microsoft with the market penetration problem. I think this qualifies as irony.