I completely understand your sentiment. However, I would also claim the sentiment to encourage everyone to eat everything that is served to them is what singlehandedly promotes childhood obesity in the United States. I actually had to teach my own father (who is fit but has high cholesterol) that the trick to being healthy is to stop eating when it's time to stop eating, regardless of what remains on your plate, or regardless of whether or not you want to finish it. If you want your nieces not to waste food, don't over-prepare food. If they get food at a restaurant, get a to-go box. If you want leftovers for tomorrow, put away half of the food you prepared and only serve the other half.
I fail to see how this is your nieces' faults. Nor do I think it's yours, per se. I'm just saying that your nieces' response is perfectly acceptable if they are being over-served food.
Precisely! I cannot begin to fathom how someone can soapbox about the necessity of free and open communal WiFi and then immediately turn around and spit acid at anyone who doesn't use the highest level of data encryption. I mean, if everything's up for share, why shouldn't your data be? Better yet, let's outsource it to the government and have them provide the free WiFi so that it's completely free and obviously secure because government things don't cost anyone real money and they most certainly never monitor citizens for nefarious purposes.
As anti-capitalistic as a lot of people can be on Slashdot, paying for things you need and use, and thus being paid to provide such goods and services, is not that bad a way to live if it all stays in check. Would I like cheaper internet? Sure. Am I going to vote with my wallet and cancel my internet to make a statement about the high cost? Hell no.
what the F#$% a 12 and 13 year old are doing with Facebook accounts? NOTHING I had to say at that age was worthy of public forum. I miss the days when you had to be in college to have a Facebook account; at least it raised the bar a modicum above middle school antics. My parents would have banned me from electronic devices entirely if I had tried to have a public page at the age of twelve (not that that's normal, but it kept me from doing stupid sh** like this, which I probably would have at 12 or 13). At least what we're seeing is a return to normalcy that childhood is not this carefree wonderland to be cherished and preserved by adults. Kids are naive, amoral, and sometimes downright cruel, and the job of parents is to teach them good, unselfish values that make them understand their actions resonate far beyond their own sheltered environments.
You bring up an interesting point. Counterfeiting goods is considered detrimental to legitimate companies because it floods the market with illegitimate goods that are of dubious quality; their cheaper price usually reflects the cheaper construction. Digital piracy, however, is for almost all instances the free exchange of the original software and not a knock-off. Thus the impact is purely financial, which is a spurious argument when considering a comparatively less affluent society. I don't really know what it means, but it's worth pointing out that there is a difference in piracy and counterfeiting.
Wow. You're right. If the government doesn't protect us, Anonymous will RULE THE COUNTRY, banishing all women from the internet and compelling people to put things in other things so that they may do things while they do things.
Oh, I don't know about banishing women. They do have the options of Tits before they GTFO.
So what happens when Sony requires every future game, DVD, and BluRay be connected to the PSN in order to be able to play?
Banning hackers is one thing. Acting as a media tyrant, as Sony has done since they started in the media entertainment industry, is something entirely different.
Beyond that, I wonder if this will serve as any kind of counter to the master key of the PS3 being released. While such a jailbreak theoretically allows for PSN connection with a compromised system, it does require that the hacking community patch for the latest security release. Take a system offline and you never have to worry about patching and can run blu-ray games burned from ISOs until your heart's content. But if Sony has a game with a unique key per disc, and all the sudden that game disc starts reporting 9,000 saves across the country, you can start pegging which consoles are running pirated versions and can kill them from your network and/or sue them in California a la Sony's PSN EULA.
Regardless of whether you consider Assange to be a freedom fighter or a terrorist, I think a safe lesson to be learned is, " don't be a douchebag mouthpiece for a controversial organization." It won't end well, whether it ends in bad press or Soviet torture methods.
I will not take your word for it, and I have, in fact, read the research. As another poster mentioned before, the research figures supporting cell phones causing distracted driving are dubious at best and completely contrived at worst. Where I live, cops are required to report any accident or traffic stop as a situation caused by a cell phone if a cell phone is visible and powered on in the vehicle when the officer arrives at the scene. Tail light out and phone charging in the console? Impaired driving due to cell phone operation. Two years ago, eating a burrito was 43% more likely to cause a vehicular accident than talking on a cell phone. Now every study you can google says cell phones are tantamount to driving drunk statistically. Last time I checked, talking on a cell phone didn't impair my judgement so badly that I vomited all evening.
... if there are more than 3 zeros after the decimal point, I generally don't have to worry about it. The sensationalist media doesn't help, but if people could do a little fact checking on their own, then we could avoid 99% of the problems caused by overreaction.
Hmm, but 1% of the problems of overreaction would still remain? Seems like a statistically viable number to worry about. I should stick to overreacting!
Are they under the age of 18 and playing half-naked in their room? Are they having sex while watching a movie when the parents aren't home? Microsoft engages in the monitoring of and sale of information abetting child pornography!
See, that just doesn't have enough tact or art to it... I'd say we'd be more likely to see the RIAA and MPAA mysteriously emerge as a front for a child pornography ring that appeared on their servers overnight. That sounds more like the slashdot way, and that way it hurts them for a lifetime rather than a millisecond, like all of the people whose lives they ruin.
Except we are not a democracy -- we are a democratic republic. As the saying goes, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. It empowers the majority to destroy the rights of the minority, which is exactly the fear that this ruling has created. A republic recognizes inaliable rights of the individual that prevents a majority from being able to strip away said rights by specific enumeration of a codified set of rights like a constitution. The problem has nothing to do with granting corporations the right to lobby -- any insistance otherwise is to strip away the rights of a body of individuals for your own agenda (and corporations ARE a body of individuals regardless of whether or not those individuals have influence). So yes, a democratic playing field IS out of balance because of present donations by companies, organizations, and rich individuals. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Wealth is power, and size is power, and both of these carry with them privileges that are recognized in a democratic republic. SO LONG as the rights of the individual are not stripped by those with size and power, there is no inequity. SCOTUS' ruling simply allows for more freedom of speech for tax-paying organizations. The problem is not with the granting of more freedoms, the problem is that the loopholes allow for some clever opacity for people to push an agenda in secret. Of course, the only two counters to this are to either strip away anonymity, and therefore privacy, or to remove power and wealth from corporations and individuals for "the greater good," which is socialism in a nutshell.
Customer: I bought this Sony Car because it had headlights. I need headlights so I can drive my car at night.
Sony: We removed the headlights feature at your last service because headlights can be used to flash oncoming drivers. But removing headlights has made your Car lighter, so it can go faster and use less fuel. We hope you like the changes.
Customer: I can't use my Car any more because you took the headlights away, thus it's no longer roadworthy and it would be inconvenient for me to drive it. Give me back my headlights, and pay $800 for the rental car I've had to use in the meantime.
Sony: No. The 400 page document you signed at purchase gives us the right to add or remove any part upon servicing your vehicle. If headlights are important, may we suggest our new car line, the Vaio?
In essence, you are technically correct in assuming that the plural form of the verb should be used. However in cases where the plural form of a word is more often used than the singular, it can usually be paired with the singular form of the verb without being incorrect more colloquially. "Media" referring to news is often used as a singular ("media welcomes new corporate overlords") as well.
You have to buy from the official store. I know on itunes for iphone apps you have to back it up yourself since they won't let you download it again if you lose it.
That is completely untrue. Your iTunes apps are saved to your account, so if you accidentally or intentionally delete something, you can download it again.
I don't know how Xbox handles that sort of thing.
The exact same way. All purchases are tied to your account. Sure, if the servers go down then you're boned, but then you could have just backed up your data in the first place.
[A]nd they sure as hell won't let you hook up an external drive via usb
You can set up 16 Gb partitions for use with USB media to back up all of your game content and saves, minus disk images of physical disks (downloads work fine) and user data, which cannot be duplicated but can be recovered from their server. Is it DRM? Yeah, and it's restrictive. Is it screwing you six ways from Sunday? Not really. You're losing the sell-back option, but it was only a matter of time before publishers started going after the used game market anyway.
This is a major consumer misconception. While I'm the first person on the "give me reliable physical media that you can't revise post-purchase a la 1984" bandwagon, I've spent a long time dealing with smaller publishers in switching to digital distribution models (and all the while explaining why DRM is evil), and I was surprised as anyone to learn that packaging costs, storage, shipping, hardware, printing, and media costs are an infintesimal part of the production cost. More than that, digital distribution comes with its own set of incredibly high costs that actually outpaces traditional distribution: data servers, drive platters, support staff, server storage location... not to mention all of the costs that remain the same - graphic design, advertising, product placement, and even physical-copy game-cards so people without/uncomfortable with using credit cards online can purchase too -- which all has to incur traditional packaging costs, warehouse storage, shipping costs, duplicating hardware, physical media, package printing, etc.
Not to mention online advertising is a total b*tch to do right. With a physical product, it has the added benefit of advertising itself (forgetting for a moment retailer practice of charging for shelf-space placement). With digital, no one knows it's there unless you're paying someone to advertise it for you, or giving them a substantial chunk of the pie. So yes, digital distribution is not only going to NOT cost less, it's probably going to cost a whole lot more. Just look at e-book pricing arguments, because the same amount of work is going into them, and that work usually costs a lot more. Web developers get paid $75-$125 / hr. industry rate; truckers get a touch over minimum wage. Why bother with digital downloads, then, if it's going to cost more? Perishability and tracking. Not only can you ensure a 1-1 purchase / use rate by destroying the secondary market, you can also research market variables by looking at the profiles of who is downloading your media and what other kinds of media they are purchasing. Hence, this is why DRM has become so attractive to publishers, because in everyone's cry for digital distribution, what everyone REALLY wanted was cheaper IP, and publishers as for-profit organizations were compelled to recoup on profits lost by the shift to digital distribution.
Yes, yes, I know the controversy over freeze production "beers" but the 27% they're referring to is Sam Adams Utopias, which releases only 10,000 bottles in a production run. I was fortunate enough to sample some last night. However, this is not the highest percentage alcohol beer by conventional standards of what constitutes beer (malt, hops, water, yeast). That honor would go to Scottish brewery known as BrewDog for their 41% "Sink the Bismarck", ousting their 32% ABV Tactical Nuclear Penguin.
Just to clarify I wasn't referencing Mitnick to glorify him but to compare "real" numbers to the imaginary damages caused by "leet h4x0rz" blackhats of Hollywood infamy (a la Swordfish and Live Free or Die Hard) who are "hacking our intornets!" Should have used script kiddies instead just to avoid confusion.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely understand your sentiment. However, I would also claim the sentiment to encourage everyone to eat everything that is served to them is what singlehandedly promotes childhood obesity in the United States. I actually had to teach my own father (who is fit but has high cholesterol) that the trick to being healthy is to stop eating when it's time to stop eating, regardless of what remains on your plate, or regardless of whether or not you want to finish it. If you want your nieces not to waste food, don't over-prepare food. If they get food at a restaurant, get a to-go box. If you want leftovers for tomorrow, put away half of the food you prepared and only serve the other half.
I fail to see how this is your nieces' faults. Nor do I think it's yours, per se. I'm just saying that your nieces' response is perfectly acceptable if they are being over-served food.
you cannot fight real bullets with lawyers not matter how many lawyers you have.
I beg to differ. In enough quantity they make great human shields.
Precisely! I cannot begin to fathom how someone can soapbox about the necessity of free and open communal WiFi and then immediately turn around and spit acid at anyone who doesn't use the highest level of data encryption. I mean, if everything's up for share, why shouldn't your data be? Better yet, let's outsource it to the government and have them provide the free WiFi so that it's completely free and obviously secure because government things don't cost anyone real money and they most certainly never monitor citizens for nefarious purposes.
As anti-capitalistic as a lot of people can be on Slashdot, paying for things you need and use, and thus being paid to provide such goods and services, is not that bad a way to live if it all stays in check. Would I like cheaper internet? Sure. Am I going to vote with my wallet and cancel my internet to make a statement about the high cost? Hell no.
what the F#$% a 12 and 13 year old are doing with Facebook accounts? NOTHING I had to say at that age was worthy of public forum. I miss the days when you had to be in college to have a Facebook account; at least it raised the bar a modicum above middle school antics. My parents would have banned me from electronic devices entirely if I had tried to have a public page at the age of twelve (not that that's normal, but it kept me from doing stupid sh** like this, which I probably would have at 12 or 13). At least what we're seeing is a return to normalcy that childhood is not this carefree wonderland to be cherished and preserved by adults. Kids are naive, amoral, and sometimes downright cruel, and the job of parents is to teach them good, unselfish values that make them understand their actions resonate far beyond their own sheltered environments.
You bring up an interesting point. Counterfeiting goods is considered detrimental to legitimate companies because it floods the market with illegitimate goods that are of dubious quality; their cheaper price usually reflects the cheaper construction. Digital piracy, however, is for almost all instances the free exchange of the original software and not a knock-off. Thus the impact is purely financial, which is a spurious argument when considering a comparatively less affluent society. I don't really know what it means, but it's worth pointing out that there is a difference in piracy and counterfeiting.
Wow. You're right. If the government doesn't protect us, Anonymous will RULE THE COUNTRY, banishing all women from the internet and compelling people to put things in other things so that they may do things while they do things.
Oh, I don't know about banishing women. They do have the options of Tits before they GTFO.
Where would it end?
Last post, page 15. Unless somebody bumps.
I would be inclined to agree.
So what happens when Sony requires every future game, DVD, and BluRay be connected to the PSN in order to be able to play?
Banning hackers is one thing. Acting as a media tyrant, as Sony has done since they started in the media entertainment industry, is something entirely different.
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Beyond that, I wonder if this will serve as any kind of counter to the master key of the PS3 being released. While such a jailbreak theoretically allows for PSN connection with a compromised system, it does require that the hacking community patch for the latest security release. Take a system offline and you never have to worry about patching and can run blu-ray games burned from ISOs until your heart's content. But if Sony has a game with a unique key per disc, and all the sudden that game disc starts reporting 9,000 saves across the country, you can start pegging which consoles are running pirated versions and can kill them from your network and/or sue them in California a la Sony's PSN EULA.
Regardless of whether you consider Assange to be a freedom fighter or a terrorist, I think a safe lesson to be learned is, " don't be a douchebag mouthpiece for a controversial organization." It won't end well, whether it ends in bad press or Soviet torture methods.
Just imagine what this would do to the overcrowding of our local zoos.
I will not take your word for it, and I have, in fact, read the research. As another poster mentioned before, the research figures supporting cell phones causing distracted driving are dubious at best and completely contrived at worst. Where I live, cops are required to report any accident or traffic stop as a situation caused by a cell phone if a cell phone is visible and powered on in the vehicle when the officer arrives at the scene. Tail light out and phone charging in the console? Impaired driving due to cell phone operation. Two years ago, eating a burrito was 43% more likely to cause a vehicular accident than talking on a cell phone. Now every study you can google says cell phones are tantamount to driving drunk statistically. Last time I checked, talking on a cell phone didn't impair my judgement so badly that I vomited all evening.
... if there are more than 3 zeros after the decimal point, I generally don't have to worry about it. The sensationalist media doesn't help, but if people could do a little fact checking on their own, then we could avoid 99% of the problems caused by overreaction.
Hmm, but 1% of the problems of overreaction would still remain? Seems like a statistically viable number to worry about. I should stick to overreacting!
I know how we can make this announcement look bad
I'll do you one better; I know how we can make this announcement look downright evil.
[...] Are they wearing Seahawks jerseys?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught-in-privacy-snafu-says-kinect-might-tailor/[...]
Are they under the age of 18 and playing half-naked in their room? Are they having sex while watching a movie when the parents aren't home? Microsoft engages in the monitoring of and sale of information abetting child pornography!
See, that just doesn't have enough tact or art to it... I'd say we'd be more likely to see the RIAA and MPAA mysteriously emerge as a front for a child pornography ring that appeared on their servers overnight. That sounds more like the slashdot way, and that way it hurts them for a lifetime rather than a millisecond, like all of the people whose lives they ruin.
Isn't this exactly what Mythbusters did on their cryptography episode?
Except we are not a democracy -- we are a democratic republic. As the saying goes, democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. It empowers the majority to destroy the rights of the minority, which is exactly the fear that this ruling has created. A republic recognizes inaliable rights of the individual that prevents a majority from being able to strip away said rights by specific enumeration of a codified set of rights like a constitution. The problem has nothing to do with granting corporations the right to lobby -- any insistance otherwise is to strip away the rights of a body of individuals for your own agenda (and corporations ARE a body of individuals regardless of whether or not those individuals have influence). So yes, a democratic playing field IS out of balance because of present donations by companies, organizations, and rich individuals. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Wealth is power, and size is power, and both of these carry with them privileges that are recognized in a democratic republic. SO LONG as the rights of the individual are not stripped by those with size and power, there is no inequity. SCOTUS' ruling simply allows for more freedom of speech for tax-paying organizations. The problem is not with the granting of more freedoms, the problem is that the loopholes allow for some clever opacity for people to push an agenda in secret. Of course, the only two counters to this are to either strip away anonymity, and therefore privacy, or to remove power and wealth from corporations and individuals for "the greater good," which is socialism in a nutshell.
Obligatory Larson
Why does a very destructive sneak attack from the ocean on major coastal cities around December sound so familiar?
Oh weird, I think I'm beginning to see a pattern.
Customer: I bought this Sony Car because it had headlights. I need headlights so I can drive my car at night.
Sony: We removed the headlights feature at your last service because headlights can be used to flash oncoming drivers. But removing headlights has made your Car lighter, so it can go faster and use less fuel. We hope you like the changes.
Customer: I can't use my Car any more because you took the headlights away, thus it's no longer roadworthy and it would be inconvenient for me to drive it. Give me back my headlights, and pay $800 for the rental car I've had to use in the meantime.
Sony: No. The 400 page document you signed at purchase gives us the right to add or remove any part upon servicing your vehicle. If headlights are important, may we suggest our new car line, the Vaio?
Customer: But EULA was TL-DR!
Judge:.Cry more, n00b
Rest of the world: American Idol!
FTFY
In essence, you are technically correct in assuming that the plural form of the verb should be used. However in cases where the plural form of a word is more often used than the singular, it can usually be paired with the singular form of the verb without being incorrect more colloquially. "Media" referring to news is often used as a singular ("media welcomes new corporate overlords") as well.
You have to buy from the official store. I know on itunes for iphone apps you have to back it up yourself since they won't let you download it again if you lose it.
That is completely untrue. Your iTunes apps are saved to your account, so if you accidentally or intentionally delete something, you can download it again.
I don't know how Xbox handles that sort of thing.
The exact same way. All purchases are tied to your account. Sure, if the servers go down then you're boned, but then you could have just backed up your data in the first place.
[A]nd they sure as hell won't let you hook up an external drive via usb
You can set up 16 Gb partitions for use with USB media to back up all of your game content and saves, minus disk images of physical disks (downloads work fine) and user data, which cannot be duplicated but can be recovered from their server. Is it DRM? Yeah, and it's restrictive. Is it screwing you six ways from Sunday? Not really. You're losing the sell-back option, but it was only a matter of time before publishers started going after the used game market anyway.
This is a major consumer misconception. While I'm the first person on the "give me reliable physical media that you can't revise post-purchase a la 1984" bandwagon, I've spent a long time dealing with smaller publishers in switching to digital distribution models (and all the while explaining why DRM is evil), and I was surprised as anyone to learn that packaging costs, storage, shipping, hardware, printing, and media costs are an infintesimal part of the production cost. More than that, digital distribution comes with its own set of incredibly high costs that actually outpaces traditional distribution: data servers, drive platters, support staff, server storage location... not to mention all of the costs that remain the same - graphic design, advertising, product placement, and even physical-copy game-cards so people without/uncomfortable with using credit cards online can purchase too -- which all has to incur traditional packaging costs, warehouse storage, shipping costs, duplicating hardware, physical media, package printing, etc.
Not to mention online advertising is a total b*tch to do right. With a physical product, it has the added benefit of advertising itself (forgetting for a moment retailer practice of charging for shelf-space placement). With digital, no one knows it's there unless you're paying someone to advertise it for you, or giving them a substantial chunk of the pie. So yes, digital distribution is not only going to NOT cost less, it's probably going to cost a whole lot more. Just look at e-book pricing arguments, because the same amount of work is going into them, and that work usually costs a lot more. Web developers get paid $75-$125 / hr. industry rate; truckers get a touch over minimum wage. Why bother with digital downloads, then, if it's going to cost more? Perishability and tracking. Not only can you ensure a 1-1 purchase / use rate by destroying the secondary market, you can also research market variables by looking at the profiles of who is downloading your media and what other kinds of media they are purchasing. Hence, this is why DRM has become so attractive to publishers, because in everyone's cry for digital distribution, what everyone REALLY wanted was cheaper IP, and publishers as for-profit organizations were compelled to recoup on profits lost by the shift to digital distribution.
Yes, yes, I know the controversy over freeze production "beers" but the 27% they're referring to is Sam Adams Utopias, which releases only 10,000 bottles in a production run. I was fortunate enough to sample some last night. However, this is not the highest percentage alcohol beer by conventional standards of what constitutes beer (malt, hops, water, yeast). That honor would go to Scottish brewery known as BrewDog for their 41% "Sink the Bismarck", ousting their 32% ABV Tactical Nuclear Penguin.
Just to clarify I wasn't referencing Mitnick to glorify him but to compare "real" numbers to the imaginary damages caused by "leet h4x0rz" blackhats of Hollywood infamy (a la Swordfish and Live Free or Die Hard) who are "hacking our intornets!" Should have used script kiddies instead just to avoid confusion.