I don't think it's the per hour charge, but the hours billed that's excessive in most cases. For what seems like a relatively simple libel case, 50k GBP at even 200/hr would be 250 hours of work. At 40 hours/week, that's 6 solid weeks of work. Since most lawyers take on more than one case at a time, you can stretch that out to 3 months easily just by working on two cases. That seems like a fairly extreme amount of time for what boils down to a case where the lawyer's research takes 5 minutes to get the tweet, and then let's be generous and say 40 hours to get precedents. It shouldn't take that much court time for a case like this.
So yes, there's still something wrong with the picture.
All you CAN eat, not all you WANT to eat. Unless it says "All the tomatoes you can eat," as long as there's other food available, they're fine. It's a pretty bad analogy.
The problem with Clear is all the stories about people who literally have no service, but still get nailed with ETF fees, asked if they have friends who would take over the contract instead, get incentives for others to join up, etc. That, and they claimed "no throttling" in their advertising, and then throttle people...
dichotomies are fine, it's the false ones you need to watch out for. Further, I don't really see how that's a dichotomy. The only thing I see is the implication that corporations are at least as bad as governments, anything further is up to the reader.
No, not really. Though it's one of the big positives of digital delivery, there's absolutely nothing stating that you *need* to be able to instantly download it. They're producing the product, just... later.
Damn it, I feel like I'm defending EA, but I'm not. I'd be rightfully pissed if they stopped him from continuing to play his game, but for not being able to simply download it in the first place, there's too many other things that could cause that for me to work up any righteous indignation.
Not everyone wants to sell their games. Some people collect them, you know. And yes, you can easily play one game on one PC, and then have someone play a different game you own (nice scarequotes, tardmonkey) on a different PC, since all you need to do is put steam in offline mode on one computer, and then you can play any of the games that don't require steam authorized servers (pretty much any non-Valve game). As for loaning them to friends, well, same deal. Go over to their place, log on to your steam account, install said game, and go in to offline mode. They can play, and YOU CAN PLAY IT AT THE SAME TIME! It's even better than loaning physical media. Betcha thought you were clever or something.
Ten minutes? Not everyone lives down the block from a game store, and further, not everyone lives where it's feasible to own a vehicle. Those two facts alone means your ten minutes is laughably naive. Furthermore, the only game store worth a shit within THIRTY minutes of me is only open until 5 or 6 except on Thursdays, and they operate a lot on preorders, and so don't carry a lot of spare copies on release week. By way of comparison, Steam is always open and with plenty of copies. 2 am? Sure. And I get the game downloaded in about an hour, too. Or I buy it at 10pm, download it while I sleep, and then play it at 6am, well before the store opens at 9. And I don't have to do it every time, either, since I have a rather large backup solution that I can save install files on for the games I know I'm going to want to replay often. Then it's simply a matter of how quickly my gigabit ethernet network can transfer the file to whichever computer I want it on. Installation after that is usually about 5 minutes.
Actually, it is, since the failure point comes in at a different moment. It's like having a television delivered. The actual case is akin to expecting the TV to show up today, so you clear some space to deal with that, and plan to use it that night. Then you get a call and get told "it's not showing up today." Yeah, it sucks, but it's not there, so there's not much you can do. Preventing someone from playing an already installed game is having the TV show up, and get set up, but then the delivery people stand there and slap your hand away from the remote any time you go to use it. It's there, there's no real reason you couldn't use it, except some gatekeeper's making you not.
EA's installation manager is actually a *download* manager. It's merely delaying the delivery of digital goods due to a flaw in the backend stating that no deliveries can be made to that address when someone clicked an option to stop other kinds of activity from that address. If you can't see the functional difference in the situations, it's because you're being wilfully stubborn.
I've used Macbooks. That keyboard sure as fuck ain't awesome. I could go out and buy OS X and stick it on any machine for under $900, and...well, okay, yes, damn you, that is a really nice screen. I'd love a better screen on my laptop, and since I should have some cash spare soon, I'm looking in to replacements, seeing if there's anything feasible. As for the aluminium unibody, I've honestly never understood the drooling over that. I treat my laptop carefully, as befitting a costly machine, and it just seems to make Macbooks terribly heavy. Am I missing something about it that just isn't obvious? The protection idea is negligible, it's not really better at dispersing heat, aesthetics are a matter of taste, and it's heavier. I've weighed my 17" HP vs. my friend's 15" Macbook.
He said "arbitrarily" changing. Linguistical shift over time is natural as language evolves. But simply using a word to mean something other than what it means, when there are other words which already mean that which you are trying to convey is not helpful. It is, in fact, doubleplusungood.
Except that still, I don't see how this is a punishment for people who aren't driving drunk. Drunk driving is illegal, and doing it is illegal regardless of if you're caught. That means if this system stops you from driving, it's not a pre-emptive punishment, it's a timely one. If someone who isn't drunk is prevented from driving because the system malfunctioned, it's still not a punishment, because any car part can malfunction and stop you from driving (battery, distributor cap, fuel pump, etc), so it's just an inconvenience. A shitty one, but any car trouble sucks. If your goal is only preventing points of failure in a vehicle and calling it removing pre-emptive punishment, we'd be better served by moving to electric cars with fewer moving parts.
Usually that distinction comes from a judge who decides how much of a penalty to apply after the person was caught and charged. And since different BAC levels affect different people different amounts, I'd rather that a limit be lower to catch people more easily affected, and catch a couple people who are only "slightly" breaking the law, then raise it up and let more people who suck cheese at driving and are 3 sheets to the wind after a highball drive around and run me over.
My opinion as a dedicated pedestrian? All drivers fucking suck, just to different degrees. Pick an easily corrected shitty driving behaviour, fix it, and move on to another. This is a good step.
This is already pretty much how it works in most states.
Except for the multiple accounts I have from US friends, and several studies of recidivism rates to back it up, that show a lot of DUIs do it 3 or 4 times, and the real repeat offenders hit double digits on offenses. So yes, it is that the penalties aren't high enough, because it's not being enforced at those levels.
However, if this system works, I think it'd go a long way to solving the problem, both reducing deaths and lower legal congestion.
Er, from what I understand, this isn't just testing for residue on your fingers, this is actually testing blood level concentration. There's a lot of comments on here that seem to think only sloppy drunks who spill their drinks are the ones being caught by this, and if that were true, this would be the most useless system ever. Washing hands isn't going to do it, serving drinks isn't going to do it. Those wipes with alcohol, or alcohol-based hand sanitizer might do it if used shortly before the test, though.
Does the level of offence really matter? If the law says "put on your fucking seatbelt or you're breaking the law" does it matter whether it comes with the rider "but you're only getting dinged for it if you're doing something else wrong too" or "and your ass is ours if we see it"? You're still breaking the law either way. I could accept you denouncing seat belt laws, but getting pissy about whether it's a primary or secondary offence is the most butt-fuck stupid thing I've read today, and I've been on both YouTube and Something Awful.
Also the fact that a lot of people drive because they *like* driving. It wouldn't matter how much better the computer was, those people would still want to be in control.
Er, why shouldn't it? You'd rather force insurance companies to take risks that as honest businesses, they shouldn't? Introduce either additional legislation forcing companies to provide insurance to high-risk individuals, or starting up a separate government insurance for individuals who can't get insurance from private companies?
The insurance is required because otherwise innocent individuals would need to pay for the damages caused by others, but drunk drivers are regarded as a high risk by companies, and so coverage is costed to reflect that high risk. Allowing them to go without insurance is a terrible idea since they're the ones most likely to use it, and mandating affordability is terrible since it punishes those who are forced to insure them, or those who are soaking up the cost being passed on to them by their insurance company. Personally, I think the system's working, and is completely separate and unlike the sex offender registry in any way.
Actually, yes, it is stuff that couldn't be done with simply one larger screen. You're not going to find a developer willing to split a single screen on a handheld in order to accommodate menus, that's why the pause screen menu was bloody well invented. Further, you're not going to find a developer who has you use two separate control schemes on the same screen when one's a touch interface, because it'd interfere with your ability to see what's happening on the screen with the other portion while making swipe gestures, meaning that instead of doing input and looking at the other screen at the same time, judging what your next input should be, you instead make touch gesture, evaluate screen, choose next action, continue. It lends toward a slower playstyle, so you can't throw as much at the player.
Honestly, did you even *think* about my examples before you replied?
Actually, it greatly improved Crono Trigger DS, and similar games, since it allowed you to access menus directly, and quickly, streamlining the crap you had to go through to get back to playing, then you had The World Ends With You, which used the screens independently, with differing control schemes, and then Metroid Pinball, which scrolled the top screen, while keeping the lower (with your paddles) static so you could always have those in view, then there's Trace Memory DS and other puzzle games that benefited from having two screens to use for puzzles. So, yes, many games used the double screens to great effect.
Actually, the way it works is if you visit a website with a Facebook widget (those omnipresent "Like" buttons, for instance), you may be considered to have logged back in to Facebook by visiting that website, since it links to Facebook's servers.
Figured someone would go after that. I like software freedom as much as hardware, I just think linux is a complete fucking failure as a model for market viability. Can't be a fanboy of something you think's a failure. I do enjoy MS's products for the most part, but my phone's an Android. I'll be a Linux fanboy the moment that running it as a base install becomes as trivially easy as a Win 7 install. The power of linux is in its customizability, but the power of Windows is I don't need to research the fuck out of any hardware I plan to get to make sure it's compatible, and then hope that if any bugs pop up, someone will be kind enough to fix it.
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I don't think it's the per hour charge, but the hours billed that's excessive in most cases. For what seems like a relatively simple libel case, 50k GBP at even 200/hr would be 250 hours of work. At 40 hours/week, that's 6 solid weeks of work. Since most lawyers take on more than one case at a time, you can stretch that out to 3 months easily just by working on two cases. That seems like a fairly extreme amount of time for what boils down to a case where the lawyer's research takes 5 minutes to get the tweet, and then let's be generous and say 40 hours to get precedents. It shouldn't take that much court time for a case like this.
So yes, there's still something wrong with the picture.
Your and idi0t.
That's about the only consideration your retardation needs in this case. Lulz.
Due to his poor phrasing, you missed that he has an online backup of his local drive full of music, and that the CDs are another level of redundancy.
I think you're right, though. If I listened to my music any more, I'd re-rip/download in flac, rather than the high-bitrate mp3s I have.
All you CAN eat, not all you WANT to eat. Unless it says "All the tomatoes you can eat," as long as there's other food available, they're fine. It's a pretty bad analogy.
The problem with Clear is all the stories about people who literally have no service, but still get nailed with ETF fees, asked if they have friends who would take over the contract instead, get incentives for others to join up, etc. That, and they claimed "no throttling" in their advertising, and then throttle people...
dichotomies are fine, it's the false ones you need to watch out for. Further, I don't really see how that's a dichotomy. The only thing I see is the implication that corporations are at least as bad as governments, anything further is up to the reader.
No, he bought a game, and due to his internet being out, he couldn't install it. That's the equivalent of the story here.
No, not really. Though it's one of the big positives of digital delivery, there's absolutely nothing stating that you *need* to be able to instantly download it. They're producing the product, just... later.
Damn it, I feel like I'm defending EA, but I'm not. I'd be rightfully pissed if they stopped him from continuing to play his game, but for not being able to simply download it in the first place, there's too many other things that could cause that for me to work up any righteous indignation.
Not everyone wants to sell their games. Some people collect them, you know. And yes, you can easily play one game on one PC, and then have someone play a different game you own (nice scarequotes, tardmonkey) on a different PC, since all you need to do is put steam in offline mode on one computer, and then you can play any of the games that don't require steam authorized servers (pretty much any non-Valve game). As for loaning them to friends, well, same deal. Go over to their place, log on to your steam account, install said game, and go in to offline mode. They can play, and YOU CAN PLAY IT AT THE SAME TIME! It's even better than loaning physical media. Betcha thought you were clever or something.
Ten minutes? Not everyone lives down the block from a game store, and further, not everyone lives where it's feasible to own a vehicle. Those two facts alone means your ten minutes is laughably naive. Furthermore, the only game store worth a shit within THIRTY minutes of me is only open until 5 or 6 except on Thursdays, and they operate a lot on preorders, and so don't carry a lot of spare copies on release week. By way of comparison, Steam is always open and with plenty of copies. 2 am? Sure. And I get the game downloaded in about an hour, too. Or I buy it at 10pm, download it while I sleep, and then play it at 6am, well before the store opens at 9. And I don't have to do it every time, either, since I have a rather large backup solution that I can save install files on for the games I know I'm going to want to replay often. Then it's simply a matter of how quickly my gigabit ethernet network can transfer the file to whichever computer I want it on. Installation after that is usually about 5 minutes.
Actually, it is, since the failure point comes in at a different moment. It's like having a television delivered. The actual case is akin to expecting the TV to show up today, so you clear some space to deal with that, and plan to use it that night. Then you get a call and get told "it's not showing up today." Yeah, it sucks, but it's not there, so there's not much you can do. Preventing someone from playing an already installed game is having the TV show up, and get set up, but then the delivery people stand there and slap your hand away from the remote any time you go to use it. It's there, there's no real reason you couldn't use it, except some gatekeeper's making you not.
EA's installation manager is actually a *download* manager. It's merely delaying the delivery of digital goods due to a flaw in the backend stating that no deliveries can be made to that address when someone clicked an option to stop other kinds of activity from that address. If you can't see the functional difference in the situations, it's because you're being wilfully stubborn.
I've used Macbooks. That keyboard sure as fuck ain't awesome. I could go out and buy OS X and stick it on any machine for under $900, and ...well, okay, yes, damn you, that is a really nice screen. I'd love a better screen on my laptop, and since I should have some cash spare soon, I'm looking in to replacements, seeing if there's anything feasible. As for the aluminium unibody, I've honestly never understood the drooling over that. I treat my laptop carefully, as befitting a costly machine, and it just seems to make Macbooks terribly heavy. Am I missing something about it that just isn't obvious? The protection idea is negligible, it's not really better at dispersing heat, aesthetics are a matter of taste, and it's heavier. I've weighed my 17" HP vs. my friend's 15" Macbook.
That's pretty funny. I almost wonder if they didn't do it on purpose, knowing it was the easiest way to get your problem fixed.
He said "arbitrarily" changing. Linguistical shift over time is natural as language evolves. But simply using a word to mean something other than what it means, when there are other words which already mean that which you are trying to convey is not helpful. It is, in fact, doubleplusungood.
Except that still, I don't see how this is a punishment for people who aren't driving drunk. Drunk driving is illegal, and doing it is illegal regardless of if you're caught. That means if this system stops you from driving, it's not a pre-emptive punishment, it's a timely one. If someone who isn't drunk is prevented from driving because the system malfunctioned, it's still not a punishment, because any car part can malfunction and stop you from driving (battery, distributor cap, fuel pump, etc), so it's just an inconvenience. A shitty one, but any car trouble sucks. If your goal is only preventing points of failure in a vehicle and calling it removing pre-emptive punishment, we'd be better served by moving to electric cars with fewer moving parts.
Usually that distinction comes from a judge who decides how much of a penalty to apply after the person was caught and charged. And since different BAC levels affect different people different amounts, I'd rather that a limit be lower to catch people more easily affected, and catch a couple people who are only "slightly" breaking the law, then raise it up and let more people who suck cheese at driving and are 3 sheets to the wind after a highball drive around and run me over.
My opinion as a dedicated pedestrian? All drivers fucking suck, just to different degrees. Pick an easily corrected shitty driving behaviour, fix it, and move on to another. This is a good step.
This is already pretty much how it works in most states.
Except for the multiple accounts I have from US friends, and several studies of recidivism rates to back it up, that show a lot of DUIs do it 3 or 4 times, and the real repeat offenders hit double digits on offenses. So yes, it is that the penalties aren't high enough, because it's not being enforced at those levels.
However, if this system works, I think it'd go a long way to solving the problem, both reducing deaths and lower legal congestion.
Er, from what I understand, this isn't just testing for residue on your fingers, this is actually testing blood level concentration. There's a lot of comments on here that seem to think only sloppy drunks who spill their drinks are the ones being caught by this, and if that were true, this would be the most useless system ever. Washing hands isn't going to do it, serving drinks isn't going to do it. Those wipes with alcohol, or alcohol-based hand sanitizer might do it if used shortly before the test, though.
Does the level of offence really matter? If the law says "put on your fucking seatbelt or you're breaking the law" does it matter whether it comes with the rider "but you're only getting dinged for it if you're doing something else wrong too" or "and your ass is ours if we see it"? You're still breaking the law either way. I could accept you denouncing seat belt laws, but getting pissy about whether it's a primary or secondary offence is the most butt-fuck stupid thing I've read today, and I've been on both YouTube and Something Awful.
Also the fact that a lot of people drive because they *like* driving. It wouldn't matter how much better the computer was, those people would still want to be in control.
I did, and yet I'd still be interested in the stat curio mentioned.
Er, why shouldn't it? You'd rather force insurance companies to take risks that as honest businesses, they shouldn't? Introduce either additional legislation forcing companies to provide insurance to high-risk individuals, or starting up a separate government insurance for individuals who can't get insurance from private companies?
The insurance is required because otherwise innocent individuals would need to pay for the damages caused by others, but drunk drivers are regarded as a high risk by companies, and so coverage is costed to reflect that high risk. Allowing them to go without insurance is a terrible idea since they're the ones most likely to use it, and mandating affordability is terrible since it punishes those who are forced to insure them, or those who are soaking up the cost being passed on to them by their insurance company. Personally, I think the system's working, and is completely separate and unlike the sex offender registry in any way.
Actually, yes, it is stuff that couldn't be done with simply one larger screen. You're not going to find a developer willing to split a single screen on a handheld in order to accommodate menus, that's why the pause screen menu was bloody well invented. Further, you're not going to find a developer who has you use two separate control schemes on the same screen when one's a touch interface, because it'd interfere with your ability to see what's happening on the screen with the other portion while making swipe gestures, meaning that instead of doing input and looking at the other screen at the same time, judging what your next input should be, you instead make touch gesture, evaluate screen, choose next action, continue. It lends toward a slower playstyle, so you can't throw as much at the player.
Honestly, did you even *think* about my examples before you replied?
Actually, it greatly improved Crono Trigger DS, and similar games, since it allowed you to access menus directly, and quickly, streamlining the crap you had to go through to get back to playing, then you had The World Ends With You, which used the screens independently, with differing control schemes, and then Metroid Pinball, which scrolled the top screen, while keeping the lower (with your paddles) static so you could always have those in view, then there's Trace Memory DS and other puzzle games that benefited from having two screens to use for puzzles. So, yes, many games used the double screens to great effect.
Actually, the way it works is if you visit a website with a Facebook widget (those omnipresent "Like" buttons, for instance), you may be considered to have logged back in to Facebook by visiting that website, since it links to Facebook's servers.
Figured someone would go after that. I like software freedom as much as hardware, I just think linux is a complete fucking failure as a model for market viability. Can't be a fanboy of something you think's a failure. I do enjoy MS's products for the most part, but my phone's an Android. I'll be a Linux fanboy the moment that running it as a base install becomes as trivially easy as a Win 7 install. The power of linux is in its customizability, but the power of Windows is I don't need to research the fuck out of any hardware I plan to get to make sure it's compatible, and then hope that if any bugs pop up, someone will be kind enough to fix it.