Furthermore, the implication that boys and men can't be trusted not to rape girls makes me a sad panda.
It's funny how that is almost always the first thing to pop in to someones head. In all fairness, the girls are just as likely to want to have sex with the boys as the boys would like to have sex with the girls. We are talking about at least 10 young people with raging hormones wearing hiking boots out in the middle of the woods with only a few adults to make sure they behave. Personally from that perspective I don't think it would matter if we had women out watching the kids with us or not.
That being said, it's not that the boys and men can't be trusted, it's that there is an expectation of privacy and if something happens (E.G. Medically, Personal Issues, Tick Checks) The parents want female leaders to be available to care for their little girls. What the parents don't seem to realize is, unless some of them do it, we have no female volunteers. I don't want to go on a rant about how dumb some of these people can be so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.
If you valued the product enough to use it, it's disgusting that you didn't value it enough to pay for it.
I don't know about a lot of other people, but I was told to buy books for my classes. My first year I didn't know any better. Some of the books we were told we needed were never opened or only used a few pages were used. After my first year of university I learned to not buy the books until the first time we needed them. In my third year I learned if we didn't need the book until more then halfway through the semester; borrow the book or buy it from Chapters or Barns and Nobel, use/copy the relevant material maybe one chapter then return the book.
I get pretty angry thinking of the nearly a $1000 I spent in my FIRST year for books, of which I only used two and out of that I only ended up using one regularly the other was one or two chapters. The rest are sitting in a box somewhere because the publishers would do the single word change then release a new edition, which made it very hard to resell most of the books I did buy, epically to freshmen who didn't know any better.
Course books are a scam. The professors get money for "reviewing" a book and all kinds of gifts if they choose to use a specific text. I don't have rich parents and had to put myself through university. I spent well over $2000 in four years on books that could have gone to other more important costs such as food, cloths, rent, bills, tuition, etc... If I had of bought all the books over all four years of my undergrad I would have paid close to $4000.
BTW, that $10-$30 each you paid is less than the publisher pays per copy for bulk production of the text in a binding that will last your lifetime.
I find it quite humors that a bunch of kids and a photo copier can produce single copies of a text cheaper then the publisher can in bulk.The book might last my lifetime, but most of the books I bought for university I didn't even need for the one class the book was for.
I think it's about time someone started to reason this out.
Where I'm living it seems like there are more girls in "Boy" scouts then there are boys now. It started off with one or two families claiming it was unfair that their daughters couldn't participate and it wasn't right to have a boys only club. There wasn't enough interest from girls to have sparks, brownies or girl scouts so it was decided to allow the few girls that wanted to join in with the boys to participate. Then we had the problem that there are no female leaders and none of the mothers would chaperon for camping trips. Of course some of the parents aren't comfortable with letting their daughters go out into the woods with a couple of men and a group of boys (understandable), but we can't exclude the girls; so no camping trips for anyone. So the parents of the boys are pulling their sons out of scouts because they claim they "don't get to do anything" and the parents see it as a waste of time and money. Two of the four leaders are talking about quitting because of all the flax they're taking. We might as well just disband.
It really just seems like there can't be something for just boys anymore. I'd like to say I wish we could have seen the issues before hand and just not let girls in, but we would have been forced to eventually anyway and it does seem unfair to the girls that there isn't something to be a part of.
I'm pretty sure this was done at least once before sometime in May in 2009. I was managing a conference and a "debate" about MS doing this broke out because supposedly if you tried to disable the plug-in Firefox would break. If I can find a reference to this I'll post it.
How hard it is to download a game to an SD card plugged into a card reader compared to trying to rip that same game yourself off a propitiatory media format?
Although they say DRMs are a waste of time the articale also says:
... Its DRM is rather simple: a one-time online activation. After that, you can play online or off without having to worry about Blizzard’s mommy-state servers keeping tabs on your authentication status....
That being said, I have no problem with a one time activation as long as is in twenty years when I want to sit down a play the game again I still can, which I doubt will be possible. Eventually they will decommission the sever thus rendering the game useless unless it's cracked.
I don't know about that. There are many issues people tend to polarize on. Abortion, spanking children, Health Care (Currently going on in the US), religious affairs, etc...
In an ideal world I love the idea of cutting government almost completely out of the picture and having Society create the laws to govern itself.
However, one thing you need to consider is that there are many groups out there, PETA comes to mind, that would take advantage of an open system to enact crazy stuff. If the issue is only people who care about a particular bill end up participating in it's creation then most bills will end up being created by special interest groups with dozens or hundreds of followers and there might not be enough support from the people that don't really care stop them... Actually never mind, that's not much different from what already goes on.
Regardless, I agree "Normal" people know what is right and wrong for them, but politicians make laws that go against all common sense. Current governments such as Canada, UK and the States are corrupt and broken and there has to be a better way, but the hell if I know what it is.
However, I can in no way accept the fact that they have or are taking a loss on consoles, it just doesn't make any business sense.
What does make sense is to claim you're taking a loss so your customers will think you care about them so much that you're willing to practically give your product away. Very charitable.
If you can provide some reference other then what's coming out of Sony, MS or Nintendo's backside I'd be inclined to accept your claim.
In other news, the US Air Force and US universities are morons. You don't purchase consumer hardware if you want reliability.
It's called Consumer Off The Shelf (COTS). Government does it all the time to save money hence why it has its own acronym. The USAF Could have bought a bunch of IBM Cell based servers and $10K a pop, but Instead decided to try and save tax payers some money by buying a much cheaper products that were advertised as doing what they needed them to do. I also highly doubt this was the decision of one or two people. The process I have to go through to buy a piece of hardware or software needs to be approved by several higher ups as well as people in the IT department. I write the software for and build data collection and tracking equipment so I know. But hay, maybe the Canadian Government has a better structure for buying hardware and software then the Americans do.
I went ahead and bought a new PS3 slim and kept my old PS3 with the 3.15 firmware on it.
IMHO, that's exactly what Sony was pushing for. Now you've not only given them money for the first PS3 you bought and got screwed over on, you went and gave them more money. The phrase "Please sir, may I have another" comes to mind.
For all the moaning about the linux support removal, I'm sure hardly anybody did anything about it except complain on message boards.
There are now three law suits on the go in the states over just this issue.
Maybe I can sell the USAF my old PS3.
I hear a PS3 with 3.15 or less is going for quite a bit on E-bay. I wasn't able to find any, I guess they're all sold out;)
Nice, great answer. Because only a few people use it it's ok to take it away after it's been paid for. That's how every thing should be. Only a few people compared to the overall population use skateboards, lets go out and pound those kids and take their boards back./end sarcasm
I bought my PS3 instead of a Wii because I wanted to put Linux on it. I use Linux on my PS3 for development and testing and as a 3D rendering node.
I don't see where other people get the right to say because only a few people paid to use it it's ok for it to be taken back. Weather or not someone knew it could be installed, they still paid for it. Don't bother going into the, "It wasn't a major part of the cost of the PS3, so you really didn't pay for it" argument.
1) Sony had to pay the team developing the Other OS feature, therefore they had to spend money on it. If you think for a second those wages weren't factored in to the price, you're not all that bright.
2) If you pick up two stakes as a Buy one get one free deal, the second stake isn't really free. You still had to pay for the first one so really you're just spreading the cost out over two instead of one. You're still paying for both. Kind of like buying a gaming console and getting a computer for free. But hay that second stake is just going to sit in your freezer for a week anyway. I guess it's ok for the grocery store to come and take it back.
What's worse about the fast food places is the cashiers get the regular minimum wage while collecting tips.
That being, said I'm from Canada. I don't know when it started, but at some point in time we started tipping at the drive through. Now if you don't what to look like a jerk you have to leave something because everyone else does.
I have the 60 GB model from Jan of 2008 and it is in my manual. This was a very widely publicized feature and it was the deal breaker for me. I was going to buy a Wii, but paid the extra $300 for the PS3 because of Linux. If you read the Lawsuit PDF it gives very concrete examples of how and when Sony and it's executives promoted about this feature. Balls in your court dumb-ass
I'm not saying they have done it, but the do have the potential too.
Maybe those three companies haven't. There was that fiasco with the George Orwell books being automatically removed from kindles after the books were purchased. I know Amazon "had" to do it because of some licensing thing and they did eventually give refunds, but what should have happened is they should have stopped selling the books and anyone who had already bought it should have been able to keep it. (http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/10/amazon-stipulates-terms-of-book-deletion-via-1984-settlement.ars). here's another example (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2006/11/8255.ars) where FM recording feature was removed from Creative Zen via firmware. The customers threatened a lawsuit and the company re-instated the feature.
You won't be laughing so hard if Sony "gets away with it". If they do you should expect to see every other major company start to pull this kind of crap after they've sold you a product promising A, B and C. They'll stop letting you use B. Then who'll be laughing.
I've read anyone in the states who bought their PS3 before March 28, 2010 when the lawsuit was filed and initially had the functionality is automatically part of the lawsuit. I don't know if that applies to me in Canada or not. I've also read that you may Opt-out of the lawsuit if you wish, I don't know how you do that.
It's also possible Sony will make every attempt to settle this out of court to prevent the court from definitively ruling on what a company may and may not put in a ToS/EULA. If a court ruled that when you buy hardware that REQUIRES software to run then you are buying the software as well there are going to be a lot of angry companies (E.G. Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, etc...) out there whom will lose their easy way to shaft their customers.
... because someone discovered a console exploit using Rugrats Movie: The Game...
I'd put money on that exploit being discovered right around the time Sony starts selling reworked PS2 games on the PSN. They'd make a killing re-selling games to people who already own them. And it's almost a guarantee people would buy them for say $10-$20 because they already know they like them, unlike new games which might be a bit of a gamble or too expensive to buy on release. This would also almost certainly kill the after game market for PS2 games for anyone that owned an older PS3. Sony would be killing multiple birds with one stone.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, the implication that boys and men can't be trusted not to rape girls makes me a sad panda.
It's funny how that is almost always the first thing to pop in to someones head. In all fairness, the girls are just as likely to want to have sex with the boys as the boys would like to have sex with the girls. We are talking about at least 10 young people with raging hormones wearing hiking boots out in the middle of the woods with only a few adults to make sure they behave. Personally from that perspective I don't think it would matter if we had women out watching the kids with us or not.
That being said, it's not that the boys and men can't be trusted, it's that there is an expectation of privacy and if something happens (E.G. Medically, Personal Issues, Tick Checks) The parents want female leaders to be available to care for their little girls. What the parents don't seem to realize is, unless some of them do it, we have no female volunteers. I don't want to go on a rant about how dumb some of these people can be so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.
If you valued the product enough to use it, it's disgusting that you didn't value it enough to pay for it.
I don't know about a lot of other people, but I was told to buy books for my classes. My first year I didn't know any better. Some of the books we were told we needed were never opened or only used a few pages were used. After my first year of university I learned to not buy the books until the first time we needed them. In my third year I learned if we didn't need the book until more then halfway through the semester; borrow the book or buy it from Chapters or Barns and Nobel, use/copy the relevant material maybe one chapter then return the book.
I get pretty angry thinking of the nearly a $1000 I spent in my FIRST year for books, of which I only used two and out of that I only ended up using one regularly the other was one or two chapters. The rest are sitting in a box somewhere because the publishers would do the single word change then release a new edition, which made it very hard to resell most of the books I did buy, epically to freshmen who didn't know any better.
Course books are a scam. The professors get money for "reviewing" a book and all kinds of gifts if they choose to use a specific text. I don't have rich parents and had to put myself through university. I spent well over $2000 in four years on books that could have gone to other more important costs such as food, cloths, rent, bills, tuition, etc... If I had of bought all the books over all four years of my undergrad I would have paid close to $4000.
BTW, that $10-$30 each you paid is less than the publisher pays per copy for bulk production of the text in a binding that will last your lifetime.
I find it quite humors that a bunch of kids and a photo copier can produce single copies of a text cheaper then the publisher can in bulk.The book might last my lifetime, but most of the books I bought for university I didn't even need for the one class the book was for.
I think it's about time someone started to reason this out.
Where I'm living it seems like there are more girls in "Boy" scouts then there are boys now. It started off with one or two families claiming it was unfair that their daughters couldn't participate and it wasn't right to have a boys only club. There wasn't enough interest from girls to have sparks, brownies or girl scouts so it was decided to allow the few girls that wanted to join in with the boys to participate. Then we had the problem that there are no female leaders and none of the mothers would chaperon for camping trips. Of course some of the parents aren't comfortable with letting their daughters go out into the woods with a couple of men and a group of boys (understandable), but we can't exclude the girls; so no camping trips for anyone. So the parents of the boys are pulling their sons out of scouts because they claim they "don't get to do anything" and the parents see it as a waste of time and money. Two of the four leaders are talking about quitting because of all the flax they're taking. We might as well just disband.
It really just seems like there can't be something for just boys anymore. I'd like to say I wish we could have seen the issues before hand and just not let girls in, but we would have been forced to eventually anyway and it does seem unfair to the girls that there isn't something to be a part of.
I'm on the line about the whole thing.
I'm pretty sure this was done at least once before sometime in May in 2009. I was managing a conference and a "debate" about MS doing this broke out because supposedly if you tried to disable the plug-in Firefox would break. If I can find a reference to this I'll post it.
If you're technically inclined enough to do so.
How hard it is to download a game to an SD card plugged into a card reader compared to trying to rip that same game yourself off a propitiatory media format?
Sounds fantastic.
Did they happen to mention where you can get these patches? Will the have a server that distributes them?
I had a friend who use to say, "It's not polite to point out he plot holes."
Although they say DRMs are a waste of time the articale also says:
... Its DRM is rather simple: a one-time online activation. After that, you can play online or off without having to worry about Blizzard’s mommy-state servers keeping tabs on your authentication status. ...
That being said, I have no problem with a one time activation as long as is in twenty years when I want to sit down a play the game again I still can, which I doubt will be possible. Eventually they will decommission the sever thus rendering the game useless unless it's cracked.
With the way the game industry it trying to ruin PC gaming with DRMs these days I don't think it's going to matter.
The super-flexible display can roll up into a cylinder
Until Sony disables that feature in the firmware.
I don't know about that. There are many issues people tend to polarize on. Abortion, spanking children, Health Care (Currently going on in the US), religious affairs, etc...
In an ideal world I love the idea of cutting government almost completely out of the picture and having Society create the laws to govern itself.
However, one thing you need to consider is that there are many groups out there, PETA comes to mind, that would take advantage of an open system to enact crazy stuff. If the issue is only people who care about a particular bill end up participating in it's creation then most bills will end up being created by special interest groups with dozens or hundreds of followers and there might not be enough support from the people that don't really care stop them... Actually never mind, that's not much different from what already goes on.
Regardless, I agree "Normal" people know what is right and wrong for them, but politicians make laws that go against all common sense. Current governments such as Canada, UK and the States are corrupt and broken and there has to be a better way, but the hell if I know what it is.
I recently drove back from North Carolina, there are places where they have jars or cups marked for tips on the counter.
It's also a common practice in Canada... Except at McDonalds, for some reason they're not allowed to accept tips.
Well thanks for enjoying the rest of my post.
However, I can in no way accept the fact that they have or are taking a loss on consoles, it just doesn't make any business sense.
What does make sense is to claim you're taking a loss so your customers will think you care about them so much that you're willing to practically give your product away. Very charitable.
If you can provide some reference other then what's coming out of Sony, MS or Nintendo's backside I'd be inclined to accept your claim.
In other news, the US Air Force and US universities are morons. You don't purchase consumer hardware if you want reliability.
It's called Consumer Off The Shelf (COTS). Government does it all the time to save money hence why it has its own acronym. The USAF Could have bought a bunch of IBM Cell based servers and $10K a pop, but Instead decided to try and save tax payers some money by buying a much cheaper products that were advertised as doing what they needed them to do. I also highly doubt this was the decision of one or two people. The process I have to go through to buy a piece of hardware or software needs to be approved by several higher ups as well as people in the IT department. I write the software for and build data collection and tracking equipment so I know. But hay, maybe the Canadian Government has a better structure for buying hardware and software then the Americans do.
I went ahead and bought a new PS3 slim and kept my old PS3 with the 3.15 firmware on it.
IMHO, that's exactly what Sony was pushing for. Now you've not only given them money for the first PS3 you bought and got screwed over on, you went and gave them more money. The phrase "Please sir, may I have another" comes to mind.
For all the moaning about the linux support removal, I'm sure hardly anybody did anything about it except complain on message boards.
There are now three law suits on the go in the states over just this issue.
Maybe I can sell the USAF my old PS3.
I hear a PS3 with 3.15 or less is going for quite a bit on E-bay. I wasn't able to find any, I guess they're all sold out ;)
This seems to be exactly what people were saying was going to happen back in April (at least) when the Other OS was removed.
"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Pastor Martin Niemöller
Nice, great answer. Because only a few people use it it's ok to take it away after it's been paid for. That's how every thing should be. Only a few people compared to the overall population use skateboards, lets go out and pound those kids and take their boards back. /end sarcasm
I bought my PS3 instead of a Wii because I wanted to put Linux on it. I use Linux on my PS3 for development and testing and as a 3D rendering node.
I don't see where other people get the right to say because only a few people paid to use it it's ok for it to be taken back. Weather or not someone knew it could be installed, they still paid for it. Don't bother going into the, "It wasn't a major part of the cost of the PS3, so you really didn't pay for it" argument.
1) Sony had to pay the team developing the Other OS feature, therefore they had to spend money on it. If you think for a second those wages weren't factored in to the price, you're not all that bright.
2) If you pick up two stakes as a Buy one get one free deal, the second stake isn't really free. You still had to pay for the first one so really you're just spreading the cost out over two instead of one. You're still paying for both. Kind of like buying a gaming console and getting a computer for free. But hay that second stake is just going to sit in your freezer for a week anyway. I guess it's ok for the grocery store to come and take it back.
What's worse about the fast food places is the cashiers get the regular minimum wage while collecting tips.
That being, said I'm from Canada. I don't know when it started, but at some point in time we started tipping at the drive through. Now if you don't what to look like a jerk you have to leave something because everyone else does.
It's only polite, Eh!
I have the 60 GB model from Jan of 2008 and it is in my manual. This was a very widely publicized feature and it was the deal breaker for me. I was going to buy a Wii, but paid the extra $300 for the PS3 because of Linux. If you read the Lawsuit PDF it gives very concrete examples of how and when Sony and it's executives promoted about this feature. Balls in your court dumb-ass
I'm not saying they have done it, but the do have the potential too.
Maybe those three companies haven't. There was that fiasco with the George Orwell books being automatically removed from kindles after the books were purchased. I know Amazon "had" to do it because of some licensing thing and they did eventually give refunds, but what should have happened is they should have stopped selling the books and anyone who had already bought it should have been able to keep it. (http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/10/amazon-stipulates-terms-of-book-deletion-via-1984-settlement.ars). here's another example (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2006/11/8255.ars) where FM recording feature was removed from Creative Zen via firmware. The customers threatened a lawsuit and the company re-instated the feature.
I'm kind of glad at least one person does. Too bad you have to be an AC to do so. LOL
You won't be laughing so hard if Sony "gets away with it". If they do you should expect to see every other major company start to pull this kind of crap after they've sold you a product promising A, B and C. They'll stop letting you use B. Then who'll be laughing.
I've read anyone in the states who bought their PS3 before March 28, 2010 when the lawsuit was filed and initially had the functionality is automatically part of the lawsuit. I don't know if that applies to me in Canada or not. I've also read that you may Opt-out of the lawsuit if you wish, I don't know how you do that.
It's also possible Sony will make every attempt to settle this out of court to prevent the court from definitively ruling on what a company may and may not put in a ToS/EULA. If a court ruled that when you buy hardware that REQUIRES software to run then you are buying the software as well there are going to be a lot of angry companies (E.G. Microsoft, Apple, Nintendo, etc...) out there whom will lose their easy way to shaft their customers.
... because someone discovered a console exploit using Rugrats Movie: The Game ...
I'd put money on that exploit being discovered right around the time Sony starts selling reworked PS2 games on the PSN. They'd make a killing re-selling games to people who already own them. And it's almost a guarantee people would buy them for say $10-$20 because they already know they like them, unlike new games which might be a bit of a gamble or too expensive to buy on release. This would also almost certainly kill the after game market for PS2 games for anyone that owned an older PS3. Sony would be killing multiple birds with one stone.