What disgusts me is that the service is advertised as unlimited bandwidth. That should mean that if I want to leave Kazaa running 24/7/365 there should be no problems at all. That isn't whats happening though.
Something else that pisses me off. Think of the situation in terms of cell phones. Imagine the DSL or cable modem is the handset. Unlike cell phones, many people do not have contracts. People buy the modem, but as part of the sign up deal, the modem is sold below cost if the user does the installation or some crap like that. Five months after signing up, the company providing service decides to cap bandwidth, or raise prices. Without a contract the user can either shut up and suffer, or try to switch companies. If the user knew this was going to happen they probably wouldn't have signed up in the first place. Now they have to buy a new modem, possibly without a discount.
Even users with contracts don't appear to have a better deal. These folks have cancellation charges to deal with if the bail early, and their contracts still let the company to change the service as it pleases. When in the cell phone industry has this crap ever been tolerated?
Because then people who use their unlimited bandwidth accounts the way they were meant to be used will have to pay even more. Think about cell phone minutes. Imagine a plan where the price is $50 and everyone can use the phone as often as they like. Most people will use only as many minutes as a current $40 plan provides. They could be using many more minutes though if they choose to. My problem with different plans for different uses is that the companies setting prices will gouge the hell out of everybody. It's bad enough many companies are limiting DSL and cable to 512Kbps or lower download and 384 or 128 upload. With separate plans the $30 plan will only allow 300MB per month at 384 down and 128 up. The $40 plan will offer 500MB per month. Count on paying $60 or more though if a user is up in the 1 or 2 GB range. 1 to 2 GB is perfectly reachable for many users through both legal and illegal content.
Here's what turns me off about rising movie ticket prices. I live in California, and when the power crisis hit ticket prices went up $.25 supposedly to pay for the power. Now power prices are back down but that $.25 is still there. If another power crisis comes I can be sure to see the tickets go up another $.25. Ten years ago a regularly priced ticket was $5.00. Now it's $9.50. WTF?!? If hollywood would stop shoveling shit onto the market maybe they would do better. Yet Hollywood has been shoveling shit for at least two or three decades and for a while there profits were just fine.
The hollywood greed machine feeds itself. Eventually the general populace will give a big FUCK YOU to $12.00 ticket prices when they arrive, and go buy the DVD of it for $19.99.
This reminds me of how Nintendo acted in the days of the NES. AOL has the number 1 and 2 clients, ICQ and AIM. AOL hasn't figured out how to turn these into cash cows yet, but they don't want just anybody to write their own AIM client. That would dilute their influence on the IM scene. Some people might start using "inferior" clients and get turned off of IM. Nintendo in the days of the NES forced companies to strict contracts including final say over content. While there were multiple reasons for this, including greed, it is undenyable that the overall quality of NES games far surpasses those for the Atari 2600 and its crate-fuls of software deserving incineration.
Personally, I feel that the point of a game is to get you hooked, Verant seems to have done a great job of that...Almost too great.
That depends on if you're looking at gaming from a developer/publisher's point of view or that of the gamer. For the gamer, the game should first and foremost be FUN.
What use does a journalist have with a 6GB hard drive? The batteries on the Archos will die long before the HD is full when recording at any bitrate including 256kbps which is not supported by the Archos. Are you suggesting journalists will happily lug the AC adapter around with them to recharge? The new player is tiny: 62 x 110 x 24 mm, and incredibly light: Weight 140 g (incl. 2 AA Batteries).
How about more battery life to go with the excessive hard drive? Unless I'm on assignment somewhere in which I don't have access to a computer, 256MB is plenty of space. Did you think about batteries? The Archos doesn't use ordinary alkalines, do you want to carry the AC adapter to finish filling the HD? The new mp3 recorder is tiny: 62 x 110 x 24 mm, and incredibly light: Weight 140 g (incl. 2 AA Batteries). So which would you pick mister journalist?
The mp3 compression algorithm takes into account what freqencies are most prominent. Recording a single acoustic guitar in 128kbps can produce almost artifact free music. Trying to record a five piece band at 128kbps will likely produce quite a few artifacts. ANY journalist can benefit from this because voice and speeches are usually from one source, with a very limited freqency range, even considering the background noise such as an audience, cars, birds...
The web is content, unlike power, water, or gas, the content varies. Sure most people know what to expect when the surf the web, but the problem I see is that with metered access people will surf much more conservatively. I mean people will have to think if they want to go to a particular porno or warez site. People will try and stick to certain news sites because their cashe will already have the graphics stored.
What about the fact that if you spent all of that $2500, you'd have no computer at all? You really would go without a computer entirely? I think people are taking their relatively fast new or newish machines, and adding on to them, or buying them with the plan being all-in-one.
Can't patents be overturned? Pardon my ignorance, but I thought that if prior art can be found a lawsuit can get the patent overturned. Does this happen? Is there a reason/. doesn't cover these lawsuits?
If a wolf bites a deer then starts chewing into it, won't the deer die even more quickly from loss of blood? Or does reality not play out that way? I'd assume it must be more terrifying to have a wolf ripping me apart instead of a gunshot.
cloth isn't strong enough to handle lateral wind blowing against the tower. Cloth also lets heat escape much faster than concrete. The tower works because the top of the tower is so much cooler than the ground. The warmed air rushes up past the turbines. The airflow is fastest near the base where the base meets the tower. The generators should thus be located there. If you put a kite on top, you're slowing the air coming out of the chimney because it has a kite in the way. If a kite was there, and it got blown out of the airstream from the chimney by a lateral wind, it would be useless. Any kite or blimp would be affected by lateral winds. This would place additional stresses on the tower. Accounting for that and strengthening it would add more weight, possibly more weight than the kite or blimp would lift.
The problem with these games for me is that the ladder never leads anywhere. Its merely rung after rung. There's no roof or floor to get off at. I played Asheron's Call for four months. The quests were interesting, but I wanted more results. Until my character's actions have a meaningful effect on the world, such as gaining real power or changing boundaries, I won't be playing any of the current crop.
I was under the impression that patents can be overturned if prior art is uncovered. What has to happen for a patent to be overturned, and why doesn't this happen for all the tech patents? Or maybe, why doesnt'/. take note when a patent is overturned?
I don't know or care what the article says, because it wasn't spraypaint, it was spray-chalk! The idea was that the spray chalk would just wear off after a couple of weeks from foot traffic then rains would finish it off. The spray-chalk turned out to be much tougher than expected, and the municipalites got pissed off long before it was expected to wear away anyway.
It still was offtopic because it wasn't directly related to the article. Since when is declaring your comment offtopic grounds for posting offtopic messages without penalty? You could post anonymously or be willing to take the karma hit. If you must keep your karma you could have included a plea to the moderators to overlook your comment just this once.
The USA is in a position to help raise third world countries to first world status in less time than the country would ordinarily. There are few good reasons why the country must suffer through the same long and painful process of modernization when the USA can help it out. Why does poor CountryX have to subject its population to 12 hour work days, 6 or 7 days a week just so the people get pissed off and demand laws to help them? If American corporations held their foreign and domestic factories to similar standards CountryX would modernize much faster.
You are correct that trade is not inevitable exploitation. The parent you responded to was not talking about all trade, Only trade between first and third world nations.
So I ask you, how much trade between the USA and third world nations is exploitive and how much is not? I'd say quite a bit does not give the people employed fair benefits and compensation. This prevents the third world nation from advancing its people to first world nation status.
How do you define wildly-overambitious? On the surface, Bungie just wanted to take the best shooters out there and improve on them, bringing more features and ideas. That's not overly ambitious in my book, that's progress.
So you're ignoring that fact that Troops and plenty of other files are available in Quicktime that aren't adds? Quicktime is a great format, far superior to.mpg in visual quality for a given file size.
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Something else that pisses me off. Think of the situation in terms of cell phones. Imagine the DSL or cable modem is the handset. Unlike cell phones, many people do not have contracts. People buy the modem, but as part of the sign up deal, the modem is sold below cost if the user does the installation or some crap like that. Five months after signing up, the company providing service decides to cap bandwidth, or raise prices. Without a contract the user can either shut up and suffer, or try to switch companies. If the user knew this was going to happen they probably wouldn't have signed up in the first place. Now they have to buy a new modem, possibly without a discount.
Even users with contracts don't appear to have a better deal. These folks have cancellation charges to deal with if the bail early, and their contracts still let the company to change the service as it pleases. When in the cell phone industry has this crap ever been tolerated?
The hollywood greed machine feeds itself. Eventually the general populace will give a big FUCK YOU to $12.00 ticket prices when they arrive, and go buy the DVD of it for $19.99.
Sir, what is your problem?
That depends on if you're looking at gaming from a developer/publisher's point of view or that of the gamer. For the gamer, the game should first and foremost be FUN.
How about more battery life to go with the excessive hard drive? Unless I'm on assignment somewhere in which I don't have access to a computer, 256MB is plenty of space. Did you think about batteries? The Archos doesn't use ordinary alkalines, do you want to carry the AC adapter to finish filling the HD? The new mp3 recorder is tiny: 62 x 110 x 24 mm, and incredibly light: Weight 140 g (incl. 2 AA Batteries). So which would you pick mister journalist?
The web is content, unlike power, water, or gas, the content varies. Sure most people know what to expect when the surf the web, but the problem I see is that with metered access people will surf much more conservatively. I mean people will have to think if they want to go to a particular porno or warez site. People will try and stick to certain news sites because their cashe will already have the graphics stored.
So I ask you, how much trade between the USA and third world nations is exploitive and how much is not? I'd say quite a bit does not give the people employed fair benefits and compensation. This prevents the third world nation from advancing its people to first world nation status.