Whine whine whine whine... I have spent more than one evening fixing other peoples computers, so that they could do something that should be Plug'n'Play 10 years ago(syncing their Hero phone with XP).
Wasting mod points here... but I used to have an iPhone 3G and now have the HTC Evo and syncing with Outlook is just as plug and play as the iPhone. You install the drivers/software and then when you plug in the phone it syncs. According to my brief google search, you do the same thing with the Hero. With the iPhone you just installed iTunes instead of "HTC Sync".
I think you need to take this one step further, though. It's not like you overhear your neighbor's conversation. It's like you're taking a full and complete transcript of your neighbor's conversation. Maybe they were only recording 5 seconds of data but they were making a perfect recording of that.
Even here in the US it's illegal to record people talking in public without their knowledge and consent (well, in many states).
I disagree with the notion that the new Mini is aimed at the living room, because this $699 box is $300-$400 more than the Boxee Box, Popcorn Hour and other less-expensive media players. It's more likely that the Mini's primary market is education and home users who want a desktop Mac for under $1K.
I thought they raised the price because people were buying Mac Mini's to get into iPhone/iPad development for less money.
I can't remember the name of the facility. I can ask if you'd like. But it was supposedly attached to a university there in Germany. A large portion of the cost was the travel/lodging but they did have to pay for a portion (not 100% supposedly) of the treatment. They had to stay there for several weeks for the process.
A co-worker of mine just got back from a trip to Germany about a year ago to have his wife treated with stem-cells for Parkinson's research. It was insanely expensive, but it was done at a proper University type research facility and they told them up front that there was a significant possibility of it failing to do any good. The treatment seems to have failed to improve her condition, unfortunately.
It was definitely a stretch for them to be able to afford it, so I hope the researchers at least got some valuable information from it.
Hmm the HTC Incredible and HTC Evo already have front cameras if I am not mistaken and are quite capable of doing video conferencing over the data network instead of wifi. Both of them have already been available for at least 3 days.;)
I haven't reviewed this most recent iteration but they had a bill like this in committee about a month or two ago that only required the president to notify a single committee of the senate. There was no rule requiring public announcement. This could be different, I don't know.
Well at least his/her hearing is theoretically unimpaired while reading the magazine and they miss that important instruction. Life happens, you just have to make reasonable rules.
That's not entirely true. They do not allow them during takeoff and landings because these are the most dangerous parts of the flight. If there is some sort of emergency the last thing they (and I) want is the guy in the emergency exit row to miss some important instruction because he was too busy watching a movie.
Sure these emergencies are rare and unlikely to happen but I don't mind reading the magazine in the seat pocket for 10-15 minutes just to be on the safe side.
You've got to be off your rocker. I threw in an 80GB SSD into my laptop to increase battery life and computer performance. Not does my battery last a lot longer in class (ah the joys of grad school), but it's a lot snappier too. The downside? I no longer have the storage space to feel comfortable with the triple booting that I had going on when I had a 500GB drive in there.
Now I carry the old drive as an external for when I need to boot another OS. Imagine having the speed of an SSD and the storage capacity of a traditional HDD in your laptop! I'm quite jealous.
Yes, of course I am aware that the beta does not feature the campaign. I've played it. But you can still play a single player game in the beta. So why does it need a constant connection to the network, other than DRM? I could have just as easily completed the game and then done a massive dump to their servers.
Uhh one can still beta test without a constant network connection. Thanks for jumping straight to the harsh words. The release version still requires you to authenticate to play any sort of network version of the game. They've said that.
Since they've completed the game they haven't said if the offline version will end up requiring it or not. It wouldn't surprise me if the Activision arm of the corporation demanded it. Also, I added as a caveat to my comment that it was during the beta. Everyone following the game knows the beta does not feature the campaign in the slightest. Thanks for playing.
I have a few points to make. I would post directly to the relevant comments, but that would take too long.
A) A history of letting you not need the disc in the drive anymore after a patch is NOT really a friendly way of stripping away DRM once the "hype" dies down. Besides, people are getting the dates wrong here, Starcraft removed needing the disc with patch 1.15, which was released almost ten years after the game debuted. Requiring online activation of a unique code is apples-to-oranges with keeping a disc in the drive.
B) People still do have LAN parties, especially Starcraft enthusiasts! It's a classic of the LAN party, and was by far the most-played at the last one I went to. Now, I'm not sure how much data is actually launched up and down the tubes when you're playing online, but if you have a lousy ISP, or not the highest-speed service, having eight people all stacked up on one connection playing that game might be a bit much, especially if you have an ISP that throttles, or imposes other crappy limits, or, in my case, one that likes to disconnect for random periods of time, especially during the night.
From access to the beta I can tell you that if you lose internet connection at any time for any of the clients, the game is over (for them).
B2) The above point, either way, shouldn't be a matter of if it is or isn't a hassle, it should be a matter of, just because you can, doesn't mean you should have to.
Especially since Blizzard has a nasty habit of bringing their servers down once a week on Tuesedays for maintenance. I have seen the maintenance last more than 36 hours in the case of a badly done patch. Invariably they always do long maintenance on a day that I have off for vacation or was on medical leave.
C) This whole discussion is instantly destroyed by the level of fanboyism for Blizzard, and the level of anti-fanboyism as well. I'm probably going to get modded down to comment hell for this post, for example. This is becoming a matter of "Awh, shucks, Blizzard are such great guys! I bet they'd buy me a new computer if my current one couldn't run Starcraft II" versus "DRM IS COCKS!!! GO DIE!!!"
D) That being said, I really see no reason for anyone who loves SC1 to get SC2. I played the beta, it's pretty much just feels like a modded, or expansion-packed, or remastered SC1, with some bits from Relic's RTSes pasted on. I think the best way to avoid the alleged hassle of SC2 is to just... keep playing SC1.
Agreed. Starcraft 2 IS Starcraft 1. They made the graphics pretty, changed some of your keybindings on you, and added a handful of new units per race.
E) I think my biggest issue here, and the one I will leave off with (leaving out comments about stat tracking and achievement farming and whatnot), is just that Blizzard here is stating, and their fanboys in the room are happily restating, is that, put simply, they are awesome because they aren't doing what Ubisoft is doing. Even though they aren't as bad as Ubi, they're just as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the market in this matter. They're still being 'bad', they just aren't the 'worst'. But they're still being bad.
Oh I don't know that they better than Ubisoft. I don't have the final game in hand but as I was mentioning above, I couldn't even do a single player comp stomp in the Beta without a constant internet connection. My gf's connection is unreliable at best dropping out every few minutes for about 30 seconds. I couldn't even build my second building before it would drop me EVERY game.
That is correct. You cannot remove a game unless you pay for a transfer and you may only transfer to direct family. They are very strict about checking ID's, addresses, etc in order to allow a transfer within a family.
I play the original starcraft offline (though not alone). I mostly play with my nephews who (there are a lot of them) range from about 6 years old to 21. We own original copies of all and we play at my parents house during family get togethers (which usually last 6+ hours). There is no way in hell I am getting onto battlenet with a kid who has just learned to read so that the can see everyone spouting off about ANAL [RAMPAGE] like they do in Warcraft. To require it just means that I won't be buying a half a dozen copies of starcraft two to play with them.
I can sell my account with all the games bound to it.
Actually if you read the terms of service, you are not allowed to sell your battle.net account and if they find out that you have, they will block the entire account. They do it with World of Borecraft (TM) all the time.
I don't know how the release version of the game is going to be but I couldn't even do a solo comp stomp of the game without an internet connection in the Beta. My girlfriend uses sprint 3G for internet at her place and her reception is terrible. I could never play a game for more than about 2 minutes at her house before it would dump me to the desktop and say my network failed. On top of that the game would then crash (it was a beta though).
Sounds like pretty restrictive DRM to me. I won't be buying it.
Are you sure people can't sue? I had Cingular (Now AT&T Wireless) put a fraudulent entry on my credit report. They even sent me to collections on a $0.00 balance. I wrote both the collections agency and AT&T and told them they had 2 business weeks to correct my credit report and cease collections attempts or I was going to sue them both for libel. Sure enough, two weeks later everything had been cleaned up.
I'm certainly no expert but my guess is that's a record time for having a credit report fixed.
Federal legislation related to the American Opportunity Tax Credit requires that all postsecondary institutions report student SSNs to the Internal Revenue Service. This IRS requirement makes it necessary for colleges to collect the social security number of every student. A student may refuse to disclose his or her SSN to the College, but the IRS is then authorized to fine the student in the amount of $50.
California Universities are not allowed to use SSN's for ID purposes. It's not the school that is requiring them, but the IRS. The student does not have to give the SSN but they will face a $50 fine per semester.
Oh tell me about it. I love how I can't download something from the App store over 3G because its larger than 10MB. Because I pay $30 a month to have unlimited data in 10MB chunks? I don't think so. And don't get me started on how text messages some how magically aren't part of that unlimited data? Last I checked texts were just ones and zeroes... of course, so are the voice calls, aren't they?
Try allowing Noscript on that site? I was listed as 1 in 4 too until I enabled scripting on that website and ran the test again. Then I came out to be 1 in 1,000,000. I'd say that's more unique than I'd like to be.
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Whine whine whine whine... I have spent more than one evening fixing other peoples computers, so that they could do something that should be Plug'n'Play 10 years ago(syncing their Hero phone with XP).
Wasting mod points here... but I used to have an iPhone 3G and now have the HTC Evo and syncing with Outlook is just as plug and play as the iPhone. You install the drivers/software and then when you plug in the phone it syncs. According to my brief google search, you do the same thing with the Hero. With the iPhone you just installed iTunes instead of "HTC Sync".
I think you need to take this one step further, though. It's not like you overhear your neighbor's conversation. It's like you're taking a full and complete transcript of your neighbor's conversation. Maybe they were only recording 5 seconds of data but they were making a perfect recording of that.
Even here in the US it's illegal to record people talking in public without their knowledge and consent (well, in many states).
I disagree with the notion that the new Mini is aimed at the living room, because this $699 box is $300-$400 more than the Boxee Box, Popcorn Hour and other less-expensive media players. It's more likely that the Mini's primary market is education and home users who want a desktop Mac for under $1K.
I thought they raised the price because people were buying Mac Mini's to get into iPhone/iPad development for less money.
That's because those jackass*s at ESPN don't cover hockey. It's a sad world. :(
I can't remember the name of the facility. I can ask if you'd like. But it was supposedly attached to a university there in Germany. A large portion of the cost was the travel/lodging but they did have to pay for a portion (not 100% supposedly) of the treatment. They had to stay there for several weeks for the process.
A co-worker of mine just got back from a trip to Germany about a year ago to have his wife treated with stem-cells for Parkinson's research. It was insanely expensive, but it was done at a proper University type research facility and they told them up front that there was a significant possibility of it failing to do any good. The treatment seems to have failed to improve her condition, unfortunately.
It was definitely a stretch for them to be able to afford it, so I hope the researchers at least got some valuable information from it.
Hmm the HTC Incredible and HTC Evo already have front cameras if I am not mistaken and are quite capable of doing video conferencing over the data network instead of wifi. Both of them have already been available for at least 3 days. ;)
I haven't reviewed this most recent iteration but they had a bill like this in committee about a month or two ago that only required the president to notify a single committee of the senate. There was no rule requiring public announcement. This could be different, I don't know.
Well at least his/her hearing is theoretically unimpaired while reading the magazine and they miss that important instruction. Life happens, you just have to make reasonable rules.
That's not entirely true. They do not allow them during takeoff and landings because these are the most dangerous parts of the flight. If there is some sort of emergency the last thing they (and I) want is the guy in the emergency exit row to miss some important instruction because he was too busy watching a movie.
Sure these emergencies are rare and unlikely to happen but I don't mind reading the magazine in the seat pocket for 10-15 minutes just to be on the safe side.
You've got to be off your rocker. I threw in an 80GB SSD into my laptop to increase battery life and computer performance. Not does my battery last a lot longer in class (ah the joys of grad school), but it's a lot snappier too. The downside? I no longer have the storage space to feel comfortable with the triple booting that I had going on when I had a 500GB drive in there.
Now I carry the old drive as an external for when I need to boot another OS. Imagine having the speed of an SSD and the storage capacity of a traditional HDD in your laptop! I'm quite jealous.
Yes, of course I am aware that the beta does not feature the campaign. I've played it. But you can still play a single player game in the beta. So why does it need a constant connection to the network, other than DRM? I could have just as easily completed the game and then done a massive dump to their servers.
Uhh one can still beta test without a constant network connection. Thanks for jumping straight to the harsh words. The release version still requires you to authenticate to play any sort of network version of the game. They've said that.
Since they've completed the game they haven't said if the offline version will end up requiring it or not. It wouldn't surprise me if the Activision arm of the corporation demanded it. Also, I added as a caveat to my comment that it was during the beta. Everyone following the game knows the beta does not feature the campaign in the slightest. Thanks for playing.
I have a few points to make. I would post directly to the relevant comments, but that would take too long. A) A history of letting you not need the disc in the drive anymore after a patch is NOT really a friendly way of stripping away DRM once the "hype" dies down. Besides, people are getting the dates wrong here, Starcraft removed needing the disc with patch 1.15, which was released almost ten years after the game debuted. Requiring online activation of a unique code is apples-to-oranges with keeping a disc in the drive. B) People still do have LAN parties, especially Starcraft enthusiasts! It's a classic of the LAN party, and was by far the most-played at the last one I went to. Now, I'm not sure how much data is actually launched up and down the tubes when you're playing online, but if you have a lousy ISP, or not the highest-speed service, having eight people all stacked up on one connection playing that game might be a bit much, especially if you have an ISP that throttles, or imposes other crappy limits, or, in my case, one that likes to disconnect for random periods of time, especially during the night.
From access to the beta I can tell you that if you lose internet connection at any time for any of the clients, the game is over (for them).
B2) The above point, either way, shouldn't be a matter of if it is or isn't a hassle, it should be a matter of, just because you can, doesn't mean you should have to.
Especially since Blizzard has a nasty habit of bringing their servers down once a week on Tuesedays for maintenance. I have seen the maintenance last more than 36 hours in the case of a badly done patch. Invariably they always do long maintenance on a day that I have off for vacation or was on medical leave.
C) This whole discussion is instantly destroyed by the level of fanboyism for Blizzard, and the level of anti-fanboyism as well. I'm probably going to get modded down to comment hell for this post, for example. This is becoming a matter of "Awh, shucks, Blizzard are such great guys! I bet they'd buy me a new computer if my current one couldn't run Starcraft II" versus "DRM IS COCKS!!! GO DIE!!!" D) That being said, I really see no reason for anyone who loves SC1 to get SC2. I played the beta, it's pretty much just feels like a modded, or expansion-packed, or remastered SC1, with some bits from Relic's RTSes pasted on. I think the best way to avoid the alleged hassle of SC2 is to just... keep playing SC1.
Agreed. Starcraft 2 IS Starcraft 1. They made the graphics pretty, changed some of your keybindings on you, and added a handful of new units per race.
E) I think my biggest issue here, and the one I will leave off with (leaving out comments about stat tracking and achievement farming and whatnot), is just that Blizzard here is stating, and their fanboys in the room are happily restating, is that, put simply, they are awesome because they aren't doing what Ubisoft is doing. Even though they aren't as bad as Ubi, they're just as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the market in this matter. They're still being 'bad', they just aren't the 'worst'. But they're still being bad.
Oh I don't know that they better than Ubisoft. I don't have the final game in hand but as I was mentioning above, I couldn't even do a single player comp stomp in the Beta without a constant internet connection. My gf's connection is unreliable at best dropping out every few minutes for about 30 seconds. I couldn't even build my second building before it would drop me EVERY game.
That is correct. You cannot remove a game unless you pay for a transfer and you may only transfer to direct family. They are very strict about checking ID's, addresses, etc in order to allow a transfer within a family.
I play the original starcraft offline (though not alone). I mostly play with my nephews who (there are a lot of them) range from about 6 years old to 21. We own original copies of all and we play at my parents house during family get togethers (which usually last 6+ hours). There is no way in hell I am getting onto battlenet with a kid who has just learned to read so that the can see everyone spouting off about ANAL [RAMPAGE] like they do in Warcraft. To require it just means that I won't be buying a half a dozen copies of starcraft two to play with them.
I can sell my account with all the games bound to it.
Actually if you read the terms of service, you are not allowed to sell your battle.net account and if they find out that you have, they will block the entire account. They do it with World of Borecraft (TM) all the time.
I don't know how the release version of the game is going to be but I couldn't even do a solo comp stomp of the game without an internet connection in the Beta. My girlfriend uses sprint 3G for internet at her place and her reception is terrible. I could never play a game for more than about 2 minutes at her house before it would dump me to the desktop and say my network failed. On top of that the game would then crash (it was a beta though).
Sounds like pretty restrictive DRM to me. I won't be buying it.
If Congress had balls (and they don't have balls, just pockets with checks in them from the banks)...
The beauty of it all is that the bank wrote that check on your account!
Are you sure people can't sue? I had Cingular (Now AT&T Wireless) put a fraudulent entry on my credit report. They even sent me to collections on a $0.00 balance. I wrote both the collections agency and AT&T and told them they had 2 business weeks to correct my credit report and cease collections attempts or I was going to sue them both for libel. Sure enough, two weeks later everything had been cleaned up.
I'm certainly no expert but my guess is that's a record time for having a credit report fixed.
Found here or here or here.
California Universities are not allowed to use SSN's for ID purposes. It's not the school that is requiring them, but the IRS. The student does not have to give the SSN but they will face a $50 fine per semester.
Oh tell me about it. I love how I can't download something from the App store over 3G because its larger than 10MB. Because I pay $30 a month to have unlimited data in 10MB chunks? I don't think so. And don't get me started on how text messages some how magically aren't part of that unlimited data? Last I checked texts were just ones and zeroes... of course, so are the voice calls, aren't they?
Try allowing Noscript on that site? I was listed as 1 in 4 too until I enabled scripting on that website and ran the test again. Then I came out to be 1 in 1,000,000. I'd say that's more unique than I'd like to be.
Test yourself here if you haven't already.
Maybe he's like me and is annoyed at having to re-jailbreak the phone every time theres any sort of update?