My Jon Katz detector worked!
on
High Score
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· Score: 1
Okay, I started to read the paragraph without actually checking who the article was by. I got to the following line: E-games are now both historic and significant...
And I was like E-GAMES??? Who the hell uses terms like that? And then I thought, "this has got to be Katz." Sure enough, it is.
Your mention of securing machines brings up a very good point relative to this. You can expect that, as wireless products get easier to work with (right now the stats on ease of use with Wi-Fi are appalling), they will be showing up in more homes. How many of these folks will have clue one about how to set these networks up to prevent roaming access? How many will really care?
In the end the providers will try to prvent this excess usage from happening, but they can hardly take on all of the people who simply forget to lock down their networks. They'll take on those who advertise, but then with the growing volume of wireless networks, will people really need to be advertising? You'll just go to wherever you want, whip out your roaming software, and be on-line. If anything your problems getting connected will likely be tied more to interference than lack of open networks.
Overall I'd expect that there will be a slight increase in overall network usage because of this extra roaming and this will end up causing a slight increase in prices and a balance will be achieved. The providers will go after egregious abusers and the rest of us will happily roam without them ever noticing.
Ummm.. starbucks... Well alright, should I have a stroke and suddenly have the urge to buy things from starbucks website, then that might be a problem. So then I'd go to one of the 18 billion starbucks with in a half mile radius of everywhere on earth.
Curious though, does starbucks have any partnerships with Microsoft? This may be part of some join promotion deal, or perhaps Microsoft actually runs starbuck's site.
Alright, now that I sit and think about the numbers some more, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Got it from the government. Which may not speak highly to it's accuracy but anyhow:
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hsfaq.htm
Specifically they show motor fuel usage about halfway down the page: In 2000, gallons of fuel consumed were:
Actually I just realized I added those up incorrectly and total use (according to them) is actually lower by these numbers. It should be Total fuel plus non-highway use. But I agree with you that this number doesn't make sense, so I'm guessing there's an order of magnitude that they aren't making clear. So hunting elsewhere:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question417.htm
Okay, so from there we get 360 million gallons of gas every day. Sounds like a more realistic number. So multiply that and we get roughly 130 billion gallons of gas every day....
So, nevermind then, if we took every single piece of arable land we wouldn't come close to the amount needed. So go with hydrogen, there's plenty of that around:).
Just for the record, I did a little quick research to find out how much farm use this would require. I found an estimate suggesting that 1 acre of rapeseed was sufficient to yield 100 gallons of biodiesel. So...
Total arable land in the US: 464 million acres Max theoretical fuel output: 46.4 billion gallons Annual gas usage in the US: 400 million gallons
Now, depending on the fuel economy inherent to bio-diesel as opposed to unleaded, this would imply that with less than 1% of the arable land in the US dedicated to making bio-diesel, there would be a surplus of fuel available.
So, I don't think this is a problem unless my numbers about rapeseed to biodiesel conversion are incorrect.
The fact of the matter is that merchants aren't going to want to put any hurdles between the customer and buying something. They won't require passport because it's just one more thing that MIGHT cause a consumer to go elsewhere. Many may offer passport, and there may be some sort of incentives attached to this, but they won't require it.
If most sites started requiring passport for some reason (credit card processor mandate?), I'd find myself showing up at physical stores once again.
2) Get laid. Get so good at it that you can walk into any social situation and walk out with someone you just met.
3) Find a person who perfectly compliments your own strengths and faults, marry them, create a strong and lasting marriage, have kids, and raise them to be excellent people.
These should probably not be attempted simultaneously:)
This seems to be another case where there may be a strong correlation but debatable causation. If you have bad social skills you are far more likely to engage in introverted hobies, included amongst those is playing video games.
Also, I'd be very curious to see a study showing the relation between different kinds of games and brain activity. Does playing a stategic game alter the effects versus a shoot 'em up kind of game. Seems to me that a puzzle solving game is probably going to have a different effect than say pac man.
Finally, I'm curious as to what his conclusions are actually saying. I'm not a neurologist so I can't comment with any real expertise, but I've done a little research about brain waves, mental states, etc. I had always been under the impression that having a brain heavily in alpha waves was good. This is, as I understand it, the state one is supposed to be in when meditating. So is this necessarily a bad thing?
I'm not certain that understanding the programming behind exploits is all that useful. I mean yes, knowing how a buffer overflow works is interesting, but if apache has a buffer overflow and I'm a sysadmin for a webserver running it, do I really care how a buffer overflow works? No, I just need to get the patch.
Unless you have the freetime to actively go scrounging through somebody's code that sort of knowledge probably isn't that useful to you. I have never, in my life, met a sysadmin who had freetime. Instead, I think the useful knowledge you need is closely related to the potential vectors of attack.
For example, one common vector is a network based attack. Thus you should have a strong knowledge of how the network works in detail. Knowing how to construct a solid firewall, and knowing how to limit your attack profile are all important. Knowing cisco stuff, yes, is probably useful here.
Another common vector is the inside job which, though less frequent is usually far more destructive. There you need to have a strong knowledge of what system you have, who uses them, etc. You need to actively manage what limits are put on the access of individual users, etc.
None of this really needs a knowledge of C programming. You need to know best practices like keeping your patches up to date, setting up intrusion detection systems, and teaching people the habits of good security (don't EVER tell somebody your password, etc).
In the article, I found the following paragraph rather interesting: While conceding later that copy-protected CDs aren't against existing law, he said their introduction wouldn't even impact the music piracy the music industry is trying to stop. Instead, the move will "anger millions of their best-customers who have become accustomed of making copies [of CDs] for their own use," which is allowed under "fair use" provisions of copyright law. So, if indeed they are angering millions of their best-customers, then why does he need a law. Seems logical that by doing this they will be hurting their own bottom line, and thus will be disincented to do it. Having said that, I'm happy to see this kind of legislation because I think copyright is getting sorely out of balance.
I have been fortunate in that my obscure taste in music has kept me away from CD's with copy protection schemes. If I do someday pick up a CD with a protection scheme, then I will handle it very simply.
I will rip it as I do with every CD to 192Kbps MP3. If it fails I'll spend some time trying to find hacks that will get it to rip successfully. If no hacks solve it, then I will return the media as unusable and demand my money back. If the label doesn't want my money, I'll just go find other musicians to listen to, thanks. If they all go to unbreakable copy protection systems (hahaha!), then I'll just hum along with the voices in my head I guess.
If they don't want to sell me music in the form that I listen to I guess I just won't listen anymore.
I've gone the last two years and though the price is quite good, from year to year the quality can vary a lot. Two years ago it was really quite good. A decent number of interesting speakers, got to hang out a bit with Bennett Haselton, the guy who runs peacefire.org. Overall had a good time.
The last year though the topics really didn't seem to be quite as good and there were endless mindless pranks going on. I'm all for clever interesting pranks, but this was dumb stuff like smashing hotel lights, etc. I mean, the prank hilight was dry ice in the pool. Neat effect, but hardly breaking new ground:)
That's the only problem with Defcon is that it tends to attract a certain anti-establishment sophmoric crowd (because unlike most similar cons, they can afford to get in:). While certainly there's something inherently anti-establishment about a hacker convention in the first place, that energy can be channeled into mindless destruction or it can be channeled into creative/constructive efforts. Seems that this varies from year to year:)
It's sorta well suited to vegas. You put down your money and take somewhat of a gamble on what you are going to get. I'd suggest checking the website for the speaker list and see if they have things that interest you. If it looks good, then go for it, give or take airfare and hotel it's a bargain.
It occurs to me that perhaps one of the biggest problems for rapid deployment of broadband services in the US is that our population centers are, for the most part, very spread out. As a broadband provider, you have to run a hell of a lot more cable, repeaters, etc, to connect the same number of customers as you might in a more densely populated area. I know this is definitely true of Japan, though I don't know how the population is spread out in Sweeden.
I have never seen a video game so aptly demonstrate what goes terribly wrong when you try to get anything done with an overfunded bureaucracy. Kudos to the developers!:)
Actually from what little I can tell from the training missions (since I can't get on an fscking server), it looks like it could be really good. If only they had either:
1) insured that there were plenty of good servers 2) dropped the silly requirement of playing one map before you could play the others
Should be interesting to see how they handle this. I'm sure it will be handled in an amply bureaucratic and ineffective way.
This guy is begging to get sued
on
P2P Streaming Radio
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The fact that this guy's website if expressly saying he's doing this to bypass carp is going to screw him in the long run. If he got taken to court and his most obvious defense would be to say that this was created to help independent artists broadcast their music. Then the judge will look at the pages from his website and that defense will be dead right away.
If you're going to try to take on the system, try to do it in an intelligent manner.
GPL won't get thrown out...
on
DishPVR 721 Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The thing is the GPL won't get thrown out in court. The reason is that it does not, in any way, restrict your right to do things under copyright law. It's only when I distribute it that I have to deal with the GPL, and under normal cirumstances i wouldn't be allowed to do that at all.
The major advantage of this design which they illustrate quite nicely in their photos is that it's ideal for presentations. No longer do you have to deal with trying to navigate a presentation while not being able to look at it.
Other than that, however, it's not thatgreat. You've got two smaller panels rather than one big one which means you actually end up with less physical screen space. Furthermore, your natural tendancy is to look to the middle of the screen which, in the case of a two-panel display, means you are looking at the joint between the two displays.
What I'd love to see is a design where it was three panels that folded out. It would make for a very bulky laptop though, so you probably would want to use it as a portable so much as be able to take it from desktop to desktop.
Microsoft has huge reserves, don't get me wrong, but it seems like, more and more, they are having to spend a lot of money to fend off their competition. 750 million is only a drop in the bucket, but it does add up eventually.
Microsoft is hemorraging big time on these consoles under the premise that they can sell software titles to make up for that loss. Furthermore I suspect there is a secondary interest in simply trying to create a nother market they can dominate. But anyhow, the damage is simply that if I can run software that never paid a toll to Microsoft, then Microsoft will lose even more money on the boxes.
Having said that there shouldn't be any legal reason that makes a mod chip illegal. SHOULDN'T being the key word here. They can likely sue on any number of fronts just as a legal bullying tactic.
The most obvious attack would be DMCA. By providing a mod chip, then you are possibly circumventing access control measures, etc. Depends on what exactly the mod chip does really. But really it doesn't matter whether they have a solid case or not, as long as it isn't frivolous enough to get thrown out of court on day one, it's gonna cost a lot of resources to fend it off.
Strange thought: what if Sony released a mod chip for X-box? >:)
While Eye Socket, Montana might be a little extreme, the fact of the matter is that their journalism could have been done in many places other than SF. I mean, do you think Ariana Huffington lives in San Francisco? If they want to find out about life in the big city, they pay some freelance writer in the big city to tell them about it.
I think they could have done qutie well journalistically had they lived in any of a number of other largish cities that weren't nearly so pricey.
What magazine were you reading? It seemed to me that, for the most part, it had very lefty anti-establishment bent. Occasionally they'd throw a bit of right-wing in there just to keep people on their toes but I think it had a pretty clear bent.
So it would appear from those figures that Sony, at least, may be making a small profit. But I'm wondering, are those prices purely the hardware cost per unit?
Each manufacturer does a lot of marketing. Also add to Microsoft's hemorraging that I'm sure they have to put quite a bit of money into getting exclusive titles for the X-box. Sony has enough market share that developing only for PS2 makes perfect sense. Most of the exclusives on Nintendo are all manufactured by Nintendo. So, in the end i have to believe Microsoft is really hurting relative to the other manufacturers. Having said that though, they have billions in the bank, they can afford to take a hit in the short term if it pans out long term.
Okay, this is a matter of some debate from the many articles I've read on the console industry. Are they all really losing money on the consoles?
It seems pretty clear that Microsoft is losing money in a big way on the consoles. I have seen nobody suggest otherwise, and if you think about what their hardware is and the price it makes sense that they are losing money.
For sony, the profit/loss question seems more up in the air. I've seen most places say that they are losing money on it but I've seen some articles suggesting that the loss is minimal or may in fact be a small profit.
As for Nintendo, I've gotten the sense that they are actually making at least a small amount on their consoles. They didn't throw in all the power that the other two companies did planning to instead rely on the power of their collection of games as incentive to buy.
So does anybody have any reasonable factual information about how much the companies are or are not losing?
In God We Trust. All others pay by credit until they are so obscenely in debt that they can only just barely pay their minimum balances every month. Then take a second mortgage out on your house to pay off some of the balances so that you can buy more stuff on credit.
I like my phrasing as it implies that somehow the government would be monitoring your thoughts. So, the new line:
... for all except people who the government thinks might be a terrorist or anybody who has ever considered the possibility of being a terrorist at any point
I my pledge my allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under JOE PESCI indivisible with liberty and justice for all except the people that might possibly have considered being a terrorist at some point
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I started to read the paragraph without actually checking who the article was by. I got to the following line:
E-games are now both historic and significant...
And I was like E-GAMES??? Who the hell uses terms like that? And then I thought, "this has got to be Katz." Sure enough, it is.
Your mention of securing machines brings up a very good point relative to this. You can expect that, as wireless products get easier to work with (right now the stats on ease of use with Wi-Fi are appalling), they will be showing up in more homes. How many of these folks will have clue one about how to set these networks up to prevent roaming access? How many will really care?
In the end the providers will try to prvent this excess usage from happening, but they can hardly take on all of the people who simply forget to lock down their networks. They'll take on those who advertise, but then with the growing volume of wireless networks, will people really need to be advertising? You'll just go to wherever you want, whip out your roaming software, and be on-line. If anything your problems getting connected will likely be tied more to interference than lack of open networks.
Overall I'd expect that there will be a slight increase in overall network usage because of this extra roaming and this will end up causing a slight increase in prices and a balance will be achieved. The providers will go after egregious abusers and the rest of us will happily roam without them ever noticing.
Try buying something online from Starbucks. Passport required. (unless it's changed recently).
Ummm.. starbucks... Well alright, should I have a stroke and suddenly have the urge to buy things from starbucks website, then that might be a problem. So then I'd go to one of the 18 billion starbucks with in a half mile radius of everywhere on earth.
Curious though, does starbucks have any partnerships with Microsoft? This may be part of some join promotion deal, or perhaps Microsoft actually runs starbuck's site.
Alright, now that I sit and think about the numbers some more, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Got it from the government. Which may not speak highly to it's accuracy but anyhow:
:).
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hsfaq.htm
Specifically they show motor fuel usage about halfway down the page:
In 2000, gallons of fuel consumed were:
128,883,609 (Gasoline - highway use)
33,376,587 (Special fuel - highway use)
162,260,196 (Total fuel - highway use)
2,971,636 (Non-highway use)
Actually I just realized I added those up incorrectly and total use (according to them) is actually lower by these numbers. It should be Total fuel plus non-highway use. But I agree with you that this number doesn't make sense, so I'm guessing there's an order of magnitude that they aren't making clear. So hunting elsewhere:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question417.htm
Okay, so from there we get 360 million gallons of gas every day. Sounds like a more realistic number. So multiply that and we get roughly 130 billion gallons of gas every day....
So, nevermind then, if we took every single piece of arable land we wouldn't come close to the amount needed. So go with hydrogen, there's plenty of that around
Just for the record, I did a little quick research to find out how much farm use this would require. I found an estimate suggesting that 1 acre of rapeseed was sufficient to yield 100 gallons of biodiesel. So...
Total arable land in the US: 464 million acres
Max theoretical fuel output: 46.4 billion gallons
Annual gas usage in the US: 400 million gallons
Now, depending on the fuel economy inherent to bio-diesel as opposed to unleaded, this would imply that with less than 1% of the arable land in the US dedicated to making bio-diesel, there would be a surplus of fuel available.
So, I don't think this is a problem unless my numbers about rapeseed to biodiesel conversion are incorrect.
The fact of the matter is that merchants aren't going to want to put any hurdles between the customer and buying something. They won't require passport because it's just one more thing that MIGHT cause a consumer to go elsewhere. Many may offer passport, and there may be some sort of incentives attached to this, but they won't require it.
If most sites started requiring passport for some reason (credit card processor mandate?), I'd find myself showing up at physical stores once again.
2) Get laid. Get so good at it that you can walk into any social situation and walk out with someone you just met.
3) Find a person who perfectly compliments your own strengths and faults, marry them, create a strong and lasting marriage, have kids, and raise them to be excellent people.
These should probably not be attempted simultaneously
This seems to be another case where there may be a strong correlation but debatable causation. If you have bad social skills you are far more likely to engage in introverted hobies, included amongst those is playing video games.
Also, I'd be very curious to see a study showing the relation between different kinds of games and brain activity. Does playing a stategic game alter the effects versus a shoot 'em up kind of game. Seems to me that a puzzle solving game is probably going to have a different effect than say pac man.
Finally, I'm curious as to what his conclusions are actually saying. I'm not a neurologist so I can't comment with any real expertise, but I've done a little research about brain waves, mental states, etc. I had always been under the impression that having a brain heavily in alpha waves was good. This is, as I understand it, the state one is supposed to be in when meditating. So is this necessarily a bad thing?
I'm not certain that understanding the programming behind exploits is all that useful. I mean yes, knowing how a buffer overflow works is interesting, but if apache has a buffer overflow and I'm a sysadmin for a webserver running it, do I really care how a buffer overflow works? No, I just need to get the patch.
Unless you have the freetime to actively go scrounging through somebody's code that sort of knowledge probably isn't that useful to you. I have never, in my life, met a sysadmin who had freetime. Instead, I think the useful knowledge you need is closely related to the potential vectors of attack.
For example, one common vector is a network based attack. Thus you should have a strong knowledge of how the network works in detail. Knowing how to construct a solid firewall, and knowing how to limit your attack profile are all important. Knowing cisco stuff, yes, is probably useful here.
Another common vector is the inside job which, though less frequent is usually far more destructive. There you need to have a strong knowledge of what system you have, who uses them, etc. You need to actively manage what limits are put on the access of individual users, etc.
None of this really needs a knowledge of C programming. You need to know best practices like keeping your patches up to date, setting up intrusion detection systems, and teaching people the habits of good security (don't EVER tell somebody your password, etc).
In the article, I found the following paragraph rather interesting:
While conceding later that copy-protected CDs aren't against existing law, he said their introduction wouldn't even impact the music piracy the music industry is trying to stop. Instead, the move will "anger millions of their best-customers who have become accustomed of making copies [of CDs] for their own use," which is allowed under "fair use" provisions of copyright law.
So, if indeed they are angering millions of their best-customers, then why does he need a law. Seems logical that by doing this they will be hurting their own bottom line, and thus will be disincented to do it. Having said that, I'm happy to see this kind of legislation because I think copyright is getting sorely out of balance.
I have been fortunate in that my obscure taste in music has kept me away from CD's with copy protection schemes. If I do someday pick up a CD with a protection scheme, then I will handle it very simply.
I will rip it as I do with every CD to 192Kbps MP3. If it fails I'll spend some time trying to find hacks that will get it to rip successfully. If no hacks solve it, then I will return the media as unusable and demand my money back. If the label doesn't want my money, I'll just go find other musicians to listen to, thanks. If they all go to unbreakable copy protection systems (hahaha!), then I'll just hum along with the voices in my head I guess.
If they don't want to sell me music in the form that I listen to I guess I just won't listen anymore.
I've gone the last two years and though the price is quite good, from year to year the quality can vary a lot. Two years ago it was really quite good. A decent number of interesting speakers, got to hang out a bit with Bennett Haselton, the guy who runs peacefire.org. Overall had a good time.
:)
:). While certainly there's something inherently anti-establishment about a hacker convention in the first place, that energy can be channeled into mindless destruction or it can be channeled into creative/constructive efforts. Seems that this varies from year to year :)
The last year though the topics really didn't seem to be quite as good and there were endless mindless pranks going on. I'm all for clever interesting pranks, but this was dumb stuff like smashing hotel lights, etc. I mean, the prank hilight was dry ice in the pool. Neat effect, but hardly breaking new ground
That's the only problem with Defcon is that it tends to attract a certain anti-establishment sophmoric crowd (because unlike most similar cons, they can afford to get in
It's sorta well suited to vegas. You put down your money and take somewhat of a gamble on what you are going to get. I'd suggest checking the website for the speaker list and see if they have things that interest you. If it looks good, then go for it, give or take airfare and hotel it's a bargain.
It occurs to me that perhaps one of the biggest problems for rapid deployment of broadband services in the US is that our population centers are, for the most part, very spread out. As a broadband provider, you have to run a hell of a lot more cable, repeaters, etc, to connect the same number of customers as you might in a more densely populated area. I know this is definitely true of Japan, though I don't know how the population is spread out in Sweeden.
I have never seen a video game so aptly demonstrate what goes terribly wrong when you try to get anything done with an overfunded bureaucracy. Kudos to the developers! :)
Actually from what little I can tell from the training missions (since I can't get on an fscking server), it looks like it could be really good. If only they had either:
1) insured that there were plenty of good servers
2) dropped the silly requirement of playing one map before you could play the others
Should be interesting to see how they handle this. I'm sure it will be handled in an amply bureaucratic and ineffective way.
The fact that this guy's website if expressly saying he's doing this to bypass carp is going to screw him in the long run. If he got taken to court and his most obvious defense would be to say that this was created to help independent artists broadcast their music. Then the judge will look at the pages from his website and that defense will be dead right away.
If you're going to try to take on the system, try to do it in an intelligent manner.
The thing is the GPL won't get thrown out in court. The reason is that it does not, in any way, restrict your right to do things under copyright law. It's only when I distribute it that I have to deal with the GPL, and under normal cirumstances i wouldn't be allowed to do that at all.
The major advantage of this design which they illustrate quite nicely in their photos is that it's ideal for presentations. No longer do you have to deal with trying to navigate a presentation while not being able to look at it.
Other than that, however, it's not thatgreat. You've got two smaller panels rather than one big one which means you actually end up with less physical screen space. Furthermore, your natural tendancy is to look to the middle of the screen which, in the case of a two-panel display, means you are looking at the joint between the two displays.
What I'd love to see is a design where it was three panels that folded out. It would make for a very bulky laptop though, so you probably would want to use it as a portable so much as be able to take it from desktop to desktop.
Microsoft has huge reserves, don't get me wrong, but it seems like, more and more, they are having to spend a lot of money to fend off their competition. 750 million is only a drop in the bucket, but it does add up eventually.
Microsoft is hemorraging big time on these consoles under the premise that they can sell software titles to make up for that loss. Furthermore I suspect there is a secondary interest in simply trying to create a nother market they can dominate. But anyhow, the damage is simply that if I can run software that never paid a toll to Microsoft, then Microsoft will lose even more money on the boxes.
Having said that there shouldn't be any legal reason that makes a mod chip illegal. SHOULDN'T being the key word here. They can likely sue on any number of fronts just as a legal bullying tactic.
The most obvious attack would be DMCA. By providing a mod chip, then you are possibly circumventing access control measures, etc. Depends on what exactly the mod chip does really. But really it doesn't matter whether they have a solid case or not, as long as it isn't frivolous enough to get thrown out of court on day one, it's gonna cost a lot of resources to fend it off.
Strange thought: what if Sony released a mod chip for X-box? >:)
While Eye Socket, Montana might be a little extreme, the fact of the matter is that their journalism could have been done in many places other than SF. I mean, do you think Ariana Huffington lives in San Francisco? If they want to find out about life in the big city, they pay some freelance writer in the big city to tell them about it.
I think they could have done qutie well journalistically had they lived in any of a number of other largish cities that weren't nearly so pricey.
What magazine were you reading? It seemed to me that, for the most part, it had very lefty anti-establishment bent. Occasionally they'd throw a bit of right-wing in there just to keep people on their toes but I think it had a pretty clear bent.
So it would appear from those figures that Sony, at least, may be making a small profit. But I'm wondering, are those prices purely the hardware cost per unit?
Each manufacturer does a lot of marketing. Also add to Microsoft's hemorraging that I'm sure they have to put quite a bit of money into getting exclusive titles for the X-box. Sony has enough market share that developing only for PS2 makes perfect sense. Most of the exclusives on Nintendo are all manufactured by Nintendo. So, in the end i have to believe Microsoft is really hurting relative to the other manufacturers. Having said that though, they have billions in the bank, they can afford to take a hit in the short term if it pans out long term.
Okay, this is a matter of some debate from the many articles I've read on the console industry. Are they all really losing money on the consoles?
It seems pretty clear that Microsoft is losing money in a big way on the consoles. I have seen nobody suggest otherwise, and if you think about what their hardware is and the price it makes sense that they are losing money.
For sony, the profit/loss question seems more up in the air. I've seen most places say that they are losing money on it but I've seen some articles suggesting that the loss is minimal or may in fact be a small profit.
As for Nintendo, I've gotten the sense that they are actually making at least a small amount on their consoles. They didn't throw in all the power that the other two companies did planning to instead rely on the power of their collection of games as incentive to buy.
So does anybody have any reasonable factual information about how much the companies are or are not losing?
In God We Trust. All others pay by credit until they are so obscenely in debt that they can only just barely pay their minimum balances every month. Then take a second mortgage out on your house to pay off some of the balances so that you can buy more stuff on credit.
:)
Eh, maybe your phrase is better
I like my phrasing as it implies that somehow the government would be monitoring your thoughts. So, the new line:
... for all except people who the government thinks might be a terrorist or anybody who has ever considered the possibility of being a terrorist at any point
yah?
I my pledge my allegiance
to the flag
of the united states of america
and to the republic
for which it stands
one nation
under JOE PESCI
indivisible
with liberty and justice for all except the people that might possibly have considered being a terrorist at some point