This service is of no use to me. The old free Audiogalaxy used to carry stuff like JPOP and HKPOP which the new pay Audiogalaxy no longer has available. I guess you could call it "value-subtracted."
However, I'll concede that most Americans have no interest in Asian pop music so I could see this rebranded Listen.com being moderately successful IF they did one little thing: Allowed the user to print out 10 coupons a month each for a dollar off one retail CD. If the user buys 10 CDs that month, then the service is essentially free. Meanwhile, product gets moved, consumers are profiled, everybody's happy.
Now ask yourself why coupons for CDs aren't already widespread the way they are for food, shampoo, even cars (in the form of cashback offers) and then remind me again how the RIAA isn't a price-fixing cartel which deserves to be broken up.
Actually, despite what the article says, the latest DVD-RAM disks don't require casing.
Furthermore, DVD-RAM has a projected lifespan of 100,000 read-write cycles, compared to about 1000 for DVD+R/-R. So it's really an attractive format and it'll be a shame if Sony doesn't include it in their combo drive.
I think the RIAA does not actually expect to go to court.
I think if that were the case, they would've tried to negotiate this behind closed doors without filing a lawsuit at all. In fact, they probably tried that, and each defendant said, "No dice," or at least, "not unless the other guys do it too."
It wouldn't surprise me, though, if one or more of the defendants coughAOLTWcough secretly hope to lose the case so they can tell their customers they were "forced" to shut down access to this site, and subsequently to ban USENET "alt" groups and Kazaa's port 1214 and so on. And of course if a legal decision comes down, every ISP will be forced to do the same thing and AOL, et. al. won't be at a competitive disadvantage.
Disposability is not the issue, cost is. Imagine that I own a company and I buy some equipment which is designed to last 15 years. Your company buys equipment which costs twice as much but is designed to last 60 years. Seems like you got a better deal, right? Wrong. Because now I can charge 10 or 20 percent less than you can for the goods I sell, and your company goes out of business long before it gets to benefit from the better made equipment. Not to mention that if your company still exists after 15 years pass, you'll probably have to replace the equipment anyway because incremental technological improvements will make it obsolete. Bottom line is that generally it doesn't pay to buy items for long-term durability. Overengineering is a waste of time and resources, and learning this lesson is one of the major ways that modern economies have become more productive.
First off The Dvd-r discs are far more compatable with DVD players than Dvd+r's are
Incorrect. DVD-R discs and DVD+R discs have virtually the same level of compatibility.
The DVD-R spec is backed by the same forum that supports the Cd-r and rw spec
Incorrect. The DVD-R spec is backed by the same forum that supports the DVD spec. The same forum that supports CSS, RCE and other technologies beloved by/. members.
And now if I'm not mistaken there is a lawsuit against the companies supporting the Dvd+r spec
AFAIK, only HP was forcing consumers to pay extra for the new drive, and even still they were eventually only charging for the updated software, which they don't make, not the hardware. Still, those are the risks for early adopters. See what kind of trade-in Creative is offering on its DVD-RAM drives.
My Money is on the DVD-R standard period!
You seem to be mistaken about most of the facts here so I'm not sure why your prediction should hold much weight. OTOH, you are honest enough to admit your bias as an owner of a DVD-RW, so I'll likewise admit that I own the HP +RW unit. Can't say I exactly "love" it, I find myself still burning a lot more CDRs than DVD+Rs. I'd frankly advise those people who can to hold out for the Blu-Ray or whatever format is coming along next.
Doesn't it look more and more like Microsoft is deliberately leaving flaws in its operating system, then issuing fixes under terms of extortion?
Yes, we'll fix that ActiveX problem you have, but in return you must give us the right to your first born. Oh, you refuse? Then we can't be held responsible for any attacks on your system, after all, we don't give mainstream support to Windows 98 anymore.
Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm.
Yet Another Inaccurate Slashdot Summary. (YAISS). That's not what the article says at all. The implication is that the haven't "disregarded" Blu-Ray, but that one particular studio, Warner, has found it lacking because it would require a brand new manufacturing process and this would preclude a quick launch date which is needed to compete with Fox's D-VHS. One analyst specifically states that Blu-Ray is likely to be supported by Sony/Columbia-Tristar.
Anyway, one point the article fails to mention is that a highly-compressed HD format which takes up 9 GB is unlikely to be further compressible without a substantial loss of quality. Someone would essentially have to copy all nine gigabytes in order to maintain HD quality. But a 30 to 50 GB Blu-Ray movie, loosely compressed, would be the basis of a very high quality DivX type dub. (It's like the difference between trying to recompress your mp3's as Oggs or going back to the source CD for a higher quality compression.) Not to mention that if it's a MS controlled format they'll easily be able to restrict a Palladium OS from copying the disk. So for those reasons, Hollywood might prefer to release Warner's format to the Sony/Philips backed Blu-Ray.
What the Zimbabwean government says they are afraid of is losing export business to Europe, which does not allow BE food. That, and the president is stupidly independant.
This is a bad thing for HP. The thing is, hackers love to share their code with the world. And there are two ways to exploit that obsessive desire, either through good (white hat) mechanisms or through bad (cracker) mechanisms. If HP prevents hackers from researching exploits in a legitimate fashion, it won't stop the hackers -- they'll just only leak their hacks onto Eastern European warez websites outside of the reach of US law. HP won't be aware of anything until it's too late and millions of dollars of damage have already been done by malicious parties. It's like that old saw about gun ownership: When hacking software is a crime then only criminals will hack your software.
I forgot to round up, so the other guy was right. But that's not the real issue at all. The real problem here is that with all my mp3's, mpgs and jpgs deemed illegal due to the RIAA, MPAA and Forgent, I frankly don't have anything to store on that monster except a couple of Excel worksheets from 1994. Oh yeah, and that old Visual Basic "Hello World!" program from college. But even VBRUN200.DLL can't make a dent in this WD beast.
Backing up this sucker ought to be fun. Hmm, I only need 138,888 floppies! Lessee, at the rate of one floppy inserted a minute, that'll take me over 96 days straight!
If I get started right away, I'll be well prepared for the inevitable HD crash that will follow my installation of WinXP SP-1.
a complete DUMBASS...COFFEE IS FUCKING HOT...lack of coordiation to open cups of coffee while driving anyway.
Several times in this thread the points have been made that (a) she was not the driver and (b) the car was not moving in any event.
Doesn't that make you even want to slightly consider that, perhaps, no, you don't know better than the judge and jury who were intimately acquainted with the facts and who unanimously agreed that McDonald's was very much at fault? That on occasion others who disagree with your worldview might not automatically be "dumbasses"?
Moreover, in proper society one does not serve tea or coffee in heat-insulating styrofoam cups.
I believe you were making the point that the insulating foam did not allow the coffee to cool off as it would do under more "proper" circumstances. That is very true, but another part of the problem was that, since their styrofoam cups insulated so well, it was impossible for the woman to ascertain exactly how hot the coffee was. Normally when one goes to a sit-down restaurant or a coffee-cart, one is given a waxed-paper cup or as you say, a china cup. Either will indicate how hot the coffee is by touch. A styrofoam cup can hold boiling hot water and be only slightly above room temperature. So how was she supposed to detect how hot her coffee was except by cracking open the lid? And that's exactly what she did, only to find out it was pretty damned hot indeed.
Murakami and many many other "postmodern" authors owe a debt to magic realism, which in terms of literature was originally used to describe Latin-American writers such as Borges and García Márquez. So you might do well to start out with Borges' "La Biblioteca Total" or García Márquez's "Cien Años de Soledad"
A friend of mine swears by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, though I certainly couldn't tell you how he reads in the original Arabic.
Also, although he writes in English, I'd urge you to consider the great Anglo-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Japanese and English people are both known to outsiders for their senses of reserve and decorum, and Ishiguro taps into that beautifully in his "The Remains of the Day." But if you are looking for something more overtly allegorical, you will do no better than the quietly bizarre novel "The Unconsoled" certainly one of the best books I've ever read.
Indeed. And furthermore, what's up with that Information Markup Language specification? It seems counterproductive to create an XML doctype nobody's using for a machine which is supposed to be as simple as possible. It would've been better for it to use a subset of HTML such as is used by some already existing PDA browsers, and to just ignore the tags it doesn't understand. Then at least there would be a large base of information already available for its users.
Furthermore, at $214 it seems to me that it would make more sense for the target nations to import a bunch of discontinued and/or reconditioned laptops, e.g. old 486 models, or even those old B/W MS HPCs you can occasionally find on sale at discount places.
I think Moby's totally wrong. Most of the people I know who download mp3s aren't tech savvy at all. Because of that, they learn how to do the basics, burn a CD and that's that. The technologically ignorant are the ones who are looking for the quick shortcut to avoid paying their $15.98. A real nerd isn't looking to cut corners -- s/he's more likely to shop online, to use search engines to find and buy obscure bands, to be into collecting stuff like CDs, and. bottom line, to have the disposable income to waste on non-essentials.
Moby's real enemies are 1) the teeny boppers who swap CDs with their friends 2) his own lack of originality this time out and 3) Dirty Vegas, who took his niche.
Furthermore, there's really no point in trying to keep score. Think of Alice's Wonderland -- there's a steady tone of giddy whimsy underlying the whole affair. Nothing quite adds up add the end, nor is it meant to. It's a send-up of an espionage mystery but one which never gets solved.
To my recollection, the best bit in the novel is Lem's parody of the canonical "spy seduced by spy babe" scene. It's a little cheesy but a great deal of fun.
It's true that VHS didn't kill off the moviehouse. So why do I think MEMS might? Well, the two situations aren't comparable. The VHS/DVD rental window opens months after the theatrical release has ended. How come? Because when you rent a film for $2.99, the rest of your family, your friends, etc., effectively watch it for free. So to allow rentals during the theatrical release would seriously undercut the initial revenue stream. However, a retinal MEMS display would be economically equivalent to a movie ticket. Instead of a family of four paying $32 at the theater, they'd pay $32 to watch four secure personal MEMS displays at home. This could be released simultaneously with the first-run theatrical issue at no loss of revenue to Hollywood. But it would drastically affect the bottom line of the theaters even if only 20% of consumers decided to watch from the comfort of their living rooms.
The cable giants and the MPAA will love retinal displays because that means they can finally charge "Pay Per Viewer." No more of those digital pirates bringing 30 friends over to watch the latest boxing match. Now every pair of eyeballs can be individually billed. Of course that would also mean the death of movie theaters because Hollywood will be able to charge you at home for each one of your little urchins when Harry Potter X comes out.
> They (record companies) seem determined to kill the goos that laid the golden egg. They'd rather have control than cash.
I think that they would rather have the cash.
The problem is that the record companies are scared. They've looked into their crystal balls and don't like what they see. OK, for now mp3's might serve to whet people's appetites for the original CDs. But looking ahead, imagine a machine sold by SonicBlue which scoured the net for music files, then downloaded albums, automatically burned full CDs as well as printing labels and inserts, all at quality very close to the original. That's what would eventually happen if the record companies allow digital file swapping to go unchallenged. So they are doing everything they can to avoid this fate.
People think the record companies can still make money with digital distribution at high (guaranteed) quality, but I don't think that's going to happen. First of all, it seems very hard to get people to pay anything for digital content, as any online newsmagazine will tell you. I'd guess that most people would rather pay $15 for a CD than $5 for a digital download of the same exact thing. Secondly, the quality issue can be fixed. A free site like Audiogalaxy could generate user ratings alongside their file lists. Don't know which version of "Smutch.mp3" to get? Pick the one which has a "Score 5" next to it.
According to current law, if Lucasfilms shows the propensity to forgive others using their trademarked material, their ownership of those trademarks would be jeopardized.
This is really not an issue. Lucasfilm could easily license its trademarked products at nominal cost to participants in the contest without losing control of those trademarks.
I make 6$ an hour, there is no way I would even spend 2$ a month on this subscription service. And I am sure that 99.99% of others agree with me on that.
The thing you have to realize is that, for people like you, Gamespot wants you to go away. Right now every time you log onto their site, you are costing them money. So they will be happy to see the back of you. However, they are willing to let you stick around and look at their crippled site, provided you will submit to those ultra-intrusive popups which will actually make money for them. Because despite what people may want to believe, content might be free -- sometimes -- but bandwidth sure as hell ain't.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean, "Talking to the gent next to you while using the urinal is Peer-to-Peer."
This service is of no use to me. The old free Audiogalaxy used to carry stuff like JPOP and HKPOP which the new pay Audiogalaxy no longer has available. I guess you could call it "value-subtracted."
However, I'll concede that most Americans have no interest in Asian pop music so I could see this rebranded Listen.com being moderately successful IF they did one little thing: Allowed the user to print out 10 coupons a month each for a dollar off one retail CD. If the user buys 10 CDs that month, then the service is essentially free. Meanwhile, product gets moved, consumers are profiled, everybody's happy.
Now ask yourself why coupons for CDs aren't already widespread the way they are for food, shampoo, even cars (in the form of cashback offers) and then remind me again how the RIAA isn't a price-fixing cartel which deserves to be broken up.
I find it funny though that your comment was modded up,when it did not even bother to define what the acronym actually stands for
The Subject header is your friend.
Actually, despite what the article says, the latest DVD-RAM disks don't require casing.
Furthermore, DVD-RAM has a projected lifespan of 100,000 read-write cycles, compared to about 1000 for DVD+R/-R. So it's really an attractive format and it'll be a shame if Sony doesn't include it in their combo drive.
I think the RIAA does not actually expect to go to court.
I think if that were the case, they would've tried to negotiate this behind closed doors without filing a lawsuit at all. In fact, they probably tried that, and each defendant said, "No dice," or at least, "not unless the other guys do it too."
It wouldn't surprise me, though, if one or more of the defendants coughAOLTWcough secretly hope to lose the case so they can tell their customers they were "forced" to shut down access to this site, and subsequently to ban USENET "alt" groups and Kazaa's port 1214 and so on. And of course if a legal decision comes down, every ISP will be forced to do the same thing and AOL, et. al. won't be at a competitive disadvantage.
Disposable items create economic churn
Disposability is not the issue, cost is. Imagine that I own a company and I buy some equipment which is designed to last 15 years. Your company buys equipment which costs twice as much but is designed to last 60 years. Seems like you got a better deal, right? Wrong. Because now I can charge 10 or 20 percent less than you can for the goods I sell, and your company goes out of business long before it gets to benefit from the better made equipment. Not to mention that if your company still exists after 15 years pass, you'll probably have to replace the equipment anyway because incremental technological improvements will make it obsolete. Bottom line is that generally it doesn't pay to buy items for long-term durability. Overengineering is a waste of time and resources, and learning this lesson is one of the major ways that modern economies have become more productive.
First off The Dvd-r discs are far more compatable with DVD players than Dvd+r's are
/. members.
Incorrect. DVD-R discs and DVD+R discs have virtually the same level of compatibility.
The DVD-R spec is backed by the same forum that supports the Cd-r and rw spec
Incorrect. The DVD-R spec is backed by the same forum that supports the DVD spec. The same forum that supports CSS, RCE and other technologies beloved by
And now if I'm not mistaken there is a lawsuit against the companies supporting the Dvd+r spec
AFAIK, only HP was forcing consumers to pay extra for the new drive, and even still they were eventually only charging for the updated software, which they don't make, not the hardware. Still, those are the risks for early adopters. See what kind of trade-in Creative is offering on its DVD-RAM drives.
My Money is on the DVD-R standard period!
You seem to be mistaken about most of the facts here so I'm not sure why your prediction should hold much weight. OTOH, you are honest enough to admit your bias as an owner of a DVD-RW, so I'll likewise admit that I own the HP +RW unit. Can't say I exactly "love" it, I find myself still burning a lot more CDRs than DVD+Rs. I'd frankly advise those people who can to hold out for the Blu-Ray or whatever format is coming along next.
Doesn't it look more and more like Microsoft is deliberately leaving flaws in its operating system, then issuing fixes under terms of extortion?
Yes, we'll fix that ActiveX problem you have, but in return you must give us the right to your first born. Oh, you refuse? Then we can't be held responsible for any attacks on your system, after all, we don't give mainstream support to Windows 98 anymore.
Unfortunately, they seem to be completely disregarding the higher storage capacity of the Blu-Ray disc standard, that will hold 6 times the amount of a DVD-9, for the current red laser format with a different compression algorithm.
Yet Another Inaccurate Slashdot Summary. (YAISS). That's not what the article says at all. The implication is that the haven't "disregarded" Blu-Ray, but that one particular studio, Warner, has found it lacking because it would require a brand new manufacturing process and this would preclude a quick launch date which is needed to compete with Fox's D-VHS. One analyst specifically states that Blu-Ray is likely to be supported by Sony/Columbia-Tristar.
Anyway, one point the article fails to mention is that a highly-compressed HD format which takes up 9 GB is unlikely to be further compressible without a substantial loss of quality. Someone would essentially have to copy all nine gigabytes in order to maintain HD quality. But a 30 to 50 GB Blu-Ray movie, loosely compressed, would be the basis of a very high quality DivX type dub. (It's like the difference between trying to recompress your mp3's as Oggs or going back to the source CD for a higher quality compression.) Not to mention that if it's a MS controlled format they'll easily be able to restrict a Palladium OS from copying the disk. So for those reasons, Hollywood might prefer to release Warner's format to the Sony/Philips backed Blu-Ray.
What the Zimbabwean government says they are afraid of is losing export business to Europe, which does not allow BE food. That, and the president is stupidly independant.
Oh, is Bush in charge over there too?
HP should be thanking them
This is a bad thing for HP. The thing is, hackers love to share their code with the world. And there are two ways to exploit that obsessive desire, either through good (white hat) mechanisms or through bad (cracker) mechanisms. If HP prevents hackers from researching exploits in a legitimate fashion, it won't stop the hackers -- they'll just only leak their hacks onto Eastern European warez websites outside of the reach of US law. HP won't be aware of anything until it's too late and millions of dollars of damage have already been done by malicious parties. It's like that old saw about gun ownership: When hacking software is a crime then only criminals will hack your software.
That would be about 285 or so CD-R's or about 45 DVD+/-Rs. Somebody else can respond to:
* how big a stack of Hollerith punch cards it would take
* how many pages one would fill up in the Library of Congress
* how big a roll of "paper tape" would be required
* how many vaporware Colecovision "stringy floppies" you would need
I forgot to round up, so the other guy was right. But that's not the real issue at all. The real problem here is that with all my mp3's, mpgs and jpgs deemed illegal due to the RIAA, MPAA and Forgent, I frankly don't have anything to store on that monster except a couple of Excel worksheets from 1994. Oh yeah, and that old Visual Basic "Hello World!" program from college. But even VBRUN200.DLL can't make a dent in this WD beast.
Backing up this sucker ought to be fun. Hmm, I only need 138,888 floppies! Lessee, at the rate of one floppy inserted a minute, that'll take me over 96 days straight!
If I get started right away, I'll be well prepared for the inevitable HD crash that will follow my installation of WinXP SP-1.
a complete DUMBASS...COFFEE IS FUCKING HOT...lack of coordiation to open cups of coffee while driving anyway.
Several times in this thread the points have been made that (a) she was not the driver and (b) the car was not moving in any event.
Doesn't that make you even want to slightly consider that, perhaps, no, you don't know better than the judge and jury who were intimately acquainted with the facts and who unanimously agreed that McDonald's was very much at fault? That on occasion others who disagree with your worldview might not automatically be "dumbasses"?
Moreover, in proper society one does not serve tea or coffee in heat-insulating styrofoam cups.
I believe you were making the point that the insulating foam did not allow the coffee to cool off as it would do under more "proper" circumstances. That is very true, but another part of the problem was that, since their styrofoam cups insulated so well, it was impossible for the woman to ascertain exactly how hot the coffee was. Normally when one goes to a sit-down restaurant or a coffee-cart, one is given a waxed-paper cup or as you say, a china cup. Either will indicate how hot the coffee is by touch. A styrofoam cup can hold boiling hot water and be only slightly above room temperature. So how was she supposed to detect how hot her coffee was except by cracking open the lid? And that's exactly what she did, only to find out it was pretty damned hot indeed.
Murakami and many many other "postmodern" authors owe a debt to magic realism, which in terms of literature was originally used to describe Latin-American writers such as Borges and García Márquez. So you might do well to start out with Borges' "La Biblioteca Total" or García Márquez's "Cien Años de Soledad"
A friend of mine swears by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, though I certainly couldn't tell you how he reads in the original Arabic.
Also, although he writes in English, I'd urge you to consider the great Anglo-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Japanese and English people are both known to outsiders for their senses of reserve and decorum, and Ishiguro taps into that beautifully in his "The Remains of the Day." But if you are looking for something more overtly allegorical, you will do no better than the quietly bizarre novel "The Unconsoled" certainly one of the best books I've ever read.
Indeed. And furthermore, what's up with that Information Markup Language specification? It seems counterproductive to create an XML doctype nobody's using for a machine which is supposed to be as simple as possible. It would've been better for it to use a subset of HTML such as is used by some already existing PDA browsers, and to just ignore the tags it doesn't understand. Then at least there would be a large base of information already available for its users.
Furthermore, at $214 it seems to me that it would make more sense for the target nations to import a bunch of discontinued and/or reconditioned laptops, e.g. old 486 models, or even those old B/W MS HPCs you can occasionally find on sale at discount places.
I think Moby's totally wrong. Most of the people I know who download mp3s aren't tech savvy at all. Because of that, they learn how to do the basics, burn a CD and that's that. The technologically ignorant are the ones who are looking for the quick shortcut to avoid paying their $15.98. A real nerd isn't looking to cut corners -- s/he's more likely to shop online, to use search engines to find and buy obscure bands, to be into collecting stuff like CDs, and. bottom line, to have the disposable income to waste on non-essentials.
Moby's real enemies are 1) the teeny boppers who swap CDs with their friends 2) his own lack of originality this time out and 3) Dirty Vegas, who took his niche.
Furthermore, there's really no point in trying to keep score. Think of Alice's Wonderland -- there's a steady tone of giddy whimsy underlying the whole affair. Nothing quite adds up add the end, nor is it meant to. It's a send-up of an espionage mystery but one which never gets solved.
To my recollection, the best bit in the novel is Lem's parody of the canonical "spy seduced by spy babe" scene. It's a little cheesy but a great deal of fun.
It's true that VHS didn't kill off the moviehouse. So why do I think MEMS might? Well, the two situations aren't comparable. The VHS/DVD rental window opens months after the theatrical release has ended. How come? Because when you rent a film for $2.99, the rest of your family, your friends, etc., effectively watch it for free. So to allow rentals during the theatrical release would seriously undercut the initial revenue stream. However, a retinal MEMS display would be economically equivalent to a movie ticket. Instead of a family of four paying $32 at the theater, they'd pay $32 to watch four secure personal MEMS displays at home. This could be released simultaneously with the first-run theatrical issue at no loss of revenue to Hollywood. But it would drastically affect the bottom line of the theaters even if only 20% of consumers decided to watch from the comfort of their living rooms.
The cable giants and the MPAA will love retinal displays because that means they can finally charge "Pay Per Viewer." No more of those digital pirates bringing 30 friends over to watch the latest boxing match. Now every pair of eyeballs can be individually billed. Of course that would also mean the death of movie theaters because Hollywood will be able to charge you at home for each one of your little urchins when Harry Potter X comes out.
I think that they would rather have the cash.
The problem is that the record companies are scared. They've looked into their crystal balls and don't like what they see. OK, for now mp3's might serve to whet people's appetites for the original CDs. But looking ahead, imagine a machine sold by SonicBlue which scoured the net for music files, then downloaded albums, automatically burned full CDs as well as printing labels and inserts, all at quality very close to the original. That's what would eventually happen if the record companies allow digital file swapping to go unchallenged. So they are doing everything they can to avoid this fate.
People think the record companies can still make money with digital distribution at high (guaranteed) quality, but I don't think that's going to happen. First of all, it seems very hard to get people to pay anything for digital content, as any online newsmagazine will tell you. I'd guess that most people would rather pay $15 for a CD than $5 for a digital download of the same exact thing. Secondly, the quality issue can be fixed. A free site like Audiogalaxy could generate user ratings alongside their file lists. Don't know which version of "Smutch.mp3" to get? Pick the one which has a "Score 5" next to it.
According to current law, if Lucasfilms shows the propensity to forgive others using their trademarked material, their ownership of those trademarks would be jeopardized.
This is really not an issue. Lucasfilm could easily license its trademarked products at nominal cost to participants in the contest without losing control of those trademarks.
I make 6$ an hour, there is no way I would even spend 2$ a month on this subscription service. And I am sure that 99.99% of others agree with me on that.
The thing you have to realize is that, for people like you, Gamespot wants you to go away. Right now every time you log onto their site, you are costing them money. So they will be happy to see the back of you. However, they are willing to let you stick around and look at their crippled site, provided you will submit to those ultra-intrusive popups which will actually make money for them. Because despite what people may want to believe, content might be free -- sometimes -- but bandwidth sure as hell ain't.