Since backups for play on another device are fair use and legal I don't see the issue.
It's generally held as legal for YOU, the consumer/taxpayer/citizen, to format-shift a copyrighted work you have purchased onto another medium for private use.
It's less clear whether you can pay a for-profit third party to perform the format shift on your behalf. I will be interested to see how the courts rule in the lawsuit that will inevitably come of this service.
I'm surprised to see Scramble cited as "really obscure", too. It may not have been Defender in terms of popularity, but I thought it was historically recognized as an important development in the genre of side-scrolling shooters.
I mean, it was the first game in the Gradius series, according to Konami's official ret-con...
But the Nintendo DS and the Virtual Boy are the only Nintendo systems that can't be displayed on a TV and thus can't be tape-recorded
1. The DS can indeed be displayed on TV screens. Many larger game showrooms have DS kiosks with the output of the DS being sent to a pair of 13" screens mounted above it. 2. This is the strangest criterion for defining a console that I've ever heard of. 3. What is "tape-recorded"? Is it anything like capturing an MPEG stream?
The DS isn't nearly as powerful as the PSP. Yet the DS vastly outsells the PSP.
When has it ever been the most powerful console that won the largest market share?
The Atari 2600 technically shouldn't have been able to play any game more complex than Pong, and yet even when more advanced consoles like the Intellivision, Colecovision, and Atari's own 5200 appeared, they still couldn't sell as well as the original VCS.
The Sega Master System and TurboGrafx-16 both had superior graphics to the 8-bit NES (if similar processing and audio capabilities), and yet Nintendo dominated that era handily.
The Genesis and SNES were pretty well matched power-wise, with each excelling in areas the other did not, and they shared the market pretty evenly. It was the higher-powered, higher-priced consoles introduced shortly thereafter -- the 3DOs, the Neo*Geos, the Sega 32Xs -- that faltered.
More recently, the PS2 had weaker specs than the Xbox or the Gamecube, and yet it sold more than the other two combined.
Sony's new strategy of producing the shinest, most expensive hardware it thinks the market will bear -- the PSP and the PS3 -- doesn't seem very wise when viewed in historical context.
I COULD have said "Mam, I do not consent to any searches of my property" and we could've gone from there depending on what she would've wanted to do.
And perhaps that's what you SHOULD have done. It's a judgment call, to be sure, but once you let the officer into your home, anything he or she sees in there can be used against you. A cop can go from Nice to Mean in seconds.
Don't confuse "being polite to cops" with "waiving your rights".
If she (my friend) had hit her back, there's not a doubt in my mind that she would have lost her job.
Are you suggesting that a police officer, when punched in the face through a plate glass window, should be reprimanded for fighting back?
Yeah, maybe they should just tell their supervisor and call the police instead. Oh, wait.
If that's not what you're suggesting, I don't understand the comparison between acceptable police behavior and acceptable McDonald's cashier behavior that you're trying to point out.
If* the PS3 sells in large volumes, then that means that Blue Ray will be de facto High Definition format?
*When
If != When.
The PS3 retail pricing STARTS at $500. Now, I may be wrong and a lot of analysts may be wrong along with me, but for a price that high I'm expecting that PS3 is going to sell well only among hardcore gamers, and not the casual gamers for whom the PS2's secondary role as a DVD player was a major selling point.
So we'll see. If Sony sells a million PS3's a month, and that leads to a million BluRay movie sales, then yes, BluRay will become the de facto standard. That's far from a foregone conclusion though.
The one that got me was the "Based on a true story" next to the game about playing some rhinocerous looking man thing that is getting revenge for something.
what ive always wondered is why game developers cannt develop their games with OpenGL, OpenAL, and SDL to allow maximum portability.
They can. Or rather, they could, if they were willing to throw away their development teams' collective decades of expertise in Direct3D, DirectSound, and DirectX.
Signing a contract that says, "the company will not be held liable by the employee for blah, blah, etc..." cannot be a defense for negligent behavior.
True, but the mere existence of harmful side effects in these four test subjects does not prove negligent behavior.
If the pharma company had prior knowledge that the drugs were likely to cause these complications, and proceeded with the trials on humans anyway, that would be negligent (as well as a pointless waste of resources). If the company administering the test misrepresented the likelihood or potential severity of side effects, they might be negligent.
there must be something awfully wrong with the current crop of kids. Because "kids" of that age are what throughout most of human history were the _adults_, and perfectly capable of functioning as adults.
Um, yeah. That was then, this is now.
The further life expectancy gets pushed back, the further back onset of adulthood will move with it. Maybe when people were lucky to live to 40, it made sense to think of a 14-year-old boy as an adult. Now that people in the first world regularly live to be 80 or 90, why shouldn't the adolescent period expand to encompass the entirely of the teenage years and even much of the 20's?
To address your topic sentence: no, I don't think that the human species was always based on babysitting your kid until the age of 21. It was based on always babysitting your kid until the age of self-sufficience.
Three hundred years ago, self-sufficience might have meant knowing how to tend a farm, and having enough hair on your nuts to knock up the girl next door so you can make some farmhands together. Society has changed; young adults now know more, and HAVE to know more, than at any time in history. If it takes them until a few years after they start puberty to prepare themselves for the world, so be it.
They (and by that I mean nearly every website of a newspaper all over the world) as if they just moved all their text-only content to the web without understanding those amazing new possibilities in the first place - and with the web now over 10 years old, I'm really starting to doubt if they will ever learn.
Print newspapers' content management systems and processes are designed for a 1-day news cycle, not for posterity. The output can be understood well enough for typesetters to put ink to paper, but no one else stands a chance. If it were HTML, you'd be begging to work with Frontpage/Geocities/MySpace code instead.
This presents a big problem for new media. Parsing plaintext out of these poorly documented, proprietary, messy, horrible print formats is possible with some work; getting the attached graphics, photos, and layout hints is nigh-impossible. Getting the print employees to change their workflow to make content more web-ready is even nigher-impossible.
I've worked for online newspapers, and they would LOVE to take better advantage of the web's multimedia capabilities. But they're tied to a legacy anchor and it's pulling them under.
But there is hope, sort of. Just in the past couple of years, the Associated Press has been migrating from delivering wire content using banks of dedicated 9600bps modems to distribution via a private NNTP service. They're called "newsgroups" for a reason, right?
seems more like a slightly upgraded Gamecube with a new controller
I guess that's like calling the DS an upgraded GBA with a second screen. And bluetooth, and dual games slots....
And more face buttons, and a touch screen, and a microphone, and a faster ARM7 CPU, and an added ARM9 CPU, and a 3D engine, and ten more hardware sound channels, and 802.11 Wifi...
Upgrading and expanding upon an existing design is often preferable to starting over from scratch, and not just for backwards compatibility reasons. Both the 360 and the PS3 have exciting new architectures, but they're very much unlike the Xbox and PS2. I wonder if they accidentally threw out any babies along with that bathwater.
If that console plays PS1 and PS2 games, then you have access to the largest single 'base' of videogames in the history of mankind (save perhaps the PC - not sure actually).
Considering that a modern x86 PC can emulate just about any gaming hardware, from arcade games of the 1970's up through PSone and N64, plus native PC games, I would imagine that it wins the "largest game library" crown hands-down.
It's also yet to be seen how comprehensive the PS3's backwards compatibility will be. My hopes aren't too high there.
this will really help the schools and libraries with their bandwith consumption. Some of the school and Library admins I know say that Myspace.com now accounts for over 50% of their traffic
You know, schools and libraries are free to establish policies restricting access to Myspace on their own, without THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FORCING THEM TO.
I run cluster jobs, and I assure you I'd prefer to run them on my laptop, if only I could put 100 cores in there.
I drive nails into lumber using a hammer. I assure you I'd prefer to use a screwdriver, if only they'd make one with a large blunt head end instead of a fine tip.
there's no way I'm getting an iPod until Apple fixes their online store's engraving widget.
That's really the only thing preventing you from getting an iPod? Jeez dude.
Just buy a "blank" iPod and get aftermarket laser-engraving done. You'll be able to customize in ways far beyond what apple.com would allow you in ANY market.
It is both cheaper and more effective to get a pile of networked laptops, and have people look at their local copy. Other benefits include people being able to cut and paste, to participate and so on.
And drawbacks include people being able to play Solitaire and chat on Instant Messenger instead of paying attention, and the difficulty of collaboration when you have to tell every person "halfway down the page, second-to-rightmost column" instead of simply pointing the appropriate area on the Big Screen.
If sites are not using W3C standards for development then they should know that they can't expect compatibility with browser updates.
The problem is that sites developed using W3C standards DON'T WORK in Internet Explorer 6.
More specifically, the problem is developers who have specified that the display hacks are to be applied to ALL versions of IE, present and future, instead of just the versions known to require them.
3) Build up a sufficient supply of cash in your ING account -- enough to pay for the next 2-4 terms 4) At this point, you have no debt, and you have reached your "margin of safety" amount.
Well, no debt except for the loans that he took out in order to build up a sufficient supply of cash in the savings account.
As low as student loan rates are right now, they're most likely still higher than the rate you'll earn from a savings account. Anything you don't need for routine expenses, pay back to the bank (or government) immediately. Your goal is to owe as close to $0 as possible on that date shortly after graduation when the loan starts accruing interest.
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Since backups for play on another device are fair use and legal I don't see the issue.
It's generally held as legal for YOU, the consumer/taxpayer/citizen, to format-shift a copyrighted work you have purchased onto another medium for private use.
It's less clear whether you can pay a for-profit third party to perform the format shift on your behalf. I will be interested to see how the courts rule in the lawsuit that will inevitably come of this service.
I'm surprised to see Scramble cited as "really obscure", too. It may not have been Defender in terms of popularity, but I thought it was historically recognized as an important development in the genre of side-scrolling shooters.
I mean, it was the first game in the Gradius series, according to Konami's official ret-con...
Just remember, this is an 80s game!
An 80s game... that was first released in 1991?
I'm shouryuken find a better way to describe the game's vintage than that.
Apple is the BEST of the big 3 by FAR, and has been for several years.
As far as openness of codec and container formats, perhaps.
As far as media player applications go, the Windows port of Quicktime Player is substantially awful.
"Absolutely nothing! Which is exactly the license you had to mod this PSP!"
Whoawhoawhoa. Whoa.
Since when do I require a LICENSE to modify a piece of hardware that I purchased outright?
But the Nintendo DS and the Virtual Boy are the only Nintendo systems that can't be displayed on a TV and thus can't be tape-recorded
1. The DS can indeed be displayed on TV screens. Many larger game showrooms have DS kiosks with the output of the DS being sent to a pair of 13" screens mounted above it.
2. This is the strangest criterion for defining a console that I've ever heard of.
3. What is "tape-recorded"? Is it anything like capturing an MPEG stream?
The DS isn't nearly as powerful as the PSP. Yet the DS vastly outsells the PSP.
When has it ever been the most powerful console that won the largest market share?
The Atari 2600 technically shouldn't have been able to play any game more complex than Pong, and yet even when more advanced consoles like the Intellivision, Colecovision, and Atari's own 5200 appeared, they still couldn't sell as well as the original VCS.
The Sega Master System and TurboGrafx-16 both had superior graphics to the 8-bit NES (if similar processing and audio capabilities), and yet Nintendo dominated that era handily.
The Genesis and SNES were pretty well matched power-wise, with each excelling in areas the other did not, and they shared the market pretty evenly. It was the higher-powered, higher-priced consoles introduced shortly thereafter -- the 3DOs, the Neo*Geos, the Sega 32Xs -- that faltered.
More recently, the PS2 had weaker specs than the Xbox or the Gamecube, and yet it sold more than the other two combined.
Sony's new strategy of producing the shinest, most expensive hardware it thinks the market will bear -- the PSP and the PS3 -- doesn't seem very wise when viewed in historical context.
Despite his normal appearance and behavior, he was still gunned down in cold blood by men who face no consequences.
You use terms like "in cold blood" and "no consequences"... but I do not think you fully understand what they mean.
I COULD have said "Mam, I do not consent to any searches of my property" and we could've gone from there depending on what she would've wanted to do.
And perhaps that's what you SHOULD have done. It's a judgment call, to be sure, but once you let the officer into your home, anything he or she sees in there can be used against you. A cop can go from Nice to Mean in seconds.
Don't confuse "being polite to cops" with "waiving your rights".
If she (my friend) had hit her back, there's not a doubt in my mind that she would have lost her job.
Are you suggesting that a police officer, when punched in the face through a plate glass window, should be reprimanded for fighting back?
Yeah, maybe they should just tell their supervisor and call the police instead. Oh, wait.
If that's not what you're suggesting, I don't understand the comparison between acceptable police behavior and acceptable McDonald's cashier behavior that you're trying to point out.
If* the PS3 sells in large volumes, then that means that Blue Ray will be de facto High Definition format?
*When
If != When.
The PS3 retail pricing STARTS at $500. Now, I may be wrong and a lot of analysts may be wrong along with me, but for a price that high I'm expecting that PS3 is going to sell well only among hardcore gamers, and not the casual gamers for whom the PS2's secondary role as a DVD player was a major selling point.
So we'll see. If Sony sells a million PS3's a month, and that leads to a million BluRay movie sales, then yes, BluRay will become the de facto standard. That's far from a foregone conclusion though.
The one that got me was the "Based on a true story" next to the game about playing some rhinocerous looking man thing that is getting revenge for something.
But did it feature real-time weapon change?
what ive always wondered is why game developers cannt develop their games with OpenGL, OpenAL, and SDL to allow maximum portability.
They can. Or rather, they could, if they were willing to throw away their development teams' collective decades of expertise in Direct3D, DirectSound, and DirectX.
Signing a contract that says,
"the company will not be held liable by the employee for blah, blah, etc..."
cannot be a defense for negligent behavior.
True, but the mere existence of harmful side effects in these four test subjects does not prove negligent behavior.
If the pharma company had prior knowledge that the drugs were likely to cause these complications, and proceeded with the trials on humans anyway, that would be negligent (as well as a pointless waste of resources). If the company administering the test misrepresented the likelihood or potential severity of side effects, they might be negligent.
there must be something awfully wrong with the current crop of kids. Because "kids" of that age are what throughout most of human history were the _adults_, and perfectly capable of functioning as adults.
Um, yeah. That was then, this is now.
The further life expectancy gets pushed back, the further back onset of adulthood will move with it. Maybe when people were lucky to live to 40, it made sense to think of a 14-year-old boy as an adult. Now that people in the first world regularly live to be 80 or 90, why shouldn't the adolescent period expand to encompass the entirely of the teenage years and even much of the 20's?
To address your topic sentence: no, I don't think that the human species was always based on babysitting your kid until the age of 21. It was based on always babysitting your kid until the age of self-sufficience.
Three hundred years ago, self-sufficience might have meant knowing how to tend a farm, and having enough hair on your nuts to knock up the girl next door so you can make some farmhands together. Society has changed; young adults now know more, and HAVE to know more, than at any time in history. If it takes them until a few years after they start puberty to prepare themselves for the world, so be it.
If you feel the need to control what your kid eats in high school through a system like this, you've allready failed as a parent.
Amazing. First comment I read, and already someone is deigning to criticize the parenting skills of others. Who the fuck are you to judge?
"If you let your children eat junk food for lunch, you've allready [sic] failed as a parent" is an equally invalid statement. So let's drop them both.
They (and by that I mean nearly every website of a newspaper all over the world) as if they just moved all their text-only content to the web without understanding those amazing new possibilities in the first place - and with the web now over 10 years old, I'm really starting to doubt if they will ever learn.
Print newspapers' content management systems and processes are designed for a 1-day news cycle, not for posterity. The output can be understood well enough for typesetters to put ink to paper, but no one else stands a chance. If it were HTML, you'd be begging to work with Frontpage/Geocities/MySpace code instead.
This presents a big problem for new media. Parsing plaintext out of these poorly documented, proprietary, messy, horrible print formats is possible with some work; getting the attached graphics, photos, and layout hints is nigh-impossible. Getting the print employees to change their workflow to make content more web-ready is even nigher-impossible.
I've worked for online newspapers, and they would LOVE to take better advantage of the web's multimedia capabilities. But they're tied to a legacy anchor and it's pulling them under.
But there is hope, sort of. Just in the past couple of years, the Associated Press has been migrating from delivering wire content using banks of dedicated 9600bps modems to distribution via a private NNTP service. They're called "newsgroups" for a reason, right?
seems more like a slightly upgraded Gamecube with a new controller
I guess that's like calling the DS an upgraded GBA with a second screen. And bluetooth, and dual games slots....
And more face buttons, and a touch screen, and a microphone, and a faster ARM7 CPU, and an added ARM9 CPU, and a 3D engine, and ten more hardware sound channels, and 802.11 Wifi...
Upgrading and expanding upon an existing design is often preferable to starting over from scratch, and not just for backwards compatibility reasons. Both the 360 and the PS3 have exciting new architectures, but they're very much unlike the Xbox and PS2. I wonder if they accidentally threw out any babies along with that bathwater.
If that console plays PS1 and PS2 games, then you have access to the largest single 'base' of videogames in the history of mankind (save perhaps the PC - not sure actually).
Considering that a modern x86 PC can emulate just about any gaming hardware, from arcade games of the 1970's up through PSone and N64, plus native PC games, I would imagine that it wins the "largest game library" crown hands-down.
It's also yet to be seen how comprehensive the PS3's backwards compatibility will be. My hopes aren't too high there.
this will really help the schools and libraries with their bandwith consumption. Some of the school and Library admins I know say that Myspace.com now accounts for over 50% of their traffic
You know, schools and libraries are free to establish policies restricting access to Myspace on their own, without THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT FORCING THEM TO.
I run cluster jobs, and I assure you I'd prefer to run them on my laptop, if only I could put 100 cores in there.
I drive nails into lumber using a hammer. I assure you I'd prefer to use a screwdriver, if only they'd make one with a large blunt head end instead of a fine tip.
there's no way I'm getting an iPod until Apple fixes their online store's engraving widget.
That's really the only thing preventing you from getting an iPod? Jeez dude.
Just buy a "blank" iPod and get aftermarket laser-engraving done. You'll be able to customize in ways far beyond what apple.com would allow you in ANY market.
It is both cheaper and more effective to get a pile of networked laptops, and have people look at their local copy. Other benefits include people being able to cut and paste, to participate and so on.
And drawbacks include people being able to play Solitaire and chat on Instant Messenger instead of paying attention, and the difficulty of collaboration when you have to tell every person "halfway down the page, second-to-rightmost column" instead of simply pointing the appropriate area on the Big Screen.
If sites are not using W3C standards for development then they should know that they can't expect compatibility with browser updates.
The problem is that sites developed using W3C standards DON'T WORK in Internet Explorer 6.
More specifically, the problem is developers who have specified that the display hacks are to be applied to ALL versions of IE, present and future, instead of just the versions known to require them.
3) Build up a sufficient supply of cash in your ING account -- enough to pay for the next 2-4 terms
4) At this point, you have no debt, and you have reached your "margin of safety" amount.
Well, no debt except for the loans that he took out in order to build up a sufficient supply of cash in the savings account.
As low as student loan rates are right now, they're most likely still higher than the rate you'll earn from a savings account. Anything you don't need for routine expenses, pay back to the bank (or government) immediately. Your goal is to owe as close to $0 as possible on that date shortly after graduation when the loan starts accruing interest.