Why don't the publishers just buy shares in Gamestop and other second-hand retailers? Is there anything stopping them? Then they'd get a share of the profits on each and every resale with their dividends and they'd be benefitting at every price point. After first sale, every other sale is gravy. It might not be a lot but it's a lot more than nothing. How many other products can you just sell and sell and sell?
Also you get people who are extremely picky and abuse return policies to return things that aren't defective, but just aren't perfect. Displays are a big one people do that with. It is extremely rare to have a perfect display.
Hmmm, that's funny because of the 4 LCD panel displays I've bought, I've had 0 dead pixels. Not one fault. Maybe I'm just lucky but, if I spend about £1700 on a display, then I really DO EXPECT PERFECTION. Any dead pixels = getting returned, no question. Why people put up with that crap these days is beyond me. Maybe back in the day when flat panels were new, edgy, and cool but they're proven tech now - they should be 100%. Putting up with faults just makes you a mark.
If you shop at a store with a no returns policy for screens then you're just a sucker and you deserve to get ripped off.
Did you get your card stamped? 10 little Windows stamps and the next version's free? No? Tough titty then. It's not fair to all the other customers that knew about the loyalty scheme...
For the love of spaghetti monster, think what you're asking for here - it's like asking for discount dose of STD-infected prison wing-wang cos you loved the taste of the the last 10 so much.
This is a fucking advert. The creators, from Cambridge, heard about it, and got their mate at the local paper, in Cambridge to write about it as a favour. This is a local paper, and the event the article is supposed to be talking about happened in Kent, 100 miles away.
Sounds plausible, but no. The Cambridge News article is actually a word-for-word re-print of a story in The Independent, a national newspaper. The Indie published 2 days earlier, if you check the dates. And the Cambridge News didn't attribute the story. Naughty.
Unless these publishers of War on Terror have got some really cool pals in the UK national press, it looks like a sense of whimsy, local colour, and what looks a lot like a penchant for plagiarism are the real reasons behind the publication of this article.
At some cinemas (like the IMAX in London) alternate frames (for each eye) are passed through vertically and horizontally polarised filters. You wear glasses with similarly polarised lenses and, when the polarisation matches, you see the image in one eye and, when it doesn't, you don't. Some also use LCD shutters synchronised with the projector to blank out the unwanted image to the eye.
I saw Beowulf at the London IMAX. All I'll say is don't sit too close to the screen cos you'll wreck your neck trying to see everything. Otherwise totally cool.
I don't think this is true. The lucrative customers are the ones that buy a high-bandwidth service, but use it for its low-latency qualities without using significant bandwidth (think gamers).
I think that's a bit of red herring as I've never heard of any ISP in the UK selling any of their packages based on guarantees of low latency. I'd say low latency is taken for granted in any package better than dial-up, certainly low enough that you're not regularly disadvantaged playing Counter-Strike. And I know, as someone who does have one of Virgin Media's 20Mbp/s packages that high bandwidth was my motivation in upgrading to that tier. I regularly play online and I always had excellent latency (between 10 and 15ms) on the servers I joined, even when I subscribed to their 1Mb/s package. I got my new package so I could take advantage of online HD content distribution (when it finally gets here on a paying basis).
I do agree that they're likely to be concerned about the ramifications of customers being wrongly disconnected but only in as far as it'll drive them to competing ISPs. I know it's a generalisation but, in the UK, I think we're more likely to think "to Hell with you then" and vote with our feet than kick up a fuss and sue over poor customer service for broadband.
My biggest gripe with tier pricing is to do with the "up to" part of the specification. If the ISPs know they can't deliver that quality of service for at least the majority of the time due to infrastructure limitations then they shouldn't be allowed to sell it as such - it doesn't allow the consumer to make a fully informed choice. Give people honest prices for honest bandwidth rates. If Virgin Media told me they could guarantee that 20Mbp/s for 95% of the time but it'd cost me £100/month then I'd seriously consider paying it but I don't have that option. I used to pay that much about a decade ago for a 1Mb/s connection with a 50:1 contention ratio and I didn't feel ripped off then because I got what I paid for. ISPs shouldn't get away with whining about high-usage customers as those customers are really only trying to get what the ISPs said they could supply them with - a reliable always-on non-metered high bandwidth connection.
As for who pays, the BPI and BFI should certainly pay for the administration and indemnify the ISPs as well. Why should ISPs be forced to do work for free for trade associations? They're not law enforcement or security services and they're certainly not charities.
What if P2P users start encrypting their traffic? The difficulties involved would be significant, but not insurmountable. Are the ISPs supposed to treat every user transmitting & receiving encrypted data as a criminal?
No, but the UK government might with the Regulatory Investigatory Powers Act (and Heaven help you if you're muslim and you start encrypting your traffic). What worries the ISPs is without that file-sharing then there's no real reason to have a sweet 20Mb/s connection and we might as well all downgrade to a bargain-basement 512kb/s connection as all we're going to be able to download is our emails and a few safe content-free BPI-approved websites. The ISPs are caught between a rock and a hard place - if they let filesharing happen they get fined and, if they don't, then they lose lucrative customers.
What bothers me is that, at the moment, there's no legal way for me to download the content I want in the UK. I suppose I'm atypical in that I'd be happy to pay for TV I watch through iTunes (or a similar service), as long as it becomes available at the same time it's originally broadcast in the US. What cheeses me off is having to wait months before it's available in the UK, then only available to a particular broadcaster I can't receive (Sky), and then it's only after it's picked up by a terrestrial broadcaster and their season ends that it's released to DVD and I can pick it up and watch it according to my schedule. This is usually a year after it's originally broadcast! Sorry, but I'm not too hot on delayed gratification for the sake of someone else's out-dated business model.
Good news is that the Beeb are catching on and starting to stick their latest programmes on iTunes, like Ashes to Ashes, but I don't just want their stuff. Who only watches one TV channel?
The crux of the argument is that an industry is using legislation to a) protect their out-dated and increasingly irrelevant business model, and b) keep artists under their thumb so they can use them up and then discard them when the cash cow dries up. These BPI and BFI people are talentless vampires, sucking the life out of creative geniuses - don't protect them, eliminate them. And reward the content creators! Now they've got their pay deals sorted, for the love of FSM buy the content off the interweb or on DVD if you like it. If you've already downloaded it on the sly, think of it as pro-active timeshifting.
Re:Compelling reason for fetal stem cell research
on
Science Debate 2008
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· Score: 1
Thanks for that - I was focusing on the treatments that the science may give us, rather than the science that needs to be done before the treatments can be developed. Cart before the horse and all that.
I know this is going to be contentious but, possibly for the only time in my life, I have to say that I think Bush made the right decision banning Federal funding for stem cell research using foetal tissue. Abortion is a woman's right to choose as far as I'm concerned but the use of the discarded tissues is ethically questionable - I'd prefer the tissues were treated as remains rather than resources. Coercing scientists into discovering ways to convert a person's own tissue back into stem cells for treatment seems to be a more useful avenue of research in the long run than implanting foreign tissue.
Of course, if there are compelling arguments to be made for the use of foetal tissue, I wouldn't mind hearing them. But I'll be very skeptical about "it'd make stem cell research way easier". Sometimes human dignity has to outweigh purely scientific advancement or we're making only a very narrow form of progress.
Given they both use the same encoding, really, I seriously doubt that you've noticed any quality improvement Blu-ray has over HD-DVD watching the same movie on the same screen.
I have to agree with the GP: I've got both (360 with an HD-DVD going into the VGA port and a PS3 going into one of the HDMI ports on my Samsung 40" 1080p LCD) and, while I've not seen the same movie on both players, I have to say that Blu-Ray's quality is significantly better overall. I was really disappointed in the HD-DVD quality which honestly didn't seem much better than DVD, while the Blu-Ray output was just lovely.
I'm willing to concede that it could be something to do with the VGA signal processing in my TV, etc. but, as Microsoft didn't see fit to equip my 360 with an HDMI port, they can just suck my balls. That's all the sympathy they'll get from me if it's their player's design making a mess out of playing their format.
As I only paid something like £22 (+5% duty and +1% exchange commission - ooh, another £1.32) for the Orange Box off Steam, what with the USD circling the drain at the mo. Bargain - saved a fiver vs. the current price for the retail version. Game prices are dropping like a bomb over here now that internet distribution's taken off - since release most retailers here have knocked a tenner off the Orange Box.
Hmm, while water sports with Will Wright have a certain allure, I always think of this gem. And the Maxis guys liked is enough to do their own version of it with the Spore graphics.
Maybe that bribery is paying for quite a few computer suites loaded up with the latest MS software at the University of Cote d'Ivoire. And the CI reps figure MS is going to win in long run anyway (as they currently are, by default), so why not take the money so their students don't feel like poor country cousins when they turn up to work? Their only danger is that MS get WGA to work properly and they can't rip off any updates when the bribe money runs out. That's the philanthropic view. The misanthropic view is the reps are too busy stuffing the cash into strippers' thongs and rolling the bills up to snort fat lines of coke to give two shits about the long-term economic welfare of their countrymen. Either way, they've got their reasons and the right to participate. But non-attendance should be counted as abstention and grounds for reduction in rank no matter what continent you're from.
And what were the figures for the USA, or the UK, or Japan, or South Korea 15 years ago? Pretty similar, I'd guess. Most people in the developed nations didn't get on until AOL flooded the Earth with drinks mats in '96-'97. They're a developing nation. You know, one of those nations the rest of the world uses the WTO to fuck over in trade negotiations. One of those nations that got told by the World Bank to invest in coffee and cocoa production, along with about 30 others - wouldn't want expensive coffee now, would we? I reckon they're doing pretty well really.
Little Baby Jeebus is crying right now at all the snobbery, exclusivity, and not a little racism going on in this thread.
I think the WTF is that the Ivory Coast, in Africa, is involved in this at all.
Where's the -1, Bigot moderation when you need it? Oh well, at least you posted it under your 4-digit UID, so we know it's Alzheimer's kicking in, working loose all those issues Daddy inculcated. It turns our that Cote d'Ivoire is one of the most economically successful African nations with a reasonable telecoms infrastructure for a developing nation - 4m mobile phones in a population of 18m. Could try harder on the not-killing-each-other front, but the western nations are hardly getting top marks right in that subject right now either. Anyway, off to the State Re-education Sensitivity and Tolerance Happy Camp for you, you bad person.
I've worked in IT in the UK with contractors from all over Africa - they're as good as anyone else in IT. Of course, that means that they can be work-shy indolent pricks with bad attitudes too - competing with the best of us, on our terms.
To interject - a petard is a really noisy fart. It's true. You can get hoisted by it, getting blown off your feet by your own forceful emission, but you can't get hoisted upon it. Unless you can walk on (smelly) air like Chow Yun Fat in Bulletproof Monk. And then something else would be hoisting you anyway, you'd just be on the ass gas to start with.
It's also a big bomb. Not as funny but, prosaically, much more likely to hoist the bomber into the air through their own mistakes.
Wow, what a stupid reason to be proud of someone.. because they happen to be born near you.
Hmmm... what sort of community would I rather have been raised in? One that's proud of its successful members, or one that couldn't give a shit whether you lived forever or dropped dead at their feet? I was raised in type 3: they'd scrape your corpse from under that lorry and feel a bit sad about it. Maybe you'd get flowers by the road.
When you buy a house 30 miles from your work, think about it, factor in the huge cost which driving will eventually be.
So what are you supposed to do if your job is in London, as about 20% of the jobs in England are? Buy a family home in Greater London for £700k? Public transport's not all that great (crowded, smelly, and nasty in the summer), the train prices are comparable to petrol + depreciation on your car, and it takes on average twice as long to get you where you're going.
It'd be better to encourage folks with huge buy-to-let portfolios to divest themselves of all those spare houses to get some balance back into the housing market. Then maybe folks could afford houses in London again (that aren't next to crack houses or crime blackspots) and people wouldn't have to commute so far or indenture themselves to the banks for the next 25 years. It's all the delays in public transport that put people off and they'd be reduced proportionately with the reduced travel distances. Also, it'd put a huge number of letting agencies out of business and that can't be a bad thing.
We already give up a huge portion of our income to the Exchequer in the UK and the current government's not exactly acted responsibly with it. Giving them more money just encourages them to be even more reckless.
Lemme guess - you live about 50 feet from your job and you'd never be in a position to pay that extra tax that you want everyone else to pay? One of the things wrong with the UK now is the majority of people willing to shit on everyone else as long as it doesn't affect them. Stuff fairness, compromise, negotiation or, God help us, seeing things from somebody else's point-of-view. Live and let live died in the UK in 1997.
What this has to do with the openness of the BBC's media player is totally beyond me though. I'd have thought the solution would be to take out the bit in the BBC's charter that allows them to use any copyrighted music or other media they feel like in their productions. If programmes are wholly original, with original scores, then there'd be no need for the DRM. And we might get the Radiophonic Workshop back.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't the publishers just buy shares in Gamestop and other second-hand retailers? Is there anything stopping them? Then they'd get a share of the profits on each and every resale with their dividends and they'd be benefitting at every price point. After first sale, every other sale is gravy. It might not be a lot but it's a lot more than nothing. How many other products can you just sell and sell and sell?
Hmmm, that's funny because of the 4 LCD panel displays I've bought, I've had 0 dead pixels. Not one fault. Maybe I'm just lucky but, if I spend about £1700 on a display, then I really DO EXPECT PERFECTION. Any dead pixels = getting returned, no question. Why people put up with that crap these days is beyond me. Maybe back in the day when flat panels were new, edgy, and cool but they're proven tech now - they should be 100%. Putting up with faults just makes you a mark.
If you shop at a store with a no returns policy for screens then you're just a sucker and you deserve to get ripped off.
Did you get your card stamped? 10 little Windows stamps and the next version's free? No? Tough titty then. It's not fair to all the other customers that knew about the loyalty scheme...
For the love of spaghetti monster, think what you're asking for here - it's like asking for discount dose of STD-infected prison wing-wang cos you loved the taste of the the last 10 so much.
Sounds plausible, but no. The Cambridge News article is actually a word-for-word re-print of a story in The Independent, a national newspaper. The Indie published 2 days earlier, if you check the dates. And the Cambridge News didn't attribute the story. Naughty.
Unless these publishers of War on Terror have got some really cool pals in the UK national press, it looks like a sense of whimsy, local colour, and what looks a lot like a penchant for plagiarism are the real reasons behind the publication of this article.
I saw Beowulf at the London IMAX. All I'll say is don't sit too close to the screen cos you'll wreck your neck trying to see everything. Otherwise totally cool.
It is now.
Oops... I should have checked - the British Film Institute is a registered charity. Bah!
I think that's a bit of red herring as I've never heard of any ISP in the UK selling any of their packages based on guarantees of low latency. I'd say low latency is taken for granted in any package better than dial-up, certainly low enough that you're not regularly disadvantaged playing Counter-Strike. And I know, as someone who does have one of Virgin Media's 20Mbp/s packages that high bandwidth was my motivation in upgrading to that tier. I regularly play online and I always had excellent latency (between 10 and 15ms) on the servers I joined, even when I subscribed to their 1Mb/s package. I got my new package so I could take advantage of online HD content distribution (when it finally gets here on a paying basis).
I do agree that they're likely to be concerned about the ramifications of customers being wrongly disconnected but only in as far as it'll drive them to competing ISPs. I know it's a generalisation but, in the UK, I think we're more likely to think "to Hell with you then" and vote with our feet than kick up a fuss and sue over poor customer service for broadband.
My biggest gripe with tier pricing is to do with the "up to" part of the specification. If the ISPs know they can't deliver that quality of service for at least the majority of the time due to infrastructure limitations then they shouldn't be allowed to sell it as such - it doesn't allow the consumer to make a fully informed choice. Give people honest prices for honest bandwidth rates. If Virgin Media told me they could guarantee that 20Mbp/s for 95% of the time but it'd cost me £100/month then I'd seriously consider paying it but I don't have that option. I used to pay that much about a decade ago for a 1Mb/s connection with a 50:1 contention ratio and I didn't feel ripped off then because I got what I paid for. ISPs shouldn't get away with whining about high-usage customers as those customers are really only trying to get what the ISPs said they could supply them with - a reliable always-on non-metered high bandwidth connection.
As for who pays, the BPI and BFI should certainly pay for the administration and indemnify the ISPs as well. Why should ISPs be forced to do work for free for trade associations? They're not law enforcement or security services and they're certainly not charities.
Safely locked up for thought crime is a kind of safe...
What bothers me is that, at the moment, there's no legal way for me to download the content I want in the UK. I suppose I'm atypical in that I'd be happy to pay for TV I watch through iTunes (or a similar service), as long as it becomes available at the same time it's originally broadcast in the US. What cheeses me off is having to wait months before it's available in the UK, then only available to a particular broadcaster I can't receive (Sky), and then it's only after it's picked up by a terrestrial broadcaster and their season ends that it's released to DVD and I can pick it up and watch it according to my schedule. This is usually a year after it's originally broadcast! Sorry, but I'm not too hot on delayed gratification for the sake of someone else's out-dated business model.
Good news is that the Beeb are catching on and starting to stick their latest programmes on iTunes, like Ashes to Ashes, but I don't just want their stuff. Who only watches one TV channel?
The crux of the argument is that an industry is using legislation to a) protect their out-dated and increasingly irrelevant business model, and b) keep artists under their thumb so they can use them up and then discard them when the cash cow dries up. These BPI and BFI people are talentless vampires, sucking the life out of creative geniuses - don't protect them, eliminate them. And reward the content creators! Now they've got their pay deals sorted, for the love of FSM buy the content off the interweb or on DVD if you like it. If you've already downloaded it on the sly, think of it as pro-active timeshifting.
Thanks for that - I was focusing on the treatments that the science may give us, rather than the science that needs to be done before the treatments can be developed. Cart before the horse and all that.
Of course, if there are compelling arguments to be made for the use of foetal tissue, I wouldn't mind hearing them. But I'll be very skeptical about "it'd make stem cell research way easier". Sometimes human dignity has to outweigh purely scientific advancement or we're making only a very narrow form of progress.
I have to agree with the GP: I've got both (360 with an HD-DVD going into the VGA port and a PS3 going into one of the HDMI ports on my Samsung 40" 1080p LCD) and, while I've not seen the same movie on both players, I have to say that Blu-Ray's quality is significantly better overall. I was really disappointed in the HD-DVD quality which honestly didn't seem much better than DVD, while the Blu-Ray output was just lovely.
I'm willing to concede that it could be something to do with the VGA signal processing in my TV, etc. but, as Microsoft didn't see fit to equip my 360 with an HDMI port, they can just suck my balls. That's all the sympathy they'll get from me if it's their player's design making a mess out of playing their format.
It truly is a golden age.
Hmm, while water sports with Will Wright have a certain allure, I always think of this gem. And the Maxis guys liked is enough to do their own version of it with the Spore graphics.
Maybe that bribery is paying for quite a few computer suites loaded up with the latest MS software at the University of Cote d'Ivoire. And the CI reps figure MS is going to win in long run anyway (as they currently are, by default), so why not take the money so their students don't feel like poor country cousins when they turn up to work? Their only danger is that MS get WGA to work properly and they can't rip off any updates when the bribe money runs out. That's the philanthropic view. The misanthropic view is the reps are too busy stuffing the cash into strippers' thongs and rolling the bills up to snort fat lines of coke to give two shits about the long-term economic welfare of their countrymen. Either way, they've got their reasons and the right to participate. But non-attendance should be counted as abstention and grounds for reduction in rank no matter what continent you're from.
Little Baby Jeebus is crying right now at all the snobbery, exclusivity, and not a little racism going on in this thread.
I've worked in IT in the UK with contractors from all over Africa - they're as good as anyone else in IT. Of course, that means that they can be work-shy indolent pricks with bad attitudes too - competing with the best of us, on our terms.
Yay! +5 Pedantic all round!
It's also a big bomb. Not as funny but, prosaically, much more likely to hoist the bomber into the air through their own mistakes.
Welcome to SAP. And all the columns are 5-letter mnemonics for German words.
So what are you supposed to do if your job is in London, as about 20% of the jobs in England are? Buy a family home in Greater London for £700k? Public transport's not all that great (crowded, smelly, and nasty in the summer), the train prices are comparable to petrol + depreciation on your car, and it takes on average twice as long to get you where you're going.
It'd be better to encourage folks with huge buy-to-let portfolios to divest themselves of all those spare houses to get some balance back into the housing market. Then maybe folks could afford houses in London again (that aren't next to crack houses or crime blackspots) and people wouldn't have to commute so far or indenture themselves to the banks for the next 25 years. It's all the delays in public transport that put people off and they'd be reduced proportionately with the reduced travel distances. Also, it'd put a huge number of letting agencies out of business and that can't be a bad thing.
We already give up a huge portion of our income to the Exchequer in the UK and the current government's not exactly acted responsibly with it. Giving them more money just encourages them to be even more reckless.
Lemme guess - you live about 50 feet from your job and you'd never be in a position to pay that extra tax that you want everyone else to pay? One of the things wrong with the UK now is the majority of people willing to shit on everyone else as long as it doesn't affect them. Stuff fairness, compromise, negotiation or, God help us, seeing things from somebody else's point-of-view. Live and let live died in the UK in 1997.
What this has to do with the openness of the BBC's media player is totally beyond me though. I'd have thought the solution would be to take out the bit in the BBC's charter that allows them to use any copyrighted music or other media they feel like in their productions. If programmes are wholly original, with original scores, then there'd be no need for the DRM. And we might get the Radiophonic Workshop back.