ACORN is bothering to check. The problem is that once someone hands in a bogus registration form to them, they are legally obliged to hand it in. What they do, which is absolutely the right thing to do, is mark it as likely problematic.
A couple of good links on the subject: This explains what's going on in detail, in terms of ACORN's responsibilities. And this is a memo from ACORN that explains their side in detail. The bottom line is that ACORN has absolutely no incentive to hand in bogus registrations. They will not (without an enormous amount of effort at disguise rarely seen outside of Hollywood) enable people to vote illegally. They undermine the ability of voter registration offices to process legitimate registrations, which the vast majority of ACORN-processed registrations are. ACORN's reputation is tarnished despite the fact they're legally required to hand in the registrations despite not originating them. And ACORN's own efforts to flag suspect registrations pretty much sink the "ACORN is involved in a conspiracy" meme - why the hell flag them if you want them accepted?
You're talking about a massive conspiracy involving a group of disparate organizations that generally don't get one. I'm not seeing this one as terribly likely, especially as ACORN has been marking the registrations it sees as likely fraudulent before handing them in. The counts would also be subject to problems given people are going to look at the voter rolls and question obvious frauds, which means that if the voter count is close to the voter roll including frauds then the election is going to get contested.
And given the fact the registrations are for people like "Mickey Mouse" and various football players, the likely reason they're being handed in to ACORN is as a joke to get annoying voter registration advocates off of their backs, rather than to actually fix the ballot.
Really, this is a non-story. In fact, insofar as it's a story, it's that a concerted campaign is being waged against those trying to register low income voters, by misrepresenting what's happening, exaggerating fraud, claiming motives that make no sense, and using slight of hand to confuse one type of minor fraud with a more serious type.
Yeah, I'm not getting the version number explanation either. I suspect the real reason for the name is that they're planning to release this in 2007...
I admit it, this is an attempt by my cat to get venture-capital funding for his amazing system to pass air through water, causing the CO2 and nitrogen in the air and hydrogen and oxygen in the water to react, creating oil. I'm going to have to lock him up in the bathroom to punish him.
Exceptionally bad though if someone knows you generally do this, and is determined to access your network, as you've essentially reduced the number of possible passwords to a 32 bit number.
Now for the current crisis, most of it can come to blame upon groups like the Acorn group and other liberals putting pressure on congress and banks to extend low income loans to people who could never afford one
No, it can't. The result of the efforts to make home ownership more widespread was a set of anti-discrimination laws placed in the CRA. However, CRA regulated loans had virtually nothing to do with the current crisis. Despite CRA-regulated banks doing the bulk of regular loans, 50% of sub-prime loans - which make up the bulk the "toxic mortgages" - were issued by banks entirely free of CRA regulation, and a further 20-25% were issued by departments of CRA-regulated banks that were free of CRA regulations. The remaining 25-30%, while performed by regulated banks, were almost certainly illegal given the strict nature of the CRA and the requirements for collateral it imposes.
The problem here are not mortgages given to people on low incomes, but sub-prime mortgages given to everyone. People were using the sub-prime market to make excessive gambles that fell apart when the housing market collapsed. These varied from overly stretched ARM HELOCs to people buying multiple houses with the intent of either flipping them or renting them out. You can probably imagine that the largest gambles were not taken by the poor, but by those on median or higher than average incomes.
BTW, thanks for being one of the few people making this argument that didn't directly blame ethnic minorities for this mess, but remember that the key laws Democrats are being blamed for are not laws directed at low incomes, but at ending discrimination against ethnic minorities. Those that are promoting this meme are treading on very dangerous ground. The CRA didn't force banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them (quite the opposite in fact), and CRA regulated loans had little or nothing to do with this crisis, which affects sub-prime loans of the type the CRA prevents. It did require banks end discrimination, but a person from an ethnic minority who entered a branch of Wachovia and asked for a 110% mortgage to help them buy a $500,000 home which they expected to pay back using their Burger King salary would have been rejected just as a white person in the same circumstances would have been. The CRA wouldn't have forced them to give the loan anyway, the CRA would have done the opposite.
You mean Windows 1.0 had this for decades. Well, ok, Windows 1.0 wasn't around for decades, but it was released in 1983/4/5, had a dock, and predates NextStep...
Somewhere in the world, at two difference advertising agencies, two overpaid campaign managers are explaining to their bosses how ads for car insurance and for supplementary health insurance could have been confused like that.
Make the same calculation a year later. Also imagine a situation where someone can take their big-ass SD card into a store and have additional content added to it.
This isn't a classic razorblades model, because razorblades don't generally get any cheaper (and in any case, it's not like the blades are being sold at cost, which is what we're talking about with SSD.)
Well, here's the thing. Does it still need to be "pressed"?
You go into Movieworld (or whatever they're called.) You browse the titles, wander over to the checkout with your selection, buy the movie, and walk out of the store.
The clerk then yells into the back "Customer just bought Hockey Mom President, need a refill."
Some guy at the back inserts an SD card into a writer. An hour later, he checks back, sees the card has been written, pulls Disney's packaging from a sealed envelope, inserts that into the transparent outer lining of the case and puts the SD card into the case itself, walks out, and puts it on the pile of "Hockey Mom President" boxes.
Disney loved it. They just needed to print the packaging and ship a hundred copies sealed to various movie stores together with a single SD card containing the master.
The movie store loves it. All they need to have in stock at any time is a big pile of blanks - blank cases, blank SD cards - plus the (easily storeable) packaging Disney et al sent. The day before a major release they do, of course, have to prefill a bunch of SD cards, but SD card writers are $1 each, so their computer can make 64 copies at a time without breaking a sweat. Oh, and if they don't sell 64 copies, they can always recycle the cards.
The only loser in the entire scenario is the idiot who bought an awful and highly improbable movie about a dimwitted soccer mom who managed to become a Governor before being picked as a Vice President by a doddering-old politician with stage-three cancer.
Let's assume Blu-ray will come down to $50 per drive within two years. Let's also assume my pricing predictions are correct, as are yours (BD-RE is $20 right now, and pressed BD discs are $2.50 if done 100,000 at a time.) Let's also acknowledge that $10 is not the floor for SD cards, it's fairly easy to find sub-$5 cards, either directly or in packages (ie four for $20, that kind of thing.)
You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers.
Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?
Make the same calculation a year later. Also imagine a situation where someone can take their big-ass SD card into a store and have additional content added to it.
Ultimately though, it boils down to this: the price per gigabyte for solid state is plummeting, plummeting to the point that for lower volumes, it's already much more cost effective than Blu-ray though not DVD. Optical storage is also coming down in price, but nothing like as quickly. So at some point in the near future, one is going to overtake the other. For rewritable media, that's very soon, easily within the next three years. For pressed media, it may take five years but the convenience of SD (or CompactFlash or whatever) may well render that timeline irrelevant.
I have a gut feeling everyone's talking at cross purposes.
At this point, distributing the same 50Gb of content to 100,000 people is probably most cheaply done with Blu-ray as long as those 100,000 people are also going to get many, many, many 50Gb-of-content packages in the same format from numerous other sources. So, as a movie distribution technology, optical media kind of works.
This works because it's cost effective for those 100,000 people to spend $200ish on a Blu-ray disk reader, and it's cost effective to get a duplicator to press 100,000 Blu-ray discs at approximately $2.50 per disc.
However, when you start reducing the numbers on either side, the price differentials start to radically change. It's cheaper for me to put the content on a cheap USB hard drive, even at $100 a pop, if I'm just distributing to a few tens of people, who aren't planning on obtaining Blu-ray readers. And it's even cheaper for me to burn the same content to DVD-R, given a dual layer DVD-R costs around $2, whereas a dual-layer BD-E costs around $15-20 - they're getting close per gigabyte, but the cost of obtaining Blu-ray burners, and the receiver of the data obtaining Blu-ray readers obviously changes the cost effectiveness of the whole thing.
Ok, so that's the current situation. Now let's look at the situation in three years.
Flash memory is coming down in price. Less than a year ago, I bought an 8Gb SD card for around $80. Four months later, I bought a 16Gb SD card for $80. A quick Amazon search shows that while 32Gb cards seem to still be relatively expensive, 16Gb is easily available for around $32. The cost of adding an SD card reader to a computer is around $1. No, I'm serious. They're actually giving away the readers with many cards now. So we're looking at flash memory gigabytes-per-dollar ratios doubling every three to six months. 50Gb for under $20 (BD-RE price) should be... well, that's about $90 now, so that's about a year and a half away, assuming a six month (being conservative) pricing half-life. Another year and a half, and, well, we're looking at 50Gb of flash costing less than 50Gb of pressed Blu-ray media does today. Actually, we're more likely looking at 128Gb SD cards costing $10.
So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.
Verizon's announced plans to move to LTE (the 4G version of GSM.) It's quite conceivable that within two years both AT&T and Verizon will be rolling out their 4G LTE networks, and Apple will have released an iPhone 4G to go with it. So don't count out the possibility yet!
I suspect the Wikipedia page was edited after Jobs started using the term. Until the iPhone was released, the term smartphone was used exclusively to refer to phones that had an open architecture and allowed the user to load arbitrary applications on them rather than having all software controlled by the manufacturer. The definition used by Wikipedia barely covers the Nokia 9000, the original smartphone and the first smartphone I ever had.
The only extent to which the definition has blurred has been over the more advanced capabilities of standard phones. Most factory-unlocked Motorola GSM phones, for instance, are closer to the original smartphone definition than the iPhone, being able to run user loaded Java applications making the phones theoretically capable of anything a PC is capable of, albeit subject to memory, storage, and speed limitations. At this point, the same cannot be said of the iPhone, which is subject to arbitrary restrictions set by Apple. If and when Apple lifts them, it'll have the right to call the phone a smartphone. But not until then.
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I didn't mean "How long Grub takes to run", I mean how long it takes between me hitting the power button and Grub, or Lilo, or whatever else, starting to do its thing.
The BIOS is (in theory) just a ROM that checks to see what devices are plugged in, configures where they are seen in memory, and loads and runs the boot sector. Yet I've seen BIOSes that take 30 seconds before they'll get to the latter step, and most usually take 10-15.
There are a variety of possible explanations, the simplest being "Because that's the reasoning", ie "Because we want to have well regulated militias, we must allow the people to bear arms." Another is that it's actually a separate right - the first amendment contains at least five (free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, a free press, right to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government), though the wording is a tad all over the place for this to be likely with the second. But certainly I've heard it argued that the intent was to ensure the states had the right to have militias, it was an argument used at the time.
I think the first is the more likely. The point is that as an English sentence, the second amendment specifically does not make the second dependent upon the first. Insofar as you can tie the things together, it's as an explanation - that because we need well regulated militias, the people must be allowed to bear arms.
If you take the language too far, as you're doing, and say that it actually introduces a dependency, it's quite possible to interpret it in exactly the opposite way those who do this do: that a militia is necessary, therefore the government must arm the people. Another way, which the courts have actually used, is to determine the meaning of the second part - ie, if the intent is to make a militia possible, then you can't say "Everyone's allowed to own spears. Guns are banned" and expect that to satisfy the amendment because, technically, people can bear arms, they just have to be spears.
But there is no dependency; in plain English, it's a justification followed by the clause that's being justified.
Is the author aware that H.264 is one of two video encoding standards that fall under the umbrella of "MPEG4"? (H.264 is MPEG 4 Part 10, with the other being Part 2, and I can't honestly remember what it's called. DivX is built off of it, but it's otherwise generally considered kinda irrelevant these days.)
I'm pretty sure Apple could charge $1.06 if they wanted to, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference in terms of sales. Rather than one industry or the other being hit, wouldn't it make more sense to pass on the charge to the customers?
Price increases happen in every industry. I don't see why music should permanently cost 99c.
The Wii is switchable 16:9 and 4:3. It's just it's 480p, regardless of aspect ratio. Kind of like DVD, where you can choose anamorphic widescreen or 4:3 pan and scan. (Except, of course, it's rarely on the same disc with DVD whereas pretty much every Wii game I've tried respects the user's preference.)
Wii revolution though doesn't "sound like" a different product.
The summary is kind of confusing in the way it's worded, but I think that's the intention, FWIW, the new Wii will be an improved version of the old Wii, not an entirely different product. Even though the Gamecube and Wii are similar underneath, the Wii was intended to be seen by everyone as something unrelated to the Gamecube. That will not be the case with the next Wii.
I think Revolution is a little cheesy and a little unsubtle though. What's needed is something that hints at a revolution. Perhaps something circular. A count, perhaps, of the number of degrees in a full circle, to imply you've gone through one whole revolution?
Yes, the "Nintendo Wii 360." What could possibly go wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
ACORN is bothering to check. The problem is that once someone hands in a bogus registration form to them, they are legally obliged to hand it in. What they do, which is absolutely the right thing to do, is mark it as likely problematic.
A couple of good links on the subject: This explains what's going on in detail, in terms of ACORN's responsibilities. And this is a memo from ACORN that explains their side in detail. The bottom line is that ACORN has absolutely no incentive to hand in bogus registrations. They will not (without an enormous amount of effort at disguise rarely seen outside of Hollywood) enable people to vote illegally. They undermine the ability of voter registration offices to process legitimate registrations, which the vast majority of ACORN-processed registrations are. ACORN's reputation is tarnished despite the fact they're legally required to hand in the registrations despite not originating them. And ACORN's own efforts to flag suspect registrations pretty much sink the "ACORN is involved in a conspiracy" meme - why the hell flag them if you want them accepted?
You're talking about a massive conspiracy involving a group of disparate organizations that generally don't get one. I'm not seeing this one as terribly likely, especially as ACORN has been marking the registrations it sees as likely fraudulent before handing them in. The counts would also be subject to problems given people are going to look at the voter rolls and question obvious frauds, which means that if the voter count is close to the voter roll including frauds then the election is going to get contested.
And given the fact the registrations are for people like "Mickey Mouse" and various football players, the likely reason they're being handed in to ACORN is as a joke to get annoying voter registration advocates off of their backs, rather than to actually fix the ballot.
Really, this is a non-story. In fact, insofar as it's a story, it's that a concerted campaign is being waged against those trying to register low income voters, by misrepresenting what's happening, exaggerating fraud, claiming motives that make no sense, and using slight of hand to confuse one type of minor fraud with a more serious type.
Well the Economics prize certainly isn't under the control of the Nobel Foundation, no.
Yeah, I'm not getting the version number explanation either. I suspect the real reason for the name is that they're planning to release this in 2007...
I admit it, this is an attempt by my cat to get venture-capital funding for his amazing system to pass air through water, causing the CO2 and nitrogen in the air and hydrogen and oxygen in the water to react, creating oil. I'm going to have to lock him up in the bathroom to punish him.
Exceptionally bad though if someone knows you generally do this, and is determined to access your network, as you've essentially reduced the number of possible passwords to a 32 bit number.
No, it can't. The result of the efforts to make home ownership more widespread was a set of anti-discrimination laws placed in the CRA. However, CRA regulated loans had virtually nothing to do with the current crisis. Despite CRA-regulated banks doing the bulk of regular loans, 50% of sub-prime loans - which make up the bulk the "toxic mortgages" - were issued by banks entirely free of CRA regulation, and a further 20-25% were issued by departments of CRA-regulated banks that were free of CRA regulations. The remaining 25-30%, while performed by regulated banks, were almost certainly illegal given the strict nature of the CRA and the requirements for collateral it imposes.
The problem here are not mortgages given to people on low incomes, but sub-prime mortgages given to everyone. People were using the sub-prime market to make excessive gambles that fell apart when the housing market collapsed. These varied from overly stretched ARM HELOCs to people buying multiple houses with the intent of either flipping them or renting them out. You can probably imagine that the largest gambles were not taken by the poor, but by those on median or higher than average incomes.
BTW, thanks for being one of the few people making this argument that didn't directly blame ethnic minorities for this mess, but remember that the key laws Democrats are being blamed for are not laws directed at low incomes, but at ending discrimination against ethnic minorities. Those that are promoting this meme are treading on very dangerous ground. The CRA didn't force banks to give loans to people who couldn't afford them (quite the opposite in fact), and CRA regulated loans had little or nothing to do with this crisis, which affects sub-prime loans of the type the CRA prevents. It did require banks end discrimination, but a person from an ethnic minority who entered a branch of Wachovia and asked for a 110% mortgage to help them buy a $500,000 home which they expected to pay back using their Burger King salary would have been rejected just as a white person in the same circumstances would have been. The CRA wouldn't have forced them to give the loan anyway, the CRA would have done the opposite.
If you big LCD has an HDMI input, it probably has HDCP, a DRM system. Sorry :/
You mean Windows 1.0 had this for decades. Well, ok, Windows 1.0 wasn't around for decades, but it was released in 1983/4/5, had a dock, and predates NextStep...
Somewhere in the world, at two difference advertising agencies, two overpaid campaign managers are explaining to their bosses how ads for car insurance and for supplementary health insurance could have been confused like that.
Thank you.
But I also said this:
This isn't a classic razorblades model, because razorblades don't generally get any cheaper (and in any case, it's not like the blades are being sold at cost, which is what we're talking about with SSD.)
Well, here's the thing. Does it still need to be "pressed"?
You go into Movieworld (or whatever they're called.) You browse the titles, wander over to the checkout with your selection, buy the movie, and walk out of the store.
The clerk then yells into the back "Customer just bought Hockey Mom President, need a refill."
Some guy at the back inserts an SD card into a writer. An hour later, he checks back, sees the card has been written, pulls Disney's packaging from a sealed envelope, inserts that into the transparent outer lining of the case and puts the SD card into the case itself, walks out, and puts it on the pile of "Hockey Mom President" boxes.
Disney loved it. They just needed to print the packaging and ship a hundred copies sealed to various movie stores together with a single SD card containing the master.
The movie store loves it. All they need to have in stock at any time is a big pile of blanks - blank cases, blank SD cards - plus the (easily storeable) packaging Disney et al sent. The day before a major release they do, of course, have to prefill a bunch of SD cards, but SD card writers are $1 each, so their computer can make 64 copies at a time without breaking a sweat. Oh, and if they don't sell 64 copies, they can always recycle the cards.
The only loser in the entire scenario is the idiot who bought an awful and highly improbable movie about a dimwitted soccer mom who managed to become a Governor before being picked as a Vice President by a doddering-old politician with stage-three cancer.
Let's assume Blu-ray will come down to $50 per drive within two years. Let's also assume my pricing predictions are correct, as are yours (BD-RE is $20 right now, and pressed BD discs are $2.50 if done 100,000 at a time.) Let's also acknowledge that $10 is not the floor for SD cards, it's fairly easy to find sub-$5 cards, either directly or in packages (ie four for $20, that kind of thing.)
You're expecting to ship ten media objects on average per player. The choice is you add $50 to the price of the devices reading the media and pay $5 (probably more, it took a while for DVD to get down to those prices) on media, or you spend $50 on media (probably less, $5 is what you pay now) and spend $1 on the readers.
Which is more cost effective? Not so obvious, is it?
Make the same calculation a year later. Also imagine a situation where someone can take their big-ass SD card into a store and have additional content added to it.
Ultimately though, it boils down to this: the price per gigabyte for solid state is plummeting, plummeting to the point that for lower volumes, it's already much more cost effective than Blu-ray though not DVD. Optical storage is also coming down in price, but nothing like as quickly. So at some point in the near future, one is going to overtake the other. For rewritable media, that's very soon, easily within the next three years. For pressed media, it may take five years but the convenience of SD (or CompactFlash or whatever) may well render that timeline irrelevant.
I have a gut feeling everyone's talking at cross purposes.
At this point, distributing the same 50Gb of content to 100,000 people is probably most cheaply done with Blu-ray as long as those 100,000 people are also going to get many, many, many 50Gb-of-content packages in the same format from numerous other sources. So, as a movie distribution technology, optical media kind of works.
This works because it's cost effective for those 100,000 people to spend $200ish on a Blu-ray disk reader, and it's cost effective to get a duplicator to press 100,000 Blu-ray discs at approximately $2.50 per disc.
However, when you start reducing the numbers on either side, the price differentials start to radically change. It's cheaper for me to put the content on a cheap USB hard drive, even at $100 a pop, if I'm just distributing to a few tens of people, who aren't planning on obtaining Blu-ray readers. And it's even cheaper for me to burn the same content to DVD-R, given a dual layer DVD-R costs around $2, whereas a dual-layer BD-E costs around $15-20 - they're getting close per gigabyte, but the cost of obtaining Blu-ray burners, and the receiver of the data obtaining Blu-ray readers obviously changes the cost effectiveness of the whole thing.
Ok, so that's the current situation. Now let's look at the situation in three years.
Flash memory is coming down in price. Less than a year ago, I bought an 8Gb SD card for around $80. Four months later, I bought a 16Gb SD card for $80. A quick Amazon search shows that while 32Gb cards seem to still be relatively expensive, 16Gb is easily available for around $32. The cost of adding an SD card reader to a computer is around $1. No, I'm serious. They're actually giving away the readers with many cards now. So we're looking at flash memory gigabytes-per-dollar ratios doubling every three to six months. 50Gb for under $20 (BD-RE price) should be... well, that's about $90 now, so that's about a year and a half away, assuming a six month (being conservative) pricing half-life. Another year and a half, and, well, we're looking at 50Gb of flash costing less than 50Gb of pressed Blu-ray media does today. Actually, we're more likely looking at 128Gb SD cards costing $10.
So the optical naysayers are probably right in the long term.
Verizon's announced plans to move to LTE (the 4G version of GSM.) It's quite conceivable that within two years both AT&T and Verizon will be rolling out their 4G LTE networks, and Apple will have released an iPhone 4G to go with it. So don't count out the possibility yet!
I suspect the Wikipedia page was edited after Jobs started using the term. Until the iPhone was released, the term smartphone was used exclusively to refer to phones that had an open architecture and allowed the user to load arbitrary applications on them rather than having all software controlled by the manufacturer. The definition used by Wikipedia barely covers the Nokia 9000, the original smartphone and the first smartphone I ever had.
The only extent to which the definition has blurred has been over the more advanced capabilities of standard phones. Most factory-unlocked Motorola GSM phones, for instance, are closer to the original smartphone definition than the iPhone, being able to run user loaded Java applications making the phones theoretically capable of anything a PC is capable of, albeit subject to memory, storage, and speed limitations. At this point, the same cannot be said of the iPhone, which is subject to arbitrary restrictions set by Apple. If and when Apple lifts them, it'll have the right to call the phone a smartphone. But not until then.
They're a 0% percentage of smartphones. Jobs redefining the term doesn't make a phone whose software is controlled by the manufacturer a "smartphone".
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I didn't mean "How long Grub takes to run", I mean how long it takes between me hitting the power button and Grub, or Lilo, or whatever else, starting to do its thing.
The BIOS is (in theory) just a ROM that checks to see what devices are plugged in, configures where they are seen in memory, and loads and runs the boot sector. Yet I've seen BIOSes that take 30 seconds before they'll get to the latter step, and most usually take 10-15.
Well, CP/M isn't exactly modern either!
I find it surprising how long it takes the friggin' BIOS to load Grub on most "modern" computers.
There are a variety of possible explanations, the simplest being "Because that's the reasoning", ie "Because we want to have well regulated militias, we must allow the people to bear arms." Another is that it's actually a separate right - the first amendment contains at least five (free exercise of religion, freedom of speech, a free press, right to peaceably assemble, and to petition the government), though the wording is a tad all over the place for this to be likely with the second. But certainly I've heard it argued that the intent was to ensure the states had the right to have militias, it was an argument used at the time.
I think the first is the more likely. The point is that as an English sentence, the second amendment specifically does not make the second dependent upon the first. Insofar as you can tie the things together, it's as an explanation - that because we need well regulated militias, the people must be allowed to bear arms.
If you take the language too far, as you're doing, and say that it actually introduces a dependency, it's quite possible to interpret it in exactly the opposite way those who do this do: that a militia is necessary, therefore the government must arm the people. Another way, which the courts have actually used, is to determine the meaning of the second part - ie, if the intent is to make a militia possible, then you can't say "Everyone's allowed to own spears. Guns are banned" and expect that to satisfy the amendment because, technically, people can bear arms, they just have to be spears.
But there is no dependency; in plain English, it's a justification followed by the clause that's being justified.
Is the author aware that H.264 is one of two video encoding standards that fall under the umbrella of "MPEG4"? (H.264 is MPEG 4 Part 10, with the other being Part 2, and I can't honestly remember what it's called. DivX is built off of it, but it's otherwise generally considered kinda irrelevant these days.)
I'm pretty sure Apple could charge $1.06 if they wanted to, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference in terms of sales. Rather than one industry or the other being hit, wouldn't it make more sense to pass on the charge to the customers?
Price increases happen in every industry. I don't see why music should permanently cost 99c.
Oh, that one's easy. Carly Simon was on record of saying it was about some guy she met who called himself "Barzok".
The Wii is switchable 16:9 and 4:3. It's just it's 480p, regardless of aspect ratio. Kind of like DVD, where you can choose anamorphic widescreen or 4:3 pan and scan. (Except, of course, it's rarely on the same disc with DVD whereas pretty much every Wii game I've tried respects the user's preference.)
The summary is kind of confusing in the way it's worded, but I think that's the intention, FWIW, the new Wii will be an improved version of the old Wii, not an entirely different product. Even though the Gamecube and Wii are similar underneath, the Wii was intended to be seen by everyone as something unrelated to the Gamecube. That will not be the case with the next Wii.
I think Revolution is a little cheesy and a little unsubtle though. What's needed is something that hints at a revolution. Perhaps something circular. A count, perhaps, of the number of degrees in a full circle, to imply you've gone through one whole revolution?
Yes, the "Nintendo Wii 360." What could possibly go wrong?