...Althought $5-$8 would be a lot better. Problem is, if I buy an album, I want 44.1khz PCM data, and not a compressed stream with a not-insignificant portion of the data missing.
If my $.99 bought me the raw stereo PCM data to burn, MP3, ogg, or sample then I would consider this reasonable.
Of course the artists probably get less than $.05 of that sale. The other.94 cents buys.05 of an ounce of cocaine to line the nostrils of a record exec.
Dear Slashdot, I don't know how to do my job. If I don't do my job right,
Unfortunately, in many offices, the person who has the most computer skill is the defacto IT-manager. In many cases, this person has no degree, no formal training, no informal training, etc...
Case in point: A little while back, my wife got a job with a small construction company. The owners's wife was in charge of all record-keeping, government forms, payroll, and any other information intensive task. My wife was hired as a receptionist, but her job description was quickly expanded to cover all the IT-specific stuff on the owner's PC just as soon as the lady found out my wife knew how to operate a computer. And yes, when data went missing because the owner wouldn't shell out for even a rudimentary backup system (They spent $5800 on a plotter, but wouldn't shell out $200 for a zip drive and some disks), my wife was fired for 'not knowing how to do her job'.
This same thing goes on in offices all over the world. If the people refuse to do the job, usually for a fraction of what a *real* sysadmin makes, they're either fired on the spot or made to leave the company in another way to make room for someone who will do the job. When they do undertake the task, they're forced to work under shitty conditions and impossible budgets.
Moral: A computer workstation and a secretary who can copy files from one drive to the next is not the same thing as a reliable IT installation. If you treat it as such, expect to get burned.
Funny, I thought that cities were for living in and business, etc, etc, not for rich-ass movie companies to play with.
You've just got no clue why cities want movies to be filmed in their jurisdictions
Think about the budget for big-time blockbusters like Matrix 2 and 3, both of which are being filmed in and around Sydney. Together, they probably total around 300-500 million dollars. Much of that money will be spent on production. A significant portion of that money is spent on things adjacent to the filming process, like catering, for example.
There are restaurants in Sydney that will be made for life with the massive amounts of catering required by such a huge production. Even if Carrie Ann Moss isn't allowed to have more than a celery stick for every meal so that she still looks good in skin-tight latex as Trinity, you can bet that Bubba the gaffer and Hank the electrician want steak and potatos for every meal. Both the Wachowski brothers are big guys. I bet they don't skimp on the catering either.
Also, since the actors have been in Sydney for about a year, do you think they're living in trailers? Probably they're living in fancy hotel aparments for thousands of dollars a month.
That hardly applies to all mods though. Ever since the video game generation grew up into hackers and consoles started to appeal to adults, there have been techies that will take any excuse to poke around inside the machines.
I agree totally. Some of the mods I've seen, such as the portable wooden Playstation we saw a little while back were cool and neat, besides making a template for people who wanted to do something similar.
The GBA display hack, on the other hand, is a case of Nintendo just not providing what people want or need. It would be as if Apple had released the iMac without a floppy drive, but also without the option to add a floppy drive via USB. Most people just put up with it. Those who want the technology and are unwilling to put up with it change the technology.
The GBA games I've seen are about on par with SNES and Sega-genesis era system requirements. These include platform games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and Super Mario World, IMHO some of the best video games ever produced.
In fact, since the days of 16bit processing, games have not expanded in playability as fast as they have expanded in terms of special effects, graphic capabilities and system usage.
Despite the fact that you can now play Sonic in a glorious 3d world on the Nintendo Game Cube, the playability and enjoyment factor just isn't the same as the old side-scrolling platform Sonic games. Sonic 2 and 3 on Genesis are incredible, infinitely playable games. I fire up a Genesis emulator about once a month and play them through again just for kicks. I occasionally find something new when I play.
Since this is the kind of game best suited for the GBA and the people at Nintendo and Sega *do* understand the difference between 'playable' and 'dazzling', it's not surprising that they've chosen this platform to 'ressurect' some of these older sprite-based game engines.
That said, it's a shame that they didn't include RGB or composit out on the GBA, because the size of the GBA's display just doesn't do these kinds of games justice. It's true that they don't have particle and polygon-based graphics. It's also true that the games are playable on a small screen albeit with lots of lighting. What Ninentdo seems to have missed is that the first time we played these games, we did so on larger displays. The games are just more enjoyable if you don't have to squint against the glare of a halogen spotlight to see them.
I, for one, would like to see every handheld in the future ship with either a RBG or Composite video out plug so that you can play the game on a TV or a 'portable' LCD screen. The fact that people feel the need to mod the game to make it more enjoyable means that Nintendo hasn't don their job.
It is easily abused, but mob rule is a step up from than tyrant rule which is what you get when some l4m3r with an aiming proxy and guard bots logs into a CS or a Q3 server. He decides he wants to ruin your server? He can, just because he's more powerful than you.
At least with the 'Cheater Button' the majority of the people on the server have a say in who stays or goes. If a legitimate player gets bumped because he was flagged a cheater, there are *always* more FPS servers out there.
This happened to me as well. Several days at the beginning of last year, the Onion Article was being passed around via email some of the more religious young women at my office. The hell of it was that it had been forwarded to the 'Local Christian E-Mail Distribution Officer' by a prominent local pastor.
As you read through it, you can just see the raw emotions in every article in that issue - it reminds me every day I look at it what that day was like.
The Holy Fucking Shit edition of The Onion was one of the finest pieces of literature serious or satirical published about the September 11 bombings. Before the HFS edition, I merely thought The Onion was funny. Afterwards, I respected The Onion.
In the middle of all the hysteria, screaming panic, and horror, The Onion *dared* to go in and examine the ridiculousness of not only what had happened but what was happening because of it.
They need to take cheats out of the game all together.
That works real well until you realized that many players cheat by unfairly reading information with a different application or proxy.
A good example of this is the 'aiming' proxy, which is a proxy application that sits between your FPS client and the server. The proxy parses the packets sent beteen client and server. Since the client is responsible for telling the server what actions you make and the server is responsible for telling the client what all the other players are doing, the proxy applies a little bit of math to the two pieces of information and 'corrects' your shot so that it hits another player despite where you really aimed.
Unless your game can somehow telepathically guess where the players are, there's no real way to hide this information from the client. Encryption strong enough to prevent a reasonable crack is too math intensive to run at the same time, meaning that hard encryption just isn't the answer.
There are apps out there for all the FPS servers that attempt to detect this sort of thing, but most of them work by checking ratios. If you happen to get luck and exceed the ratio of possible good shots to bad shots, you're tagged as a cheater.
If you can read the client-server data stream, you can cheat.
That's why the answer to cheaters lies not only in designing applications to prevent cheating, but allowing players to flag cheaters and bump them from the game.
In MMOG's, this means that GM's should respond quickly, intelligently, and decisively to player complaints. In smaller scale actions, players should always have a 'cheater' button that allows them to collectively police the game by booting and banning malicious players.
I have a feeling those digital projector parts are going to cost me big.
The cost of digital may start out high, but it will rapidly decrease. Why?
First of all, you're not using nearly so many moving parts. A digital projector is either going to read from a larg capacity hdd or some sort of laser media rather than a large, prone to failure, reel-to-reel system.
For those who haven't been inside a theatre projection room in the last little bit, these 'reels' are actually complex turntable systems that cost thousands to maintain.
Also, as LCD projectors become more and more common, the bulbs and other projection equipment are coming down in price. You can already set up a reasonable home digital projection system for under $5000. Scale that up, and you'll see that as more and more of digital projection equipment becomes commodity hardware, prices will plummet.
There is one caveat to this. Hollywood may see this as a bad thing since it lowers the bar for theatre ownership and therefore, control of theatre revenue. They may leverage their influence against hardware manufacturers or buy legislation that makes it prohibitive to buy the equipment, even if the prices would normally fall.
Re:Crappy moderation...
on
What Free Cable?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Cox Communications in the Texas Panhandle, which I've written about before does this. You gotta have either basic analog cable or digital cable before they'll let you have a cable modem account.
I understand that a lot of Jewish religous law about technology is based around the 'started fire' idea. Forgive me for not knowing more about it as I'm not Jewish, but the way I understand it, a fire cannot be started on the sabbath, but a fire can be maintained during the sabbath.
By the same doctrine, computerized systems can be booted on the day before the sabbath and then put on an autmatic mode during the sabbath. During that time, a sysadmin can address important issues as they creep up, just like he would add a log to the fire he started before the sabbath.
Right? Please correct me if I'm not.
Okay, this said, is Linux kosher for the sabbath? Is it permissable to say, perform a checkfs during the holy day? What tasks can you perform and what tasks can't you?
The company I work for used a wireless link to get a 45mbit/sec data connection between our two offices for more than a year. Different businesses in the same building initiated wireless links after seeing the sucess we had with ours. One, which was aimed at a nearby wireless ISP was illegally overpowered and wiped out our connection regularly, despite the fact that the dishes weren't even facing the same direction. The other, which made a very short hop, was apparently on poorly configured equipment and would also play merry hell with our shot.
IANAWE(I am not a wireless engineer), but I can't help but feeling that if we're to see the 'unlimited spectrum' as it's been mentioned before, then equipment manufacturers are going to have to do a hell of a lot better job of making wireless kit that minimizes signal bleed.
... Some of us really like to read about nifty hardware presentation hacks like case mods, lego cases, acrylic and cast iron cases, liquid-helium cooled processors, teddybears with routers embedded, etc... and so forth. Why not create a new topic area for material like this *separate* from the regular hardware area so those of us who are interested can see the stories more often and those of us who aren't can filter that area.... like most of us do with Jon Katz...
Cox Communications in Amarillo TX, which is owned by Cox, but is its own provider, uses a similar tier. I've always thought it was *very* fair in comparison to other cable plans and DSL rates, with the exception that you have to buy regular cable service before you can use a cablemodem connection. (Can you say 'Tying'?)
Currently, you get 1024 kilobit/s down and 128 kilobit/s up at the lowest rate, around $35/month. 15 kilobyte per second can be used for a P2P connection or personal website, but it sucks.
It's more than enough, however, to download from Usenet or large files off the web in reasonable amounts of time.
More and more bandwidth costs more and more per month until you're paying about $300/month for about T1 speeds. I would suggest that most cable operators could probably get this scheme to work. People who are interested in using a lot of bandwidth end up paying for the tier they fit in, while those who are only interested in email and web pay just slightly more than they would for a dial-up account.
...A robber once successfully sued a homeowner because he fell out of a window and broke his leg while escaping after a heist.
This is bullshit. Spam is theft. Spammers steal the use of bandwidth, machine use, and disk space from ISPs and users. Any court who even thinks twice about letting this go to trial will be so caught up in legal technicalities that it won't hear *any* trial fairly.
... and as we have seen repeatedly-- DVD, WMA, SDMI, etc, etc, etc... it WILL be broken. Sure, you can have the redbook audio, which will probably be pretty poor quality, or you can have the hi-res stuff. If there is a DeSACD app available-- and you can bet there will be in very short order-- which would you rather have, the 2 channel redbook or the multi-channel hi-res audio? Which do you think will be turning up on alt.binaries.mp3, 2 channel mp3's or multi-channel ogg format encodings?
Uhmm... Sorry. Despite the fact that sex toys and sodomy (and by the strictest definition -- anything other than hetero, vaginal sex) are on the books as illegal in TX, dildos are still sold quite openly in the right stores.
I've been to Forbidden Fruit in Austin. Lived next to it for almost a year since it's across the street from the UT student commons, as a matter of fact. Just said no when my buddies tried to convince me to get a body piercing there. Ahem...
AT ANY RATE... They did indeed openly sell a wide array of sex-related merchandise... Including leather ball-sacs, cock-rings, love-beads, and yes, vibrators and dildos. Mind you, this was in '93, and I don't live in Austin any more. Any Austinites care to confirm or dispell my dated data?
Just like Spidey and Star Wars, The Eminem Show can be taken as a good test case for how piracy *really* affects sales.
In Spider-Man's and Star Wars's cases, it appears that the piracy either had no effect on the incredible revenue both movies generated, or actually had a marketing effect. People who downloaded the pirate version were *more* likely to go see the in-threater version.
I suspect that The Eminem Show will do the same thing. Just like a label pays a radio station to play a promo-only single before an album's release, the pirate copies of The Eminem Show will encourage people who hear them to go get the album.
Pay close attention to the figures, and when someone tries to tell you that 'piracy hurt the artist', recite them verbatim!
Our galaxy is around 100k light years across. Assuming we built a craft that traveled.5c, it'd still take over 200k years to cross that... about 20 times longer than human civilization has been around.
The distance between galaxies is an order of magnitude larger. Even if there was life in the Andromeda galaxy, if they started at the same time we did, we wouldn't meet them for millions and millions of years, assuming sub-light travel.
I wonder how long it will be before the console game world realizes that a good solid keyboard and a small, comfortable mouse are the best controllers available.
I would agree with this, except that for most action games that aren't FPS's, then a Keyboard and mouse sucks.
Here's a good example. Go get yourself a copy of any of the Street fighter games for the console of your choice. Take a few minutes to get comfortable with the controller, especially if you have a joystick/thumbstick directional controller.
Now go find Mame rom for that game and play it with your keyboard.
It *can* be done. I frequently boot up Capcom vs. Marvel when I'm waiting on a download to let out with some Wolverine-style agression. It would be so much more pleasant if I had a little arcade-style joystick that sat on the left side of my keyboard.
Slashdot Mirror
After playing FF 9 for about eleven hours straight yesterday, I would like to beleive that I could invest some serious time in a Final Fantasy MMRPG.
Still, I don't know how fun it would be if you had to play for even a month to get as far as you can get on the single player games in a week.
I dunno. Being surrounded by cute Square-style anime girls might just make it worth it.
Better yet, Slashdot a local restaurant that's more deserving of your business.
Some restaurants, those who server alcohol at any rate, will tend to comp your food bill if you rack up a huge drink tab.
...Althought $5-$8 would be a lot better. Problem is, if I buy an album, I want 44.1khz PCM data, and not a compressed stream with a not-insignificant portion of the data missing.
.94 cents buys .05 of an ounce of cocaine to line the nostrils of a record exec.
If my $.99 bought me the raw stereo PCM data to burn, MP3, ogg, or sample then I would consider this reasonable.
Of course the artists probably get less than $.05 of that sale. The other
Dear Slashdot, I don't know how to do my job. If I don't do my job right,
Unfortunately, in many offices, the person who has the most computer skill is the defacto IT-manager. In many cases, this person has no degree, no formal training, no informal training, etc...
Case in point: A little while back, my wife got a job with a small construction company. The owners's wife was in charge of all record-keeping, government forms, payroll, and any other information intensive task. My wife was hired as a receptionist, but her job description was quickly expanded to cover all the IT-specific stuff on the owner's PC just as soon as the lady found out my wife knew how to operate a computer. And yes, when data went missing because the owner wouldn't shell out for even a rudimentary backup system (They spent $5800 on a plotter, but wouldn't shell out $200 for a zip drive and some disks), my wife was fired for 'not knowing how to do her job'.
This same thing goes on in offices all over the world. If the people refuse to do the job, usually for a fraction of what a *real* sysadmin makes, they're either fired on the spot or made to leave the company in another way to make room for someone who will do the job. When they do undertake the task, they're forced to work under shitty conditions and impossible budgets.
Moral: A computer workstation and a secretary who can copy files from one drive to the next is not the same thing as a reliable IT installation. If you treat it as such, expect to get burned.
Funny, I thought that cities were for living in and business, etc, etc, not for rich-ass movie companies to play with.
You've just got no clue why cities want movies to be filmed in their jurisdictions
Think about the budget for big-time blockbusters like Matrix 2 and 3, both of which are being filmed in and around Sydney. Together, they probably total around 300-500 million dollars. Much of that money will be spent on production. A significant portion of that money is spent on things adjacent to the filming process, like catering, for example.
There are restaurants in Sydney that will be made for life with the massive amounts of catering required by such a huge production. Even if Carrie Ann Moss isn't allowed to have more than a celery stick for every meal so that she still looks good in skin-tight latex as Trinity, you can bet that Bubba the gaffer and Hank the electrician want steak and potatos for every meal. Both the Wachowski brothers are big guys. I bet they don't skimp on the catering either.
Also, since the actors have been in Sydney for about a year, do you think they're living in trailers? Probably they're living in fancy hotel aparments for thousands of dollars a month.
Money makes it worth it.
The game is for a movie that comes out this month, staring a CG dog. 'Nuff said.
Ruh-roh! Rou wan me to go see the movie? Ri don't think so! Not even for ree Scooby snacks!
That hardly applies to all mods though. Ever since the video game generation grew up into hackers and consoles started to appeal to adults, there have been techies that will take any excuse to poke around inside the machines.
I agree totally. Some of the mods I've seen, such as the portable wooden Playstation we saw a little while back were cool and neat, besides making a template for people who wanted to do something similar.
The GBA display hack, on the other hand, is a case of Nintendo just not providing what people want or need. It would be as if Apple had released the iMac without a floppy drive, but also without the option to add a floppy drive via USB. Most people just put up with it. Those who want the technology and are unwilling to put up with it change the technology.
The GBA games I've seen are about on par with SNES and Sega-genesis era system requirements. These include platform games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and Super Mario World, IMHO some of the best video games ever produced.
In fact, since the days of 16bit processing, games have not expanded in playability as fast as they have expanded in terms of special effects, graphic capabilities and system usage.
Despite the fact that you can now play Sonic in a glorious 3d world on the Nintendo Game Cube, the playability and enjoyment factor just isn't the same as the old side-scrolling platform Sonic games. Sonic 2 and 3 on Genesis are incredible, infinitely playable games. I fire up a Genesis emulator about once a month and play them through again just for kicks. I occasionally find something new when I play.
Since this is the kind of game best suited for the GBA and the people at Nintendo and Sega *do* understand the difference between 'playable' and 'dazzling', it's not surprising that they've chosen this platform to 'ressurect' some of these older sprite-based game engines.
That said, it's a shame that they didn't include RGB or composit out on the GBA, because the size of the GBA's display just doesn't do these kinds of games justice. It's true that they don't have particle and polygon-based graphics. It's also true that the games are playable on a small screen albeit with lots of lighting. What Ninentdo seems to have missed is that the first time we played these games, we did so on larger displays. The games are just more enjoyable if you don't have to squint against the glare of a halogen spotlight to see them.
I, for one, would like to see every handheld in the future ship with either a RBG or Composite video out plug so that you can play the game on a TV or a 'portable' LCD screen. The fact that people feel the need to mod the game to make it more enjoyable means that Nintendo hasn't don their job.
It is easily abused, but mob rule is a step up from than tyrant rule which is what you get when some l4m3r with an aiming proxy and guard bots logs into a CS or a Q3 server. He decides he wants to ruin your server? He can, just because he's more powerful than you.
At least with the 'Cheater Button' the majority of the people on the server have a say in who stays or goes. If a legitimate player gets bumped because he was flagged a cheater, there are *always* more FPS servers out there.
This happened to me as well. Several days at the beginning of last year, the Onion Article was being passed around via email some of the more religious young women at my office. The hell of it was that it had been forwarded to the 'Local Christian E-Mail Distribution Officer' by a prominent local pastor.
They *Bought* this, hook, line, and sinker.
As you read through it, you can just see the raw emotions in every article in that issue - it reminds me every day I look at it what that day was like.
The Holy Fucking Shit edition of The Onion was one of the finest pieces of literature serious or satirical published about the September 11 bombings. Before the HFS edition, I merely thought The Onion was funny. Afterwards, I respected The Onion.
In the middle of all the hysteria, screaming panic, and horror, The Onion *dared* to go in and examine the ridiculousness of not only what had happened but what was happening because of it.
Good work guys!
They need to take cheats out of the game all together.
That works real well until you realized that many players cheat by unfairly reading information with a different application or proxy.
A good example of this is the 'aiming' proxy, which is a proxy application that sits between your FPS client and the server. The proxy parses the packets sent beteen client and server. Since the client is responsible for telling the server what actions you make and the server is responsible for telling the client what all the other players are doing, the proxy applies a little bit of math to the two pieces of information and 'corrects' your shot so that it hits another player despite where you really aimed.
Unless your game can somehow telepathically guess where the players are, there's no real way to hide this information from the client. Encryption strong enough to prevent a reasonable crack is too math intensive to run at the same time, meaning that hard encryption just isn't the answer.
There are apps out there for all the FPS servers that attempt to detect this sort of thing, but most of them work by checking ratios. If you happen to get luck and exceed the ratio of possible good shots to bad shots, you're tagged as a cheater.
If you can read the client-server data stream, you can cheat.
That's why the answer to cheaters lies not only in designing applications to prevent cheating, but allowing players to flag cheaters and bump them from the game.
In MMOG's, this means that GM's should respond quickly, intelligently, and decisively to player complaints. In smaller scale actions, players should always have a 'cheater' button that allows them to collectively police the game by booting and banning malicious players.
I have a feeling those digital projector parts are going to cost me big.
The cost of digital may start out high, but it will rapidly decrease. Why?
First of all, you're not using nearly so many moving parts. A digital projector is either going to read from a larg capacity hdd or some sort of laser media rather than a large, prone to failure, reel-to-reel system.
For those who haven't been inside a theatre projection room in the last little bit, these 'reels' are actually complex turntable systems that cost thousands to maintain.
Also, as LCD projectors become more and more common, the bulbs and other projection equipment are coming down in price. You can already set up a reasonable home digital projection system for under $5000. Scale that up, and you'll see that as more and more of digital projection equipment becomes commodity hardware, prices will plummet.
There is one caveat to this. Hollywood may see this as a bad thing since it lowers the bar for theatre ownership and therefore, control of theatre revenue. They may leverage their influence against hardware manufacturers or buy legislation that makes it prohibitive to buy the equipment, even if the prices would normally fall.
Cox Communications in the Texas Panhandle, which I've written about before does this. You gotta have either basic analog cable or digital cable before they'll let you have a cable modem account.
I understand that a lot of Jewish religous law about technology is based around the 'started fire' idea. Forgive me for not knowing more about it as I'm not Jewish, but the way I understand it, a fire cannot be started on the sabbath, but a fire can be maintained during the sabbath.
By the same doctrine, computerized systems can be booted on the day before the sabbath and then put on an autmatic mode during the sabbath. During that time, a sysadmin can address important issues as they creep up, just like he would add a log to the fire he started before the sabbath.
Right? Please correct me if I'm not.
Okay, this said, is Linux kosher for the sabbath? Is it permissable to say, perform a checkfs during the holy day? What tasks can you perform and what tasks can't you?
The company I work for used a wireless link to get a 45mbit/sec data connection between our two offices for more than a year. Different businesses in the same building initiated wireless links after seeing the sucess we had with ours. One, which was aimed at a nearby wireless ISP was illegally overpowered and wiped out our connection regularly, despite the fact that the dishes weren't even facing the same direction. The other, which made a very short hop, was apparently on poorly configured equipment and would also play merry hell with our shot.
IANAWE(I am not a wireless engineer), but I can't help but feeling that if we're to see the 'unlimited spectrum' as it's been mentioned before, then equipment manufacturers are going to have to do a hell of a lot better job of making wireless kit that minimizes signal bleed.
... Some of us really like to read about nifty hardware presentation hacks like case mods, lego cases, acrylic and cast iron cases, liquid-helium cooled processors, teddybears with routers embedded, etc... and so forth. Why not create a new topic area for material like this *separate* from the regular hardware area so those of us who are interested can see the stories more often and those of us who aren't can filter that area.... like most of us do with Jon Katz...
Cox Communications in Amarillo TX, which is owned by Cox, but is its own provider, uses a similar tier. I've always thought it was *very* fair in comparison to other cable plans and DSL rates, with the exception that you have to buy regular cable service before you can use a cablemodem connection. (Can you say 'Tying'?)
Currently, you get 1024 kilobit/s down and 128 kilobit/s up at the lowest rate, around $35/month. 15 kilobyte per second can be used for a P2P connection or personal website, but it sucks.
It's more than enough, however, to download from Usenet or large files off the web in reasonable amounts of time.
More and more bandwidth costs more and more per month until you're paying about $300/month for about T1 speeds. I would suggest that most cable operators could probably get this scheme to work. People who are interested in using a lot of bandwidth end up paying for the tier they fit in, while those who are only interested in email and web pay just slightly more than they would for a dial-up account.
Like I said, 'This is bullshit'. It is an urban legend, but I used it to demonstrate how ridiculous the Spamhaus' complaints are.
...A robber once successfully sued a homeowner because he fell out of a window and broke his leg while escaping after a heist.
This is bullshit. Spam is theft. Spammers steal the use of bandwidth, machine use, and disk space from ISPs and users. Any court who even thinks twice about letting this go to trial will be so caught up in legal technicalities that it won't hear *any* trial fairly.
... and as we have seen repeatedly-- DVD, WMA, SDMI, etc, etc, etc... it WILL be broken. Sure, you can have the redbook audio, which will probably be pretty poor quality, or you can have the hi-res stuff. If there is a DeSACD app available-- and you can bet there will be in very short order-- which would you rather have, the 2 channel redbook or the multi-channel hi-res audio? Which do you think will be turning up on alt.binaries.mp3, 2 channel mp3's or multi-channel ogg format encodings?
Uhmm... Sorry. Despite the fact that sex toys and sodomy (and by the strictest definition -- anything other than hetero, vaginal sex) are on the books as illegal in TX, dildos are still sold quite openly in the right stores.
I've been to Forbidden Fruit in Austin. Lived next to it for almost a year since it's across the street from the UT student commons, as a matter of fact. Just said no when my buddies tried to convince me to get a body piercing there. Ahem...
AT ANY RATE... They did indeed openly sell a wide array of sex-related merchandise... Including leather ball-sacs, cock-rings, love-beads, and yes, vibrators and dildos. Mind you, this was in '93, and I don't live in Austin any more. Any Austinites care to confirm or dispell my dated data?
Just like Spidey and Star Wars, The Eminem Show can be taken as a good test case for how piracy *really* affects sales.
In Spider-Man's and Star Wars's cases, it appears that the piracy either had no effect on the incredible revenue both movies generated, or actually had a marketing effect. People who downloaded the pirate version were *more* likely to go see the in-threater version.
I suspect that The Eminem Show will do the same thing. Just like a label pays a radio station to play a promo-only single before an album's release, the pirate copies of The Eminem Show will encourage people who hear them to go get the album.
Pay close attention to the figures, and when someone tries to tell you that 'piracy hurt the artist', recite them verbatim!
Our galaxy is around 100k light years across. Assuming we built a craft that traveled .5c, it'd still take over 200k years to cross that... about 20 times longer than human civilization has been around.
The distance between galaxies is an order of magnitude larger. Even if there was life in the Andromeda galaxy, if they started at the same time we did, we wouldn't meet them for millions and millions of years, assuming sub-light travel.
I wonder how long it will be before the console game world realizes that a good solid keyboard and a small, comfortable mouse are the best controllers available.
I would agree with this, except that for most action games that aren't FPS's, then a Keyboard and mouse sucks.
Here's a good example. Go get yourself a copy of any of the Street fighter games for the console of your choice. Take a few minutes to get comfortable with the controller, especially if you have a joystick/thumbstick directional controller.
Now go find Mame rom for that game and play it with your keyboard.
It *can* be done. I frequently boot up Capcom vs. Marvel when I'm waiting on a download to let out with some Wolverine-style agression. It would be so much more pleasant if I had a little arcade-style joystick that sat on the left side of my keyboard.
I should just go buy one. *sigh*