Every French and Swiss person legally has to have a national ID card and carry it with them at all times, on pain of arrest[...] That's the theory: in practice, no one carries them or is ever asked for them [...] In France, no bartender can ask for your National ID card
What does that signify? We're talking about the USA, where it's becoming increasingly common for cops, airlines, bars, liquour stores, rental outfits, banks, to demand - not ask, demand - to see your ID before they will allow you to go about your business or conduct perfectly ordinary transactions.
I expect you wonder why that's so bad. Here's why: it assumes guilt, until you can prove otherwise. It sends the very clear signal: trust no-one. Everyone is a liar and a cheat and a fraud until they convince you otherwise with a bit of plastic. You may want to live in that kind of society, but I don't.
I beleive in Civil Liberties and all
Clearly, you don't. Nor do you understand that dictatorships are generally popular and benign seeming - at first. There is not - ever - any justification for granting yourself powers you don't intend to use, because the guy that comes after you might not be so friendly.
The irony of posting this on a site where the editors have given themselves unlimited moderation (i.e. censorship) powers isn't lost on me. Of course, it's a benign dictatorship, for our own good. Aren't they all?
I recall an online altercation that I had a few years back. A post appeared in one of the UK ISP groups advertising a "too good to be true" service. This was at the time when narrowband access was going nuts in the UK, with companies taking a year's money off of people, then going bust the next day.
As a warning to the terminally gullible, I posted the whois info for the domain, and noted that it didn't match the trading address on the website.
A few hours later I received a vicious email from the poster threatening legal action because I had posted his home address on the group, when he was only the admin for the site, and threatening to post my home details all over the place.
Well, fuck me sideways, I thought, and let loose with a tirade about how anyone could possibly call themselves an admin when they didn't even understand that whois records are public - which mine were, and so I couldn't give a damn about what he did with them.
Two minutes after I sent it, I thought... wait a minute. There's a real human being receiving this.
And so I hammered out an apology, a genuine and heartfelt and sincere apology. Oh, I didn't mean a word of it, of course. The guy had screwed up, and was too stubborn to admit it. But I screw up every day, and don't like having it pointed out, and it was simply cruel to heap any further misery on this poster.
So I apologised for posting his address, and he replied in a calmer manner, and we had a chat, and he turned out to be a decent (if slightly clueless) bloke. He declined my offer to post a public apology on the group. I would have had no qualms about doing so, because knowing that I was absolutely in the right meant that I really didn't have anything to prove, and that my priority was to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world (in a small way, but every little helps, right?).
It's a shame that Bill didn't take the opportunity to defuse this situation. It's so obvious that Shifman is in the wrong that it really doesn't need to be laboured. He's clearly not very bright, and so it's rather cruel (funny, yes, but cruel) to taunt him so. I'm sure that Bill could just send a without-prejudice apology and walk away from this, and we'd understand that he's doing it from kindness and generosity, to dig Shifman out of the hole that he's dug for himself.
The fact that Bill doesn't do this, and that he's taking care to avoid actionable statements even though he claims that Shifman has no case rather implies that Bill isn't entirely confident that he's in the right here. And that's a shame, because he could end this with one brave and courteous gesture, for pity's sake, and out of strength, not weakness.
the emails were bulk and they were unsolicited, but they were sent to addresses posted on the websites of the target companies STRICTLY for the purpose of receiving job requests and resumes
Which is where your apology (in the sense of explanation) falls apart. The original email was not sent to a posted address of a target company, it was a badly targetted unsolicited commercial communication.
From the recipient's point of view, badly targetted and untargetted look exactly the same. Without further communication, there's no way to tell, and further communication these days generally means you disclosing that your address is active, which just solitics more spam. Also, most spammers these days slather their dross in laughable disclaimers like "This is not unsolicited email" or faux-intimate personalisation, and there's nothing in Shifman's original solicitation (sent from an @home address rather than his own domain) to mark it as being badly targetted through ignorance rather than untargetted through malice.
Sad to say, there's now only one sensible response to receiving any piece of UCE, from any sender. Refer it to the sender's upstream provider, and let them deal with it. If the sender has made one - or a couple - of innocent mistakes, they should have no problem convincing their provider of that, right?
What's most telling is Shifman's response to the initial and impersonal complaint. He took it as a personal and malicious attack, which indicates either that he doesn't understand why Bill interpreted his email as untargetted (rather than badly targetted), or that he simply thinks that there's nothing inherently wrong with untargetted UCE. A simple, "Sorry, my bad, targetting error" would have sorted the whole thing out.
Note that by the time Bill's chums leapt it to join the Shifman taunting, he had already dug his own grave with his ignorance and belligerency. Cruel as it is, it is undeniably funny to read his frenzied frothings.
Straight up, when I saw "holding up", I read it as meaning "propping up".
When you look at the beatings that broadband providers are taking, it seems like the only thing keeping the whole broadband "revolution" going is the mindless optimism of marketing droids, based on the mythical "average user" spending all of their time (and disposable income) sucking down advert laden pay-per-stream postage stamp sized Britney Spears videos from the provider's portal. It's insane (gee, do I pay-per-view for a postage stamp, or do I pay-per-view to the same provider down the same cable, but have it go to the big widescreen TV on the other side of the splitter?) but it seems to be the only thing keeping the rollouts going.
This is an interesting piece, but it doesn't address the basic problem of broadband. Those of us who already have it know exactly why we want it: we want a fat and unmetered pipe to go find and create our own content with. But the pricing is aimed at bringing in Ms Average User. Frankly, I just don't think that's going to happen, not until the price is way down (in which case you've got to gouge that bit deeper on the pay-pers), and sooner or later broadband providers are going to give up this nonsense about selling content, and are going to have to start charging a sustainable amount for a sustainable service. And those of us who have got used to (fairly) affordable broadband are going to catch it right in the shorts. Oops.
The Future of Music Coalition [have] taken the stance that creators of music should be rewarded
Which is a noble sentiment, but I'm still seeing a lot of artists choosing (with eyes open) to sign organ-grinder-monkey-contracts and do work-for-hire for the big labels. When I sign a contract that gives me money and security in return for signing away all ownership rights (as I do when creating bespoke software for an employer), I don't expect to be able to turn around months or years down the line and whine "But I created it, I deserve direct royalties!"
I suggest that what the FoM and others should work towards is encouraging some big names to jump ship from big labels and go solo. Mariah Carey has just been given $35 by Virgin to buy them out of their side of a multi-album contract. Every time we hear about a struggling artist, let's think about that, and what it says about the amount of money in this industry. That's $35 million dollars for doing nothing. Now, if Mariah really believes that she can make it, she's got the perfect opportunity to spend that money making, promoting and distributing her own music, under her own control.
Will she do it? Will she hell. She'll go and whore herself to another big label, because it's safer and easier.
And that's the problem. It's not with the labels, it's with the artists. If I hear another sob story about a struggling artist who acknowledges that they've signed a stupid contract, but are going to tough it out anyway, I think I'll blow a fuse. Why should we feel sympathy for people who are dumb and cowardly and greedy?
No, when I see artists leaving the big labels faster than new ones can be created and promoted, then I'll feel sympathy for them. Until then, I'll pay my money to the labels, and not get confused about who's doing the work, producing the creativity, and taking the risks in this business.
My god. I actually find myself feeling sympathy for the RIAA. Now see what you've done!;-)
Either the record companies will say "Keep you pittance you collect on the blank media" or they will simply start a smear campaign on the senator
Or bride him, or blackmail him (with real or fake material), or threaten him or his family, or, hey, just kill him. American history is replete with examples of elected officials coming a cropper when they try to play hard ball with (even more) ruthless self selving bastards. You'd be surprised by how little protection officials have from non-acute threats.
On the other hand, they might just say "Won't somebody think of the children/national economy!" and ignore him. It seems to be working fine up to now.
Re:I had WORSE problems with my PS2 at launch!
on
XBox Defects Draw Ire
·
· Score: 2
he wouldn't have gotten [a PS2] quicker. Remember that absurd supply shortage Sony had at launch? The one that lasted something like six months?
As I remember it, the "waiting list" thing was a crock; the people on waiting lists were the ones who didn't care enough to keep hitting the stores (on and offline) and asking about stock, so Sony and the retaillers reckoned that they weren't going to be big games purchasers anyway, and didn't give a damn about servicing the waiting lists. The big noises about long waits and unavailability were from the people on lists who were too patient/lazy to look elsewhere, and got sick of hearing that Little Johnny next door had wandered into Wal-Mart and found two dozen on the shelves. Given that the poster was a (smart, determined) first-day purchaser, I reckon he'd have found one elsewhere.
Microsoft most likely went with the company that gave them the lowest bid, which may well have been Intel over AMD, regardless of consumer pricing of their products
Let's not forget the heat issue. AMD chips run toasty hot, and Xbox has to be quiet, which means paying for hefty sinks and whisper fans.
Re:I had WORSE problems with my PS2 at launch!
on
XBox Defects Draw Ire
·
· Score: 3, Troll
Remember, I sat in line for about 8 hours on October 26th to get a unit that I didn't get to actually play until December 8th. Let's just say, I'll never do that again. (Actually, I did, but I only was in line 30 minutes for an XBox.)
Sorry to say it, but you are part of the problem. You should have done what the store suggested in the first place: get a full refund, and take your business elsewhere (you'd have got one quicker, right?). That's what you're paying that retail markup for.
Every time I see people saying that their new unit was DOA, I wonder why they put up with it. When you buy a new item that is unequivocably not fit for purpose, consumer law states very, very clearly that you are entitled to receive a fully working new item. A reconditioned or repaired one is not sufficient, and the sooner we stop accepting that crap from retaillers and producers, the sooner they'll stop channeling money from QA and support to marketing. If it breaks even a week down the line, reconditioned is fine, but DOA means it ain't your problem, and you've got the law on your side on that one.
When my original NES died after only 2 days of play it took 2 months to get a replacement from Nintendo. The store wouldn't take it back, they said I had to deal with Nintendo directly.
Which is where the joy of credit cards comes in. I have run into this crap from retaillers in the past, when I know damn well that they are legally obliged to replace a not-fit-for-purpose DOA system - if you're the last profit maker in the selling chain then you're the first step in the return chain. If you don't like that you're in the wrong business.
It takes a degree of certainty, but if this happens again, put the box on the counter and say "If you don't replace it with a new item, I'll simply instruct my CC issuer to bill you back, as I've never received fit-for-purpose goods. Either way, I'm not picking that box up again."
It's OK to be firm in these situations, as the retailler is already breaking the law (although the adamancy of their denials often makes me think that retail chains just flat out lie to their underpaid front line employees about what the law actually is). As many people have suggested, this is what Xbox purchasers should have done. In fact, if you're a really ruthless bastard, it's even easier with an online retailler. Get a documentation trail that shows you're asserting that the goods are non-fit-for-purpose, bill them back, order a new box (from someone else), and tell the original seller that they can arrange to collect the DOA system or not, it's really up to them.
Lest we forget, putting up with crappy customer service only encourages more flouting of the very clear consumer protection laws that we (fortunately) still have.
one can retort that this blurb is entirely anecodotal
Actually, it's a plotline from King of the Hill. You probably watched it when you were high as a kite. If you think that the show just copied it to sow confusion and cover up the real event, that's the paranoia from the weed talking.;-)
One day, this will be something they'll tell someone else's grandchildren about.
I reckon they'll be telling them about the time that they said that they were going to wait in line for nearly five months to see a lame film, and dozens of - ahem - reputable news sources believed them and ran it as a story.
News: two guys have waited for five months.
Not news: two guys have said they will wait for five months.
They'll get their names in the papers, and wind up meeting Uber-Trekkies. The resulting union will result in offspring that will make the monsters in Aliens, seem like the Olsen Twins
Say what? The Olsen Twins are way scarier than Aliens, freaky little All American uber-kinder that they are. Sort of like George Lucas versions of real people.
I don't think the director has ever read the book from start to finish. It was pretty obvious that anything that involved characterisation or subtlety would have bored him to death.
Careful now. He did set up and show the stone trolls, and Sean Bean's comment of "Still sharp" about Narsil could be heard as "Still Sharpe".
Also, note that he set up (but didn't pursue) Gimli's antipathy of elves, and showed the farewell to Bill the Pony but not the hello. I suspect that this was all filmed but cut by the studio (with Bill Ferny getting squished), and it will re-appear in the DVD.
Unfortunately, the combat scenes will still bite the weenie, and we'll still have the Indiana Jones debacle.
it wasn't complete within itself and had several continuity errors and confusing loose ends, particularly Narsil
While the reforging was skipped, notice that Peter managed to keep the scene where it is used as a character development device. Although perhaps that was just to crack his Sharpe joke.
Had his predecessors understood how huge the Internet would turn out to be, Hoskins figures, they would surely have licensed the protocols, sold the rights to a corporation and collected a royalty
What a curiously idiotic statement. All they had to do was to to use their 20-20 prescience to decide that this arbitrary piece of technology was going to be huge, and then they could should have kept it proprietary and commercial, because god knows that wouldn't have slowed the adoption of it, right?
This is either a misquote, or Mr Hoskins needs beaten around the head with the basics of capitalist society. You can't dictate to the market until there is a market, and you can't create demand for a new technology by cackling and saying "All your install base are belong to us". Even Microsoft couldn't do that until they'd killed all the effective competition.
To achieve a minimum orbital velocity in a 2-kilometer run, you'd have to accelerate at a little more than 1500 gees.
Yup. And for a more manageable 10g, you'd need a 315km run to reach geosynchronous velocity. Of course, you'd also burn to a crisp in the atmosphere;-)
The advantage of railgun / rocket sled launches is in getting you some of the way up to orbital velocity, but there's still a good long way to go. Basically, you can't reach orbital velocity while still inside the atmosphere, so you have to carry a bunch of fuel up with you whichever way you cut it.
Here's some handy dandy info for those who want to have a play with the numbers and have forgotten their Newtonian stuff:
Geosynchronous orbit is at 42,245m, which requires an orbital velocity of 7869m/s. Gravity is 9.81m/s^2
Distance = half of acceleration times time squared (s = 0.5 * a * t^2) and velocity equals acceleration times time, so time equals velocity divided by acceleration (v = a * t, t = v / a)
If you know the speed that you want and the acceleration that you can tolerate, this gives you:
s = 0.5 * v^2 / a (e.g. for 7869m/s and 98.1m/s^2, s = 0.5 * 7869 * 7869 / 98.1 = 315602m = 315km)
Or, if you know the distance you have and speed that you want, and want to know the acceleration you need:
a = 0.5 * v^2 / s (e.g. for 7869m/s and a 2km run, a = 0.5 * 7869 * 7869 / 2000 = 15480 m/s^2 or about 1578g!)
NASA hopes to drive down the cost of rocket departures from $10,000 per pound to $1,000 per pound
Whoa there, son. Y'all from the future? Let's use units we all understand: what's that work out to in bushels of cotton per hectare?
Hmmm, I can't help but think that if we ceased habitually using stone age units of measurement, then we might be able to stop pounding Mars with "landers";-)
And by the way, I'm not even a level designer, I'm a "writer", so none of the shit that came out of there is my fault, it was all those other bitches, because while they were obviously slacking by playing other people's games, I was slacking more subtly by working on my Great American Novel, or bidding on Call of Cthulhu rulebooks on eBay.
It's been said before and I'll say it again. Shit never, ever sticks to the "creative" guys. By the way, when a games person says they worked on a title "briefly" (Deus Ex in this case), it means they walked past a room when the producers were being lied to about it a couple of times. Believe me, I know.
Let me recall an anecdote about Daikatana. A games magazine was invited to view it a couple of months before release (I don't know which "release" that referred to). The mag flack played for a bit then asked "Where's the sniper rifle?"
"Sniper rifle?" asked the Ion Storm "creatives".
The mag flack explained it, pointing out that every FPS had one. It was a genre convention. The answer from the Ion Storm guys:
"Wow, that sounds cool. We'd better put one in."
Jesus H Breakdancing Christ. Ill informed, incompetent, and unprincipled. They could at least have stuck to their guns (literally) rather than throwing yet another new challenge at the programming team with a deadline looming. It really is astonishing that it turned out as good (ahem) as it did.
there is no reason that content can't be classified with better granularity than "adult/non-adult"
Oh please! Consider pr0n. Look at the granularity that you need in that. Off the top of my head, I can think of countries where the age of consent varies from 13 to 21, and even then depends on the sex act and the age and relationship of the partner(s).
And honest pr0n is simplicity itself compared to applying abritrary labels that distinguish between art and titilation (David, Venus) and the minefield of political and religious speech.
Any useful system would be so complex that it would be unused. How many people right now bother even with such trivial stuff as HTML version numbers?
Fortunately, attempts to classify or censor the net aren't in the least concerned with coming up with a useful system. They are PR or ego exercises, pure and simple.
So what you are saying is that most people who want porn online "know what they are doing" with a computer? I doubt it. Most people are chumps.
Before Napster, I'd have agreed with you. But now everyone and their grandma knows about P2P (helped along by the RIAA's legal and PR campaign against P2P). Have you used any of the KazAa clients? They really are idiot proof. Within 2 minutes of downloading, I was leeching software, music and quality pr0n, using a front end that's easy to understand, and a back end that makes Napster look like tin cans and bits of string.
I have to agree with the original poster. Compared to juggling a dozen browser windows and trying out hundreds of dead web passes for pr0n sites, P2P is actually simplicity itself.
Calling a windowed operating system "Windows" is like naming an automobile "Wheels."
Tsk tsk, you're re-painting history with today's common usage. The analogy is more like naming one of the first automobiles "Gears". Other manufactuers are using the same technology and internal technical usage of the word (as other developers were using "windows" as a descriptive term before Microsoft used it as a trademark), but the important point to consider is: who's spending money to associate the word in the publics' mind by creating a new common usage? Without Microsoft's consistent usage of Windows as a trademark, the word "windows" wouldn't be as synonymous with a desktop GUI as it is.
Consider: if they'd chosen "Microsoft Clicky", now we'd have people making clones "Licky" clones, and we'd be bitching that "clicky" is a common descriptive word that can't possibly be trademarked. Think! The common word for a GUI (Windows, Clicky, Splunge, pick any word you like), is only common through promotion as a trademark.
Slashdot Mirror
What does that signify? We're talking about the USA, where it's becoming increasingly common for cops, airlines, bars, liquour stores, rental outfits, banks, to demand - not ask, demand - to see your ID before they will allow you to go about your business or conduct perfectly ordinary transactions.
I expect you wonder why that's so bad. Here's why: it assumes guilt, until you can prove otherwise. It sends the very clear signal: trust no-one. Everyone is a liar and a cheat and a fraud until they convince you otherwise with a bit of plastic. You may want to live in that kind of society, but I don't.
Clearly, you don't. Nor do you understand that dictatorships are generally popular and benign seeming - at first. There is not - ever - any justification for granting yourself powers you don't intend to use, because the guy that comes after you might not be so friendly.
The irony of posting this on a site where the editors have given themselves unlimited moderation (i.e. censorship) powers isn't lost on me. Of course, it's a benign dictatorship, for our own good. Aren't they all?
Er, of course, that would be Neil and not Bill. That's real karmic payback for my complaint that the editor has spelled Shifman's name wrong. ;-)
I recall an online altercation that I had a few years back. A post appeared in one of the UK ISP groups advertising a "too good to be true" service. This was at the time when narrowband access was going nuts in the UK, with companies taking a year's money off of people, then going bust the next day.
As a warning to the terminally gullible, I posted the whois info for the domain, and noted that it didn't match the trading address on the website.
A few hours later I received a vicious email from the poster threatening legal action because I had posted his home address on the group, when he was only the admin for the site, and threatening to post my home details all over the place.
Well, fuck me sideways, I thought, and let loose with a tirade about how anyone could possibly call themselves an admin when they didn't even understand that whois records are public - which mine were, and so I couldn't give a damn about what he did with them.
Two minutes after I sent it, I thought... wait a minute. There's a real human being receiving this.
And so I hammered out an apology, a genuine and heartfelt and sincere apology. Oh, I didn't mean a word of it, of course. The guy had screwed up, and was too stubborn to admit it. But I screw up every day, and don't like having it pointed out, and it was simply cruel to heap any further misery on this poster.
So I apologised for posting his address, and he replied in a calmer manner, and we had a chat, and he turned out to be a decent (if slightly clueless) bloke. He declined my offer to post a public apology on the group. I would have had no qualms about doing so, because knowing that I was absolutely in the right meant that I really didn't have anything to prove, and that my priority was to reduce the amount of human suffering in the world (in a small way, but every little helps, right?).
It's a shame that Bill didn't take the opportunity to defuse this situation. It's so obvious that Shifman is in the wrong that it really doesn't need to be laboured. He's clearly not very bright, and so it's rather cruel (funny, yes, but cruel) to taunt him so. I'm sure that Bill could just send a without-prejudice apology and walk away from this, and we'd understand that he's doing it from kindness and generosity, to dig Shifman out of the hole that he's dug for himself.
The fact that Bill doesn't do this, and that he's taking care to avoid actionable statements even though he claims that Shifman has no case rather implies that Bill isn't entirely confident that he's in the right here. And that's a shame, because he could end this with one brave and courteous gesture, for pity's sake, and out of strength, not weakness.
Which is where your apology (in the sense of explanation) falls apart. The original email was not sent to a posted address of a target company, it was a badly targetted unsolicited commercial communication.
From the recipient's point of view, badly targetted and untargetted look exactly the same. Without further communication, there's no way to tell, and further communication these days generally means you disclosing that your address is active, which just solitics more spam. Also, most spammers these days slather their dross in laughable disclaimers like "This is not unsolicited email" or faux-intimate personalisation, and there's nothing in Shifman's original solicitation (sent from an @home address rather than his own domain) to mark it as being badly targetted through ignorance rather than untargetted through malice.
Sad to say, there's now only one sensible response to receiving any piece of UCE, from any sender. Refer it to the sender's upstream provider, and let them deal with it. If the sender has made one - or a couple - of innocent mistakes, they should have no problem convincing their provider of that, right?
What's most telling is Shifman's response to the initial and impersonal complaint. He took it as a personal and malicious attack, which indicates either that he doesn't understand why Bill interpreted his email as untargetted (rather than badly targetted), or that he simply thinks that there's nothing inherently wrong with untargetted UCE. A simple, "Sorry, my bad, targetting error" would have sorted the whole thing out.
Note that by the time Bill's chums leapt it to join the Shifman taunting, he had already dug his own grave with his ignorance and belligerency. Cruel as it is, it is undeniably funny to read his frenzied frothings.
Editors and posters, please take care: we're talking about Bernard Shifman (single 'f'), not any of the Bernard Shiffman's (double 'ff') out there.
As Mr Shifman seems to be highly irrascible, it's probably as well to at least get his name correct.
Straight up, when I saw "holding up", I read it as meaning "propping up".
When you look at the beatings that broadband providers are taking, it seems like the only thing keeping the whole broadband "revolution" going is the mindless optimism of marketing droids, based on the mythical "average user" spending all of their time (and disposable income) sucking down advert laden pay-per-stream postage stamp sized Britney Spears videos from the provider's portal. It's insane (gee, do I pay-per-view for a postage stamp, or do I pay-per-view to the same provider down the same cable, but have it go to the big widescreen TV on the other side of the splitter?) but it seems to be the only thing keeping the rollouts going.
This is an interesting piece, but it doesn't address the basic problem of broadband. Those of us who already have it know exactly why we want it: we want a fat and unmetered pipe to go find and create our own content with. But the pricing is aimed at bringing in Ms Average User. Frankly, I just don't think that's going to happen, not until the price is way down (in which case you've got to gouge that bit deeper on the pay-pers), and sooner or later broadband providers are going to give up this nonsense about selling content, and are going to have to start charging a sustainable amount for a sustainable service. And those of us who have got used to (fairly) affordable broadband are going to catch it right in the shorts. Oops.
Which is a noble sentiment, but I'm still seeing a lot of artists choosing (with eyes open) to sign organ-grinder-monkey-contracts and do work-for-hire for the big labels. When I sign a contract that gives me money and security in return for signing away all ownership rights (as I do when creating bespoke software for an employer), I don't expect to be able to turn around months or years down the line and whine "But I created it, I deserve direct royalties!"
I suggest that what the FoM and others should work towards is encouraging some big names to jump ship from big labels and go solo. Mariah Carey has just been given $35 by Virgin to buy them out of their side of a multi-album contract. Every time we hear about a struggling artist, let's think about that, and what it says about the amount of money in this industry. That's $35 million dollars for doing nothing. Now, if Mariah really believes that she can make it, she's got the perfect opportunity to spend that money making, promoting and distributing her own music, under her own control.
Will she do it? Will she hell. She'll go and whore herself to another big label, because it's safer and easier.
And that's the problem. It's not with the labels, it's with the artists. If I hear another sob story about a struggling artist who acknowledges that they've signed a stupid contract, but are going to tough it out anyway, I think I'll blow a fuse. Why should we feel sympathy for people who are dumb and cowardly and greedy?
No, when I see artists leaving the big labels faster than new ones can be created and promoted, then I'll feel sympathy for them. Until then, I'll pay my money to the labels, and not get confused about who's doing the work, producing the creativity, and taking the risks in this business.
My god. I actually find myself feeling sympathy for the RIAA. Now see what you've done! ;-)
Or bride him, or blackmail him (with real or fake material), or threaten him or his family, or, hey, just kill him. American history is replete with examples of elected officials coming a cropper when they try to play hard ball with (even more) ruthless self selving bastards. You'd be surprised by how little protection officials have from non-acute threats.
On the other hand, they might just say "Won't somebody think of the children/national economy!" and ignore him. It seems to be working fine up to now.
As I remember it, the "waiting list" thing was a crock; the people on waiting lists were the ones who didn't care enough to keep hitting the stores (on and offline) and asking about stock, so Sony and the retaillers reckoned that they weren't going to be big games purchasers anyway, and didn't give a damn about servicing the waiting lists. The big noises about long waits and unavailability were from the people on lists who were too patient/lazy to look elsewhere, and got sick of hearing that Little Johnny next door had wandered into Wal-Mart and found two dozen on the shelves. Given that the poster was a (smart, determined) first-day purchaser, I reckon he'd have found one elsewhere.
Let's not forget the heat issue. AMD chips run toasty hot, and Xbox has to be quiet, which means paying for hefty sinks and whisper fans.
Sorry to say it, but you are part of the problem. You should have done what the store suggested in the first place: get a full refund, and take your business elsewhere (you'd have got one quicker, right?). That's what you're paying that retail markup for.
Every time I see people saying that their new unit was DOA, I wonder why they put up with it. When you buy a new item that is unequivocably not fit for purpose, consumer law states very, very clearly that you are entitled to receive a fully working new item. A reconditioned or repaired one is not sufficient, and the sooner we stop accepting that crap from retaillers and producers, the sooner they'll stop channeling money from QA and support to marketing. If it breaks even a week down the line, reconditioned is fine, but DOA means it ain't your problem, and you've got the law on your side on that one.
Which is where the joy of credit cards comes in. I have run into this crap from retaillers in the past, when I know damn well that they are legally obliged to replace a not-fit-for-purpose DOA system - if you're the last profit maker in the selling chain then you're the first step in the return chain. If you don't like that you're in the wrong business.
It takes a degree of certainty, but if this happens again, put the box on the counter and say "If you don't replace it with a new item, I'll simply instruct my CC issuer to bill you back, as I've never received fit-for-purpose goods. Either way, I'm not picking that box up again."
It's OK to be firm in these situations, as the retailler is already breaking the law (although the adamancy of their denials often makes me think that retail chains just flat out lie to their underpaid front line employees about what the law actually is). As many people have suggested, this is what Xbox purchasers should have done. In fact, if you're a really ruthless bastard, it's even easier with an online retailler. Get a documentation trail that shows you're asserting that the goods are non-fit-for-purpose, bill them back, order a new box (from someone else), and tell the original seller that they can arrange to collect the DOA system or not, it's really up to them.
Lest we forget, putting up with crappy customer service only encourages more flouting of the very clear consumer protection laws that we (fortunately) still have.
Actually, it's a plotline from King of the Hill. You probably watched it when you were high as a kite. If you think that the show just copied it to sow confusion and cover up the real event, that's the paranoia from the weed talking. ;-)
I reckon they'll be telling them about the time that they said that they were going to wait in line for nearly five months to see a lame film, and dozens of - ahem - reputable news sources believed them and ran it as a story.
News: two guys have waited for five months.
Not news: two guys have said they will wait for five months.
Say what? The Olsen Twins are way scarier than Aliens, freaky little All American uber-kinder that they are. Sort of like George Lucas versions of real people.
The people I worry about at the folk giving it 10/10 at IMDB, while at the same time looking forward to the director's cut.
(Spinal Tap Mode) Ah, but this site goes to eleven.
Careful now. He did set up and show the stone trolls, and Sean Bean's comment of "Still sharp" about Narsil could be heard as "Still Sharpe".
Also, note that he set up (but didn't pursue) Gimli's antipathy of elves, and showed the farewell to Bill the Pony but not the hello. I suspect that this was all filmed but cut by the studio (with Bill Ferny getting squished), and it will re-appear in the DVD.
Unfortunately, the combat scenes will still bite the weenie, and we'll still have the Indiana Jones debacle.
While the reforging was skipped, notice that Peter managed to keep the scene where it is used as a character development device. Although perhaps that was just to crack his Sharpe joke.
What a curiously idiotic statement. All they had to do was to to use their 20-20 prescience to decide that this arbitrary piece of technology was going to be huge, and then they could should have kept it proprietary and commercial, because god knows that wouldn't have slowed the adoption of it, right?
This is either a misquote, or Mr Hoskins needs beaten around the head with the basics of capitalist society. You can't dictate to the market until there is a market, and you can't create demand for a new technology by cackling and saying "All your install base are belong to us". Even Microsoft couldn't do that until they'd killed all the effective competition.
Yup. And for a more manageable 10g, you'd need a 315km run to reach geosynchronous velocity. Of course, you'd also burn to a crisp in the atmosphere ;-)
The advantage of railgun / rocket sled launches is in getting you some of the way up to orbital velocity, but there's still a good long way to go. Basically, you can't reach orbital velocity while still inside the atmosphere, so you have to carry a bunch of fuel up with you whichever way you cut it.
Here's some handy dandy info for those who want to have a play with the numbers and have forgotten their Newtonian stuff:
Geosynchronous orbit is at 42,245m, which requires an orbital velocity of 7869m/s. Gravity is 9.81m/s^2
Distance = half of acceleration times time squared (s = 0.5 * a * t^2) and velocity equals acceleration times time, so time equals velocity divided by acceleration (v = a * t, t = v / a)
If you know the speed that you want and the acceleration that you can tolerate, this gives you:
s = 0.5 * v^2 / a (e.g. for 7869m/s and 98.1m/s^2, s = 0.5 * 7869 * 7869 / 98.1 = 315602m = 315km)
Or, if you know the distance you have and speed that you want, and want to know the acceleration you need:
a = 0.5 * v^2 / s (e.g. for 7869m/s and a 2km run, a = 0.5 * 7869 * 7869 / 2000 = 15480 m/s^2 or about 1578g!)
Whoa there, son. Y'all from the future? Let's use units we all understand: what's that work out to in bushels of cotton per hectare?
Hmmm, I can't help but think that if we ceased habitually using stone age units of measurement, then we might be able to stop pounding Mars with "landers" ;-)
And by the way, I'm not even a level designer, I'm a "writer", so none of the shit that came out of there is my fault, it was all those other bitches, because while they were obviously slacking by playing other people's games, I was slacking more subtly by working on my Great American Novel, or bidding on Call of Cthulhu rulebooks on eBay.
It's been said before and I'll say it again. Shit never, ever sticks to the "creative" guys. By the way, when a games person says they worked on a title "briefly" (Deus Ex in this case), it means they walked past a room when the producers were being lied to about it a couple of times. Believe me, I know.
Let me recall an anecdote about Daikatana. A games magazine was invited to view it a couple of months before release (I don't know which "release" that referred to). The mag flack played for a bit then asked "Where's the sniper rifle?"
"Sniper rifle?" asked the Ion Storm "creatives".
The mag flack explained it, pointing out that every FPS had one. It was a genre convention. The answer from the Ion Storm guys:
"Wow, that sounds cool. We'd better put one in."
Jesus H Breakdancing Christ. Ill informed, incompetent, and unprincipled. They could at least have stuck to their guns (literally) rather than throwing yet another new challenge at the programming team with a deadline looming. It really is astonishing that it turned out as good (ahem) as it did.
Oh please! Consider pr0n. Look at the granularity that you need in that. Off the top of my head, I can think of countries where the age of consent varies from 13 to 21, and even then depends on the sex act and the age and relationship of the partner(s).
And honest pr0n is simplicity itself compared to applying abritrary labels that distinguish between art and titilation (David, Venus) and the minefield of political and religious speech.
Any useful system would be so complex that it would be unused. How many people right now bother even with such trivial stuff as HTML version numbers?
Fortunately, attempts to classify or censor the net aren't in the least concerned with coming up with a useful system. They are PR or ego exercises, pure and simple.
Before Napster, I'd have agreed with you. But now everyone and their grandma knows about P2P (helped along by the RIAA's legal and PR campaign against P2P). Have you used any of the KazAa clients? They really are idiot proof. Within 2 minutes of downloading, I was leeching software, music and quality pr0n, using a front end that's easy to understand, and a back end that makes Napster look like tin cans and bits of string.
I have to agree with the original poster. Compared to juggling a dozen browser windows and trying out hundreds of dead web passes for pr0n sites, P2P is actually simplicity itself.
Claims "Dave Brennins" aka "gayrod" aka dave@davebrennins.org
whois -h magic davebrenninslaw.orgCrsnic.net hasn't heard of davebrenninslaw.org
Whois Server Version 1.3
No match for "DAVEBRENNINSLAW.ORG".
traceroute davebrenninslaw.org
Error - davebrenninslaw.org doesn't exist
Sure, YAAL, whatever. Neat piece of whoring though.
Tsk tsk, you're re-painting history with today's common usage. The analogy is more like naming one of the first automobiles "Gears". Other manufactuers are using the same technology and internal technical usage of the word (as other developers were using "windows" as a descriptive term before Microsoft used it as a trademark), but the important point to consider is: who's spending money to associate the word in the publics' mind by creating a new common usage? Without Microsoft's consistent usage of Windows as a trademark, the word "windows" wouldn't be as synonymous with a desktop GUI as it is.
Consider: if they'd chosen "Microsoft Clicky", now we'd have people making clones "Licky" clones, and we'd be bitching that "clicky" is a common descriptive word that can't possibly be trademarked. Think! The common word for a GUI (Windows, Clicky, Splunge, pick any word you like), is only common through promotion as a trademark.