The same thing happened with my mom. She's not really a tech-savvy user, but she doesn't go poking at things she doesn't understand, and the backup process wasn't exactly complicated. There was an error on the recovery partition and the backup puked. We ended up getting a copy of Windows 7 to throw on it instead of the default Vista that it came with so she was out a few bucks but better off I guess. Still, I find it extremely dickish of Toshiba to do such a thing.
The Tandy TRS-80 had a speech cartridge, and for some stupid reason Radio Shack would leave those plugged into the display models. I'd go up to them, type in every swear word I could think of multiple times, scroll them off the screen, and then go "browse" somewhere nearby. Another kid would see the computer, get excited, run up and type "HELLO" and get a nice long, loud, string of cursing. They'd get thrown out of the store, professing their innocence, to the delight of my evil 8 or 9 year old mind.
What about the behavior that the documents expose? The people that have been killed and those that will continue to be killed due to cover-ups of unethical, corrupt, and outright murderous action?
Yeah, I don't think having the over 20k people download it for free or grabbing the cracked version would ever have amounted to anywhere near that amount of sales. It's just counter to the argument that being indie means nobody will take the time to look at you. If people are on a pirate site and you show up on the recent traffic, people will download it just because they can. It was a first game. There might actually be a positive effect the second time around, since some of the people that got it, liked it and might want to buy the next project. But it was was certainly overwhelmingly in the cracked category before we did the free weekend (which was after a month or two, and then it was set to 99c)
You'd be surprised. We put an app out on the app store. We saw 1600 pirated copies that weekend. We know because that's how many more submitted scores to the scoreboard than we had in sales. 1600 people went out and pirated a 2 dollar game the weekend it was released. That was pretty surprising. We made it free for a weekend, and 25,000 people grabbed it. But at 99 cents it pulls in maybe 2 to 5 dozen sales a week. Indie doesn't matter if people have easy access to it for free.
I joined as soon as I got the beta invite and threw my 8 Euros into the pool. 2 Euros came out the first month, and I got.37 back. Next month, I some 2.15 back or thereabouts. Now a few months in I'm back above the 8 Euros. So I'm not really losing money, and not really making money - just playing a zero-sum game for the moment. But it's still fun. I find interesting stuff now and then and sometimes my clicks get divided, and once someone got the whole 2 Euros for the month. Good for them.
When I did some medical transcription a couple of years ago it was up to me to do it myself, and I didn't find anything open source at the time. So I loaded up Amarok, configured global hotkeys to pause and jump forward and backward in the audio file in five second gap, and then loaded up a word processor. Sure, it's not automatic, but it helped me get the job done.
It took me 3 to 4 hours to transcribe each spoken hour of a group of strangers. When the subjects have familiar speech patterns or it's an individual I found progress was much faster.
I don't know what the law is like where he is but when we had that option in Ontario the cop said that once you've contacted the thief yourself good luck getting the police involved in any way afterwards. Any form of negotiation, even to say "If you don't, I'm calling the police." transforms it from a criminal to a civil suit, at least according to him.
I guess when they create the.epub format books they're just automating it from the straight text documents, hence that formatting. I do use Calibre so I'll have to investigate:)
I have the PRS-600 and I like it, but I do find that I spend more time than I'd like shifting it around to get glare off the screen. Additionally some of the books I've downloaded from Project Gutenberg are formatted strangely, and have carriage returns part way through lines. (Commercial ebooks are fine so far.) Both issues tend to slow down my reading experience.
I also wouldn't recommend the PRS-600 for reading PDF based ebooks. The text reflow is bearable but if there are images or scripting it murders the document.
But it's a nice portable solution for carrying your favorite literature around.
The first two thirds of Sunshine is a good sci-fi movie. And then it goes to complete shit. Almost as if a Hollywood exec ran out of toilet paper while reading the script in the bathroom. The only reason it can be considered 'special' is because Danny Boyle and Cilian Murphy were attached to it.
I didn't mention the drawings. I'm talking about both religions in general.
But regarding the Hadiths, it honestly sounds like Muhammad was suffering from a form of mental illness. He didn't just have a problem with pictures of himself. He freaked out when encountering any drawing of living things. He would fly into rages or leave and refuse to come back until the images were removed.
Apple *could* have TCRs for application submissions in the same way that Microsoft and Sony do for their consoles, but why bother?
The cost of entry for a developer is dirt cheap in comparison to consoles, and if Apple had "real" TCRs to enforce testing each app would be expensive. If the average income of an app is less than a few hundred dollars it is absolutely not worth it to them. Especially when they can just tell you to fuckoff at any time based on their current arbitrary system based on notes scribbled by Jobs while he's on the toilet. (hyperbole)
There are enough people clamoring to be developers that they don't give a rats ass about being fair to you, because you mean *nothing*.
You have no leverage whatsoever.
If there were a higher cost of entry and developers united to make demands it might mean something. But even if you get together a few dozen developers to take a stand there are thousands of devs with a Mini, an iPod, and a 100 bucks who don't care about fair.
Don't expect this pattern to change any time soon.
If the CIA wanted to fuck with the Anarchist's Cookbook, I bet they wouldn't touch a single recipe. They'd make changes and typos here and there to watermark copies made available to people under online surveillance and then watch for other people making copies of it available. If Jerry S. in Wichita has a copy, and the next thing Carl W. is found to have a printout of it in his possession there's a connection between them, however tenuous.
You might think so, until you start talking to other gun owners.
If your firearms go missing here, it's your fault. It doesn't matter what actions you took to protect them, it obviously wasn't enough.
You'd be surprised at how many people in Canada have sizable gun collections. Nobody knows about it because it's like Fight Club. You only talk about your collection with other guys at the range and it's silence otherwise.
Get a gun stolen and you can lose your ability to own one legally.
If they happened to maintain the levels of privacy the users agreed to without changing them up and forcing the users to play catch up it wouldn't be an issue.
Instead of having control over the dispersion of information among their social network people are sticking fingers in the dike to plug up new leaks every day. People may be overly trusting with their data, but if they have to agree to terms of service then Facebook should have some obligation to honor the users rules of dissemination.
During our firearm safety course the instructor talked of a friend with a collection rivaling his (huge) that had the equivalent of a bank safe full of guns in his basement. He went on vacation, and while he was gone thieves broke into his house and apparently spent *days* breaking into the vault with a jackhammer and other tools. They finally cleaned him out.
When he returned home and reported the theft he was charged with improper storage of firearms. Their reasoning? Because he left the collection without someone to check on it while he was gone he wasn't taking adequate responsibility to ensure the guns didn't fall into the wrong hands.
Heavy fines and a firearms ownership ban were applied. This took place in Canada.
In other markets prices go down as the market gets bigger. This didn't happen with games. They were expensive because they were originally a small hobby market. That market has exploded and games have not gotten cheaper at all, despite games going from selling hundreds of copies to hundreds of thousands or millions.
There are enough consumers now that you could make games 20 or 30 bucks and you would likely see enough additional sales to compensate for the lower price as people would now be able to buy more games each month.
Just wait until this becomes a cosmetic procedure for the rich. A few years of refinement and advances in microsurgery, and then they'll be raising clones of rich people in jungle compounds down in Brazil...
I was REALLY surprised to find out that Google was doing roads all over Prince Edward Island. Basically they'll drive down anything that isn't dirt, so our house out in the middle of nowhere is on street view. There's even a little white ball of pixels that's actually the dog.
I'd be curious to know if they managed to index our wi-fi though. I can't get a signal in the same room but for some reason I can go stand 300 feet away at the mailbox and use my iPod to check Heavens Above for satellite traffic.
Cite a source. Only sources I can find are religious websites trying to sell books about communing with "god".
Even the clinically brain dead have electrical activity in the brain. So they run a series of stimulus/response tests to see what function still exists.
If you have "no brain electrical activity" the only way you're getting back up is if George Romero has a plan for you.
If I had a painful injury that altered my quality of life, and I had the chance of healing it now with a higher risk of cancer in 10 years, I'd take that shot in a second.
I could have an aneurysm tomorrow, be hit by a car next weekend, or die of a completely unrelated cancer in a year.
Living should be about quality of life, not about hedging your bets that you're going to live to be XX years old.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently you were raised in a bubble and fed through tubes by gentle aliens who isolated you from the outside world.
Watch children in action. Even the "nicest" child will eventually show predatory or "nasty" behavior by the standards of others.
If you believe otherwise you are deluded.
The same thing happened with my mom. She's not really a tech-savvy user, but she doesn't go poking at things she doesn't understand, and the backup process wasn't exactly complicated. There was an error on the recovery partition and the backup puked.
We ended up getting a copy of Windows 7 to throw on it instead of the default Vista that it came with so she was out a few bucks but better off I guess.
Still, I find it extremely dickish of Toshiba to do such a thing.
The Tandy TRS-80 had a speech cartridge, and for some stupid reason Radio Shack would leave those plugged into the display models.
I'd go up to them, type in every swear word I could think of multiple times, scroll them off the screen, and then go "browse" somewhere nearby.
Another kid would see the computer, get excited, run up and type "HELLO" and get a nice long, loud, string of cursing.
They'd get thrown out of the store, professing their innocence, to the delight of my evil 8 or 9 year old mind.
Children are assholes. Never forget that.
So you're buying the spin, no questions asked.
What about the behavior that the documents expose? The people that have been killed and those that will continue to be killed due to cover-ups of unethical, corrupt, and outright murderous action?
Yeah, I don't think having the over 20k people download it for free or grabbing the cracked version would ever have amounted to anywhere near that amount of sales.
It's just counter to the argument that being indie means nobody will take the time to look at you.
If people are on a pirate site and you show up on the recent traffic, people will download it just because they can.
It was a first game. There might actually be a positive effect the second time around, since some of the people that got it, liked it and might want to buy the next project.
But it was was certainly overwhelmingly in the cracked category before we did the free weekend (which was after a month or two, and then it was set to 99c)
You'd be surprised.
We put an app out on the app store. We saw 1600 pirated copies that weekend. We know because that's how many more submitted scores to the scoreboard than we had in sales.
1600 people went out and pirated a 2 dollar game the weekend it was released. That was pretty surprising.
We made it free for a weekend, and 25,000 people grabbed it.
But at 99 cents it pulls in maybe 2 to 5 dozen sales a week.
Indie doesn't matter if people have easy access to it for free.
I joined as soon as I got the beta invite and threw my 8 Euros into the pool. 2 Euros came out the first month, and I got .37 back. Next month, I some 2.15 back or thereabouts.
Now a few months in I'm back above the 8 Euros. So I'm not really losing money, and not really making money - just playing a zero-sum game for the moment. But it's still fun.
I find interesting stuff now and then and sometimes my clicks get divided, and once someone got the whole 2 Euros for the month. Good for them.
When I did some medical transcription a couple of years ago it was up to me to do it myself, and I didn't find anything open source at the time.
So I loaded up Amarok, configured global hotkeys to pause and jump forward and backward in the audio file in five second gap, and then loaded up a word processor.
Sure, it's not automatic, but it helped me get the job done.
It took me 3 to 4 hours to transcribe each spoken hour of a group of strangers. When the subjects have familiar speech patterns or it's an individual I found progress was much faster.
I don't know what the law is like where he is but when we had that option in Ontario the cop said that once you've contacted the thief yourself good luck getting the police involved in any way afterwards.
Any form of negotiation, even to say "If you don't, I'm calling the police." transforms it from a criminal to a civil suit, at least according to him.
I guess when they create the .epub format books they're just automating it from the straight text documents, hence that formatting. :)
I do use Calibre so I'll have to investigate
I have the PRS-600 and I like it, but I do find that I spend more time than I'd like shifting it around to get glare off the screen.
Additionally some of the books I've downloaded from Project Gutenberg are formatted strangely, and have carriage returns part way through lines. (Commercial ebooks are fine so far.)
Both issues tend to slow down my reading experience.
I also wouldn't recommend the PRS-600 for reading PDF based ebooks. The text reflow is bearable but if there are images or scripting it murders the document.
But it's a nice portable solution for carrying your favorite literature around.
The first two thirds of Sunshine is a good sci-fi movie. And then it goes to complete shit. Almost as if a Hollywood exec ran out of toilet paper while reading the script in the bathroom.
The only reason it can be considered 'special' is because Danny Boyle and Cilian Murphy were attached to it.
I like to use "Skygod Crankypants".
That's always well received.
I didn't mention the drawings.
I'm talking about both religions in general.
But regarding the Hadiths, it honestly sounds like Muhammad was suffering from a form of mental illness. He didn't just have a problem with pictures of himself. He freaked out when encountering any drawing of living things. He would fly into rages or leave and refuse to come back until the images were removed.
Something was misfiring there.
Apple *could* have TCRs for application submissions in the same way that Microsoft and Sony do for their consoles, but why bother?
The cost of entry for a developer is dirt cheap in comparison to consoles, and if Apple had "real" TCRs to enforce testing each app would be expensive. If the average income of an app is less than a few hundred dollars it is absolutely not worth it to them. Especially when they can just tell you to fuckoff at any time based on their current arbitrary system based on notes scribbled by Jobs while he's on the toilet. (hyperbole)
There are enough people clamoring to be developers that they don't give a rats ass about being fair to you, because you mean *nothing*.
You have no leverage whatsoever.
If there were a higher cost of entry and developers united to make demands it might mean something. But even if you get together a few dozen developers to take a stand there are thousands of devs with a Mini, an iPod, and a 100 bucks who don't care about fair.
Don't expect this pattern to change any time soon.
The Qu'ran, like the Bible, definitely wants to strip you of your freedom.
Muslims and Christians DO want to take your freedom away.
If someone paints themselves as a moderate, they're certainly not Muslims or Christians in the sense that they are adhering to their scripture.
Don't want to be associated with the stupidity in either book? Then they should stop calling themselves Muslims and Christians.
If the CIA wanted to fuck with the Anarchist's Cookbook, I bet they wouldn't touch a single recipe.
They'd make changes and typos here and there to watermark copies made available to people under online surveillance and then watch for other people making copies of it available.
If Jerry S. in Wichita has a copy, and the next thing Carl W. is found to have a printout of it in his possession there's a connection between them, however tenuous.
You might think so, until you start talking to other gun owners.
If your firearms go missing here, it's your fault. It doesn't matter what actions you took to protect them, it obviously wasn't enough.
You'd be surprised at how many people in Canada have sizable gun collections. Nobody knows about it because it's like Fight Club. You only talk about your collection with other guys at the range and it's silence otherwise.
Get a gun stolen and you can lose your ability to own one legally.
There is no 'right to bear arms' here.
If they happened to maintain the levels of privacy the users agreed to without changing them up and forcing the users to play catch up it wouldn't be an issue.
Instead of having control over the dispersion of information among their social network people are sticking fingers in the dike to plug up new leaks every day. People may be overly trusting with their data, but if they have to agree to terms of service then Facebook should have some obligation to honor the users rules of dissemination.
So on that note, gut your Facebook profile today or delete it altogether.
During our firearm safety course the instructor talked of a friend with a collection rivaling his (huge) that had the equivalent of a bank safe full of guns in his basement. He went on vacation, and while he was gone thieves broke into his house and apparently spent *days* breaking into the vault with a jackhammer and other tools. They finally cleaned him out.
When he returned home and reported the theft he was charged with improper storage of firearms. Their reasoning? Because he left the collection without someone to check on it while he was gone he wasn't taking adequate responsibility to ensure the guns didn't fall into the wrong hands.
Heavy fines and a firearms ownership ban were applied. This took place in Canada.
In other markets prices go down as the market gets bigger.
This didn't happen with games. They were expensive because they were originally a small hobby market.
That market has exploded and games have not gotten cheaper at all, despite games going from selling hundreds of copies to hundreds of thousands or millions.
There are enough consumers now that you could make games 20 or 30 bucks and you would likely see enough additional sales to compensate for the lower price as people would now be able to buy more games each month.
Just wait until this becomes a cosmetic procedure for the rich. A few years of refinement and advances in microsurgery, and then they'll be raising clones of rich people in jungle compounds down in Brazil...
I was REALLY surprised to find out that Google was doing roads all over Prince Edward Island. Basically they'll drive down anything that isn't dirt, so our house out in the middle of nowhere is on street view. There's even a little white ball of pixels that's actually the dog.
I'd be curious to know if they managed to index our wi-fi though. I can't get a signal in the same room but for some reason I can go stand 300 feet away at the mailbox and use my iPod to check Heavens Above for satellite traffic.
Cite a source. Only sources I can find are religious websites trying to sell books about communing with "god".
Even the clinically brain dead have electrical activity in the brain. So they run a series of stimulus/response tests to see what function still exists.
If you have "no brain electrical activity" the only way you're getting back up is if George Romero has a plan for you.
If I had a painful injury that altered my quality of life, and I had the chance of healing it now with a higher risk of cancer in 10 years, I'd take that shot in a second.
I could have an aneurysm tomorrow, be hit by a car next weekend, or die of a completely unrelated cancer in a year.
Living should be about quality of life, not about hedging your bets that you're going to live to be XX years old.