I think your post was satire, but obviously at leasat one moderator took it seriously, so I'll respond.
A) I do not pirate games, and the industry is hardly dying. B) Nobody has had their 360 banned to date (to my knowledge). C) If I cared about XBox Live, I wouldn't risk getting banned.
I know this is going to sound absurd, especially on Slashdot, but some of us have kids. It's not so much a question of if I'll need a backup, but when. I realize that your kids, if they exist, are perfect little angels with perfect little memories, but mine are not.
Also, the Wii has already been chipped -- essentially the same chip as the GC, since it's essentially the same console. I'm not sure how that can be irrelevant, but I applaud your industry insight.
Not that I agree with the idea of people getting paid for work they used to do (instead of saving for retirement while they are working), but pensions still exist, particularly among the automakers you used as an example.
I just bought an XBox 360 last week, and the reason wasn't strictly the price, or the anemic selection of games for the PS3. The number one reason that swayed me to the 360 isn't even an official feature: It's backups. Even if there was a workaround for playing backups on the PS3 (and AFAIK, there isn't), the $25 discs make it impractical. Sure it's cheaper than buying another copy, assuming you don't make any coasters, but it's still almost 15 times more than the price of DVD9 discs to make 360 backups.
I hate redundancy, and I'm a twin. And I hate irony!
Re:Sounds like they're doing it right
on
Dell Linux Details
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· Score: 1
They are usually just another little m$ bitch when Bill cracks the whip. Maybe this is a new era for Dell.
We can probably thank Vista for that, since it offers so little in terms of functional improvement that MS is hard pressed to sell it without help from hardware retailers. Retailers, especially large ones like Dell and HP, now have a lot more leverage in their relationship with MS.
The purpose of manned space flight is human unity. It's the global selfless dedication to a goal greater than all of humanity. It's what we learn science and build surplus economies to achieve. It's the purpose of being alive now. We need to get off this rock right now. We need this so that we can look up at night and know there are people up there. Not just a scientist or two.. but an entire civilization.
-- Is John Carmack on crack? [insomnia.org]
Talk about an out of place sig... that was like a bad morning show segue. "Those puppies were adorable, thanks Amanda! Coming up, the story of a man who had to eat his own leg to survive for weeks at the bottom of a well, only to die of food poisoning."
One of the (few) benefits of living in a US Territory -- we get both CNN domestic and CNNi, as well as BBC World News. On the downside, we have 0 HD channels, and we get the Australian Discovery Channel, which is okay, except the picture is poorly converted from PAL and some of the shows are up to a year or more behind the US. I do pay for all of the channels, but I usually only watch the news, which is one of the few things that isn't time delayed -- I obtain almost all of my other programming in h.264 format from alternative sources.
Actually, MCE 2005 is the best IMHO. The horizontal layout of Vista is counterintuitive, and grouping somewhat unrelated things into different levels of the main menu only makes it worse. Pictures and videos should have seperate lines. The "last 3" feature is gone, maybe so pr0n thumbnails didn't show up when little Johnny went to watch cartoons. That feature was particularly useful when Media Center crashes, although Vista MC seems to crash less frequently, which is a plus. Additionally, the lack of filename display for videos, until selected, makes browsing particularly difficult, especially if you have a folder full of episodes of a particular show. It only adds to the confusion that grouping goes left to right until you reach some threshold, depending on display width, where it changes to up to down. It was irritating to figure out how to remove the public photos and videos (merely removing the folders from the list of "watched" folders is insufficient).
I still prefer Media Center to the other solutions currently available, but I still have plenty of gripes with it.
Not-so ironically, most of Bullshit is just that. I've heard P&T described as critical thinking dressed up as entertainment, but I'd describe it as entertainment dressed up as critical thinking. They do much more hand waving than laying out logical, conclusive arguments. For example, while the water episode was hilarious, it mainly demonstrated the tendency for people to trust rather than exploring the actual issue of whether or not bottled water is higher quality. "These idiots can't tell the difference, therefore there is no difference," is a non sequitur; moreover it's an argument that relies on the judgement of idiots.
At any rate, you omit the fact that the author finds a large correlation between increased policing, increased punishment, and lower crime, which is much more relevant to the discussion.. unless you're asserting that the sky drones should be performing abortions (or at least singling people out for them).
The problems with that are many. First, people like to pay for something before they have any idea whether or not it's going to be any good. Unfortunately, the only (effective) way to do that is for works to be produced first, then paid for by the people who like them. And that's only marginally effective, as the opinions of your peers, or respected critics, may differ from your own.
Further, what you're describing is essentially the government; a lot of people paying for various programs, who may or may not approve of all of them. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find people who approve for all of the programs a government pays for, and I'd argue that most people would actually opt not to support programs they disapprove of, be it the War in Iraq, NASA, NEA, or what have you. The same thing would happen in your Commission Collective, except people WOULD stop paying for certain works. At best, the main group would split into smaller groups which more closely match the taste of their members, and then you're paying at least as much as you would in the system we have today. In fact, the current system allows for MORE diversity than your proposed system, because films/videos are essentially priced at a flat rate, and the profits from a hugely successful project can be used to fund a more niche/risky project. Granted, there are few of those as it stands, but in the commission model there would be fewer still, since only those projects which attract enough investors could be made.
Moreover, there could be no wildly successful products, because the product is already paid for at a set rate before it's made. Suppose we had a hybrid of the current system, and your proposal. In that case, the collective is mainly going to want to fund established producers with a good track record. At first they might be more liberal, but after they see a few pieces of crap, they'll become much more conservative, and fast.* Furthermore, the established producers are going to chase the big money, so the collectives will have to pay much more to entice them, with no guarantee of an end product that they will really enjoy.
* Prosper.com is a perfect example of this: At first, lenders loaned money to just about anyone, at any rate, because they somehow thought the market forces ceased to exist with direct lending. Once they started seeing their loans go into default, however, they quickly smartened up. Interest rates skyrocketed, and people were much more skeptical of would-be borrowers.
Meet, no. Marry, maybe. If maintaining a career is more important than sacrificing for the sake of the marriage, then the marriage probably isn't worthwhile.
Actually, most of the companies simply don't renew if the card fails to authorize. Unfortunately for the GP, you usually get the same CC# on your new card, just a new expiration date, and banks will often authorize charges on the expired card. A more reliable, though onerous method would be to report the card lost/stolen, once a year or so. Although personally, I like auto-renewing, and if I forget to cancel, it's my own fault.
A caveat for Microsoft services though. I had a MS "radio" subscription at one point. I got a notice saying the subscription was going to expire soon, and that I needed to cancel if I didn't want to be charged again. Unfortunately, I discovered that they sent the notice after they charged me. After an hour of searching, I finally managed to contact a "real person" through an online chat interface who promised the account would be cancelled and the money refunded. Unfortunately, neither happened. That card is no good anymore, but I still get a notice every year telling me that my subscription is about to expire, and that I need to take action if I don't wish to renew. When I follow the link provided, it tells me I have no accounts, which is only somewhat reassuring -- certainly not as reassuring as knowing the card I gave them is invalid now. At any rate, it's fairly easy to get charges reversed, so I'm not too worried about it, but I wouldn't recommend a subscription to MS anything, despite the fact that their OneCare twice found a trojan on my system that NOD32 and Symantec missed.
I would like to find a good on-access AV solution though, since I routinely obtain a lot of executables from untrusted sources.
I don't know -- he's your friend -- but either it was a GF3, or you're mistaken about the time of purchase. Point is, a system built at XP launch wouldn't meet the minimum Vista reqs.
Actually, it only tries the transaction once you've entered all the info (PIN, Transaction type, and amount), which is why it's not rejected for an invalid PIN until that point. Some ATMs with a dialup connection might be connecting during that time, but that's a seperate issue.
I hate to break it to you, but the government consists of people, and there is only 1 type of person who can keep a secret, especially indefinately, especially when it's something of monumental importance. Hell, Deep Throat couldn't even manage to take his own secret to the grave. Now, that's not to say people can't keep *some* secrets, especially when nobody's asking, such as a password, or when something's personally embarassing, but conspiracies are completely different, as they involve a significant number of people, some of which will have little to no incentive or to keep the secret, and much incentive to disclose it. Especially old people who no longer fear any possible repercussions. Hell, China and Russia manage(d) to regularly find people to sell them information. If you want to find out if there's really a conspiracy, put up a $1M bounty for credible evidence. Someone will talk. Sure, you probably don't personally have that kind of money, but I'm sure you could convince someone with money to do it.
That crap you see in movies about CIA agents whose families don't even know they work for the CIA is just that -- crap. For every 1 person who doesn't say anything, there's 20 who tell their wives everything. Of course, most people have enough discretion that they won't go blabbing to the neighbors and the press, but every once in a while you get a Valerie Plame situation.
Secret conspiracies are certainly possible, but pulling off a successful one is highly, highly improbable, and the odds of success are directly inverse to the magnitude of the conspiracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your post was satire, but obviously at leasat one moderator took it seriously, so I'll respond.
A) I do not pirate games, and the industry is hardly dying.
B) Nobody has had their 360 banned to date (to my knowledge).
C) If I cared about XBox Live, I wouldn't risk getting banned.
I know this is going to sound absurd, especially on Slashdot, but some of us have kids. It's not so much a question of if I'll need a backup, but when. I realize that your kids, if they exist, are perfect little angels with perfect little memories, but mine are not.
Also, the Wii has already been chipped -- essentially the same chip as the GC, since it's essentially the same console. I'm not sure how that can be irrelevant, but I applaud your industry insight.
Ever heard of a pension?
Not that I agree with the idea of people getting paid for work they used to do (instead of saving for retirement while they are working), but pensions still exist, particularly among the automakers you used as an example.
I just bought an XBox 360 last week, and the reason wasn't strictly the price, or the anemic selection of games for the PS3. The number one reason that swayed me to the 360 isn't even an official feature: It's backups. Even if there was a workaround for playing backups on the PS3 (and AFAIK, there isn't), the $25 discs make it impractical. Sure it's cheaper than buying another copy, assuming you don't make any coasters, but it's still almost 15 times more than the price of DVD9 discs to make 360 backups.
I hate redundancy, and I'm a twin. And I hate irony!
They are usually just another little m$ bitch when Bill cracks the whip. Maybe this is a new era for Dell.
We can probably thank Vista for that, since it offers so little in terms of functional improvement that MS is hard pressed to sell it without help from hardware retailers. Retailers, especially large ones like Dell and HP, now have a lot more leverage in their relationship with MS.
Talk about an out of place sig... that was like a bad morning show segue. "Those puppies were adorable, thanks Amanda! Coming up, the story of a man who had to eat his own leg to survive for weeks at the bottom of a well, only to die of food poisoning."
One of the (few) benefits of living in a US Territory -- we get both CNN domestic and CNNi, as well as BBC World News. On the downside, we have 0 HD channels, and we get the Australian Discovery Channel, which is okay, except the picture is poorly converted from PAL and some of the shows are up to a year or more behind the US. I do pay for all of the channels, but I usually only watch the news, which is one of the few things that isn't time delayed -- I obtain almost all of my other programming in h.264 format from alternative sources.
Actually, MCE 2005 is the best IMHO. The horizontal layout of Vista is counterintuitive, and grouping somewhat unrelated things into different levels of the main menu only makes it worse. Pictures and videos should have seperate lines. The "last 3" feature is gone, maybe so pr0n thumbnails didn't show up when little Johnny went to watch cartoons. That feature was particularly useful when Media Center crashes, although Vista MC seems to crash less frequently, which is a plus. Additionally, the lack of filename display for videos, until selected, makes browsing particularly difficult, especially if you have a folder full of episodes of a particular show. It only adds to the confusion that grouping goes left to right until you reach some threshold, depending on display width, where it changes to up to down. It was irritating to figure out how to remove the public photos and videos (merely removing the folders from the list of "watched" folders is insufficient).
I still prefer Media Center to the other solutions currently available, but I still have plenty of gripes with it.
Not-so ironically, most of Bullshit is just that. I've heard P&T described as critical thinking dressed up as entertainment, but I'd describe it as entertainment dressed up as critical thinking. They do much more hand waving than laying out logical, conclusive arguments. For example, while the water episode was hilarious, it mainly demonstrated the tendency for people to trust rather than exploring the actual issue of whether or not bottled water is higher quality. "These idiots can't tell the difference, therefore there is no difference," is a non sequitur; moreover it's an argument that relies on the judgement of idiots.
Nice ad for the book everyone read two years ago.
At any rate, you omit the fact that the author finds a large correlation between increased policing, increased punishment, and lower crime, which is much more relevant to the discussion.. unless you're asserting that the sky drones should be performing abortions (or at least singling people out for them).
Oops.. second sentence should read "people don't like to pay for something..."
The problems with that are many. First, people like to pay for something before they have any idea whether or not it's going to be any good. Unfortunately, the only (effective) way to do that is for works to be produced first, then paid for by the people who like them. And that's only marginally effective, as the opinions of your peers, or respected critics, may differ from your own.
Further, what you're describing is essentially the government; a lot of people paying for various programs, who may or may not approve of all of them. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find people who approve for all of the programs a government pays for, and I'd argue that most people would actually opt not to support programs they disapprove of, be it the War in Iraq, NASA, NEA, or what have you. The same thing would happen in your Commission Collective, except people WOULD stop paying for certain works. At best, the main group would split into smaller groups which more closely match the taste of their members, and then you're paying at least as much as you would in the system we have today. In fact, the current system allows for MORE diversity than your proposed system, because films/videos are essentially priced at a flat rate, and the profits from a hugely successful project can be used to fund a more niche/risky project. Granted, there are few of those as it stands, but in the commission model there would be fewer still, since only those projects which attract enough investors could be made.
Moreover, there could be no wildly successful products, because the product is already paid for at a set rate before it's made. Suppose we had a hybrid of the current system, and your proposal. In that case, the collective is mainly going to want to fund established producers with a good track record. At first they might be more liberal, but after they see a few pieces of crap, they'll become much more conservative, and fast.* Furthermore, the established producers are going to chase the big money, so the collectives will have to pay much more to entice them, with no guarantee of an end product that they will really enjoy.
* Prosper.com is a perfect example of this: At first, lenders loaned money to just about anyone, at any rate, because they somehow thought the market forces ceased to exist with direct lending. Once they started seeing their loans go into default, however, they quickly smartened up. Interest rates skyrocketed, and people were much more skeptical of would-be borrowers.
Please pay for your purchase and get out and come again!
They'll probably call it wideband...
here in SLO-town I had an experience that that shows the opposite.
There's only one flaw in your otherwise airtight case: Leckrone is not in California.
Meet, no. Marry, maybe. If maintaining a career is more important than sacrificing for the sake of the marriage, then the marriage probably isn't worthwhile.
I'd get the fastest.
Actually, most of the companies simply don't renew if the card fails to authorize. Unfortunately for the GP, you usually get the same CC# on your new card, just a new expiration date, and banks will often authorize charges on the expired card. A more reliable, though onerous method would be to report the card lost/stolen, once a year or so. Although personally, I like auto-renewing, and if I forget to cancel, it's my own fault.
A caveat for Microsoft services though. I had a MS "radio" subscription at one point. I got a notice saying the subscription was going to expire soon, and that I needed to cancel if I didn't want to be charged again. Unfortunately, I discovered that they sent the notice after they charged me. After an hour of searching, I finally managed to contact a "real person" through an online chat interface who promised the account would be cancelled and the money refunded. Unfortunately, neither happened. That card is no good anymore, but I still get a notice every year telling me that my subscription is about to expire, and that I need to take action if I don't wish to renew. When I follow the link provided, it tells me I have no accounts, which is only somewhat reassuring -- certainly not as reassuring as knowing the card I gave them is invalid now. At any rate, it's fairly easy to get charges reversed, so I'm not too worried about it, but I wouldn't recommend a subscription to MS anything, despite the fact that their OneCare twice found a trojan on my system that NOD32 and Symantec missed.
I would like to find a good on-access AV solution though, since I routinely obtain a lot of executables from untrusted sources.
that $200 bill almost spelled divorce.
That's a solid relationship you have there.
He was being literal. When he ripped the bill into shreds and threw it on the floor, the pieces spelled out D-I-V-O-R-E-C.
I don't know -- he's your friend -- but either it was a GF3, or you're mistaken about the time of purchase. Point is, a system built at XP launch wouldn't meet the minimum Vista reqs.
Actually, it only tries the transaction once you've entered all the info (PIN, Transaction type, and amount), which is why it's not rejected for an invalid PIN until that point. Some ATMs with a dialup connection might be connecting during that time, but that's a seperate issue.
But 48 is 75% of 64! What you're saying could only be true if we were discussing expon..
Oh wait.
The Geforce 4 wasn't introduced until April 2002.
I hate to break it to you, but the government consists of people, and there is only 1 type of person who can keep a secret, especially indefinately, especially when it's something of monumental importance. Hell, Deep Throat couldn't even manage to take his own secret to the grave. Now, that's not to say people can't keep *some* secrets, especially when nobody's asking, such as a password, or when something's personally embarassing, but conspiracies are completely different, as they involve a significant number of people, some of which will have little to no incentive or to keep the secret, and much incentive to disclose it. Especially old people who no longer fear any possible repercussions. Hell, China and Russia manage(d) to regularly find people to sell them information. If you want to find out if there's really a conspiracy, put up a $1M bounty for credible evidence. Someone will talk. Sure, you probably don't personally have that kind of money, but I'm sure you could convince someone with money to do it.
That crap you see in movies about CIA agents whose families don't even know they work for the CIA is just that -- crap. For every 1 person who doesn't say anything, there's 20 who tell their wives everything. Of course, most people have enough discretion that they won't go blabbing to the neighbors and the press, but every once in a while you get a Valerie Plame situation.
Secret conspiracies are certainly possible, but pulling off a successful one is highly, highly improbable, and the odds of success are directly inverse to the magnitude of the conspiracy.