If I had points, you'd be getting some Insightful from me on that one. It reminds me of a George Carlin ditty about the Reagan Administration...
"They're against street crime, as long as that street isn't Wall Street. They want to eliminate street crime to make the streets safer for the business criminals.
Paraphrasing, of course, from "What am I doing in New Jersey?" Disclaimer: I don't work for George Carlin, I'm just a satisfied customer. God, I would love to see some of his ideas to balance the budget implemented...:)
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Very true. I wish there was some way to mobilize the sheep into a constructive goal. Changing the **AA laws will never be accomplished until bribery becomes fully illegal. I'm still amazed that bribing a public official is considered legal when using a licenced middleman known as a lobbyist. I guess the people who passed that law didn't like the competition from the unlicenced middlemen and amateurs. Or maybe they just didn't like the term 'bribery' and figured out (rightly) that changing the name of it to something that sounds like anyone might get their opinion heard by congress would reduce the karma feedback - even though it changed nothing and proved the golden rule: "Those with the gold make the rules".
Re:Parent is flamebait and trollish. Mod down.
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As much as I agree with you, nowadays the only *successful* activism we have is bribin... oops, I mean LOBBYING members of congress.
One person with millions of dollars can change more laws in this country than millions of registered voters. Money provides instant gratification to the lobbied, while the majority of the sheep... um, I mean VOTERS usually forget about it after a week or two - long before the next re-election. Unless you have a large wad of cash to pay to a lobbyist, who in turn pays it to a congressperson, activism isn't going to stop, or even slow, the **AA and their "bought-and-paid-for" laws.
And before the flame war starts, there's no sense blaming either republicans or democrats for this, it's been happening for decades. If you must blame someone, blame your local politician for listening to his fat wallet getting fatter instead of listening to his constituents.
Probably, but my point wasn't to have the lighters be childproof, but rather to have an age dependant switch/sensor to discourage underage smoking - ie, making sure nobody under 18 could operate the lighter - being childproof would simply be a welcome side effect of an age 18 switch/sensor.
As a side comment, maybe a solution to the health concerns of smoking would be to make lighters adult-proof...:)
(sarcasm) How about forcing Tobacco manufacturers to take 'reasonable care' to make sure that minors couldn't smoke them. Making it illegal to sell them to kids has done absolutely nothing towards stopping kids from getting them, hasn't it? So this should be a 'reasonable' response, right?
Or how about making sure that lighters wouldn't work if the person flicking the switch was underage - that would also prevent children from accidentally burning down homes when they wonder what that 'Bic Lighter' thing is that mommy uses for those white sticks after the weekly milkman visit. (/sarcasm)
What the bill doesn't take into account is that any measure that might be gotten around will be. It might be easier just to deport the programmers from California - in fact I'm sure they'll move first just to avoid the law.
I wholeheartedly agree. Not that very many are going to read down this far, but one of my favorite toy memories growing up was of the Micronauts. We had dozens of them. Figures and ships that could all be taken apart and put together in different configurations, you could even combine just about everything you had into one big huge monster ship. I hated it when they started to glue the projectiles into the guns - large battles weren't as much fun when you didn't actually fire the bullet, but then that's what imaginations were for. Funny, the shots we had to imagine never seemed to miss, though...:)
It's too bad the Palisades Micronauts never took off well enough to let them start selling ships. I bought at least one of every Palisades Micronaut they released a couple of years ago, but apparently nobody else did. Thank god for Takara Microman, they're enjoying a new worldwide high - I can't wait for ships!
I agree with most of what others have already said about Lego. It's hard to imagine much when the ship is built with an instruction sheet, but I did notice that the Special Edition X-Wing they put out a few years ago was just the right size for a Micronaut. Get a bunch of the huge Technic sets and the first run Star Wars sets, mix in a little imagination and you've got the makings of a nice Micronaut/Lego space fleet.
I buy a song, download it with their app, then I'm considered a sharer. Someone else buys the song, pays the company, then downloads the song from me.
Am I going to get a "Shipping & Handling" fee from the company for storing the song on my pc for someone else to download? Who's going to be paying me for my bandwidth spike if the song is popular? Am I going to be required to share every song I buy 24/7 so that it's available for others to download when they buy?
Sounds like a pretty good scam to me. Selling music for someone else and you don't even have to store it on your own servers or use any of your own bandwidth except for the tracker.
The truly funny part of all this is the karma points Microsoft just burned. Microsoft went after all those companies a couple of years ago with Windows licenses making damn sure every single one of them was properly licensed and frying them for just one single peon who loaded an unlicensed copy - their crusade to try to keep piracy from entering the workplace of their contracted partners - it turns out they're just as guilty. One peon was all it took to burn a multi-million dollar contract, and now one peon could cause an infringement against MS.
-...in most cases the user has "agreed" to allow these programs to run...
Ironically, the biggest offender of bypassing this "agreement" is WhenU. I had the misfortune of having this program install itself on my computer without any window/clickthrough/permission popping up at all. I was using my computer (not using IE) and suddenly I had a WhenU menu bar attached to my taskbar. It was apparently installed by a virus, and yes, I have a distinct firewall. Even quickly disconnecting the cable didn't stop it from installing 20 more adware programs of malicious intent. It took two days to clean the computer enough to be able to reconnect to the internet.
I personally will never trust an ad-fighter that partners with an adware product, least of all WhenU. They just killed their company.
Yes, I still have and use all of the components I mentioned. If you have trouble with Sony, that's not my fault, and chances are it's probably not Sony's fault either - you've either had extremely bad luck or you're treating your components as if they're expendable. To each his own I guess.
I agree with the other poster on this - What are you doing to these components?
I have a Sony 5-disk changer that's over 16 years old. It's seen heavy use all through college and after - no problems whatsover, it even plays burned CD's flawlessly. I have 2 Sony VCR's, one 5 years old, the other 7 years old. Again - NO problems, both still play crystal clear. A Sony surround tuner, 12 years old, I still use it in my second theatre system. An original (1st model, before they removed the aux connectors) Playstation 1, still plays games perfectly. A PS2, bought it about a year after they came out - no problems.
I even have a Trinitron TV, 9 years old, no color fade or distortion, that is pissing me off because my wife won't let me buy an HD-Wega until it dies. I have never had a single problem with any Sony component I've used over the years. What in the blue hells are you doing to your units that they all die so quickly?
I already mentioned this in the last PS2 resize discussion, but I've been thinking about getting one of these new slim bad boys for the car, even though I have a 1st gen PS2 at home. Smaller footprint, lower power consumption, ability to play burned DVD's (according to EBworld) - all of this makes it an excellent choice as a DVD/Game add-on to my car system for my child on those long trips.
- wouldn't it have made more economic sense to give the fans exactly what they wanted?
Economically - it would make even more sense to give the fans what he wants to give them, telling them they're never going to get what they really want. Then after he's milked the fans for this first product, release it again, only this time giving the fans what they want. The fans buy it twice - economically (for him) it's much better than simply giving the fans what they want in the first place.
It's not a new idea - George has been doing exactly this for most of 20 years. All the griping and complaining that's ever been done over this still hasn't changed the fact that he's made a huge steaming pile of cash doing it.
- However, on the flip side, how many people will buy them?
I have a first gen PS2, and I've been thinking about getting another one to put in the car for the kid. Taking out the power supply and making it that much smaller is making it look very attractive for this purpose...
True - that is what he said in the interview. But since when do we actually believe what he says in interviews? He's been lying about releases since the 80's. Blatently and often.
As for these dvd's, he started working on them in secret (according to rumored reports) about two years ago - roughly the same time he told us to wait until 2006/7 and well before the widespead proliferation of high-speed internet and the ability to download an entire DVD quickly. He could not possibly have had the idea back then that piracy would be so rampant 4-5 years down the road, his vision isn't that good...:) One corner of his mouth was telling the fans that it wasn't going to happen, and the other corner was telling his technogeek squad to plan for "just before the episode 3 marketing campaign". In the middle was what little was left of his brain and it was busy typing out dollar sign$ across his eyeballs - thinking he can pull another fast one getting more money out of our pockets. Again.
With the fans clamoring for a release he knows that the millions it will cost to restore the film will be made up in the first week's sales alone. And telling us that the original editions will never be released is most likely just like all the other times he said the word "never": hoping to catch those of us who believe him and will buy them tuesday so he can make us buy it again later on when he "changes his mind" yet again.
- And, as an aside, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the original versions will make it to DVD (at least the THX release) and this is just a big fucking stunt to whip us up into a fury so we'll buy both.
Of course he will. He's already done this too many times to be believable whenever he says anything like: "I won't release it!". He gets us to buy what he does put out, then when he's sure he's milked it for all it is worth, he releases what we wanted in the first place. Every Laserdisc fan knows this...
(early 90's) "You have to buy a 9 disc set to get the remastered movies because we're not releasing them seperately." (2 years later) "Look, seperate movies are available! Remastered! Again! Doubly Remastered! Look - Shiny object!"
(late 90's) "Special editions are not being released on laser." (9 months later, after buying WS vhs) "Oops, I lied. My bad. Here they are!"
Speaking of laserdiscs - it's nice of him to let us know that the original versions are still out there on laser... good luck trying to find them, they've been out of print for 7 or 8 years - but he knows this since he's the one who made the decision just before releasing the Special editions.
Hell, the dvd release on tuesday was supposed to be "around 2006 or 2007" so he could release them all as a 6 movie set. He's timing this one so that we all stay mindful of him getting ready for Episode 3 next May. I bet he'll change the movies again for the 6 movie release, then 2 years later he'll give us a version with the originals and all 3 generations since (like Terminator 2 did) in a special package - all so we'll have to buy it 3 times in the process of getting the one version we want.
Well - they hardly notice those of us who don't bribe them. A new car or a roll of $1,000's can usually get a lot more attention that the pile of masses who supposedly control our representatives.
I know nobody will read this far down, but I gotta say it. The fact that SP2 is just as insecure as pre-SP2 surprises nobody around where I am.
Why? Quite easy: We've been noticing for a while that all these so-called "patches" that MS has been releasing have never closed a hole. They might close the one it claims to close, but more often than not the vulnerability is really still available, and it's usually either the same one or it was simply moved so that a new one is still open in a similar fashion.
SP2 blocked normal access by simply turning on the MS firewall, leaving it our fault if we turn it off and get hacked through the holes MS left. There are some of us over here that are starting to wonder if ol' Bill has got his own uses for these holes and that's why MS never closes them....
And when they disable the firewall and let all those nice trojans into the backdoors, Microsoft's answer is going to be "Well, we enabled it and you disabled it, so it's no longer our fault when your computer gets trojans due to all those holes in our software..."
WhenU doesn't ask you to voluntarily install anything, they force it on you, so why should they care about this law and why should a judge take their input on the case?
Ugh - replied to my own post because I forgot something.
(sarcasm) If this type of activity occured anywhere else - say on an airplane - WhenU would be arrested on terrorism charges. I'd really like to know how WhenU can get away with this legally... (/sarcasm)
> Forced upon you? You were forced to click "I Agree"?
I had WhenU force itself on my computer last week after a virus infection through MSIE. In no way did it ever even ask me to allow it to install - it simply hijacked my computer and had its way with it until I forced it off using various virus/adware programs. WhenU should not have a legal standpoint in this case for the sole reason that they are using an actual virus (which can be considered illegal, or at least able to be prosecuted) to spread their right to "free speech".
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If I had points, you'd be getting some Insightful from me on that one. It reminds me of a George Carlin ditty about the Reagan Administration...
:)
"They're against street crime, as long as that street isn't Wall Street. They want to eliminate street crime to make the streets safer for the business criminals.
Paraphrasing, of course, from "What am I doing in New Jersey?" Disclaimer: I don't work for George Carlin, I'm just a satisfied customer. God, I would love to see some of his ideas to balance the budget implemented...
Very true. I wish there was some way to mobilize the sheep into a constructive goal. Changing the **AA laws will never be accomplished until bribery becomes fully illegal. I'm still amazed that bribing a public official is considered legal when using a licenced middleman known as a lobbyist. I guess the people who passed that law didn't like the competition from the unlicenced middlemen and amateurs. Or maybe they just didn't like the term 'bribery' and figured out (rightly) that changing the name of it to something that sounds like anyone might get their opinion heard by congress would reduce the karma feedback - even though it changed nothing and proved the golden rule: "Those with the gold make the rules".
As much as I agree with you, nowadays the only *successful* activism we have is bribin... oops, I mean LOBBYING members of congress.
One person with millions of dollars can change more laws in this country than millions of registered voters. Money provides instant gratification to the lobbied, while the majority of the sheep... um, I mean VOTERS usually forget about it after a week or two - long before the next re-election. Unless you have a large wad of cash to pay to a lobbyist, who in turn pays it to a congressperson, activism isn't going to stop, or even slow, the **AA and their "bought-and-paid-for" laws.
And before the flame war starts, there's no sense blaming either republicans or democrats for this, it's been happening for decades. If you must blame someone, blame your local politician for listening to his fat wallet getting fatter instead of listening to his constituents.
Good point, bad example.
:)
Probably, but my point wasn't to have the lighters be childproof, but rather to have an age dependant switch/sensor to discourage underage smoking - ie, making sure nobody under 18 could operate the lighter - being childproof would simply be a welcome side effect of an age 18 switch/sensor.
As a side comment, maybe a solution to the health concerns of smoking would be to make lighters adult-proof...
(sarcasm)
How about forcing Tobacco manufacturers to take 'reasonable care' to make sure that minors couldn't smoke them. Making it illegal to sell them to kids has done absolutely nothing towards stopping kids from getting them, hasn't it? So this should be a 'reasonable' response, right?
Or how about making sure that lighters wouldn't work if the person flicking the switch was underage - that would also prevent children from accidentally burning down homes when they wonder what that 'Bic Lighter' thing is that mommy uses for those white sticks after the weekly milkman visit.
(/sarcasm)
What the bill doesn't take into account is that any measure that might be gotten around will be. It might be easier just to deport the programmers from California - in fact I'm sure they'll move first just to avoid the law.
I wholeheartedly agree. Not that very many are going to read down this far, but one of my favorite toy memories growing up was of the Micronauts. We had dozens of them. Figures and ships that could all be taken apart and put together in different configurations, you could even combine just about everything you had into one big huge monster ship. I hated it when they started to glue the projectiles into the guns - large battles weren't as much fun when you didn't actually fire the bullet, but then that's what imaginations were for. Funny, the shots we had to imagine never seemed to miss, though... :)
It's too bad the Palisades Micronauts never took off well enough to let them start selling ships. I bought at least one of every Palisades Micronaut they released a couple of years ago, but apparently nobody else did. Thank god for Takara Microman, they're enjoying a new worldwide high - I can't wait for ships!
I agree with most of what others have already said about Lego. It's hard to imagine much when the ship is built with an instruction sheet, but I did notice that the Special Edition X-Wing they put out a few years ago was just the right size for a Micronaut. Get a bunch of the huge Technic sets and the first run Star Wars sets, mix in a little imagination and you've got the makings of a nice Micronaut/Lego space fleet.
So, let me get this straight...
I buy a song, download it with their app, then I'm considered a sharer. Someone else buys the song, pays the company, then downloads the song from me.
Am I going to get a "Shipping & Handling" fee from the company for storing the song on my pc for someone else to download? Who's going to be paying me for my bandwidth spike if the song is popular? Am I going to be required to share every song I buy 24/7 so that it's available for others to download when they buy?
Sounds like a pretty good scam to me. Selling music for someone else and you don't even have to store it on your own servers or use any of your own bandwidth except for the tracker.
mmm... I smell a patent being filled out...
The truly funny part of all this is the karma points Microsoft just burned. Microsoft went after all those companies a couple of years ago with Windows licenses making damn sure every single one of them was properly licensed and frying them for just one single peon who loaded an unlicensed copy - their crusade to try to keep piracy from entering the workplace of their contracted partners - it turns out they're just as guilty. One peon was all it took to burn a multi-million dollar contract, and now one peon could cause an infringement against MS.
- ...in most cases the user has "agreed" to allow these programs to run...
Ironically, the biggest offender of bypassing this "agreement" is WhenU. I had the misfortune of having this program install itself on my computer without any window/clickthrough/permission popping up at all. I was using my computer (not using IE) and suddenly I had a WhenU menu bar attached to my taskbar. It was apparently installed by a virus, and yes, I have a distinct firewall. Even quickly disconnecting the cable didn't stop it from installing 20 more adware programs of malicious intent. It took two days to clean the computer enough to be able to reconnect to the internet.
I personally will never trust an ad-fighter that partners with an adware product, least of all WhenU. They just killed their company.
- You're a liar, plan and simple.
That coming from an anonymous coward. How nice.
Yes, I still have and use all of the components I mentioned. If you have trouble with Sony, that's not my fault, and chances are it's probably not Sony's fault either - you've either had extremely bad luck or you're treating your components as if they're expendable. To each his own I guess.
I agree with the other poster on this - What are you doing to these components?
I have a Sony 5-disk changer that's over 16 years old. It's seen heavy use all through college and after - no problems whatsover, it even plays burned CD's flawlessly. I have 2 Sony VCR's, one 5 years old, the other 7 years old. Again - NO problems, both still play crystal clear. A Sony surround tuner, 12 years old, I still use it in my second theatre system. An original (1st model, before they removed the aux connectors) Playstation 1, still plays games perfectly. A PS2, bought it about a year after they came out - no problems.
I even have a Trinitron TV, 9 years old, no color fade or distortion, that is pissing me off because my wife won't let me buy an HD-Wega until it dies. I have never had a single problem with any Sony component I've used over the years. What in the blue hells are you doing to your units that they all die so quickly?
I already mentioned this in the last PS2 resize discussion, but I've been thinking about getting one of these new slim bad boys for the car, even though I have a 1st gen PS2 at home. Smaller footprint, lower power consumption, ability to play burned DVD's (according to EBworld) - all of this makes it an excellent choice as a DVD/Game add-on to my car system for my child on those long trips.
What'll be funny is if it turns out that pot is the only plant we bring up that is viable on Mars.
"We're gonna die soon, but at least it's a good time!"
- wouldn't it have made more economic sense to give the fans exactly what they wanted?
Economically - it would make even more sense to give the fans what he wants to give them, telling them they're never going to get what they really want. Then after he's milked the fans for this first product, release it again, only this time giving the fans what they want. The fans buy it twice - economically (for him) it's much better than simply giving the fans what they want in the first place.
It's not a new idea - George has been doing exactly this for most of 20 years. All the griping and complaining that's ever been done over this still hasn't changed the fact that he's made a huge steaming pile of cash doing it.
- However, on the flip side, how many people will buy them?
I have a first gen PS2, and I've been thinking about getting another one to put in the car for the kid. Taking out the power supply and making it that much smaller is making it look very attractive for this purpose...
- If you hunt around on the net diligently enough, you can find that some brave souls have created DVD images from the LDs of the original series.
:) I give props to whoever did them in thanks.
Yes - I have them.
True - that is what he said in the interview. But since when do we actually believe what he says in interviews? He's been lying about releases since the 80's. Blatently and often.
:) One corner of his mouth was telling the fans that it wasn't going to happen, and the other corner was telling his technogeek squad to plan for "just before the episode 3 marketing campaign". In the middle was what little was left of his brain and it was busy typing out dollar sign$ across his eyeballs - thinking he can pull another fast one getting more money out of our pockets. Again.
As for these dvd's, he started working on them in secret (according to rumored reports) about two years ago - roughly the same time he told us to wait until 2006/7 and well before the widespead proliferation of high-speed internet and the ability to download an entire DVD quickly. He could not possibly have had the idea back then that piracy would be so rampant 4-5 years down the road, his vision isn't that good...
With the fans clamoring for a release he knows that the millions it will cost to restore the film will be made up in the first week's sales alone. And telling us that the original editions will never be released is most likely just like all the other times he said the word "never": hoping to catch those of us who believe him and will buy them tuesday so he can make us buy it again later on when he "changes his mind" yet again.
- And, as an aside, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the original versions will make it to DVD (at least the THX release) and this is just a big fucking stunt to whip us up into a fury so we'll buy both.
Of course he will. He's already done this too many times to be believable whenever he says anything like: "I won't release it!". He gets us to buy what he does put out, then when he's sure he's milked it for all it is worth, he releases what we wanted in the first place. Every Laserdisc fan knows this...
(early 90's) "You have to buy a 9 disc set to get the remastered movies because we're not releasing them seperately." (2 years later) "Look, seperate movies are available! Remastered! Again! Doubly Remastered! Look - Shiny object!"
(late 90's) "Special editions are not being released on laser." (9 months later, after buying WS vhs) "Oops, I lied. My bad. Here they are!"
Speaking of laserdiscs - it's nice of him to let us know that the original versions are still out there on laser... good luck trying to find them, they've been out of print for 7 or 8 years - but he knows this since he's the one who made the decision just before releasing the Special editions.
Hell, the dvd release on tuesday was supposed to be "around 2006 or 2007" so he could release them all as a 6 movie set. He's timing this one so that we all stay mindful of him getting ready for Episode 3 next May. I bet he'll change the movies again for the 6 movie release, then 2 years later he'll give us a version with the originals and all 3 generations since (like Terminator 2 did) in a special package - all so we'll have to buy it 3 times in the process of getting the one version we want.
Well - they hardly notice those of us who don't bribe them. A new car or a roll of $1,000's can usually get a lot more attention that the pile of masses who supposedly control our representatives.
I know nobody will read this far down, but I gotta say it. The fact that SP2 is just as insecure as pre-SP2 surprises nobody around where I am.
Why? Quite easy: We've been noticing for a while that all these so-called "patches" that MS has been releasing have never closed a hole. They might close the one it claims to close, but more often than not the vulnerability is really still available, and it's usually either the same one or it was simply moved so that a new one is still open in a similar fashion.
SP2 blocked normal access by simply turning on the MS firewall, leaving it our fault if we turn it off and get hacked through the holes MS left. There are some of us over here that are starting to wonder if ol' Bill has got his own uses for these holes and that's why MS never closes them....
And when they disable the firewall and let all those nice trojans into the backdoors, Microsoft's answer is going to be "Well, we enabled it and you disabled it, so it's no longer our fault when your computer gets trojans due to all those holes in our software..."
WhenU doesn't ask you to voluntarily install anything, they force it on you, so why should they care about this law and why should a judge take their input on the case?
Ugh - replied to my own post because I forgot something.
(sarcasm)
If this type of activity occured anywhere else - say on an airplane - WhenU would be arrested on terrorism charges. I'd really like to know how WhenU can get away with this legally...
(/sarcasm)
> Forced upon you? You were forced to click "I Agree"?
I had WhenU force itself on my computer last week after a virus infection through MSIE. In no way did it ever even ask me to allow it to install - it simply hijacked my computer and had its way with it until I forced it off using various virus/adware programs. WhenU should not have a legal standpoint in this case for the sole reason that they are using an actual virus (which can be considered illegal, or at least able to be prosecuted) to spread their right to "free speech".
What about "Blood Music"?