cool idea, but it stopped being funny very quickly... after that it was just more of the same. got pretty banal pretty quick.
screw that, how about load balancing first?
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Seriously... why bother with anything new if your system is too slow for anyone to be able to use it? Right now, I was just waiting for my profile to load for about 2 minutes - and that's not even that bad. Some features just time out or load partially.
MySpace is simply collapsing under its own load. It has become too popular for its own good.
First, get the site to stay up - then and only then can you add features.
I think everyone here is missing the point. The point being that the studios are being ridiculously paranoid, with all these stupid DRM schemes. The fact is, if you can see it, you can record it. There is another way too. Get a nice 9"CRT projector or a 1080p DLP projector, project onto a nice screen and set up your HDV camera and hit record. Presto, a homemade "cam".
Where there's a will there's a way. There's always going to be a way of "stealing" content (even if the "stealing" is simply in the form of transferring content you've already purchased onto another medium for home use, such as a media center).
Oh well - I'm probably going to get flamed for this....
but there's no honor among theives.
Just stop being a bunch of cheap a-holes and BUY music that you like.
Wow... It's posts like these that make me wish Slashdot had a moderation option for "-1, Stupid".
Freedb, like its proprietary and commercial counterpart, cddb, is a perfectly valid and legal service which recognizes the CD in your drive and downloads information about the artist, the album, the songs, cover art and sometimes even lyrics for display within your CD player software.
It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with theft or being cheap.
OK, if racing a card board box is the same to you as racing a souped up Camaro, then you're part of the problem. I don't mind if there's a "story" or a "championship" mode in the game. Just give me one that allows me to drive whatever car I want, on whatever track I want. Best of both worlds...
Re:Games with no unlockables suck
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I disagree. I buy a car game because they have screenshots and demos of a supercharged Camaro that sounds great and runs great. When I come home, I start the game, only to find out I have to spend the next 3 evenings working my way up, driving POS cars like a Ford Fiesta or a Honda, before I can touch the cars that made me want to get the game in the first place. By that time, the game has already gotten monotonous and in some cases outright boring. I get car games to drive cool cars. I've had enough experience with POS cars in real life, thank you. I don't need to do it when I want to "escape". Let me play the game with what sold me on the idea in the first place. Don't hold it over my head. Don't use it as a carrot to get me to stay playing something I don't really like that much, just to get to the part I want. The good thing about car games, is that they have a much longer lifespan than games that have storylines. For example, I'm still playing an old PC game called 1nsane, but Indigo Prophecy I only played once and I have no desire to play it again. So the cheap game with lots of playability has gotten hundreds if not thousands of hours of playtime from me, while the story driven game that probably cost 100 times as much, only managed 20 or so hours of play... because it was linear. I'll take a non-linear game over a linear one any day and twice on Sunday - because a non-linear actually CAN be played twice.
How about Mel Gibson doing a video game version of The Passion of the Christ? You could choose what character to control...
You could play various Romans, including the ones lashing him. You get points for each lashing, plus bonus points for the artistic value of the lacerations on his torso. If you can draw a perfect Z for Zorro, you get a cheat code. You keep track of his health, and if you lash him too often or too fast, he dies and you lose the game. Remember, this is just torture, not murder. If you want murder, you have to play one of the guys nailing him to the cross... or better yet, the guy with the spear. Maybe you could change characters as the story progresses, a la Indigo Prophecy.
You could play his mother or even Mary Magdalene. Your goal is to get to the site of the cross without getting in trouble with the Romans. Keep in mind that the gospels don't agree on the site, so you have to follow the leads in the game.
You could also play one of the Jewish leaders and just sit back, seeing as they somehow got the Romans to do their dirtywork for them. If they'd actually wanted him dead, they would have stoned him to death like they did everyone else, and they certainly would have waited until after Passover. You can ponder all that as you watch the game from the sidelines.
Or you could play Jesus himself. Then your goal would be to stay alive, carry the cross and of course, pick phrases from the gospels and have him mutter them at the appropriate time. Bonus points for doing it in sync with the movie.
There would be a lot of educational and artistic value in this game. It would make a lot of money, as the religious fanbase is huge and they would all buy this for their children, because they have to know that Jesus suffered and died for our sins... right?
PS. if you're not smart enough to ralize that this is sarcasm, then by all means, give me your best flames.
So, this guy's the winner because his design most closely resembles the current Slashdot design? What part of RE-Design am I missing here? I thought a competition for a RE-design actually meant making a new design, that may or may not be based on the old one. The winning design is basically the same old design, with slightly spiffier graphics and collapsable blocks. That's it... hardly a re-design. More like putting shoe-shine on your worn-out sandals and calling them new shoes.
I for one am very disappointed in this choice, given the quality of the other finalists. Personally I would have wanted Michael Johnson's design.
If Wal*Mart ends up owning ever store in the world, just go buy fruits from the farmer.
What farmer? Family owned farmers are slowly but surely being made extinct by MEGACORP Inc. subsidised farming conglomerates. So, my choice would be to buy fruit from Wal-Mart or from a farm owned by Wal-Mart?
Your post is a shining example of what was being talked about. You still think about how things SHOULD be, but seem completely ignorant to how things ARE.
You proved my point when you said "they can see what they're producing from the outside, and they can tweak it". A real life actor doesn't "tweak" a muscle or something like that. What you'll wind up with is a mechanical effort, not artistry. You know why King Kong succeeded in the closeups? Andy Serkis. Not the animators who applied his motion capture to the model.
Do you honestly think a group of animators can match a nuanced performance of a gifted character actor? Do you honestly think a group of animators could deliver something on par with Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets or Charlize Theron in Monster or Philip Seymore Hoffman in Capote? Don't be ridiculous.
When laws no longer make sense, they need to be changed. When we look only at the letter of the law and not the intent of the law, or at each particular case or at the people involved, the way we look needs to be changed.
Copyright as we know it is dead. DRM is the dying gasp of the greedy beast it created. Instead of adapting, the beast is flailing about, desperately trying to force consumers to adhere to a business model that no longer works the way it once did, and is only getting worse.
Art survived for millenia without copyright, and it will continue to survive without it. The original intent of copyrights and patents is long since gone. Remember, it was supposed to encourage further creation of art, allowing the artist to make a living while creating more art. How is it exactly that extending the copyright of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck another 70 years is going to "encourage" Disney to create more art? The Walt Disney Co. hasn't created original art since Walt died. The only thing it encourages, is sales of Disney shares.
The way the laws are set up today, if you're a songwriter, you can have one huge hit and retire (Dolly Parton made $9 million when Whitney Houston released "I will always love you"). If you can have one hit and retire, where's the encouragement part?
One of many problems I have with the RIAA is that they claim to have the artists' interest at heart, while in reality, it's the bottom line of the giant corporations it represents. They couldn't give two shits about the artists. They're just tools to make money. Who makes more off CD sales, the artist or the Record label? Right... follow the money.
Sorry... didn't mean to go off on a rant here...
But seriously... record labels need to adapt or die... not sue their customers (or people who won't be their customers).
Anything that ignores circumstances and/or exculpatory evidence, is fundamentalist thinking, and it never gets us anywhere.
You did have a good point though, when you said "Both must be proved."
This is exactly why the extortion tactics of the RIAA are so absurd. They haven't been able to prove anything. They haven't even demonstrated a loss. They have not demonstrated or provided evidence for ANY of the damages they claim to have incurred, and thus the $1100 figure they're demanding per song seems rather O'Reilly like (as in, pulled from one's ass).
I'm sorry, but that's just fundamental BS. Nothing is as black and white as you're claiming it is.
Besides, you seem to have missed the part where I said "is it fair? No". I never said downloading without compensation was fair to the artist or the copyright holder. However, I did make the point that they're not as big a victim in this as they claim to be. If you never intended to buy their stuff anyway, how exactly did they LOSE money when you made a copy for personal use? Again, let me repeat this for those who only seem to skim messages: How can you LOSE money you never earned and never would have earned? When I download music, I don't think of it as stealing, because I either A) never would have paid for it legitimately anyway, even if that was my only option of getting it, and B) I've already paid for it in some form, either as a CD or as a "protected" online purchase and I wanted to move it to my cell phone, which plays plain mp3's, but no DRM'd crap. In either case, the artist did not lose money, and was not cheated out of money I otherwise would have paid... because I wouldn't have.
How the RIAA can come to the conclusion that a song is worth $1100 when they sell it for $0.99 online is beyond me. Even if they were to estimate that 1112 people had downloaded it from whomever they're attacking at the time, can they prove that number? More to the point, can they prove that none of those 1112 were like me, people with no intention of paying for it in the first place?
My point is, how can you specify damages when you can't even prove you've been hurt?
Now, if this were true in any way shape or form, I personally know several people who would have access to BILLION of dollars in development for video applications and television broadcasting applications, not to mention feature film distribution and/or production.
Currently, uncompressed High Definition video requires enormous storage, as well as massive bandwidth to play in realtime. With a 25:1 data compression scheme (no image degradation), any laptop would be able to store hours of High Definition video. If this can truly compress anything, then encoded video shouldn't be a problem. Which means a 25mbit video (DV video format) could be downloaded as a 1mbit stream...
25x compression would allow lossless compression of 4k video to be stored on regular miniDV tapes...
Now, having said that, I think I can say with a lot of certainty that the entire story is BULLSHIT, therefore none of what I just wrote will happen anyway, so...
Don't be a boob. Nobody here is saying she's a victim. We're saying, let the punishment fit the crime. She's not exactly a hardened criminal.
She downloaded a song for Pete's sake, it's not like she was abusing children. Dropping out of college to pay what is essentially an extortion tactic, is stupid, and it's outrageous of RIAA to even suggest it. Do they want her to be a paying customer in the future? If yes, then they shouldn't suggest she limit her income potential in order to pay their extortion fees. In fact, their best option would be to suggest a payment plan she can handle, or even postpone payment until she graduates. Keeping her income potential high makes her a lot more likely to be a customer in the future (although I personally wouldn't dream of doing business with anyone who treats me the way RIAA is treating her).
This is called being temporally challenged in business. They're only thinking of the short term profit, not the long term effect. Any seasoned professional worth his/her salt will tell you that it's better to keep the customer happy than the profit margin high (i.e. one sale/check may make you some money right now, but a happy customer will make you lots more money in the future by buying often).
Most people who download are downloading something they never would have paid for in the first place. I've downloaded many a song, and gotten copies from friends. If I didn't have that option I simply wouldn't have those songs. Ergo, the artist and the copyright holders didn't lose my sale, but I did get to enjoy their work without compensating them for it. Is it fair? No, but neither is what the RIAA is suggesting here.
I'm not going to drop $12-$25 on a CD. Not even for a song I like. That's right, "A" song. For the longest time, most CDs have had one or two good songs, and the rest was filler. That's changing now. You know why? Because of legal downloading. Once artists and producers realized that each song had to sell individually, the filler crap started going away. That's a very good thing, as it eventually will mean nobody will ever have to hear Ashlee Simpson again.
Yet again, RIAA demonstrates what we already knew: they just don't get it.
As someone said, I'd hate to be on their PR team on this one.
Again, she's not a victim, but we won't see her face on the wall at the post office any time soon either - provided she stays in college...
As I said. Let the punishment fit the crime. $1100 per song is simply moronic and has no basis in reality, which is why I say this is extortion. If they want her money, sue her and get a jury to decide. Until then, they can bugger off.
At $500, there are going to be a lot of indifferent customers come March of '07. This will be especially true if, over a year after launch, Microsoft cuts the price of the 360 to coincide with the PS3 launch. If you have to choose between a solid platform that costs $300 (and already has a stable of games available) and a brand-new system that is two hundred bucks more with far fewer games, which one do you think most people will buy?
Sure, if the option was that simple, then the 360 would have it easy. However, the PS3 has a Blu-Ray High Definition DVD Player. If your choice is to buy a 360 for $3-400 and then a Blu-Ray for another $3-500, the choice becomes pretty easy, and clearly in favor of the PS3.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't care about the Sony vs. Microsoft politics one way or the other (I have an original xbox, modded of course). Both are evil corporations, that happen to make products a lot of people want to use.
As far as I can see it, the only choice Microsoft will have, is to:
Lower the prices of the current version of the 360, and
add a third option to the 360 staple, which would be priced at around the same level as the PS3, but would also include a high definition DVD player.
They must do both. They can't just do one or the other and still expect the 360 to be on top.
However, the Hi-Def player would most likely be the HD-DVD, seeing as that's where Microsoft has declared its loyalty, and unfortunately - with only one major studio supporting that format - it's not nearly as attractive an option as the Blu-Ray.
Actually, that's not entirely correct. Software High Def DVD player software on your computer will most likely have the same requirements as set top HiDef DVD players, i.e. support HDCP or no license. It also means that if you're viewing it on your monitor instead of an HDCP capable HDTV, you'll only get 480p resolution out of it, which is the same as regular DVDs. Therefore, a software patch could theoretically be created to allow playback of full HD quality from HiDef DVDs on a computer which is not connected to its monitor with HDCP.
So while breaking through HDCP for set top playback is not an option without new hardware, unlocking this limitation on software really is an option.
I have a pre-paid cell phone plan that charges me 10 cents for each text message, both incoming and outgoing. So, can I send an invoice to SCO for all the unwanted incoming messages I'll be paying for out of my pre-paid minutes?
The problem isn't the system, but the driver. The headline suggests the system itself causes distraction, when nothing could be further from the truth. I've used both maps and a navigation system, and the navigation system is about a zillion times better. If the driver programs the route WHILE DRIVING, the driver is a total moron.
Place blame where it belongs, with the driver, not the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
cool idea, but it stopped being funny very quickly... after that it was just more of the same.
got pretty banal pretty quick.
Seriously... why bother with anything new if your system is too slow for anyone to be able to use it?
Right now, I was just waiting for my profile to load for about 2 minutes - and that's not even that bad. Some features just time out or load partially.
MySpace is simply collapsing under its own load.
It has become too popular for its own good.
First, get the site to stay up - then and only then can you add features.
I think everyone here is missing the point.
The point being that the studios are being ridiculously paranoid, with all these stupid DRM schemes.
The fact is, if you can see it, you can record it.
There is another way too. Get a nice 9"CRT projector or a 1080p DLP projector, project onto a nice screen and set up your HDV camera and hit record. Presto, a homemade "cam".
Where there's a will there's a way. There's always going to be a way of "stealing" content (even if the "stealing" is simply in the form of transferring content you've already purchased onto another medium for home use, such as a media center).
To me, the article is sarcasm.
Wow...
It's posts like these that make me wish Slashdot had a moderation option for "-1, Stupid".
Freedb, like its proprietary and commercial counterpart, cddb, is a perfectly valid and legal service which recognizes the CD in your drive and downloads information about the artist, the album, the songs, cover art and sometimes even lyrics for display within your CD player software.
It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with theft or being cheap.
Who said anything about an IROC?
I was talking about a blown big block '68.
OK, if racing a card board box is the same to you as racing a souped up Camaro, then you're part of the problem.
I don't mind if there's a "story" or a "championship" mode in the game. Just give me one that allows me to drive whatever car I want, on whatever track I want. Best of both worlds...
I disagree.
I buy a car game because they have screenshots and demos of a supercharged Camaro that sounds great and runs great. When I come home, I start the game, only to find out I have to spend the next 3 evenings working my way up, driving POS cars like a Ford Fiesta or a Honda, before I can touch the cars that made me want to get the game in the first place. By that time, the game has already gotten monotonous and in some cases outright boring.
I get car games to drive cool cars. I've had enough experience with POS cars in real life, thank you. I don't need to do it when I want to "escape".
Let me play the game with what sold me on the idea in the first place. Don't hold it over my head. Don't use it as a carrot to get me to stay playing something I don't really like that much, just to get to the part I want.
The good thing about car games, is that they have a much longer lifespan than games that have storylines. For example, I'm still playing an old PC game called 1nsane, but Indigo Prophecy I only played once and I have no desire to play it again. So the cheap game with lots of playability has gotten hundreds if not thousands of hours of playtime from me, while the story driven game that probably cost 100 times as much, only managed 20 or so hours of play... because it was linear.
I'll take a non-linear game over a linear one any day and twice on Sunday - because a non-linear actually CAN be played twice.
Exactly! I was just going to comment on that.
Doesn't this strike a serious blow to the validity of "click to accept" EULAs?
How about Mel Gibson doing a video game version of The Passion of the Christ?
You could choose what character to control...
You could play various Romans, including the ones lashing him. You get points for each lashing, plus bonus points for the artistic value of the lacerations on his torso. If you can draw a perfect Z for Zorro, you get a cheat code. You keep track of his health, and if you lash him too often or too fast, he dies and you lose the game. Remember, this is just torture, not murder. If you want murder, you have to play one of the guys nailing him to the cross... or better yet, the guy with the spear. Maybe you could change characters as the story progresses, a la Indigo Prophecy.
You could play his mother or even Mary Magdalene. Your goal is to get to the site of the cross without getting in trouble with the Romans. Keep in mind that the gospels don't agree on the site, so you have to follow the leads in the game.
You could also play one of the Jewish leaders and just sit back, seeing as they somehow got the Romans to do their dirtywork for them. If they'd actually wanted him dead, they would have stoned him to death like they did everyone else, and they certainly would have waited until after Passover. You can ponder all that as you watch the game from the sidelines.
Or you could play Jesus himself. Then your goal would be to stay alive, carry the cross and of course, pick phrases from the gospels and have him mutter them at the appropriate time. Bonus points for doing it in sync with the movie.
There would be a lot of educational and artistic value in this game. It would make a lot of money, as the religious fanbase is huge and they would all buy this for their children, because they have to know that Jesus suffered and died for our sins... right?
PS. if you're not smart enough to ralize that this is sarcasm, then by all means, give me your best flames.
So, this guy's the winner because his design most closely resembles the current Slashdot design?
What part of RE-Design am I missing here?
I thought a competition for a RE-design actually meant making a new design, that may or may not be based on the old one.
The winning design is basically the same old design, with slightly spiffier graphics and collapsable blocks. That's it... hardly a re-design. More like putting shoe-shine on your worn-out sandals and calling them new shoes.
I for one am very disappointed in this choice, given the quality of the other finalists.
Personally I would have wanted Michael Johnson's design.
What farmer? Family owned farmers are slowly but surely being made extinct by MEGACORP Inc. subsidised farming conglomerates.
So, my choice would be to buy fruit from Wal-Mart or from a farm owned by Wal-Mart?
Your post is a shining example of what was being talked about. You still think about how things SHOULD be, but seem completely ignorant to how things ARE.
You proved my point when you said "they can see what they're producing from the outside, and they can tweak it".
A real life actor doesn't "tweak" a muscle or something like that. What you'll wind up with is a mechanical effort, not artistry.
You know why King Kong succeeded in the closeups? Andy Serkis. Not the animators who applied his motion capture to the model.
Your overwhelming reasoning skills have rendered me speechless.
How can I possibly respond to this incredibly detailed explanation of your position?
Do you honestly think a group of animators can match a nuanced performance of a gifted character actor?
Do you honestly think a group of animators could deliver something on par with Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets or Charlize Theron in Monster or Philip Seymore Hoffman in Capote?
Don't be ridiculous.
In a word, bullshit.
CG actors are good standins for dangerous action sequences, but a computer will never be able to react or emote the way a human being can.
When laws no longer make sense, they need to be changed.
When we look only at the letter of the law and not the intent of the law, or at each particular case or at the people involved, the way we look needs to be changed.
Copyright as we know it is dead. DRM is the dying gasp of the greedy beast it created. Instead of adapting, the beast is flailing about, desperately trying to force consumers to adhere to a business model that no longer works the way it once did, and is only getting worse.
Art survived for millenia without copyright, and it will continue to survive without it.
The original intent of copyrights and patents is long since gone.
Remember, it was supposed to encourage further creation of art, allowing the artist to make a living while creating more art.
How is it exactly that extending the copyright of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck another 70 years is going to "encourage" Disney to create more art? The Walt Disney Co. hasn't created original art since Walt died. The only thing it encourages, is sales of Disney shares.
The way the laws are set up today, if you're a songwriter, you can have one huge hit and retire (Dolly Parton made $9 million when Whitney Houston released "I will always love you"). If you can have one hit and retire, where's the encouragement part?
One of many problems I have with the RIAA is that they claim to have the artists' interest at heart, while in reality, it's the bottom line of the giant corporations it represents. They couldn't give two shits about the artists. They're just tools to make money. Who makes more off CD sales, the artist or the Record label? Right... follow the money.
Sorry... didn't mean to go off on a rant here...
But seriously... record labels need to adapt or die... not sue their customers (or people who won't be their customers).
The fundamental part: "it happens to be the law."
Anything that ignores circumstances and/or exculpatory evidence, is fundamentalist thinking, and it never gets us anywhere.
You did have a good point though, when you said "Both must be proved."
This is exactly why the extortion tactics of the RIAA are so absurd. They haven't been able to prove anything. They haven't even demonstrated a loss. They have not demonstrated or provided evidence for ANY of the damages they claim to have incurred, and thus the $1100 figure they're demanding per song seems rather O'Reilly like (as in, pulled from one's ass).
I'm sorry, but that's just fundamental BS.
Nothing is as black and white as you're claiming it is.
Besides, you seem to have missed the part where I said "is it fair? No".
I never said downloading without compensation was fair to the artist or the copyright holder.
However, I did make the point that they're not as big a victim in this as they claim to be. If you never intended to buy their stuff anyway, how exactly did they LOSE money when you made a copy for personal use?
Again, let me repeat this for those who only seem to skim messages:
How can you LOSE money you never earned and never would have earned?
When I download music, I don't think of it as stealing, because I either A) never would have paid for it legitimately anyway, even if that was my only option of getting it, and B) I've already paid for it in some form, either as a CD or as a "protected" online purchase and I wanted to move it to my cell phone, which plays plain mp3's, but no DRM'd crap. In either case, the artist did not lose money, and was not cheated out of money I otherwise would have paid... because I wouldn't have.
How the RIAA can come to the conclusion that a song is worth $1100 when they sell it for $0.99 online is beyond me. Even if they were to estimate that 1112 people had downloaded it from whomever they're attacking at the time, can they prove that number? More to the point, can they prove that none of those 1112 were like me, people with no intention of paying for it in the first place?
My point is, how can you specify damages when you can't even prove you've been hurt?
Now, if this were true in any way shape or form, I personally know several people who would have access to BILLION of dollars in development for video applications and television broadcasting applications, not to mention feature film distribution and/or production.
Currently, uncompressed High Definition video requires enormous storage, as well as massive bandwidth to play in realtime.
With a 25:1 data compression scheme (no image degradation), any laptop would be able to store hours of High Definition video.
If this can truly compress anything, then encoded video shouldn't be a problem. Which means a 25mbit video (DV video format) could be downloaded as a 1mbit stream...
25x compression would allow lossless compression of 4k video to be stored on regular miniDV tapes...
Now, having said that, I think I can say with a lot of certainty that the entire story is BULLSHIT, therefore none of what I just wrote will happen anyway, so...
Don't be a boob. Nobody here is saying she's a victim.
We're saying, let the punishment fit the crime.
She's not exactly a hardened criminal.
She downloaded a song for Pete's sake, it's not like she was abusing children.
Dropping out of college to pay what is essentially an extortion tactic, is stupid, and it's outrageous of RIAA to even suggest it.
Do they want her to be a paying customer in the future? If yes, then they shouldn't suggest she limit her income potential in order to pay their extortion fees. In fact, their best option would be to suggest a payment plan she can handle, or even postpone payment until she graduates. Keeping her income potential high makes her a lot more likely to be a customer in the future (although I personally wouldn't dream of doing business with anyone who treats me the way RIAA is treating her).
This is called being temporally challenged in business. They're only thinking of the short term profit, not the long term effect. Any seasoned professional worth his/her salt will tell you that it's better to keep the customer happy than the profit margin high (i.e. one sale/check may make you some money right now, but a happy customer will make you lots more money in the future by buying often).
Most people who download are downloading something they never would have paid for in the first place. I've downloaded many a song, and gotten copies from friends. If I didn't have that option I simply wouldn't have those songs. Ergo, the artist and the copyright holders didn't lose my sale, but I did get to enjoy their work without compensating them for it. Is it fair? No, but neither is what the RIAA is suggesting here.
I'm not going to drop $12-$25 on a CD. Not even for a song I like. That's right, "A" song. For the longest time, most CDs have had one or two good songs, and the rest was filler. That's changing now. You know why? Because of legal downloading. Once artists and producers realized that each song had to sell individually, the filler crap started going away. That's a very good thing, as it eventually will mean nobody will ever have to hear Ashlee Simpson again.
Yet again, RIAA demonstrates what we already knew: they just don't get it.
As someone said, I'd hate to be on their PR team on this one.
Again, she's not a victim, but we won't see her face on the wall at the post office any time soon either - provided she stays in college...
As I said. Let the punishment fit the crime. $1100 per song is simply moronic and has no basis in reality, which is why I say this is extortion. If they want her money, sue her and get a jury to decide. Until then, they can bugger off.
However, the PS3 has a Blu-Ray High Definition DVD Player.
If your choice is to buy a 360 for $3-400 and then a Blu-Ray for another $3-500, the choice becomes pretty easy, and clearly in favor of the PS3.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't care about the Sony vs. Microsoft politics one way or the other (I have an original xbox, modded of course). Both are evil corporations, that happen to make products a lot of people want to use.
As far as I can see it, the only choice Microsoft will have, is to:
They must do both. They can't just do one or the other and still expect the 360 to be on top.
However, the Hi-Def player would most likely be the HD-DVD, seeing as that's where Microsoft has declared its loyalty, and unfortunately - with only one major studio supporting that format - it's not nearly as attractive an option as the Blu-Ray.
Actually, that's not entirely correct.
Software High Def DVD player software on your computer will most likely have the same requirements as set top HiDef DVD players, i.e. support HDCP or no license. It also means that if you're viewing it on your monitor instead of an HDCP capable HDTV, you'll only get 480p resolution out of it, which is the same as regular DVDs.
Therefore, a software patch could theoretically be created to allow playback of full HD quality from HiDef DVDs on a computer which is not connected to its monitor with HDCP.
So while breaking through HDCP for set top playback is not an option without new hardware, unlocking this limitation on software really is an option.
I have a pre-paid cell phone plan that charges me 10 cents for each text message, both incoming and outgoing.
So, can I send an invoice to SCO for all the unwanted incoming messages I'll be paying for out of my pre-paid minutes?
Just who the hell are these people?
The problem isn't the system, but the driver.
The headline suggests the system itself causes distraction, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I've used both maps and a navigation system, and the navigation system is about a zillion times better.
If the driver programs the route WHILE DRIVING, the driver is a total moron.
Place blame where it belongs, with the driver, not the technology.
For crying out loud...