I have never yet found a torrent on any torrent site that had a virus or trojan.
They're very rare. The only times I've found any have been when looking at big-name commercial software. Usually the software is legit but the password generator is a trojan. But the comments on the torrent will have warned you about this first if it hasn't already been taken down.
My personal hypothesis is that either you can't change history, only fulfill it because it has already happened, or you end up in a different time line. Yay! now we have a testable hypothesis and science. We just need a way to test it.
Where does the energy come from to create the entire universe for that branching timeline? Does it create a duplicate for every atom in the universe from the core of the earth out to the furthest celestial object riding the shockwave of the big bang? That strikes me as a big of cosmic egotism to think all that could happen from me killing my granddad.
I've seen some scifi stories that have gotten a little more quirky with the idea, that the timelines are elastic and occurring simultaneously in the same space-time. If I killed my granddad, not all that much would be affected. I'm a pretty unassuming guy. To an omniscient observer, there would be a ripple around where these actions had impact but beyond that ripple the world is exactly the same. I like the idea of a causality loop forming and dropping out of spacetime. So that observer, watching the entire flow of events, would see timeline in flux. All the random chances playing out simultaneously. So the circumstances conspiring to give me a time machine and the frame of mind to go back and kill my granddad, that appears, then he sees the causality loop formed by those actions and it winks off the timeline. Potentially, my grandfather, myself, and all of the interactions he would have made after his murder, my dad, myself, all of our interactions are swept off the table.
Now let's say I'm a clutzy nuclear reactor technician and let's pretend that we have a reactor that can render an entire state uninhabitable if it blows. And let's say that I did just that. The ripple of my life would be a whole lot larger. The people who are dead, displaced, some people might end up staying with relatives on the other side of the country. There's a whole chain of dependencies and what-ifs based on that. But here's a question. If a man with a time machine pinned the blame for all of this on me and killed my granddad, would the disaster be averted? Or would it be a statistical likelihood, given that it must have been in rough shape if a single mistake like me made it blow up? Would the reactor's failing be as historically inevitable as a quake or volcanic eruption? Or could there be the 2% case of a regulator doing his job and getting the thing shut down before the disaster?
Now get creative. Like to go to theme parks? Set up another LLC and create a website dedicated to reviewing them, talking about which ones have what etc. Now you get to write off trips to Six Flags and Cedar point as legitimate business research.
Which step is "Watching it all come tumbling down when the IRS takes a dim light to your creativity?"
I worked for a small business guy who played tricks like this. His wife's trips to the lingerie store were called a business expense, clothing. They worked in construction services so unless she was giving lap dances to roofers, I don't think so.
Jesus Christ, is this a suitable and proper application for the technology? There is such a thing as overengineering. If the system is too complex to safely maintain, it's too complex to deploy, end of story. I don't care what features you're touting if the failure mode for that vehicle is me and my passengers looking like Buddhist monks protesting something.
I hate broccoli. You know what I do when someone who loves broccoli starts fawning over some dish they recently ate which had broccoli in it? Nothing really, I just enjoy the conversation and talk about something I like in response. I don't even have to mention I don't like broccoli.
Not me. If someone talks about eating broccoli, I'll smugly point out I haven't eaten broccoli in years. I don't even have any in the house. I'll intimate that this makes me a better person. Wait, did you say you watched something on television? Why, I haven't watched television in years....
It's up with "The Gimp" for 'worst name ever' award. It's hard to think of a worse name for a political party, although rural canola producers one day might come up with the "Farmers for Rape" party. I live in hope.
Media consultants will tell them that "Surprise Sex" tests better than "rape" in most demographics.
Now my country does levy a blank CD tax...Oh yeah, I never buy any blank discs because EVERYTHING is on Hard drives or flash cards. I'm laughing man, because I am so not legit. Ok, queue up the haters, I don't give a shit what any of you think.
You know what I think? You're not going to have to re-buy all your stuff when they come out with the next standard after blue-ray. You'll just have to download things again. Not too shabby.
I've read articles where kids with behavioral disorders, social anxiety, general nerdiness, etc were encouraged to use this as a means of driving more appropriate/better behaviors. Like if a shy kid talked to a classmate, he gave himself 10 points, etc. Then they worked with the therapist to track the whole thing - basically making life your RPG.
Too much grinding, too many griefers and the loot drops have been nerfed. Nobody ever said live was fair? I'm sending a nastygram to the developers. *jolly's account gets permabanned*
They really stripped Civ down to the core components of what makes the game Civ. The problem with each sequel is a lot of new stuff was added that gave the games breadth but did little to add depth. Just more things to fiddle and micro-manage. I didn't like how Rev limited you to up to three other competing civs and a fixed world size with random terrain. Also would have like a means to upgrade units directly instead of by chance. You can end up heavily invested in obsolete units. But what was removed, that was necessary to keep the games streamlined. You can play start to finish for a whole game in an hour or two.
Of course, there are people who like the sprawling 4x games and taking tons of extra time to play a scenario is just icing on the cake for them. And they do have a kind of point to that.
My biggest shortcoming as a player is not getting my ass kicked by the computer. It's doable, many people are able to achieve high scores on insane mode but I've always had trouble getting past the whole resource management screwjob in the early games. Infrastructure spending vs. science vs. units, who to fight and when, how to force them back when you have to, hitting them before defensive tech makes it too expensive.
Some prankster did something similar with dating sites. He put up a pic of some random hot chick as his profile and posed as a nympho looking for sex. He asked guys to send pictures of their faces and their junk and he got a ton of results, often with personal information that had them completely pegged as if faces weren't enough. Now at this point he could have just said "I could really drop the bomb on these people, the point has been proven" but no, he released everything instead. I don't know if there were any repercussions from this but that really didn't seem like a smart move.
I think these guys are making a great point here but if they're really showing real info, nothing obfuscated, then a robbery is bound to happen. Even if the robber had no idea about this service and just happened to hit the house, the victim wouldn't know that and would naturally assume that's why he was hit. Liability out the ying-yang, methinks.
Still not quite sure why twitter is necessary
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What exactly is twitter doing that couldn't be done with existing blogging sites that have email updates? Nothing says you have to write 2k words on your blog post, you could write 120 characters on any blogging site and do the same thing.
I do like the idea of pushing towards more open standards. Email is a standard everyone can agree with, everyone can interoperate with. I can send mail from my phone to someone on a mac or a pc or linux. I can swap out clients if I find one I like more. I do like the idea of transitioning these sorts of services to protocols and then you're selecting the provider you want based on how that protocol is implemented.
I see value in what Facebook does even though I dislike the way it's implemented, similar to the way I like what Exchange/Outlook is trying to do while hating everything about the way it's actually done.
There's been talk about trying to open up the silos represented by these applications. You have your data in twitter, you have your data in facebook, you have your data in google, and there's lots of duplication across each. Facebook will talk to google to import your data but that's a bit clunky and is still just putting your stuff in another silo. I like the idea of more interoperability but am also concerned about the potential for holes. I don't mind if my facebook gets hacked because there's nothing important on there, nothing personal or embarrassing. I don't put anything there I wouldn't mind seeing on the front page of the new york times. But if facebook had tight access to my gmail, suddenly a hole in facebook could become a hole in gmail. Not so good.
Build up enough of a rage meter on your customers, and they'll start refusing to buy your products. I refused to buy L4D2 for similar reasons, though I'm sure it's a perfectly good game.
As I recall, that was an even bigger dick move because you bought the first game with the expectation that the missing pieces were going to be released as free DLC over the next year, then they said all of the missing stuff was going to be in the sequel. So you basically paid top dollar for the privilege of playing an incomplete beta.
Thank you... I hoped that I was not the only one who felt sick watching the iPhone "blend" or seeing Bill Nye chuck an Apple IIe to demonstrate momentum (back when they were new, of course).
Oh, I remember when that got posted here. I said I did not care for it and was told I was a stupid asshole for complaining.
Whenever there's a new geegaw out on the market you'll find smashmygeegaw sites spring up like smashmyxbox.com The idea is you paypal these guys some money and they go and get in line when the product comes out, preferably midnight of launch. They'll then unbox it, dance around in front of the other waiting geeks to show it off and then smash it to pieces with sledgehammers. The whole point is to catch the moment of transition between jealous nerd lust and horror at the act just witnessed. The whole process is accompanied by frat boy laughter, the kind you're used to hearing when you see a video of someone doing something stupid that suddenly turns painful and disfiguring and the guy with the camera shows no sign of human compassion and concern, just keeps yucking it up because he finds the pain of others amusing.
Yes, I think it's stupid for anyone to get worked up over any consumer product. It's a lifeless object, it's not family. Seeing a teen blubbering like a baby over the smashed box is embarrassing. But saying so doesn't mean the smashers aren't equally embarrassing. And you get a sense they'd enjoy doing the same thing with puppies to get that same reaction, the only thing holding them back is jail time.
You mean like Grindhouse that was both movies in theater but then had to be sold as 2 different movies when it went to DVD just to make more money (the money they were hoping to make during the theater run but didn't get). Strangely, in both movies it was centered with movies by Quentin Tarantino.
Well, I'd be willing to pay money not to own a copy of Death Proof. If I were ever going to buy the Aliens movies, I'd want to pay to get the first two unbundled from the rest of the crappy ones.:)
But yeah, those are dick moves. This isn't the publisher saying hear me out, this is going to be good for all of us and winning you over. This is the publisher pissing down your neck and not even making that much of an effort to convince you it's rain.
From my perspective I think "Hey, we can release more expansions, give the developers a more consistent revenue stream and enhance the quality of the experience for players." But the publisher's perspective is "Let's soak these fans for as much as possible, nickel and dime them for shit that should have already been in the original game, and still not pay the developer any more than they would have gotten off of doing things the old way!" The publisher approach would be taking a look at the kind of money spent on D&D materials and they'd just see bullshit dollar signs in their eyes.
From the looks of things, Rockstar did a decent job with the GTAIV expansions. You've got the core game, then you have the expansions that deliver more content and interconnecting stories to the existing game.
When they declared it would be sold as three different packs, one per race. While they do have a history of expansion packs, it's never been 1 with 2 more like this, nor planned this far in advanced to break it up and sell the parts.
Wouldn't be so bad of an idea if done intelligently. For games we really like, expansion packs are loved. Figuring full retail, that's $40 for the game (back in the day), $20 each for the expansions. You could end up spending $80 if you bought it all new, or you could get the bundle months later for $40. You paid for two games and the developer probably didn't have to expend as much effort on two expansions as with the full original game. Win win for all.
What gets to be bullshit is when the $60 game is chopped up and you're left paying the full freight for the original game plus the expansions.
What I always thought would be fair is something like this: the developer plans out the game with maybe six races total. Starcraft has a lot of Warhammer 40k similarities and just think of how many races you have in that setting, it's more than orks and humans and eldar. But we'll stick with Starcraft. You sell the game with three races. The development of additional races is proceeding alongside. Sell the game for full price and then release additional races with full campaigns as add-ons. Don't skimp on the details but charge a fair price. The customer knows he's getting another 20 hours of gameplay with the expansion, plus he can use the new race in multiplayer. Then after the game's been out for a while, all the add-ons can be bundled in a battlechest and the people who skipped it when it launched can catch up with the fun. The publisher makes more money which is an upside, the fan gets more game which is another upside.
Of course, this can be more complicated than I think. I thought the idea of episodic content for shooters was a good idea, sell the game in affordable, bite-sized serial format but the reality was less enjoyable. And the dick move usually is the one that gets made. So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place. That's not like Lord of the Rings where they're releasing three movies at once, always planned on doing so and you feel you're getting your money's worth, this is more like Kill Bill where it was supposed to be one movie and they just released it as two to make more money and planned on soaking the fans by releasing multiple versions on DVD.
can we please drop the average consumer crap? Usage trends for internet are completely unpredictable even on a year to year basis, age group basis, or otherwise. So when people think DSL speeds are good enough, they're trying to define average consumers. It doesn't exist. This is like saying "the average user isn't a gamer" or "the average user just burns bandwidth on youtube" or "the average user just browses the web and sends email".
With online video and other streaming services, today's average teenager can tear through bandwidth like last decade's uber-l33t warez geek. Bandwidth consumption is only going to increase.
There is a more or less fundamental problem with insurance, that is ever pushing against your ever getting customer service(which is a pity; because insurance can theoretically serve a very useful function).
When you buy insurance(either with a lump sum payment at point of sale, or with monthly premiums), the insurer is already as well off as they will ever be, with respect to you. Up until that moment, you were a customer now you are just a cost center. Now, in the real world, regardless of legal obligations, appeals to ethics, or fancy economic analysis from the IT department claiming that they actually save the company money, cost centers have a way of getting the bare minimum, and that grudgingly.
Insurance companies figured out hundreds of years ago that they needed to make sure the insurer had a definite self-interest in the preservation of the asset being insured. If not, I could take out insurance on someone else's ship and sink it, pocketing the full payout. Likewise, I would have no incentive to preserve a ship if it were a leaky wreck when I bought it and my intention was all along to sink it for the insurance money. Things become murkier for the investigator when I did indeed buy the ship for a legitimate business and circumstances turned against me. I could then try to sink the ship for the insurance money if I'd make more on the payout than selling it.
I think gadget insurance is pretty crazy to begin with. Insuring cars, yes, especially gap insurance. Nothing sucks more than crashing a two year old car and realizing you have to finish off payments for it plus the replacement. Insuring your house makes sense. And few people are going to burn down a house with all the valuables inside just for the payout. But an interesting point for fraud investigators, if someone is claiming the house as a primary domicile and it burns down without valuables and irreplaceable personal possessions inside, that's a big warning sign for fraud.
The sad thing is that you may have to buy insurance on products these days simply because they're made so poorly. Among coworkers and friends, there are so many stories of netbooks and laptops crapping out, especially HP's. If a $400 device won't even last you a year, maybe you should buy the insurance. You're going to need it.
I'm wondering if maybe a better model might not be leasing the equipment instead. You subscribe to the iphone, send the old one back when the new model comes out. I wouldn't feel so bad about it if they could properly break these things down into constituent molecules and recycle. It just feels awful to chuck expensive electronics every other year. It feels like sin.
To play devil's advocate, giving tax breaks to attract/keep major businesses is a normal thing for state governments.
And stores will often have two-for-one sales. But I don't think they'd be too happy if they caught me shoplifting and I said "heeeey, buddy, how about we make this one of those deals you sometimes run?" They'd bust my balls before they called the cops.
But given Microsoft's size, this is just an illustration of that old saying: "You owe the bank a thousand bucks, that's your problem. You owe the bank a million bucks, that's their problem." Microsoft gets away with it because they're big enough to get away with it.
Most laptops come with built-in webcams that are good enough for 99% of usages and are too cheap to not include, just for the 1% who want something better.
For many electronic devices, it is easier/cheaper to buy a newer one than to upgrade. That saddens me, but it is has become a fact of economics. So the "no ability to expand" might not be as bad a thing as you think. If it comes with a camera, a GPS, accelerometers, bluetooth, wi-fi, and sufficient storage... by the time the next generation of wi-fi comes out, it might be cheaper/easier just to buy a new iPad than to upgrade the current one.
That's the long and the short of it. I buy a desktop now, three years later I want to upgrade it and I'm swapping out the whole kit and kaboodle. New mommyboard, new RAM, new CPU, new viddy card. The only thing left in the case are the drives and power supply. The only time I was really fiddling with things on a weekly basis was when I worked for a computer shop and could just swap parts in and out of inventory.
Maybe we'll get to the point where we'll see all of that stuff concentrated onto a single chip or board. Buy your PC which is just a flatscreen with a hump on the back with the computer bits, run it for a few years, swap out the hump with the latest hardware. Don't have to rebuy the screen.
I wonder if this article would have made it to the front page of./ if it hadn't provided an opportunity for certain folks to get a political jab in again at the "evil republicans".
Oh, it would have been posted for the Beetle Mania pun. The bit with Limbaugh was just icing on the cake.
Slashdot Mirror
Will Microsoft install a magnetic field generator in the next Xbox to ensure the solder fails there, too?
The sequel is a lie.
I have never yet found a torrent on any torrent site that had a virus or trojan.
They're very rare. The only times I've found any have been when looking at big-name commercial software. Usually the software is legit but the password generator is a trojan. But the comments on the torrent will have warned you about this first if it hasn't already been taken down.
My personal hypothesis is that either you can't change history, only fulfill it because it has already happened, or you end up in a different time line. Yay! now we have a testable hypothesis and science. We just need a way to test it.
Where does the energy come from to create the entire universe for that branching timeline? Does it create a duplicate for every atom in the universe from the core of the earth out to the furthest celestial object riding the shockwave of the big bang? That strikes me as a big of cosmic egotism to think all that could happen from me killing my granddad.
I've seen some scifi stories that have gotten a little more quirky with the idea, that the timelines are elastic and occurring simultaneously in the same space-time. If I killed my granddad, not all that much would be affected. I'm a pretty unassuming guy. To an omniscient observer, there would be a ripple around where these actions had impact but beyond that ripple the world is exactly the same. I like the idea of a causality loop forming and dropping out of spacetime. So that observer, watching the entire flow of events, would see timeline in flux. All the random chances playing out simultaneously. So the circumstances conspiring to give me a time machine and the frame of mind to go back and kill my granddad, that appears, then he sees the causality loop formed by those actions and it winks off the timeline. Potentially, my grandfather, myself, and all of the interactions he would have made after his murder, my dad, myself, all of our interactions are swept off the table.
Now let's say I'm a clutzy nuclear reactor technician and let's pretend that we have a reactor that can render an entire state uninhabitable if it blows. And let's say that I did just that. The ripple of my life would be a whole lot larger. The people who are dead, displaced, some people might end up staying with relatives on the other side of the country. There's a whole chain of dependencies and what-ifs based on that. But here's a question. If a man with a time machine pinned the blame for all of this on me and killed my granddad, would the disaster be averted? Or would it be a statistical likelihood, given that it must have been in rough shape if a single mistake like me made it blow up? Would the reactor's failing be as historically inevitable as a quake or volcanic eruption? Or could there be the 2% case of a regulator doing his job and getting the thing shut down before the disaster?
Now get creative. Like to go to theme parks? Set up another LLC and create a website dedicated to reviewing them, talking about which ones have what etc. Now you get to write off trips to Six Flags and Cedar point as legitimate business research.
Which step is "Watching it all come tumbling down when the IRS takes a dim light to your creativity?"
I worked for a small business guy who played tricks like this. His wife's trips to the lingerie store were called a business expense, clothing. They worked in construction services so unless she was giving lap dances to roofers, I don't think so.
Jesus Christ, is this a suitable and proper application for the technology? There is such a thing as overengineering. If the system is too complex to safely maintain, it's too complex to deploy, end of story. I don't care what features you're touting if the failure mode for that vehicle is me and my passengers looking like Buddhist monks protesting something.
I hate broccoli. You know what I do when someone who loves broccoli starts fawning over some dish they recently ate which had broccoli in it? Nothing really, I just enjoy the conversation and talk about something I like in response. I don't even have to mention I don't like broccoli.
Not me. If someone talks about eating broccoli, I'll smugly point out I haven't eaten broccoli in years. I don't even have any in the house. I'll intimate that this makes me a better person. Wait, did you say you watched something on television? Why, I haven't watched television in years....
It's up with "The Gimp" for 'worst name ever' award. It's hard to think of a worse name for a political party, although rural canola producers one day might come up with the "Farmers for Rape" party. I live in hope.
Media consultants will tell them that "Surprise Sex" tests better than "rape" in most demographics.
Now my country does levy a blank CD tax...Oh yeah, I never buy any blank discs because EVERYTHING is on Hard drives or flash cards.
I'm laughing man, because I am so not legit.
Ok, queue up the haters, I don't give a shit what any of you think.
You know what I think? You're not going to have to re-buy all your stuff when they come out with the next standard after blue-ray. You'll just have to download things again. Not too shabby.
I've read articles where kids with behavioral disorders, social anxiety, general nerdiness, etc were encouraged to use this as a means of driving more appropriate/better behaviors. Like if a shy kid talked to a classmate, he gave himself 10 points, etc. Then they worked with the therapist to track the whole thing - basically making life your RPG.
Too much grinding, too many griefers and the loot drops have been nerfed. Nobody ever said live was fair? I'm sending a nastygram to the developers. *jolly's account gets permabanned*
They really stripped Civ down to the core components of what makes the game Civ. The problem with each sequel is a lot of new stuff was added that gave the games breadth but did little to add depth. Just more things to fiddle and micro-manage. I didn't like how Rev limited you to up to three other competing civs and a fixed world size with random terrain. Also would have like a means to upgrade units directly instead of by chance. You can end up heavily invested in obsolete units. But what was removed, that was necessary to keep the games streamlined. You can play start to finish for a whole game in an hour or two.
Of course, there are people who like the sprawling 4x games and taking tons of extra time to play a scenario is just icing on the cake for them. And they do have a kind of point to that.
My biggest shortcoming as a player is not getting my ass kicked by the computer. It's doable, many people are able to achieve high scores on insane mode but I've always had trouble getting past the whole resource management screwjob in the early games. Infrastructure spending vs. science vs. units, who to fight and when, how to force them back when you have to, hitting them before defensive tech makes it too expensive.
Some prankster did something similar with dating sites. He put up a pic of some random hot chick as his profile and posed as a nympho looking for sex. He asked guys to send pictures of their faces and their junk and he got a ton of results, often with personal information that had them completely pegged as if faces weren't enough. Now at this point he could have just said "I could really drop the bomb on these people, the point has been proven" but no, he released everything instead. I don't know if there were any repercussions from this but that really didn't seem like a smart move.
I think these guys are making a great point here but if they're really showing real info, nothing obfuscated, then a robbery is bound to happen. Even if the robber had no idea about this service and just happened to hit the house, the victim wouldn't know that and would naturally assume that's why he was hit. Liability out the ying-yang, methinks.
What exactly is twitter doing that couldn't be done with existing blogging sites that have email updates? Nothing says you have to write 2k words on your blog post, you could write 120 characters on any blogging site and do the same thing.
I do like the idea of pushing towards more open standards. Email is a standard everyone can agree with, everyone can interoperate with. I can send mail from my phone to someone on a mac or a pc or linux. I can swap out clients if I find one I like more. I do like the idea of transitioning these sorts of services to protocols and then you're selecting the provider you want based on how that protocol is implemented.
I see value in what Facebook does even though I dislike the way it's implemented, similar to the way I like what Exchange/Outlook is trying to do while hating everything about the way it's actually done.
There's been talk about trying to open up the silos represented by these applications. You have your data in twitter, you have your data in facebook, you have your data in google, and there's lots of duplication across each. Facebook will talk to google to import your data but that's a bit clunky and is still just putting your stuff in another silo. I like the idea of more interoperability but am also concerned about the potential for holes. I don't mind if my facebook gets hacked because there's nothing important on there, nothing personal or embarrassing. I don't put anything there I wouldn't mind seeing on the front page of the new york times. But if facebook had tight access to my gmail, suddenly a hole in facebook could become a hole in gmail. Not so good.
Build up enough of a rage meter on your customers, and they'll start refusing to buy your products. I refused to buy L4D2 for similar reasons, though I'm sure it's a perfectly good game.
As I recall, that was an even bigger dick move because you bought the first game with the expectation that the missing pieces were going to be released as free DLC over the next year, then they said all of the missing stuff was going to be in the sequel. So you basically paid top dollar for the privilege of playing an incomplete beta.
Thank you... I hoped that I was not the only one who felt sick watching the iPhone "blend" or seeing Bill Nye chuck an Apple IIe to demonstrate momentum (back when they were new, of course).
Oh, I remember when that got posted here. I said I did not care for it and was told I was a stupid asshole for complaining.
Whenever there's a new geegaw out on the market you'll find smashmygeegaw sites spring up like smashmyxbox.com The idea is you paypal these guys some money and they go and get in line when the product comes out, preferably midnight of launch. They'll then unbox it, dance around in front of the other waiting geeks to show it off and then smash it to pieces with sledgehammers. The whole point is to catch the moment of transition between jealous nerd lust and horror at the act just witnessed. The whole process is accompanied by frat boy laughter, the kind you're used to hearing when you see a video of someone doing something stupid that suddenly turns painful and disfiguring and the guy with the camera shows no sign of human compassion and concern, just keeps yucking it up because he finds the pain of others amusing.
Yes, I think it's stupid for anyone to get worked up over any consumer product. It's a lifeless object, it's not family. Seeing a teen blubbering like a baby over the smashed box is embarrassing. But saying so doesn't mean the smashers aren't equally embarrassing. And you get a sense they'd enjoy doing the same thing with puppies to get that same reaction, the only thing holding them back is jail time.
You mean like Grindhouse that was both movies in theater but then had to be sold as 2 different movies when it went to DVD just to make more money (the money they were hoping to make during the theater run but didn't get). Strangely, in both movies it was centered with movies by Quentin Tarantino.
Well, I'd be willing to pay money not to own a copy of Death Proof. If I were ever going to buy the Aliens movies, I'd want to pay to get the first two unbundled from the rest of the crappy ones. :)
But yeah, those are dick moves. This isn't the publisher saying hear me out, this is going to be good for all of us and winning you over. This is the publisher pissing down your neck and not even making that much of an effort to convince you it's rain.
From my perspective I think "Hey, we can release more expansions, give the developers a more consistent revenue stream and enhance the quality of the experience for players." But the publisher's perspective is "Let's soak these fans for as much as possible, nickel and dime them for shit that should have already been in the original game, and still not pay the developer any more than they would have gotten off of doing things the old way!" The publisher approach would be taking a look at the kind of money spent on D&D materials and they'd just see bullshit dollar signs in their eyes.
From the looks of things, Rockstar did a decent job with the GTAIV expansions. You've got the core game, then you have the expansions that deliver more content and interconnecting stories to the existing game.
When they declared it would be sold as three different packs, one per race. While they do have a history of expansion packs, it's never been 1 with 2 more like this, nor planned this far in advanced to break it up and sell the parts.
Wouldn't be so bad of an idea if done intelligently. For games we really like, expansion packs are loved. Figuring full retail, that's $40 for the game (back in the day), $20 each for the expansions. You could end up spending $80 if you bought it all new, or you could get the bundle months later for $40. You paid for two games and the developer probably didn't have to expend as much effort on two expansions as with the full original game. Win win for all.
What gets to be bullshit is when the $60 game is chopped up and you're left paying the full freight for the original game plus the expansions.
What I always thought would be fair is something like this: the developer plans out the game with maybe six races total. Starcraft has a lot of Warhammer 40k similarities and just think of how many races you have in that setting, it's more than orks and humans and eldar. But we'll stick with Starcraft. You sell the game with three races. The development of additional races is proceeding alongside. Sell the game for full price and then release additional races with full campaigns as add-ons. Don't skimp on the details but charge a fair price. The customer knows he's getting another 20 hours of gameplay with the expansion, plus he can use the new race in multiplayer. Then after the game's been out for a while, all the add-ons can be bundled in a battlechest and the people who skipped it when it launched can catch up with the fun. The publisher makes more money which is an upside, the fan gets more game which is another upside.
Of course, this can be more complicated than I think. I thought the idea of episodic content for shooters was a good idea, sell the game in affordable, bite-sized serial format but the reality was less enjoyable. And the dick move usually is the one that gets made. So you buy a full game like Dragon Age and are getting propositioned for add-ons that were developed at the same time as the original game and should have been included in the first place. That's not like Lord of the Rings where they're releasing three movies at once, always planned on doing so and you feel you're getting your money's worth, this is more like Kill Bill where it was supposed to be one movie and they just released it as two to make more money and planned on soaking the fans by releasing multiple versions on DVD.
can we please drop the average consumer crap? Usage trends for internet are completely unpredictable even on a year to year basis, age group basis, or otherwise. So when people think DSL speeds are good enough, they're trying to define average consumers. It doesn't exist. This is like saying "the average user isn't a gamer" or "the average user just burns bandwidth on youtube" or "the average user just browses the web and sends email".
With online video and other streaming services, today's average teenager can tear through bandwidth like last decade's uber-l33t warez geek. Bandwidth consumption is only going to increase.
There is a more or less fundamental problem with insurance, that is ever pushing against your ever getting customer service(which is a pity; because insurance can theoretically serve a very useful function).
When you buy insurance(either with a lump sum payment at point of sale, or with monthly premiums), the insurer is already as well off as they will ever be, with respect to you. Up until that moment, you were a customer now you are just a cost center. Now, in the real world, regardless of legal obligations, appeals to ethics, or fancy economic analysis from the IT department claiming that they actually save the company money, cost centers have a way of getting the bare minimum, and that grudgingly.
Insurance companies figured out hundreds of years ago that they needed to make sure the insurer had a definite self-interest in the preservation of the asset being insured. If not, I could take out insurance on someone else's ship and sink it, pocketing the full payout. Likewise, I would have no incentive to preserve a ship if it were a leaky wreck when I bought it and my intention was all along to sink it for the insurance money. Things become murkier for the investigator when I did indeed buy the ship for a legitimate business and circumstances turned against me. I could then try to sink the ship for the insurance money if I'd make more on the payout than selling it.
I think gadget insurance is pretty crazy to begin with. Insuring cars, yes, especially gap insurance. Nothing sucks more than crashing a two year old car and realizing you have to finish off payments for it plus the replacement. Insuring your house makes sense. And few people are going to burn down a house with all the valuables inside just for the payout. But an interesting point for fraud investigators, if someone is claiming the house as a primary domicile and it burns down without valuables and irreplaceable personal possessions inside, that's a big warning sign for fraud.
The sad thing is that you may have to buy insurance on products these days simply because they're made so poorly. Among coworkers and friends, there are so many stories of netbooks and laptops crapping out, especially HP's. If a $400 device won't even last you a year, maybe you should buy the insurance. You're going to need it.
I'm wondering if maybe a better model might not be leasing the equipment instead. You subscribe to the iphone, send the old one back when the new model comes out. I wouldn't feel so bad about it if they could properly break these things down into constituent molecules and recycle. It just feels awful to chuck expensive electronics every other year. It feels like sin.
To play devil's advocate, giving tax breaks to attract/keep major businesses is a normal thing for state governments.
And stores will often have two-for-one sales. But I don't think they'd be too happy if they caught me shoplifting and I said "heeeey, buddy, how about we make this one of those deals you sometimes run?" They'd bust my balls before they called the cops.
But given Microsoft's size, this is just an illustration of that old saying: "You owe the bank a thousand bucks, that's your problem. You owe the bank a million bucks, that's their problem." Microsoft gets away with it because they're big enough to get away with it.
Most laptops come with built-in webcams that are good enough for 99% of usages and are too cheap to not include, just for the 1% who want something better.
For many electronic devices, it is easier/cheaper to buy a newer one than to upgrade. That saddens me, but it is has become a fact of economics. So the "no ability to expand" might not be as bad a thing as you think. If it comes with a camera, a GPS, accelerometers, bluetooth, wi-fi, and sufficient storage... by the time the next generation of wi-fi comes out, it might be cheaper/easier just to buy a new iPad than to upgrade the current one.
That's the long and the short of it. I buy a desktop now, three years later I want to upgrade it and I'm swapping out the whole kit and kaboodle. New mommyboard, new RAM, new CPU, new viddy card. The only thing left in the case are the drives and power supply. The only time I was really fiddling with things on a weekly basis was when I worked for a computer shop and could just swap parts in and out of inventory.
Maybe we'll get to the point where we'll see all of that stuff concentrated onto a single chip or board. Buy your PC which is just a flatscreen with a hump on the back with the computer bits, run it for a few years, swap out the hump with the latest hardware. Don't have to rebuy the screen.
Would a turd by any other name still taste like shit?
POPPIES! POPPIES!
Yeah, you can make someone a lot happier with a lobotomy too.
Not me. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.
I wonder if this article would have made it to the front page of ./ if it hadn't provided an opportunity for certain folks to get a political jab in again at the "evil republicans".
Oh, it would have been posted for the Beetle Mania pun. The bit with Limbaugh was just icing on the cake.