I think that one of the main problems with the article is that anyone that started to read the article from a cynical standpoint, which would be just about any non-feminist gamer because we've all seen way too many feminist rants against video games, stopped when they saw the line "...the peripherals (the laughably phallic joystick, the original Xbox controllers which are too big for my hands, the color scheme of the Xbox) are male-friendly." That line, since it didn't seem like a joke (and she has yet to indicate in the comments that it was), undermined her entire point. "The laughably phallic joystick"? That's moronic. It's shaped that way because it fits the human hand so well, not because arcade control designers and almost a century of aircraft engineers want to assert their penile dominance over her gender. Besides that, everyone already knows that the controllers had to be redesigned because hardly anyone -- male, female, or child -- could use them, and that line about the Xbox's color scheme just boggles the mind.
And I know you're going to say "Oh, but that was a joke". However, it struck few people as being a joke and in spite of the fact that a lot of people have complained about it in the comments, she still hasn't mentioned it in the two or three responses that she's made there. I respected and agreed with most of the article after that, despite the fact that she didn't mention the positive roles that women have had in video games in recent years and stuck to a sort of "the sky is falling" argument, but I can see where the people that criticize her are coming from when the beginning of her article has that bit in it.
Afterthought: I just searched the article again and found the part where she mentions the "joke":
good point, xocet... i meant the "laughably phallic" to be more of a joke than a serious criticism. i think though that other people have written about certain alienating aspects of the interfaces in videogames (Poole mentions it briefly in Trigger Happy).
So in other words, it was a joke... but it wasn't. Depends on how stupid/offensive you thought it was, I guess? And what about the ridiculous comments about the Xbox's controller and color scheme? No mention fo that.
Honestly though, as you pointed out, I'm sure Taco realized this, and thought it was humor. You have to admit, news has been slow lately. I can't think of a better time for some humor. Maybe they won't even post it twice?
If he realized it, he wouldn't have acted like it was a fact and linked to the only site that is erroneously presenting it as fact, which is Yahoo. He put it as humor because he thought it was real and funny, not because he thought it was fake and funny. He made a mistake, just like all of the other thousands of people that have been spreading this around as fact and warranting a post on Snopes.com to clear it up.
This is a hoax. It is "making-the-rounds" as fact, but it is, as anyone that reads the article and isn't stupid immediately realizes, fake. It's from the Weekly World News. It even says it's from the Weekly World News right there at the bottom!
What's next, a front page/. story about Bat Boy fighting in Iraq?
From a practical point of view, who verifies the costs? What if I report to Microsoft that my 100 person support team spent two work days dealing with some small bug. And by the way, our support people make $250k/year.
There's definitely a way to implement this in the contract. As with any contract regarding constant service, from rental homes that require repairs to service contracts for air conditioners and heaters, a penalty for lack of service can be required either at a set rate, by percentage, or some other rate that can be proven through evidence instead of the unfounded claims of the client that is demanding a discount. Contracts for small, mid-size, large, and multinational businesses could have different set rates, a small percentage of the cost of the entire deal could be used as a penalty rate for all businesses, etc. The problem, however, is that A) this is not in the contract and Microsoft's clients are thus in no position to demand any sort of refund or penalty fee, B) Microsoft would never allow that sort of contract anyway because they have a de facto monopoly advantage in the workplace, and C) Microsoft would never make that sort of decision because both their older and hastily patched software is so horrifically buggy that they would lose tons of money on such a plan.
Losses (dubious): 1. A questionable and meagre loss on the sale of the hardware.
Taking into account the list that was put above that, I would add in 2. Lower cost of piracy per both disc and console in China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which is especially bad since Microsoft has demonstrated a bizarre desire to try to squeeze the Xbox into high piracy areas.
Geeks that hate Microsoft and put Linux on their XBox are not likely to buy XBox games and play them. Microsoft loses money on every XBox sold and only makes a profit from you if you buy more than four or five games over the life of the system.
So no, this isn't a ploy by Microsoft to sell XBoxes to people that aren't going to buy games with them. That doesn't make sense.
As for the price of a modded XBox, check the last story on XBox modding. We went over it with a fine tooth comb and found that modding a used XBox is somewhat cheaper than buying a fresh, weak Linux PC, but only if you don't need more functionality than a modded XBox can offer (games, server, media player, Xbox game machine, fun toy, and nothing else).
I'm not neccesarily the paragon of legal knowledge. That being said, the last time that I checked China was a communist country. What kind of "freedom" does a citizen have in a communist country?
China is a very oppressive country and Russia is still very oppressive as well. I think the idea behind the "where people still have some freedoms left" comment was to point out that the people in two much more oppressive countries than the US have a freedom that we do not. Even worse, it's an intellectual freedom governing knowledge and free speech, which is something that countries like China are usually much more restrictive about than the United States.
In other words, it's like pointing out something that some black power/racial pride/anti-defamation group does and saying, "Wow! Even the Klan doesn't do that!"
Again, prove it. Give me solid information. You want to criticize the data? Present it and show exactly where its weak points are. Don't just give me a general "Well, of course it's wrong" just because you disagree with its conclusions. You say it's based on purchasers, not players. That goes against the several statistics that I've heard that have all come up with an age around 28, so present one of the statistics and tell me all the places where it's wrong.
You can't argue against statistics with general common sense assertions and half-assed assumptions about why that statistic could be wrong. No one that believes that hard data instead of common sense should guide their judgement will be convinced by your common sense assertions. Get the data, rip it apart, and show us where it's wrong. Otherwise, the statistic is more trustworthy.
Then you have to get a TV-out card for another $40 US, but the system you end up with is hugely superior to the XBox, both in upgradeability and flexibility.
If you're on a budget and all you need is a small media PC to take the load off your other PC, why would you spend $215 USD more for more than you need? Comparing a $345 system to a modded XBox is like comparing a laptop to an iPod. Sure, okay, the laptop is "hugely superior" to the iPod... but all I want is something smaller and cheaper that plays MP3s, not a full system that costs more than twice as much!
In your analysis, you forgot that the XBox, even modded, is not really a PC. It's a derivative of the PC that serves a specific function. When modded, an XBox plays media files, emulated games, and Xbox games. If all you need a second computer for is to play media files, emulated games, and you also feel like having a game console and/or weekend project, it beats the cheap PC, much like the way an MP3 player can beat a laptop.
You also neglected the concept of a budget, which is sort of important to the financial argument. For the person that is attracted to the $130 modded XBox, the fact that they don't have $345 to get something different may factor into the decision. After all, I'm sure I'd get more bang for my buck with a Big Ugly (satellite) Dish instead of a little DirecTV midget dish... if I had the cash for a Big Ugly Dish, that is. Which I don't.
Xbox would be the price of the box (200) + a memory card (40) + a copy of 007 (20?).
Refurbished XBox because consoles are pretty durable and they obviously weren't owned that long, so there is probably no need for a brand new one = $130-$150
Used memory card, because once again, it hasn't been used that long or that often = $20? (actually $0 if you use ebay, since hardly anyone is going to sell their XBox without its memory card)
Used copy of 007, because few people want to keep it for long and its suckage will propel it into the bargain bin soon anyway = $10
That's $140-$180, plus it still plays XBox games, which a PC does not (a very small bonus, I will admit), and it also comes with a decent gamepad for emulated/freeware/abandonware games, which you did not mention in your PC list. For someone that's on the fence about whether or not they want an XBox console, I'd say it's a great deal. For someone that just wants a small media PC, I'd say it's a fair deal that also provides a weekend of enjoyable hacking, if that's their sort of thing.
And besides, putting a PC together is just a little bit easier than this really simple modding job. For a little more work, you could save about $100 and still get as much functionality as you need for a media PC.
They have to give all of the code over to Microsoft anyway because Microsoft, just like Sony and Nintendo, has an extensive reviewing process for all of the games on their console. This is why so few console games have crash bugs and such when compared to the PC. The company that runs the console verifies that the product is ready for market before licensing it for it sale and the game cannot be sold until that time. If any company bypasses this and just releases a game to market without consulting the console manufacturer, they can be sued for breaking various licensing and copyright agreements, such as the licensing agreement that came with the XBox SDK that they had to use to make the game.
This bug probably slipped through the reviewing process because A) it is an obscure bug, B) the XBox has a lot more avenues of attack than a PS2 or GameCube because of the hard drive and ethernet card, and C) Microsoft's reviewing process seems to be a bit less extensive than Sony's or Nintendo's.
I just checked Ebay and they have some used XBoxes going for about $130. That's a Linux box with a 700mhz processor, 64MB RAM, a GeForce 3, a 10GB hard drive, TV-Out, and an ethernet card for $130, provided that you can find a friend somewhere with a mod chip. It's an extra thirty bucks or so if you need to get your own solderless mod chip. To me that seems like a pretty good deal, especially when you take into account the facts that used consoles usually turn out to be more durable than used PCs and that you can reliably get the same hardware over and over for roughly the same price without hunting for bargains.
And that's just the useful side of it. Some of us just think that prying open a console, seeing how it works, and generally playing around inside of it is worth the price of admission all by itself. It's an interesting weekend project.
Umm... if you're running your own mailserver on your residential DSL... aren't you violating the Terms of Service of most residential DSL agreements which says "thou shalt not run servers that are accessible via the DSL connection"?
Yeah, but you're also violating it if you choose to run a P2P program, start a DCC Chat session in IRC, start a game of Warcraft III (the person that starts the games actually hosts them and Battle.net is just a forum for the players to find each other), or send any sort of file to anyone at any time. The "no servers" stipulation is really just a technical way of saying that they can revoke your service at their leisure, since almost everyone who uses a computer has to run a server at some point.
So, really, those TOS are a joke. A bit OT, all of this, I guess.
That would be the point. They're making unreasonable technical demands in their terms of service so that they can revoke your service at their leisure without being obligated to give you a refund or to honor any contracts that you've signed with them. They do this because a long list of unreasonable technical demands looks a lot friendlier to the average person ("Oh, that's just anti-hacker/criminal stuff") than the words "We may revoke your service at our leisure without being obligated to give you a refund or honor any contracts that you have signed with us."
What makes this kid unique is that his parents let him (a 12 year old) babysit a toddler by himself. Both parents were often out and he was by himself a great deal of the time. That and he was a rabid fan of pro-wresling and video games. He killed his cousin with a pro-wrestling manuever. I'm sure he didn't mean to kill him, but what do you expect when you see guys on TV smacking each other down and leave the ring exactly like they did when they first started to fight? The boy expected his cousin to not be hurt.
Oh, come on. You act like a twelve year old is the same as a four year old. That they can't naturally tell reality from fantasy and that, if left with a small child, they will invariably kill them. That is absolute bullshit. Plenty of twelve year olds can be left with young children and not kill them. They shouldn't be babysitting them, but they won't violently kill them, either. This child was uniquely fucked up. Call it a lack of education, bad parenting, what have you, but wrestling could not possibly have had enough of an effect to motivate this kid to attack a small child. If they're willing to attack a small child that quickly, then seeing someone fall off their bike or two dogs playing with each other could've been an equal motivation. You're right to blame bad parenting, but the pro wrestling doesn't even have to come into it at all. The catalyst doesn't matter if the kid's threshold for violence against small children is that low. Anything could've set him off at any time.
I also find it incredibly ironic that you're blaming pro wrestling. Granted, I haven't watched much of it in the last couple of years, but the last time I was watching the WWF/WWE, it was the most responsible show of violence on television. A month didn't go by that the storyline didn't have one wrestler or another in a hospital with a serious injury and often they didn't come back for at least a month or two. That's more responsible than any other show of violence on television, including Saturday morning cartoons. I have not seen anywhere else on TV that violence has been displayed to children as having real consequences where people are seriously injured. It's something that Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, and action shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer simply have not had.
We're talking about a product which gives you two options of use: buy it, or use the free version with ad banners. If you choose the free version and disable the ads, then you are stealing.
And you've never, ever taped a TV show and fast forwarded through the commercials, right? Or gotten up to go to the bathroom when what you really should be doing is sitting on the couch and watching the commercials intently like a good little non-thief? Feh. I think not. I think that you, thief that you are, even throw out the supermarket advertisement flyers that are sent to you in the mail as a vital part of the Special Supersavers Checkout Card plan that you use to save yourself money at Shoprite. You make me sick, thief.
But seriously, all melodramatic sarcasm aside, I am almost positive that you are bypassing 90% of the ads that make up the business models of the free or discounted products that you enjoy. We all are. If bypassing ads is stealing, then let he who bypasses no ads cast the first stone. If he's not busy trying to watch the commercials on every network broadcast channel at the same time to make sure that he isn't stealing any channels, that is.
Just recently I watched a show on Court TV about a 12 year old killing his baby cousin (one or two years old) using a WWF wrestling move. He was left to babysit his cousin alone as well. The show also talked about video game violence in brief, basically saying that it's on of the mediums that kids may want to immitate in real life.
The question that comes to my mind is: Are video games/wrestling/media/etc causing the violence, or are the kids?
Well, that's a no-brainer, kids are committing the acts. I've known many young boys who really look up to WWF wrestlers and immitate violent acts such as those in video games. Not because they want to hurt anybody, but because they want to immitate their idols and what they see. With wresling, the see a guy get a beatdown, and magically get back up, and after the show is over, they walk out of the ring unscathed. With video games, I think it's the player's interaction, coupled with the glamorization of violence that would make some kids want to try it out in real life.
Kids *are* impressionable like that
Please practice some media literacy, sir. If every kid that watched pro wrestling, of which there are at least many thousands, was so impressionable that they couldn't control themselves and acted out violent acts upon anything and anyone in the area around them, this kid would not be notable enough to be on Court TV. There would be dead babies killed by their older brothers all across the United States and this would just be one of many, which would not make him interesting enough for a television story. He would be no different than a liquor store robbery or a straight man/woman-shoots-wife/husband story: tragic, but not unique enough to interest people as a national news story.
This kid is on Court TV because kids aren't that impressionable. This child was uniquely fucked up and committed a relatively unique crime because he was so uniquely fucked up, and that is what makes him interesting enough to get Court TV some decent ratings and another hit of the steady advertising profit that they depend on to stay afloat. Stories like this are not national news because they are so incredibly common. They are national news because they are unique, because they are strange, and above all because they are not indicative of the normal way that a human being functions.
There is a difference between consciously engaging the lyrics of a song or words in a book and actively reliving experiences (remember, observations and sensations are experiences) involving violence and death.
Whether or not playing a first person shooter is "reliving experiences involving violence and death", in my opinion, up in the air. I don't see how clicking a mouse button and killing a blocky polygonal representation of a human being that is clearly NOT alive and has nothing even barely resembling a life is any closer to murdering a real, living human being than squashing a bug is. A computerized representation of a human being is no more real than a GI Joe toy. Even a seven year old can tell that the person standing next to them is something distinctly different than the human-looking mess of polygons on their computer, just like they can tell that a human-looking GI Joe toy is something distinctly different than the person standing next to them, as well.
This is the main problem with this debate. Because a mess of polygons that looks like a human being is a relatively new thing, people do not yet equate children playing violently with it the same way that they treat a child playing violently with a GI Joe toy or a stuffed doll. They have not yet connected the dots and realized that young children have violently murdered represensations of human beings for as long as there have been toys that look vaguely human and that the sane among those children have come out fine.
we bombard them with this dreck day in and out (and I'm not just referring to MA games, but all the other pointlessly violent garbage that Hollyweird shovels down our throats by the truckload), it seem to me to be rather obvious that this will have an adverse influence on their perception of violence.
(anyone who has spent five minutes in an Electronic Boutique knows that the average age of a video game purchaser is less than 28)
Alas, your overwhelming anecdotal evidence trumps our woefully inadequate extensively researched statistics and scientific studies. We might as well just give up now, because we've already lost.
I pulled down 131mb of zipped episodes (1-22, plus trailer) from http://bs.brokensaints.com/av/downloads/ [brokensaints.com] just now, and so in a sense I guess that's a bit of bandwidth hurt.
You "guess" that 131MB of tranfers to one user in one day during a Slashdotting is, "in a sense", "a bit of a bandwidth hurt"? That's like saying that you might have, "in a sense", killed your next door neighbor "a bit" when you "stabbed him in the chest forty-two times".
Seriously, though... downloading 131MB of files from a site that is currently on the front page of Slashdot is not cool. Practice a little restraint next time by bookmarking the page and coming back to it in a couple of days or something.
This is the same Supreme Court that made it legal for police officers to arrest drivers at traffic stops for any reason they choose, including speeding. I am not at all confident that they will challenge a law that broadens police powers.
But Even at the most base, survivalistic level, you need them to live. why? because the diseases that can wipe these animals out are the diseases that can wipe us out. All ethical considerations of conservation and the morality of medical testing aside, we need creatures running around with something close to our DNA
I'm not in favor of the extinction of any animals, but I have to say that your argument just doesn't make sense. If there were no more apes or monkeys, then their natural diseases would not be ingested by the poor Africans that eat their meat, and then their natural diseases would not spread to the general population of the world. Without any apes or monkeys, ape and monkey diseases would not be crossing over to our species.
There are probably a lot of good reasons to save the Great Apes, but protection from disease is NOT one of them. From the standpoint of protection from disease, Great Apes and all other non-human primates are nothing but walking incubation chambers for brain and immunodeficiency viruses that will cross over to our species and kill us once they've matured. African primates would save more lives by being extinct than by being alive. Africa is going to continue to be poverty stricken for a very, very long time, so there will be poor, hungry Africans eating their brains for a very, very long time, and in that time several new viruses will cross the species barrier and potentially travel into Europe, Asia, or the entire world.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that one of the main problems with the article is that anyone that started to read the article from a cynical standpoint, which would be just about any non-feminist gamer because we've all seen way too many feminist rants against video games, stopped when they saw the line "...the peripherals (the laughably phallic joystick, the original Xbox controllers which are too big for my hands, the color scheme of the Xbox) are male-friendly." That line, since it didn't seem like a joke (and she has yet to indicate in the comments that it was), undermined her entire point. "The laughably phallic joystick"? That's moronic. It's shaped that way because it fits the human hand so well, not because arcade control designers and almost a century of aircraft engineers want to assert their penile dominance over her gender. Besides that, everyone already knows that the controllers had to be redesigned because hardly anyone -- male, female, or child -- could use them, and that line about the Xbox's color scheme just boggles the mind.
And I know you're going to say "Oh, but that was a joke". However, it struck few people as being a joke and in spite of the fact that a lot of people have complained about it in the comments, she still hasn't mentioned it in the two or three responses that she's made there. I respected and agreed with most of the article after that, despite the fact that she didn't mention the positive roles that women have had in video games in recent years and stuck to a sort of "the sky is falling" argument, but I can see where the people that criticize her are coming from when the beginning of her article has that bit in it.
Afterthought: I just searched the article again and found the part where she mentions the "joke":
good point, xocet... i meant the "laughably phallic" to be more of a joke than a serious criticism. i think though that other people have written about certain alienating aspects of the interfaces in videogames (Poole mentions it briefly in Trigger Happy).
So in other words, it was a joke... but it wasn't. Depends on how stupid/offensive you thought it was, I guess? And what about the ridiculous comments about the Xbox's controller and color scheme? No mention fo that.
Honestly though, as you pointed out, I'm sure Taco realized this, and thought it was humor. You have to admit, news has been slow lately. I can't think of a better time for some humor. Maybe they won't even post it twice?
If he realized it, he wouldn't have acted like it was a fact and linked to the only site that is erroneously presenting it as fact, which is Yahoo. He put it as humor because he thought it was real and funny, not because he thought it was fake and funny. He made a mistake, just like all of the other thousands of people that have been spreading this around as fact and warranting a post on Snopes.com to clear it up.
This is a hoax. It is "making-the-rounds" as fact, but it is, as anyone that reads the article and isn't stupid immediately realizes, fake. It's from the Weekly World News. It even says it's from the Weekly World News right there at the bottom!
/. story about Bat Boy fighting in Iraq?
What's next, a front page
From a practical point of view, who verifies the costs? What if I report to Microsoft that my 100 person support team spent two work days dealing with some small bug. And by the way, our support people make $250k/year.
There's definitely a way to implement this in the contract. As with any contract regarding constant service, from rental homes that require repairs to service contracts for air conditioners and heaters, a penalty for lack of service can be required either at a set rate, by percentage, or some other rate that can be proven through evidence instead of the unfounded claims of the client that is demanding a discount. Contracts for small, mid-size, large, and multinational businesses could have different set rates, a small percentage of the cost of the entire deal could be used as a penalty rate for all businesses, etc. The problem, however, is that A) this is not in the contract and Microsoft's clients are thus in no position to demand any sort of refund or penalty fee, B) Microsoft would never allow that sort of contract anyway because they have a de facto monopoly advantage in the workplace, and C) Microsoft would never make that sort of decision because both their older and hastily patched software is so horrifically buggy that they would lose tons of money on such a plan.
Yeah, and one addition to this great post:
Losses (dubious):
1. A questionable and meagre loss on the sale of the hardware.
Taking into account the list that was put above that, I would add in 2. Lower cost of piracy per both disc and console in China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which is especially bad since Microsoft has demonstrated a bizarre desire to try to squeeze the Xbox into high piracy areas.
Geeks that hate Microsoft and put Linux on their XBox are not likely to buy XBox games and play them. Microsoft loses money on every XBox sold and only makes a profit from you if you buy more than four or five games over the life of the system.
So no, this isn't a ploy by Microsoft to sell XBoxes to people that aren't going to buy games with them. That doesn't make sense.
As for the price of a modded XBox, check the last story on XBox modding. We went over it with a fine tooth comb and found that modding a used XBox is somewhat cheaper than buying a fresh, weak Linux PC, but only if you don't need more functionality than a modded XBox can offer (games, server, media player, Xbox game machine, fun toy, and nothing else).
I'm not neccesarily the paragon of legal knowledge. That being said, the last time that I checked China was a communist country.
What kind of "freedom" does a citizen have in a communist country?
China is a very oppressive country and Russia is still very oppressive as well. I think the idea behind the "where people still have some freedoms left" comment was to point out that the people in two much more oppressive countries than the US have a freedom that we do not. Even worse, it's an intellectual freedom governing knowledge and free speech, which is something that countries like China are usually much more restrictive about than the United States.
In other words, it's like pointing out something that some black power/racial pride/anti-defamation group does and saying, "Wow! Even the Klan doesn't do that!"
Again, prove it. Give me solid information. You want to criticize the data? Present it and show exactly where its weak points are. Don't just give me a general "Well, of course it's wrong" just because you disagree with its conclusions. You say it's based on purchasers, not players. That goes against the several statistics that I've heard that have all come up with an age around 28, so present one of the statistics and tell me all the places where it's wrong.
You can't argue against statistics with general common sense assertions and half-assed assumptions about why that statistic could be wrong. No one that believes that hard data instead of common sense should guide their judgement will be convinced by your common sense assertions. Get the data, rip it apart, and show us where it's wrong. Otherwise, the statistic is more trustworthy.
Then you have to get a TV-out card for another $40 US, but the system you end up with is hugely superior to the XBox, both in upgradeability and flexibility.
If you're on a budget and all you need is a small media PC to take the load off your other PC, why would you spend $215 USD more for more than you need? Comparing a $345 system to a modded XBox is like comparing a laptop to an iPod. Sure, okay, the laptop is "hugely superior" to the iPod... but all I want is something smaller and cheaper that plays MP3s, not a full system that costs more than twice as much!
In your analysis, you forgot that the XBox, even modded, is not really a PC. It's a derivative of the PC that serves a specific function. When modded, an XBox plays media files, emulated games, and Xbox games. If all you need a second computer for is to play media files, emulated games, and you also feel like having a game console and/or weekend project, it beats the cheap PC, much like the way an MP3 player can beat a laptop.
You also neglected the concept of a budget, which is sort of important to the financial argument. For the person that is attracted to the $130 modded XBox, the fact that they don't have $345 to get something different may factor into the decision. After all, I'm sure I'd get more bang for my buck with a Big Ugly (satellite) Dish instead of a little DirecTV midget dish... if I had the cash for a Big Ugly Dish, that is. Which I don't.
Xbox would be the price of the box (200) + a memory card (40) + a copy of 007 (20?).
Refurbished XBox because consoles are pretty durable and they obviously weren't owned that long, so there is probably no need for a brand new one = $130-$150
Used memory card, because once again, it hasn't been used that long or that often = $20? (actually $0 if you use ebay, since hardly anyone is going to sell their XBox without its memory card)
Used copy of 007, because few people want to keep it for long and its suckage will propel it into the bargain bin soon anyway = $10
That's $140-$180, plus it still plays XBox games, which a PC does not (a very small bonus, I will admit), and it also comes with a decent gamepad for emulated/freeware/abandonware games, which you did not mention in your PC list. For someone that's on the fence about whether or not they want an XBox console, I'd say it's a great deal. For someone that just wants a small media PC, I'd say it's a fair deal that also provides a weekend of enjoyable hacking, if that's their sort of thing.
And besides, putting a PC together is just a little bit easier than this really simple modding job. For a little more work, you could save about $100 and still get as much functionality as you need for a media PC.
They have to give all of the code over to Microsoft anyway because Microsoft, just like Sony and Nintendo, has an extensive reviewing process for all of the games on their console. This is why so few console games have crash bugs and such when compared to the PC. The company that runs the console verifies that the product is ready for market before licensing it for it sale and the game cannot be sold until that time. If any company bypasses this and just releases a game to market without consulting the console manufacturer, they can be sued for breaking various licensing and copyright agreements, such as the licensing agreement that came with the XBox SDK that they had to use to make the game.
This bug probably slipped through the reviewing process because A) it is an obscure bug, B) the XBox has a lot more avenues of attack than a PS2 or GameCube because of the hard drive and ethernet card, and C) Microsoft's reviewing process seems to be a bit less extensive than Sony's or Nintendo's.
I just checked Ebay and they have some used XBoxes going for about $130. That's a Linux box with a 700mhz processor, 64MB RAM, a GeForce 3, a 10GB hard drive, TV-Out, and an ethernet card for $130, provided that you can find a friend somewhere with a mod chip. It's an extra thirty bucks or so if you need to get your own solderless mod chip. To me that seems like a pretty good deal, especially when you take into account the facts that used consoles usually turn out to be more durable than used PCs and that you can reliably get the same hardware over and over for roughly the same price without hunting for bargains.
And that's just the useful side of it. Some of us just think that prying open a console, seeing how it works, and generally playing around inside of it is worth the price of admission all by itself. It's an interesting weekend project.
Umm ... if you're running your own mailserver on your residential DSL ... aren't you violating the Terms of Service of most residential DSL agreements which says "thou shalt not run servers that are accessible via the DSL connection"?
Yeah, but you're also violating it if you choose to run a P2P program, start a DCC Chat session in IRC, start a game of Warcraft III (the person that starts the games actually hosts them and Battle.net is just a forum for the players to find each other), or send any sort of file to anyone at any time. The "no servers" stipulation is really just a technical way of saying that they can revoke your service at their leisure, since almost everyone who uses a computer has to run a server at some point.
So, really, those TOS are a joke. A bit OT, all of this, I guess.
That would be the point. They're making unreasonable technical demands in their terms of service so that they can revoke your service at their leisure without being obligated to give you a refund or to honor any contracts that you've signed with them. They do this because a long list of unreasonable technical demands looks a lot friendlier to the average person ("Oh, that's just anti-hacker/criminal stuff") than the words "We may revoke your service at our leisure without being obligated to give you a refund or honor any contracts that you have signed with us."
What makes this kid unique is that his parents let him (a 12 year old) babysit a toddler by himself. Both parents were often out and he was by himself a great deal of the time. That and he was a rabid fan of pro-wresling and video games. He killed his cousin with a pro-wrestling manuever. I'm sure he didn't mean to kill him, but what do you expect when you see guys on TV smacking each other down and leave the ring exactly like they did when they first started to fight? The boy expected his cousin to not be hurt.
Oh, come on. You act like a twelve year old is the same as a four year old. That they can't naturally tell reality from fantasy and that, if left with a small child, they will invariably kill them. That is absolute bullshit. Plenty of twelve year olds can be left with young children and not kill them. They shouldn't be babysitting them, but they won't violently kill them, either. This child was uniquely fucked up. Call it a lack of education, bad parenting, what have you, but wrestling could not possibly have had enough of an effect to motivate this kid to attack a small child. If they're willing to attack a small child that quickly, then seeing someone fall off their bike or two dogs playing with each other could've been an equal motivation. You're right to blame bad parenting, but the pro wrestling doesn't even have to come into it at all. The catalyst doesn't matter if the kid's threshold for violence against small children is that low. Anything could've set him off at any time.
I also find it incredibly ironic that you're blaming pro wrestling. Granted, I haven't watched much of it in the last couple of years, but the last time I was watching the WWF/WWE, it was the most responsible show of violence on television. A month didn't go by that the storyline didn't have one wrestler or another in a hospital with a serious injury and often they didn't come back for at least a month or two. That's more responsible than any other show of violence on television, including Saturday morning cartoons. I have not seen anywhere else on TV that violence has been displayed to children as having real consequences where people are seriously injured. It's something that Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, and action shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer simply have not had.
We're talking about a product which gives you two options of use: buy it, or use the free version with ad banners. If you choose the free version and disable the ads, then you are stealing.
And you've never, ever taped a TV show and fast forwarded through the commercials, right? Or gotten up to go to the bathroom when what you really should be doing is sitting on the couch and watching the commercials intently like a good little non-thief? Feh. I think not. I think that you, thief that you are, even throw out the supermarket advertisement flyers that are sent to you in the mail as a vital part of the Special Supersavers Checkout Card plan that you use to save yourself money at Shoprite. You make me sick, thief.
But seriously, all melodramatic sarcasm aside, I am almost positive that you are bypassing 90% of the ads that make up the business models of the free or discounted products that you enjoy. We all are. If bypassing ads is stealing, then let he who bypasses no ads cast the first stone. If he's not busy trying to watch the commercials on every network broadcast channel at the same time to make sure that he isn't stealing any channels, that is.
Just recently I watched a show on Court TV about a 12 year old killing his baby cousin (one or two years old) using a WWF wrestling move. He was left to babysit his cousin alone as well. The show also talked about video game violence in brief, basically saying that it's on of the mediums that kids may want to immitate in real life.
The question that comes to my mind is: Are video games/wrestling/media/etc causing the violence, or are the kids?
Well, that's a no-brainer, kids are committing the acts. I've known many young boys who really look up to WWF wrestlers and immitate violent acts such as those in video games. Not because they want to hurt anybody, but because they want to immitate their idols and what they see. With wresling, the see a guy get a beatdown, and magically get back up, and after the show is over, they walk out of the ring unscathed. With video games, I think it's the player's interaction, coupled with the glamorization of violence that would make some kids want to try it out in real life.
Kids *are* impressionable like that
Please practice some media literacy, sir. If every kid that watched pro wrestling, of which there are at least many thousands, was so impressionable that they couldn't control themselves and acted out violent acts upon anything and anyone in the area around them, this kid would not be notable enough to be on Court TV. There would be dead babies killed by their older brothers all across the United States and this would just be one of many, which would not make him interesting enough for a television story. He would be no different than a liquor store robbery or a straight man/woman-shoots-wife/husband story: tragic, but not unique enough to interest people as a national news story.
This kid is on Court TV because kids aren't that impressionable. This child was uniquely fucked up and committed a relatively unique crime because he was so uniquely fucked up, and that is what makes him interesting enough to get Court TV some decent ratings and another hit of the steady advertising profit that they depend on to stay afloat. Stories like this are not national news because they are so incredibly common. They are national news because they are unique, because they are strange, and above all because they are not indicative of the normal way that a human being functions.
There is a difference between consciously engaging the lyrics of a song or words in a book and actively reliving experiences (remember, observations and sensations are experiences) involving violence and death.
Whether or not playing a first person shooter is "reliving experiences involving violence and death", in my opinion, up in the air. I don't see how clicking a mouse button and killing a blocky polygonal representation of a human being that is clearly NOT alive and has nothing even barely resembling a life is any closer to murdering a real, living human being than squashing a bug is. A computerized representation of a human being is no more real than a GI Joe toy. Even a seven year old can tell that the person standing next to them is something distinctly different than the human-looking mess of polygons on their computer, just like they can tell that a human-looking GI Joe toy is something distinctly different than the person standing next to them, as well.
This is the main problem with this debate. Because a mess of polygons that looks like a human being is a relatively new thing, people do not yet equate children playing violently with it the same way that they treat a child playing violently with a GI Joe toy or a stuffed doll. They have not yet connected the dots and realized that young children have violently murdered represensations of human beings for as long as there have been toys that look vaguely human and that the sane among those children have come out fine.
we bombard them with this dreck day in and out (and I'm not just referring to MA games, but all the other pointlessly violent garbage that Hollyweird shovels down our throats by the truckload), it seem to me to be rather obvious that this will have an adverse influence on their perception of violence.
(anyone who has spent five minutes in an Electronic Boutique knows that the average age of a video game purchaser is less than 28)
Alas, your overwhelming anecdotal evidence trumps our woefully inadequate extensively researched statistics and scientific studies. We might as well just give up now, because we've already lost.
I pulled down 131mb of zipped episodes (1-22, plus trailer) from http://bs.brokensaints.com/av/downloads/ [brokensaints.com] just now, and so in a sense I guess that's a bit of bandwidth hurt.
You "guess" that 131MB of tranfers to one user in one day during a Slashdotting is, "in a sense", "a bit of a bandwidth hurt"? That's like saying that you might have, "in a sense", killed your next door neighbor "a bit" when you "stabbed him in the chest forty-two times".
Seriously, though... downloading 131MB of files from a site that is currently on the front page of Slashdot is not cool. Practice a little restraint next time by bookmarking the page and coming back to it in a couple of days or something.
Unless your meaning was that they could actually ARREST you for it, I.E. bring you in and question you etc.
Yes, it was. That's why I said "made it legal for police officers to arrest drivers at traffic stops for any reason they choose".
This is the same Supreme Court that made it legal for police officers to arrest drivers at traffic stops for any reason they choose, including speeding. I am not at all confident that they will challenge a law that broadens police powers.
Feh. Sounds like vaporware to me.
The link to the /. article about the third Animatrix short is a 404.
But Even at the most base, survivalistic level, you need them to live. why? because the diseases that can wipe these animals out are the diseases that can wipe us out. All ethical considerations of conservation and the morality of medical testing aside, we need creatures running around with something close to our DNA
I'm not in favor of the extinction of any animals, but I have to say that your argument just doesn't make sense. If there were no more apes or monkeys, then their natural diseases would not be ingested by the poor Africans that eat their meat, and then their natural diseases would not spread to the general population of the world. Without any apes or monkeys, ape and monkey diseases would not be crossing over to our species.
There are probably a lot of good reasons to save the Great Apes, but protection from disease is NOT one of them. From the standpoint of protection from disease, Great Apes and all other non-human primates are nothing but walking incubation chambers for brain and immunodeficiency viruses that will cross over to our species and kill us once they've matured. African primates would save more lives by being extinct than by being alive. Africa is going to continue to be poverty stricken for a very, very long time, so there will be poor, hungry Africans eating their brains for a very, very long time, and in that time several new viruses will cross the species barrier and potentially travel into Europe, Asia, or the entire world.