People have so much self control that they'll spend every last dime in a casino. A lot of people found the PC game Diablo 2 to be addictive because killing each enemy was a roll of the dice for a pretty piece of equipment with a shiny name. I can attest to the injection of feel-good chemicals in the brain when one drops..even if it is small. THATS how addiction begins. Some are stronger than others.
In a casino the flashing lights and ringing bells are the shiny name. Except you have to go through the bothersome process of showering/putting on clothes/gathering change from the 7-11 charity jar/etc..
On an online casino, you could lay in bed and play it all day, and go back to sleep from exhaustion when you've wasted your second mortgage.
The American Dream everyone refers to is not a dog, cat, 2.5 kids and a house with a white picket fence.
The American Dream is selling bleeding edge technology at rape-like prices, and then going back and selling older technology at rape-like prices once people figure out that the bleeding edge technology actually loses quality over the older technology.
All the while you're farming the hell out of two technologies..ones that you didn't pay a whole lot to impliment due to China being the industrial whore.
Ten bucks says no one over there ever sued for much more than medical fees. Over here if someone even had a sore shoulder after a game, they'd sue for medical costs, therapy costs, mental pain costs, disability costs, etc, etc. Totalling about $5 million.
While I do agree, my thankfulness that Google lived up to its name far far outweighs annoyance that they didn't immediately offer a full CC based refund.
Maybe they have no legitimate interest. They see Microsoft's overall lack of success in side markets.
If MS dropped $30 billion for this as a knee-jerk reaction to keep it away from Google, well...they might get a third of that, total, back in revenue. That's after a few more billion to develop uses for it.
I was in Erwin, TN a few months to a year ago. The town is small. Almost everything about it is average small town in BFE, TN. I didn't know I was miles away from one of two places in the Southeast that can keep highly enriched uranium. Being a nerd, I would have at least wanted to see the plant!
Microsoft shot themselves in the foot when they released Vista. Another bullet for making DX10 Vista only for no reason. Another for asking companies to make DX10 games come out first and then a DX9c game months later. Another for requiring validation to download patches, and another for not making it a fool proof system.
I swear to God, its a horrible joke at this point. Almost like when you hear trailer trash bitching about how their lives are so bad, when most of the time it was caused by a ten year long string of horrible decisions on their parts.
Take a look at Shadowrun. Came out for Vista via DX10 (which is Vista only..God knows it could never be made to work with XP)..and was promptly hacked to work with XP / DX9c. Now MS is banning anyone from the Live! network who is using this hack (and is caught) to play SR on Windows XP, as the XP version won't be released for a few more weeks I don't think.
And its not like you pay for the game and play for free. You have to play for the privilige of playing it online too. And if you have an Xbox or 360 and play online there, you'll get banned from that as well if its the same account.
That said, whoever develops a game solely for Vista right now is committing suicide.
Sprint, for example, already does this if you don't have their data plan for their cell phones. Sure you can still access the network, at a rate of about ten cents per KILOBYTE. Ten k is a dollar. A hundred k is ten dollars. A megabyte is a hundred dollars.
You willing to pay ten cents per kilobyte with 30-100 spam messages coming into your email box every few hours?
Three free ringtones of your choice, some limitations apply, requires activation of special ringtone account for $40/month and minimum contract of two months.
Believe me, people will be all over it..as far as they see it, they are losing nothing but are gaining three free ringtones. All they have to do is remember to cancel their subscription to that special ringtone service after two months.
$40 in 30 days is $0 right now to most people. Its one reason everyone's so in debt.
People good with numbers will usually take the usable floor space of a data center and put a watts per square foot estimate with it based on average or projected power consumption. If you say every square foot costs an average of $5 in power usage, you can figure that in with maintainance per square foot, cooling per square foot, etc, etc.
Combine these all into a neat little sum on someone's bill.
Try to think of data center 'floor space' as the main stage. Everything is built around maintaining and supplying that stage. Thus, all costs will be paid for in that one room. You can bet your ass that electricity, cooling, maintainance, supplies, services, etc, are all figured into that little bill.
With a company so large and bloated, you should easily be able to find fucktards on which you can easily apply social engineering. You should be warned once and fired if it happens again.
No one stops to do multiple runs of the same instance anymore anyway. If you and maybe 2 or 3 friends could casually plow Strath or Scholo or BRD or UBRS without too much effort it might be pretty fun. You know. Without the hour required for UBRS. Quests might be fucking possible for those instances again.
Please, invest a lot of money trying to prevent us from doing so. I guaren-fucking-tee you that the hackers of the world will spend a lot less breaking whatever protection you put on it, and I guaren-fucking-tee you again that the regular citizens of the US that want to share their music to themselves at home will do so.
Nothing you say or do can stop them. Even if you passed a law saying people would be put to death for it, most people still would.
So please. Spend your money and time trying to stop us. Its just proving what we knew all along.
Now that the FBI is handling this, everyone that knows their neighbor has a CD burner, mod chip, or unlocked DVD player should call and report them. After all, these things can ONLY be used to facilitate piracy.
Maybe after a few hundred thousand calls they'd lay off. Shouldn't the FBI be doing more important things anyway? Like say, busting drug rings, killin' gangsters, thwarting terrorists, and making sure that all those school teachers don't have any child molestation charges?
I don't see how busting people for having mod chips is going to help society beyond MAYBE a few video game purchases. Most of them probably got the mod chips in the first place to back up what they have or to avoid paying $59.99 for a piece of shit game full of bugs..I sure as hell wouldn't buy any more games for that generation if I couldn't make backups like I had done with all of my old ones, and I wouldn't start buying the games knowing that half of them will turn out to suck despite the hype/previews anyway.
Busting a drug ring can save many lives, buttloads of money, and make society safer. Standing on top of a pile of cash/drugs/criminals and having your picture taken is a lot more glorious than busting some 19 year old in college because he pirated Madden '08.
When you buy blank media they charge you for the media.
When you buy any kind of software they charge you mainly for the licence to use the software and to get support/etc. However when you lose the media or it breaks, they want to charge you to replace the media.
So which is it? Charging us for the media or charging us for the licence? One or the other.
Six terrorists were killed in a mysterious explosion. Supposedly they were trying to reload the goblin mortar that they purchased on the auction house. Had one of them been a paladin, they might have been saved.
I was thinking something along the lines of a memo that said something to the effect of:
"We need a lot of people to sue. Priority on children, the poor, and the very old. Even if they can't pay up, we can cut 80% off of our original demand and still look good in the end. There will be a bonus for whoever gets the biggest settlement; I need to make a yacht payment this month."
Hopefully he'll get a nice fat settlement. I mean the RIAA was expecting it out of him just for downloading some songs..what if he had exposed some of their embarassing info? They'd be wanting his head on a stick.
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This poster speaks the truth.
People have so much self control that they'll spend every last dime in a casino. A lot of people found the PC game Diablo 2 to be addictive because killing each enemy was a roll of the dice for a pretty piece of equipment with a shiny name. I can attest to the injection of feel-good chemicals in the brain when one drops..even if it is small. THATS how addiction begins. Some are stronger than others.
In a casino the flashing lights and ringing bells are the shiny name. Except you have to go through the bothersome process of showering/putting on clothes/gathering change from the 7-11 charity jar/etc..
On an online casino, you could lay in bed and play it all day, and go back to sleep from exhaustion when you've wasted your second mortgage.
The American Dream everyone refers to is not a dog, cat, 2.5 kids and a house with a white picket fence.
The American Dream is selling bleeding edge technology at rape-like prices, and then going back and selling older technology at rape-like prices once people figure out that the bleeding edge technology actually loses quality over the older technology.
All the while you're farming the hell out of two technologies..ones that you didn't pay a whole lot to impliment due to China being the industrial whore.
Ten bucks says no one over there ever sued for much more than medical fees. Over here if someone even had a sore shoulder after a game, they'd sue for medical costs, therapy costs, mental pain costs, disability costs, etc, etc. Totalling about $5 million.
While I do agree, my thankfulness that Google lived up to its name far far outweighs annoyance that they didn't immediately offer a full CC based refund.
Maybe they have no legitimate interest. They see Microsoft's overall lack of success in side markets.
If MS dropped $30 billion for this as a knee-jerk reaction to keep it away from Google, well...they might get a third of that, total, back in revenue. That's after a few more billion to develop uses for it.
I was in Erwin, TN a few months to a year ago. The town is small. Almost everything about it is average small town in BFE, TN. I didn't know I was miles away from one of two places in the Southeast that can keep highly enriched uranium. Being a nerd, I would have at least wanted to see the plant!
No idea it was even there..
If someone did this to a lot of fiber links around the country. We'd be totally
The prices of cell phones are seriously inflated to corner people into the contracts.
AKA you can pay $400 for this base model cell phone, or you can get it for free, with 2 year contract.
Microsoft shot themselves in the foot when they released Vista. Another bullet for making DX10 Vista only for no reason. Another for asking companies to make DX10 games come out first and then a DX9c game months later. Another for requiring validation to download patches, and another for not making it a fool proof system.
I swear to God, its a horrible joke at this point. Almost like when you hear trailer trash bitching about how their lives are so bad, when most of the time it was caused by a ten year long string of horrible decisions on their parts.
Mmhmm.
Take a look at Shadowrun. Came out for Vista via DX10 (which is Vista only..God knows it could never be made to work with XP)..and was promptly hacked to work with XP / DX9c. Now MS is banning anyone from the Live! network who is using this hack (and is caught) to play SR on Windows XP, as the XP version won't be released for a few more weeks I don't think.
And its not like you pay for the game and play for free. You have to play for the privilige of playing it online too. And if you have an Xbox or 360 and play online there, you'll get banned from that as well if its the same account.
That said, whoever develops a game solely for Vista right now is committing suicide.
Great idea.
Sprint, for example, already does this if you don't have their data plan for their cell phones. Sure you can still access the network, at a rate of about ten cents per KILOBYTE. Ten k is a dollar. A hundred k is ten dollars. A megabyte is a hundred dollars.
You willing to pay ten cents per kilobyte with 30-100 spam messages coming into your email box every few hours?
Three free ringtones of your choice, some limitations apply, requires activation of special ringtone account for $40/month and minimum contract of two months.
Believe me, people will be all over it..as far as they see it, they are losing nothing but are gaining three free ringtones. All they have to do is remember to cancel their subscription to that special ringtone service after two months.
$40 in 30 days is $0 right now to most people. Its one reason everyone's so in debt.
People good with numbers will usually take the usable floor space of a data center and put a watts per square foot estimate with it based on average or projected power consumption. If you say every square foot costs an average of $5 in power usage, you can figure that in with maintainance per square foot, cooling per square foot, etc, etc.
Combine these all into a neat little sum on someone's bill.
Try to think of data center 'floor space' as the main stage. Everything is built around maintaining and supplying that stage. Thus, all costs will be paid for in that one room. You can bet your ass that electricity, cooling, maintainance, supplies, services, etc, are all figured into that little bill.
With a company so large and bloated, you should easily be able to find fucktards on which you can easily apply social engineering. You should be warned once and fired if it happens again.
No one stops to do multiple runs of the same instance anymore anyway. If you and maybe 2 or 3 friends could casually plow Strath or Scholo or BRD or UBRS without too much effort it might be pretty fun. You know. Without the hour required for UBRS. Quests might be fucking possible for those instances again.
$2000 of help? When you could have just planned ahead? Will you EVER spend $2000 in coffee to keep you awake on long road trips?
If they'd make all pre-BC instances non-elite and not that difficult it would make the game SO much more fun for pre-60s.
Please, invest a lot of money trying to prevent us from doing so. I guaren-fucking-tee you that the hackers of the world will spend a lot less breaking whatever protection you put on it, and I guaren-fucking-tee you again that the regular citizens of the US that want to share their music to themselves at home will do so.
Nothing you say or do can stop them. Even if you passed a law saying people would be put to death for it, most people still would.
So please. Spend your money and time trying to stop us. Its just proving what we knew all along.
eBay is an auction. Not a sale.
At a sale, either person can change their mind at the last minute.
"Sorry, sir, you can't buy this beer because you look like you've had one too many."
as opposed to,
"Well, you're drunk, but you were the highest bidder..so here ya go."
Ruling them as sales means they're just 'deals' with a down-to-the-second time limit.
Fine paid: $2,500.
Year servced: One year.
Money gained for copyright holder/theater: Negative amounts.
Money gained for prison system: Negative amounts.
Total outcome: Hassle for everyone and shitload of money lost all around.
Now that the FBI is handling this, everyone that knows their neighbor has a CD burner, mod chip, or unlocked DVD player should call and report them. After all, these things can ONLY be used to facilitate piracy.
Maybe after a few hundred thousand calls they'd lay off. Shouldn't the FBI be doing more important things anyway? Like say, busting drug rings, killin' gangsters, thwarting terrorists, and making sure that all those school teachers don't have any child molestation charges?
I don't see how busting people for having mod chips is going to help society beyond MAYBE a few video game purchases. Most of them probably got the mod chips in the first place to back up what they have or to avoid paying $59.99 for a piece of shit game full of bugs..I sure as hell wouldn't buy any more games for that generation if I couldn't make backups like I had done with all of my old ones, and I wouldn't start buying the games knowing that half of them will turn out to suck despite the hype/previews anyway.
Busting a drug ring can save many lives, buttloads of money, and make society safer. Standing on top of a pile of cash/drugs/criminals and having your picture taken is a lot more glorious than busting some 19 year old in college because he pirated Madden '08.
When you buy blank media they charge you for the media.
When you buy any kind of software they charge you mainly for the licence to use the software and to get support/etc. However when you lose the media or it breaks, they want to charge you to replace the media.
So which is it? Charging us for the media or charging us for the licence? One or the other.
Six terrorists were killed in a mysterious explosion. Supposedly they were trying to reload the goblin mortar that they purchased on the auction house. Had one of them been a paladin, they might have been saved.
I was thinking something along the lines of a memo that said something to the effect of:
"We need a lot of people to sue. Priority on children, the poor, and the very old. Even if they can't pay up, we can cut 80% off of our original demand and still look good in the end. There will be a bonus for whoever gets the biggest settlement; I need to make a yacht payment this month."
Hopefully he'll get a nice fat settlement. I mean the RIAA was expecting it out of him just for downloading some songs..what if he had exposed some of their embarassing info? They'd be wanting his head on a stick.