How am I supposed to get the Halo 2 map packs from the old Xbox DLC service if I have to buy a new Xbox due to hard drive failure or other death, if not for "pirates" who preserved them? How about all the other DLC for original Xbox titles?
What happens a few years down the road when the DLC for the Fable series, or Halo 3, or for that matter just all the Xbox Live Arcade titles I've bought is unavailable because Microsoft shuts down the servers in favor of the Xbox 3rd-generation console Live service?
The "DMCA" says that it's illegal to "circumvent" the "anti-piracy" measures. But without that circumvention, I am unable to safeguard my investment into MY PURCHASED PROPERTY that came in a download form.
Sure, I still have the "original game disc" - minus any patches needed to fix the game-breaking bugs. Minus any map packs and DLC items that make up what most people would consider the complete game.
What to do? Seems like "Piracy" is the only answer, because the answer from the game companies is "fuck you, we already got your money, go away you little peon."
Calling it "Piracy" is the wrong word. We should call it "Jesusing."
Think about it. Jesus took fish and bread, copied them, and gave the copies out to the hungry poor for free. I bet the fishermen and bakers weren't too happy about it either.
No, how about the regulatory agencies responsible for handling business licensing, fraud, and criminal prosecutions actually get off their ass and do something about this guy?
It should be easy enough to set up a sting on him. Buy a pair of glasses, check if they're fakes, attempt to return them, see what he does in return and record any messages he leaves along with any other interactions with a "honeypot" credit card account.
The problem is that law enforcement agencies in the US aren't interested in doing their jobs when it comes to criminals like Borker.
Y'know what? It may be called "out of line" by someone, but I'd say the O:P operations are the modern-day equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.
So far as I know, nobody finds the dogs offensive or controversial.
Muslims consider dogs and pigs "unclean." They've raised fusses about it to the point where our servicemen in Iraq can't bring a dog in to hunt down hidden exlosives even when terrorists have been cleared out of a Mosque.
Grandma Mable gets scanned because the TSA isn't racist
Grandma Mable gets probed and pulled aside for a "random bag check" because people like you are idiots and too damn stupid to understand the idea of focusing resources where they will do the most good.
The guy below says he is "not comfortable" with the government keeping "tabs" on citizens. I guess he's never applied for any job that required a real background check, where agents will actually go and interview friends, neighbors, past employers, etc. And I'm sure you and he both don't understand the level of infiltration and front-organization setups that go on in the incestuous relationship between US mosques, terrorist front groups (CAIR was founded by two Hamas members, "Islamic Society of North America" is a Muslim Brotherhood organization, half the "charities" in Dearbornistan MI are Hezbollah front groups, and so on).
Political correctness gone amok is getting to be more of a danger to us than the pedoprophet's followers are!
No, the goal is "security theater." Make people think you are doing something, even if what you are doing is worthless and pointless.
If we really wanted safety, we would follow the Israeli model. Catch the people flying single, with a one-way ticket especially. Extra scrutiny for those with connections to terrorist and fundamentalist organizations.
The problem with the US is that we are so hung up on "OMG PROFILING RAWR" and "waah we can't let muslims think we're against them" that we refuse to acknowledge the differences between Islam and every actual peaceful religion in the world, we refuse to acknowledge the teachings of Islam that make fundamentalism so easy to develop in the pedo's moon cult, and we refuse to acknowledge that a large number (majority or mere sizable minority, makes no difference) of them consider themselves to be "at war" with any non-muslim. There's a reason Islam considers the world broken into two pieces and calls them "Dar Al-Islam" and "Dar Al-Harb": the second means "domain of war."
We don't have to declare to be "at war" with them. They're at war with us merely for not being muslim.
This is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson himself reported to Congress, after meeting with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (Tripoli's envoy to London): "The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."
Isn't it nice how we have become so spineless that we now just roll over for them?
No, the real reason is that in most of these areas, the company - verizon, comcast, cox, etc - is a FUCKING MONOPOLY. In 90% of the US, you have your choice of either one ISP, or dialup, and that's it. In major metro areas, you might have a competition between the DSL guys and the local cable TV monopoly, but that's a fucking joke in itself since they all have side collusion agreements not to let their prices get too far apart.
No competition = no reason for prices to come down.
If the Democrats really cared about broadband penetration like they were lying about, they'd have crafted equal-access laws to force other carriers to be able to get into the market like they did for local and long-distance phone carriers ages ago. The fact that they haven't shows you just how much hot air they spew whenever they talk about it.
Welcome to the days where school has become nothing but a crappy day-care replacement.
No, I'm serious. In most public schools, the purpose is not for the kids to learn. The purpose is to pay substandard wages to a bunch of idiots who were too dumb to realize what they were really getting into, give them zero support and tools to actually enforce classroom discipline, and then tell them to just keep the kids in the building between the hours of 8 and 5 so the absentee parents can go off to work.
The schools have financial incentive to pack as many fucking kids in per classroom as possible. And even if there is a kid so bad (knifing, bringing guns, obviously bringing drugs, etc), good luck getting rid of the kid. The most you can do is have them sent to "alternative school" for a month, and in the meantime the deadbeat shithead parents are busy getting a lawyer and spinning sob stories to the media about how their "good little angel" is getting a bad rap because of the "racist teacher who obviously hates them."
The whole system is fucking broken. The feds give out money on a per-head basis, so the schools want to pack in as many kids as possible even if it means overloading the rooms. The localities enact truancy laws that stuff the good-for-nothings into schools with the kids who are actually there to learn. 5 of 9 shitheads in black robes say we can't even check for legal status and kick out the worthless leeching motherfuckers who ought to be deported. Parents scream and complain if their "good little gifted angel", who's actually an unmotivated little retard, doesn't get into the same class as the kids who ought to be on an accelerated track. And when little Roshanjam, the 9th son of Shaniqua who has 8 other half-brothers and no daddy for any of them, gets into fights and gangs and knifes people and someone actually hauls him in, there she is crying and screaming "racism" and unwilling to accept that no, her kid is a criminal little punk who has his head straight up his own ass.
Then they lie their asses off claiming they "can't find qualified Americans" for the job, and proceed to try to hire H1-B's (who are locked in to one employer and get shit wages) instead. Meanwhile, Americans who actually DO qualify for the job are shut out of the hiring process, since when the employers go looking in India or elsewhere, the job requirements magically return to what's actually going to be needed on the job.
Rewarding for loyalty stopped the moment the magic "outsourcing" and mass-corporate-takeover scams began.
My father worked for a company for 25 years, only to get shoved out the door when a multinational bought his company up just for the patents and then shit-canned everyone. Since that time, every job he's been in has been the same way: the company exists *just long enough* to develop some patent or product. Then the company gets bought out, everyone gets shit-canned as they shut down all local offices, and "continued development" is moved overseas and ceases to be about making the product better, but instead making it out of this shittiest, crappiest components designed to break within a month of the warranty expiring.
There is no such thing as loyalty anymore - companies don't see their employees as valued, they have no loyalty towards them, so it should be no surprise that an entire generation's decided that loyalty to your employer is just a sucker's game.
As for the corporate types: the assholes at the top are all soulless shits who need to be shot, because they're the ones who got us into this mess.
They'd fuck with the english translation for the same reason they fuck with the english translations generally, and the same reason they created the Great Firewall of China.
Trusting the "official translation" of the Chinese Communist Party is asking for an ass-raping.
Standard response of a dog to a locked door: whine, whine, bark, bark, whine, wait for human to open door.
Standard response of a cat to a locked door: probe every possible nook and cranny for cracks. Test seams with forceful pressure. Slide paw under to test for something to grab on to. When that finally fails, say "fuck it", and go curl up for a nap.
I say the cat is smarter. At least the cat has reasoning capability. The dog will sit there for a day or more waiting rather than learn its lesson.
I don't know why we are relying on a Google translated article when Xinhua News Agency (state run [wikipedia.org]) offers their own English translations [peopledaily.com.cn] (second copy [beijingnews.net]) of this exact news release.
Maybe because trusting the "official translation" of a despotic tin-pot dictatorship with delusions of world domination just, possibly, might be a bad idea?
Give me the original Dark Forces. The one BEFORE they did "Jedi Knight" and the game became nothing but wankers with lightsabers.
Seriously. They made a great, in-universe Star Wars title that didn't need a lightsaber. Then they made a sequel where by the end of it, you never fucking picked up another weapon again. And in the following sequels, you REALLY didn't even bother to touch anything but the fucking glow-rod for weaponry.
There's more to Star Wars than just jerkoffs comparing lightsaber sizes. And there's far more of us who miss the days when being a fan of Star Wars was more than sitting around in a black robe with a plastic lightsaber and showing up at conventions calling yourself Darth Obesity.
I had professors who simply gave every student the chance to bring a note sheet to the exam.
One 8-12x11" sheet of paper. Both sides. Put whatever you want on it. The kids who printed it up with every possible item in 3-point font failed, those who put down the relevant concepts and formulae in a quick and easy-access format succeeded, because the test was actually structured to test whether you had learned the concepts and how to apply them.
Of course, this requires that the professor isn't a lazy asshole who's been using the same, unchanged scantron-based multiple guess test for the past 20 years.
This is why shake/crank is perhaps the best. As long as someone has enough energy to move, they have the energy to operate. And as long as a shake/crank device has an external plug to power other things, you can make it run.
The worse part today, however, is how much power devices use.
- Backlit screen? Better be switchable. The screen needs to be readable in sunlight too, so that switching the backlight off actually saves power usefully.
- Processor? The slower, the better. Yes, that's counterintuitive, but power consumption scales linearly with clock speed. Getting the workable voltage down as far as possible also helps, since it's actually the square of the voltage that impacts power consumption - the problem there is, current tech can only go down so far, and the "lowest voltage" CPU's also happen to be the most fragile.
- Extra devices. USB costs power. How much depends on the device, but do you REALLY want to saddle them without the ability to run an external backup device or printer?
Yes, I'd fully accept that most P2P traffic is illegal,
Then you're an idiot. You just pointed out one high-traffic area in which "p2p" protocols are used. But more and more companies are moving to "p2p"
protocols for distribution every day. A lot of the "freeware" (as in "free to play, buy the items if you want") MMO's are distributing their client via p2p to keep the cost down.
The false claim that even "most P2P traffic" is illegal is one way the MafiAA skunks try to skew the debate.
And of course there's the fact that the levee system was rated for a category 3 hurricane, while Katrina was actually a Category 4 - in other words, exceed the specs, expect failures.
I've visited NO. It's a decent place to visit. Wouldn't really want to live there till they get out of the Poverty-Pimp business though.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the ones getting me is DLC expiration.
How am I supposed to get the Halo 2 map packs from the old Xbox DLC service if I have to buy a new Xbox due to hard drive failure or other death, if not for "pirates" who preserved them? How about all the other DLC for original Xbox titles?
What happens a few years down the road when the DLC for the Fable series, or Halo 3, or for that matter just all the Xbox Live Arcade titles I've bought is unavailable because Microsoft shuts down the servers in favor of the Xbox 3rd-generation console Live service?
The "DMCA" says that it's illegal to "circumvent" the "anti-piracy" measures. But without that circumvention, I am unable to safeguard my investment into MY PURCHASED PROPERTY that came in a download form.
Sure, I still have the "original game disc" - minus any patches needed to fix the game-breaking bugs. Minus any map packs and DLC items that make up what most people would consider the complete game.
What to do? Seems like "Piracy" is the only answer, because the answer from the game companies is "fuck you, we already got your money, go away you little peon."
Calling it "Piracy" is the wrong word. We should call it "Jesusing."
Think about it. Jesus took fish and bread, copied them, and gave the copies out to the hungry poor for free. I bet the fishermen and bakers weren't too happy about it either.
No, how about the regulatory agencies responsible for handling business licensing, fraud, and criminal prosecutions actually get off their ass and do something about this guy?
It should be easy enough to set up a sting on him. Buy a pair of glasses, check if they're fakes, attempt to return them, see what he does in return and record any messages he leaves along with any other interactions with a "honeypot" credit card account.
The problem is that law enforcement agencies in the US aren't interested in doing their jobs when it comes to criminals like Borker.
It was "illegal" for those who were participating in lunch counter sit-ins.
The point was, the law was wrong, not the people.
The same is true today. The problem is with the MafiAA types, not the people doing the protesting.
Y'know what? It may be called "out of line" by someone, but I'd say the O:P operations are the modern-day equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.
We need more people doing this, not less.
Moreover, a few minutes on google, snopes and wikipedia...
http://www.google.com/search?q=muslims+dogs+unclean&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Congratulations, you're a fucking moron.
So far as I know, nobody finds the dogs offensive or controversial.
Muslims consider dogs and pigs "unclean." They've raised fusses about it to the point where our servicemen in Iraq can't bring a dog in to hunt down hidden exlosives even when terrorists have been cleared out of a Mosque.
I think it was someone trying to claim this is a "false" story. Or someone who really hates libertarians.
Grandma Mable gets scanned because the TSA isn't racist
Grandma Mable gets probed and pulled aside for a "random bag check" because people like you are idiots and too damn stupid to understand the idea of focusing resources where they will do the most good.
The guy below says he is "not comfortable" with the government keeping "tabs" on citizens. I guess he's never applied for any job that required a real background check, where agents will actually go and interview friends, neighbors, past employers, etc. And I'm sure you and he both don't understand the level of infiltration and front-organization setups that go on in the incestuous relationship between US mosques, terrorist front groups (CAIR was founded by two Hamas members, "Islamic Society of North America" is a Muslim Brotherhood organization, half the "charities" in Dearbornistan MI are Hezbollah front groups, and so on).
Political correctness gone amok is getting to be more of a danger to us than the pedoprophet's followers are!
No, the goal is "security theater." Make people think you are doing something, even if what you are doing is worthless and pointless.
If we really wanted safety, we would follow the Israeli model. Catch the people flying single, with a one-way ticket especially. Extra scrutiny for those with connections to terrorist and fundamentalist organizations.
The problem with the US is that we are so hung up on "OMG PROFILING RAWR" and "waah we can't let muslims think we're against them" that we refuse to acknowledge the differences between Islam and every actual peaceful religion in the world, we refuse to acknowledge the teachings of Islam that make fundamentalism so easy to develop in the pedo's moon cult, and we refuse to acknowledge that a large number (majority or mere sizable minority, makes no difference) of them consider themselves to be "at war" with any non-muslim. There's a reason Islam considers the world broken into two pieces and calls them "Dar Al-Islam" and "Dar Al-Harb": the second means "domain of war."
We don't have to declare to be "at war" with them. They're at war with us merely for not being muslim.
This is nothing new. Thomas Jefferson himself reported to Congress, after meeting with Sidi Haji Abdrahaman (Tripoli's envoy to London): "The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise."
Isn't it nice how we have become so spineless that we now just roll over for them?
No, the real reason is that in most of these areas, the company - verizon, comcast, cox, etc - is a FUCKING MONOPOLY. In 90% of the US, you have your choice of either one ISP, or dialup, and that's it. In major metro areas, you might have a competition between the DSL guys and the local cable TV monopoly, but that's a fucking joke in itself since they all have side collusion agreements not to let their prices get too far apart.
No competition = no reason for prices to come down.
If the Democrats really cared about broadband penetration like they were lying about, they'd have crafted equal-access laws to force other carriers to be able to get into the market like they did for local and long-distance phone carriers ages ago. The fact that they haven't shows you just how much hot air they spew whenever they talk about it.
Actually, in plenty of schools that's exactly what they will do.
Welcome to the days where school has become nothing but a crappy day-care replacement.
No, I'm serious. In most public schools, the purpose is not for the kids to learn. The purpose is to pay substandard wages to a bunch of idiots who were too dumb to realize what they were really getting into, give them zero support and tools to actually enforce classroom discipline, and then tell them to just keep the kids in the building between the hours of 8 and 5 so the absentee parents can go off to work.
The schools have financial incentive to pack as many fucking kids in per classroom as possible. And even if there is a kid so bad (knifing, bringing guns, obviously bringing drugs, etc), good luck getting rid of the kid. The most you can do is have them sent to "alternative school" for a month, and in the meantime the deadbeat shithead parents are busy getting a lawyer and spinning sob stories to the media about how their "good little angel" is getting a bad rap because of the "racist teacher who obviously hates them."
The whole system is fucking broken. The feds give out money on a per-head basis, so the schools want to pack in as many kids as possible even if it means overloading the rooms. The localities enact truancy laws that stuff the good-for-nothings into schools with the kids who are actually there to learn. 5 of 9 shitheads in black robes say we can't even check for legal status and kick out the worthless leeching motherfuckers who ought to be deported. Parents scream and complain if their "good little gifted angel", who's actually an unmotivated little retard, doesn't get into the same class as the kids who ought to be on an accelerated track. And when little Roshanjam, the 9th son of Shaniqua who has 8 other half-brothers and no daddy for any of them, gets into fights and gangs and knifes people and someone actually hauls him in, there she is crying and screaming "racism" and unwilling to accept that no, her kid is a criminal little punk who has his head straight up his own ass.
There are professional race-baiters out there who see "racism" in the color of their morning coffee.
Most of them work for people like Al Sharpton, or racial supremacist organizations like the NAACP or LULAC.
Actually, most of those ads are written so that *no American can possibly fill them*.
They're called "PERM ads", and they are designed to do an end-run around the US's H1-B Visa system. They run completely fake, ludicrous ads that look a lot like this analysis here.
Then they lie their asses off claiming they "can't find qualified Americans" for the job, and proceed to try to hire H1-B's (who are locked in to one employer and get shit wages) instead. Meanwhile, Americans who actually DO qualify for the job are shut out of the hiring process, since when the employers go looking in India or elsewhere, the job requirements magically return to what's actually going to be needed on the job.
Rewarding for loyalty stopped the moment the magic "outsourcing" and mass-corporate-takeover scams began.
My father worked for a company for 25 years, only to get shoved out the door when a multinational bought his company up just for the patents and then shit-canned everyone. Since that time, every job he's been in has been the same way: the company exists *just long enough* to develop some patent or product. Then the company gets bought out, everyone gets shit-canned as they shut down all local offices, and "continued development" is moved overseas and ceases to be about making the product better, but instead making it out of this shittiest, crappiest components designed to break within a month of the warranty expiring.
There is no such thing as loyalty anymore - companies don't see their employees as valued, they have no loyalty towards them, so it should be no surprise that an entire generation's decided that loyalty to your employer is just a sucker's game.
As for the corporate types: the assholes at the top are all soulless shits who need to be shot, because they're the ones who got us into this mess.
They'd fuck with the english translation for the same reason they fuck with the english translations generally, and the same reason they created the Great Firewall of China.
Trusting the "official translation" of the Chinese Communist Party is asking for an ass-raping.
Standard response of a dog to a locked door: whine, whine, bark, bark, whine, wait for human to open door.
Standard response of a cat to a locked door: probe every possible nook and cranny for cracks. Test seams with forceful pressure. Slide paw under to test for something to grab on to. When that finally fails, say "fuck it", and go curl up for a nap.
I say the cat is smarter. At least the cat has reasoning capability. The dog will sit there for a day or more waiting rather than learn its lesson.
I don't know why we are relying on a Google translated article when Xinhua News Agency (state run [wikipedia.org]) offers their own English translations [peopledaily.com.cn] (second copy [beijingnews.net]) of this exact news release.
Maybe because trusting the "official translation" of a despotic tin-pot dictatorship with delusions of world domination just, possibly, might be a bad idea?
Give me the original Dark Forces. The one BEFORE they did "Jedi Knight" and the game became nothing but wankers with lightsabers.
Seriously. They made a great, in-universe Star Wars title that didn't need a lightsaber. Then they made a sequel where by the end of it, you never fucking picked up another weapon again. And in the following sequels, you REALLY didn't even bother to touch anything but the fucking glow-rod for weaponry.
There's more to Star Wars than just jerkoffs comparing lightsaber sizes. And there's far more of us who miss the days when being a fan of Star Wars was more than sitting around in a black robe with a plastic lightsaber and showing up at conventions calling yourself Darth Obesity.
No spherical chickens?
I had professors who simply gave every student the chance to bring a note sheet to the exam.
One 8-12x11" sheet of paper. Both sides. Put whatever you want on it. The kids who printed it up with every possible item in 3-point font failed, those who put down the relevant concepts and formulae in a quick and easy-access format succeeded, because the test was actually structured to test whether you had learned the concepts and how to apply them.
Of course, this requires that the professor isn't a lazy asshole who's been using the same, unchanged scantron-based multiple guess test for the past 20 years.
This is why shake/crank is perhaps the best. As long as someone has enough energy to move, they have the energy to operate. And as long as a shake/crank device has an external plug to power other things, you can make it run.
The worse part today, however, is how much power devices use.
- Backlit screen? Better be switchable. The screen needs to be readable in sunlight too, so that switching the backlight off actually saves power usefully.
- Processor? The slower, the better. Yes, that's counterintuitive, but power consumption scales linearly with clock speed. Getting the workable voltage down as far as possible also helps, since it's actually the square of the voltage that impacts power consumption - the problem there is, current tech can only go down so far, and the "lowest voltage" CPU's also happen to be the most fragile.
- Extra devices. USB costs power. How much depends on the device, but do you REALLY want to saddle them without the ability to run an external backup device or printer?
Yes, I'd fully accept that most P2P traffic is illegal,
Then you're an idiot. You just pointed out one high-traffic area in which "p2p" protocols are used. But more and more companies are moving to "p2p"
protocols for distribution every day. A lot of the "freeware" (as in "free to play, buy the items if you want") MMO's are distributing their client via p2p to keep the cost down.
The false claim that even "most P2P traffic" is illegal is one way the MafiAA skunks try to skew the debate.
He wasn't left wing.
He wasn't right wing.
He was a moron who'd basically just let anything by his desk, no questions asked.
and if it wasn't for the man made disaster that was our levy system,
You mean, if it wasn't for the greed and corruption that left the levee system unmaintained and ready to fail.
And of course there's the fact that the levee system was rated for a category 3 hurricane, while Katrina was actually a Category 4 - in other words, exceed the specs, expect failures.
I've visited NO. It's a decent place to visit. Wouldn't really want to live there till they get out of the Poverty-Pimp business though.