"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison
Our system fails whenever one party amasses too much power. Since 2006, it's basically been all in the hands of Democrats, since Bush was a wishy-washy RINO who wouldn't stand up to Pelosi and Reid anyways.
But go along with what you want to think. Personally, I subscribe to the "keep government divided" school. If the Democrats have the congress, vote Republican for Prez. If the Democrats have the prez, vote Republican for congress.
If you let one group have it all, they fuck the system up. Happened under Carter, happened for the first two years of Clinton, happened under Shrub for basically 8 years since he was a wishy-washy rubberstamp, and happened now for the past two under Oh Bummer.
Even Crysis - which at one point was the "go-to" benchmark game - performs very well on a single 5770.
There are "games" which are basically tech demos meant to stress cards, and that's the category into which Crysis falls. For everyone else, the existing games are either a console port (in which case they are tuned for 5 year old hardware anyways) or are tuned down enough to run on 5 year old hardware (sometimes even those crapass Intel-onboard video solutions that come from manufacturers like Dell) in order to widen their possible-sales market wide enough to break even.
The problem is, how much does it cost? Radeon 5770s can be had for $120 at Newegg after rebate, so why the hell would I need to waste $500 on this card? I could hook up a pair of 5770's for much less and get similar performance.
And what the hell games on the PC is it actually supposed to be required to play?
The AMD cards do just fine from the last gen, when they were beating NVidia cards. And I'm willing to bet that the "next gen" AMD card will see similar performance increases as well when it hits by next month.
Oddly enough, there was talk from Bethesda at one point of actually making Fallout 3 (or at least the PS3 port) able to read mods from a USB device, so that people could actually load 3rd-party mods on their console.
Officially acknowledged by Nintendo. What's worse, their "solution" involved gamers actually mailing an SD card to them to have the savefile "repaired."
Before I forget... the other culprit in this is the major gaming stores.
"Release day" parties (Call of Doody last night dumping another buggy load of shit on gamers to be "patched" in a month and then again a month after that, oh joy). "Preorder incentives", like the various MMO's that give you a vanity item, or the pseudo-MMO-FPS titles where they give you an "upgraded gun", or the various preorder packs for Fallout: New Vegas that were based on which store you preordered from (Amazon, Worst Buy, Gamestop Pawnshops, etc).
The industry as a whole is simply not focused on putting out a good product that stands the test of time any more. It's all about first-week or first-month sales, and if they are good enough, then *maybe* you get a patched disc available (which you have to purchase all over again if you want to hold on to it) as a "Silver Edition", "Platinum Hits", or "Game of the Year Edition" a year later.
What's worse is the fervor for all the "DLC" crap these days. Don't get me wrong, DLC as a method of shipping out expansion packs is fine. The problem is that these days, there is no way to preserve your purchase. 5 years from now, most people may still have their original disc, but good luck with getting the game running properly if you want to load it up on a console with "backwards compatibility" - if anyone else hasn't noticed, all the patches and DLC for original Xbox titles have basically gone into the ether after MS shut down the original Live servers. Halo2 maps? Poof, gone. Halo2 patches? Poof, gone. Same for all other original Xbox titles.
Answer: Obsidian tried to do a hell of a lot more inside the engine than Bethesda ever dreamed.
The landscape's more ambitious than the engine seems to be able to handle. Result? Constant clipping errors. Nothing is quite as annoying as having to go off to get a sandwich because my traveling companion has decided that a local radscorpion... who is stuck inside of a big rock thanks to a clipping error... must die and my companion isn't going to move until some lucky shot manages to clip the one tiny pixel that's clipping its way back outside the rock.
The companion engine - with "companions" and "followers" - is likewise buggy, especially when getting indoors, or triggering certain quests that try to "reset" or add to your companion's speech tree.
The inventory system has its limitations. In my apartment in Novac, I've basically assigned a different storage "locker" (dresser, fridge, wardrobe, suitcase, etc) for each different category of item and a couple of subcategories besides, just to keep up.
And then there are the myriad bugs with the faction system, where "on the fly" calculations had the Fiends suddenly turn on me for no apparent reason while I was exploring Vault 3. Going through companion-less worked just fine, no idea why the companion (who was just told to wait by the door anyways) would have caused that though.
The "cinematic kill" system I'm about to turn off. I've lost track of the number of times the game's frozen during a cinematic kill. That and the fact that the "cinematic kill" freezes the player, but changes nothing else going on, which has killed my companion a couple of times (couldn't get to them till the cinematic ended, meanwhile some asshole with an uzi is just pumping them full of lead while I'm forced to watch).
Now, was Fallout 3 perfect? Hell no. But New Vegas definitely stretches the engine to its limitations. I remain hopeful for the upcoming patch to make it more playable, but at the same time I really would prefer they had done the quality control work in the first place.
The problem therein is that all the publishers really give a crap about is first-month sales. Chances are, if everyone is waiting for the game to be patched, then the patch will never see the light of day because they will assume the game failed and that's the end of it.
There was a time that the main rallying cry of the console gamers who didn't want to play on PC was "it just works" when they put the disc into the console. But now, with the advent of online-enabled consoles, so much for that. Xbox and PS3 gamers are forced to sit through the old "ship now, patch later" setup, and woe to someone who has an offline console and simply has to suffer through the bugs - since none of the companies are interested in putting their fucking game patches in a USB-storage compatible file for offline updating.
I'd say that the Wii doesn't have so much of this, but then there was the game-breaking Metroid: Other M bug, as well as the 5-6 other bugged doors that wouldn't "break" the game but would prevent 100% completion. And of course, most of the 3rd-parties writing for the Wii these days aren't doing quality control since they're simply shovelware houses putting out crappy knockoffs.
6-7 years of experience in technologies that are only 2-3 years old.
10+ years of experience with operating systems that are less than 5 old.
Version-number-specific job requirements for a version of a software package that never shipped or never even existed (e.g. requiring experience on version 8.5 when the company skipped straight from 8.3.4 to 9.0).
Every goddamn "certification" known to mankind, including several not offered in the US or that are no longer issued.
All this, and more, can be found on the "job requirements" of any company claiming they "need H1-B's" because they "can't find qualified Americans." Microsoft makes a daily practice of it, for instance.
You obviously failed logic, if they even taught it in what was most probably laughably called "school" if you even graduated.
The logic is rather as follows: 90% or more of the population has $x per month in income. Of that, a very minor amount is disposable income. The rest goes into food, rent, transportation, and other daily necessities.
So, they have money. They have the option of spending money on various amenities or saving it.
After individual choices are averaged out (remember, you can't deal with the decision of each individual to purchase or not-purchase, you have to look at the societal average), it turns out that the music and entertainment industries benefit from file sharing. Which is to say that as a whole, industry-wide profits went UP and down as people chose to spend more money on them than they otherwise would have absent filesharing.
The reason for this is simple: more people were exposed to things they wanted to own legitimate copies of than they would have been absent file sharing.
Who loses in this scenario? The industries where file sharing can't push as much exposure. Booksellers haven't been doing nearly as well recently, because less people are reading newspapers (so no book reviews), using public libraries, and are spending their time (also a limited quantity) consuming other products.
But what the studies have shown, consistently, is that the industries with filesharing have done just fine. Individual actors within have fallen, but individual actors within those industries are always rising and falling, whether "filesharing" is a concern or not.
In a world where "filesharing" is hyped as being the death of everyone, it is an oddity that (a) software, (b) music, and (c) movies are doing just fine (when you go through the honest accounting, rather than the dishonest Hollywood Accounting method designed mostly to hide their profits from the tax man). (D) books, (E) restaurants, and (F) Miscellaneous other entertainments are not doing so hot. Hell, even (G) the brothels aren't doing so well out in Reno.
In the ongoing struggle between A,B,C,D,E,F and G for disposable income, A,B, and C, which are the industries claiming to be "hardest hit" by "piracy", actually are doing quite nicely, and the research proves it. Filesharing isn't harming them, it's keeping people exposed to their products.
As for (H) saving the money for later? The average USA consumer hasn't done that in decades.
The law, as originally written, was entirely based on what a person made. And it followed the longstanding legal precedent used in most other laws of this sort, also known as "treble damages."
If you were out selling bootlegs at $5/cd, your "treble damages" would be $15/cd. Enough to take away all your profits, any equipment, and make it absolutely clear that you were being punished.
The first fraud that has been perpetrated in respect to copyright law is the removal of that phrase, which is what allows subhuman MafiAA snakes to put the dumbest shits on a jury that they can and then try to convince them that there were billions of dollars worth of "damages" done by someone. The second fraud is the ridiculous notion of a 1:1 correlation between a shared file and a "lost sale."
Numerous studies have shown that far from being damaging, so-called "piracy" actually is a net benefit to the industry as a whole: the only "artists" who get burned are the talentless, overproduced hacks like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus who really shouldn't be on top anyways.
A judge's ruling that a certain level of "damages" is excessive is very much precedent - whether individually binding, contributory to an overall aggregate of similar decisions, or "persuasive" precedent (essentially similar to Amicus briefs in the way that they can be considered in relation to a current case) - that can affect the damages the MafiAA may be able to extort in future trials.
Vacating a ruling means that you declare the ruling inapplicable and inadmissible to any future proceeding - in essence, "Null and Void." As such, a vacated ruling cannot be cited as precedent, whether binding or persuasive.
Now please run along, little child. The grownups are trying to have a grown-up discussion of important things. Come back in 18 years or so when you have a firm grounding in the real world and how the legal system works.
They also are brazen enough to try to charge any artist who demands to audit the books the cost of the audit... a very, very, very inflated cost of course.
The problem is, the laws they are using to prosecute this are almost entirely inapplicable to the situation.
There was never supposed to be a major nasty punishment in law for noncommercial activity. Copyright laws weren't written to assault someone who photocopies a chapter of a book to study from, or even the whole book. They were written to go after the guy who set up a printing press in a warehouse, or an LP-pressing machine, or a CD-burning machine, started burning bootleg copies and then selling them on the street corner or somewhere else for profit while undercutting the copyright owner.
At points along the way, the dishonest content cartels decided they wanted even more power. Thus we got punishments for noncommercial copying, even though users are supposed to have the right to secure their purchases and back up what they have purchased.
Then we got EULA's and all the crappy stupidity that entails, and a legion of idiot, fuckwitted judges couldn't figure out that if it has the form of a sale (e.g. one-time payment, usage in perpetuity) then it is a SALE. Only a few judges ever have enough brain cells to rub together in order to get it right, like the one who ruled in favor of unbundling Adobe packages and selling the pieces one at a time.
As it turns out, most judges are retarded technophobes who were raised at the teat of assholes like Jack Valenti.
But earlier this year, the judge found that amount to be "monstrous and shocking" and reduced the amount to $54,000. Following that, the RIAA informed Thomas-Rasset that it would accept $25,000--less than half of the court-reduced award--if she agreed to ask the judge to "vacate" his decision, which means removing his decision from the record. Thomas-Rasset rejected that offer almost immediately.
The judge's decision stood as a great precedent.
Therefore, the scumwad MafiAA lawyers tried to extort Thomas to have the judge's decision vacated - essentially, make it invalid so that nobody else the MafiAA extortion racket targets can hold up the judge's decision as precedent against them.
Also: Updated at 8:20 p.m. PT with comment from Thomas-Rasset attorney, and at 9:10 p.m. to emphasize the illegal sharing aspect of the copyright complaint.
Why is it Cnet doesn't say who told them to do that? Some subhuman MafiAA goon lawyer wants to remain anonymous. How typical of them.
Dope-smoking MafiAA accountants. The same people who decide that a multiplatinum album grossing over a billion dollars in sales, for which the band was fronted $45k each in a year, studio time perhaps $500k, physical production run costs possibly $200k, and $200,000 in "tour support" can somehow lose money.
I love how retards like you fail to understand how bandwidth works.
You're not paying for a certain amount of downloads per month as if you were buying gas. You're paying for a pipe with a certain momentary capacity measurable in a very small time frame, say 100mbit/second.
When they start advertising "high max data speeds" but then implement a cap that works out to a piddly-crap connection worse than dialup (the standard crapass USA ISP like Comcrap, or Coxsuckers at 150GB limit equals 0.45 Mbit/second), they are committing false advertising, plain and simple.
First - FORD pardoned Nixon. Carter didn't. So your whole first paragraph is raw idiocy.
Obama has not wreaked this economy upon us, the Bush administration and the prior Congress did.
"The prior Congress" - you mean the one Obama was a part of as a US Senator, when Obama voted for every last one of the fucked-up policies that said Congress passed and Shrub43 signed...
Clinton fixed a broken economy,
Please, do tell me what alternate reality you came from. The economy was already on the mend well before Clinton got elected, just too late to save Bush41.
Between being scared to death of Hillarycare and reeling from Clinton's tax hikes, the economy took another nosedive until 1994. And that we can blame squarely on Clinton and the Democrats he had in Congress.
You mean like "all our power should come from wind, geothermal, and algae"?
How about "we should nationalize the health care industry"?
How about "fuck it, just send all the jobs overseas and give every social program we can to illegal aliens anyways with no way to pay for it"?
Or the other side, which says to go full-bore laissez-faire economics and will send troops to war at moment's notice without figuring out what it costs, and will happily pay blood money to shithead tin-pot dictators and religious monarchies run by 7th century pedophile cults because they have oil?
Seems like both parties are pretty much batshit insane already.
Really? The first two years of Clinton were pretty damn shitty. As I pointed out to someone else, the President isn't half as important as who's running Congress save for being able to put the brakes on what Congress passes.
Thanks to Perot, we got two years of Democrats trying to push all sorts of their favorite tax-tax-tax-spend-spend-spend items, just like we've seen in the past two years now. Without Perot, Bush41 likely would have won, and Congress would likely have stayed Democrat at least until 1996.
About the only thing Perot proved is that if you are a multibillionaire, you can cause a shitstorm in the system by throwing your dishonestly-gained money around.
I live in a state that is completely vote by mail. It is ridiculously easy to register to vote. You can vote for anyone you like. Anyone who doesn't vote is lazy, indifferent or ineligible. They get the representation they deserve. The problem is that I also get the representation that they deserve.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken
So, you'd be from Oregon then? Looks like Tom Cox rather fucked your state over by splitting the vote in 2002, you wound up with that complete slimeball Ted Kulongoski as governor by a tiny margin - very similar to the problem I point out above.
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
"Ambition must be made to counteract ambition" - James Madison
Our system fails whenever one party amasses too much power. Since 2006, it's basically been all in the hands of Democrats, since Bush was a wishy-washy RINO who wouldn't stand up to Pelosi and Reid anyways.
But go along with what you want to think. Personally, I subscribe to the "keep government divided" school. If the Democrats have the congress, vote Republican for Prez. If the Democrats have the prez, vote Republican for congress.
If you let one group have it all, they fuck the system up. Happened under Carter, happened for the first two years of Clinton, happened under Shrub for basically 8 years since he was a wishy-washy rubberstamp, and happened now for the past two under Oh Bummer.
Democrats have been in power since 2006.
How's that working out for you?
I can buy two 5770's, AND have $50 in my pocket, for the price of one 5870...
Precisely the point I was making.
Even Crysis - which at one point was the "go-to" benchmark game - performs very well on a single 5770.
There are "games" which are basically tech demos meant to stress cards, and that's the category into which Crysis falls. For everyone else, the existing games are either a console port (in which case they are tuned for 5 year old hardware anyways) or are tuned down enough to run on 5 year old hardware (sometimes even those crapass Intel-onboard video solutions that come from manufacturers like Dell) in order to widen their possible-sales market wide enough to break even.
The problem is, how much does it cost? Radeon 5770s can be had for $120 at Newegg after rebate, so why the hell would I need to waste $500 on this card? I could hook up a pair of 5770's for much less and get similar performance.
And what the hell games on the PC is it actually supposed to be required to play?
The AMD cards do just fine from the last gen, when they were beating NVidia cards. And I'm willing to bet that the "next gen" AMD card will see similar performance increases as well when it hits by next month.
Oddly enough, there was talk from Bethesda at one point of actually making Fallout 3 (or at least the PS3 port) able to read mods from a USB device, so that people could actually load 3rd-party mods on their console.
I wonder whatever became of that.
Other M was worse, though, in that they actually had ammo pickups you had to find AFTER the last boss was dead.
Not quite. There's a "secret boss" in the after-game "run around to find the rest of the crap" setup.
Game-Breaking Bug.
Officially acknowledged by Nintendo. What's worse, their "solution" involved gamers actually mailing an SD card to them to have the savefile "repaired."
Insanity.
Before I forget... the other culprit in this is the major gaming stores.
"Release day" parties (Call of Doody last night dumping another buggy load of shit on gamers to be "patched" in a month and then again a month after that, oh joy). "Preorder incentives", like the various MMO's that give you a vanity item, or the pseudo-MMO-FPS titles where they give you an "upgraded gun", or the various preorder packs for Fallout: New Vegas that were based on which store you preordered from (Amazon, Worst Buy, Gamestop Pawnshops, etc).
The industry as a whole is simply not focused on putting out a good product that stands the test of time any more. It's all about first-week or first-month sales, and if they are good enough, then *maybe* you get a patched disc available (which you have to purchase all over again if you want to hold on to it) as a "Silver Edition", "Platinum Hits", or "Game of the Year Edition" a year later.
What's worse is the fervor for all the "DLC" crap these days. Don't get me wrong, DLC as a method of shipping out expansion packs is fine. The problem is that these days, there is no way to preserve your purchase. 5 years from now, most people may still have their original disc, but good luck with getting the game running properly if you want to load it up on a console with "backwards compatibility" - if anyone else hasn't noticed, all the patches and DLC for original Xbox titles have basically gone into the ether after MS shut down the original Live servers. Halo2 maps? Poof, gone. Halo2 patches? Poof, gone. Same for all other original Xbox titles.
Answer: Obsidian tried to do a hell of a lot more inside the engine than Bethesda ever dreamed.
The landscape's more ambitious than the engine seems to be able to handle. Result? Constant clipping errors. Nothing is quite as annoying as having to go off to get a sandwich because my traveling companion has decided that a local radscorpion... who is stuck inside of a big rock thanks to a clipping error... must die and my companion isn't going to move until some lucky shot manages to clip the one tiny pixel that's clipping its way back outside the rock.
The companion engine - with "companions" and "followers" - is likewise buggy, especially when getting indoors, or triggering certain quests that try to "reset" or add to your companion's speech tree.
The inventory system has its limitations. In my apartment in Novac, I've basically assigned a different storage "locker" (dresser, fridge, wardrobe, suitcase, etc) for each different category of item and a couple of subcategories besides, just to keep up.
And then there are the myriad bugs with the faction system, where "on the fly" calculations had the Fiends suddenly turn on me for no apparent reason while I was exploring Vault 3. Going through companion-less worked just fine, no idea why the companion (who was just told to wait by the door anyways) would have caused that though.
The "cinematic kill" system I'm about to turn off. I've lost track of the number of times the game's frozen during a cinematic kill. That and the fact that the "cinematic kill" freezes the player, but changes nothing else going on, which has killed my companion a couple of times (couldn't get to them till the cinematic ended, meanwhile some asshole with an uzi is just pumping them full of lead while I'm forced to watch).
Now, was Fallout 3 perfect? Hell no. But New Vegas definitely stretches the engine to its limitations. I remain hopeful for the upcoming patch to make it more playable, but at the same time I really would prefer they had done the quality control work in the first place.
The problem therein is that all the publishers really give a crap about is first-month sales. Chances are, if everyone is waiting for the game to be patched, then the patch will never see the light of day because they will assume the game failed and that's the end of it.
There was a time that the main rallying cry of the console gamers who didn't want to play on PC was "it just works" when they put the disc into the console. But now, with the advent of online-enabled consoles, so much for that. Xbox and PS3 gamers are forced to sit through the old "ship now, patch later" setup, and woe to someone who has an offline console and simply has to suffer through the bugs - since none of the companies are interested in putting their fucking game patches in a USB-storage compatible file for offline updating.
I'd say that the Wii doesn't have so much of this, but then there was the game-breaking Metroid: Other M bug, as well as the 5-6 other bugged doors that wouldn't "break" the game but would prevent 100% completion. And of course, most of the 3rd-parties writing for the Wii these days aren't doing quality control since they're simply shovelware houses putting out crappy knockoffs.
6-7 years of experience in technologies that are only 2-3 years old.
10+ years of experience with operating systems that are less than 5 old.
Version-number-specific job requirements for a version of a software package that never shipped or never even existed (e.g. requiring experience on version 8.5 when the company skipped straight from 8.3.4 to 9.0).
Every goddamn "certification" known to mankind, including several not offered in the US or that are no longer issued.
All this, and more, can be found on the "job requirements" of any company claiming they "need H1-B's" because they "can't find qualified Americans." Microsoft makes a daily practice of it, for instance.
The logic works like this.
You obviously failed logic, if they even taught it in what was most probably laughably called "school" if you even graduated.
The logic is rather as follows: 90% or more of the population has $x per month in income. Of that, a very minor amount is disposable income. The rest goes into food, rent, transportation, and other daily necessities.
So, they have money. They have the option of spending money on various amenities or saving it.
After individual choices are averaged out (remember, you can't deal with the decision of each individual to purchase or not-purchase, you have to look at the societal average), it turns out that the music and entertainment industries benefit from file sharing. Which is to say that as a whole, industry-wide profits went UP and down as people chose to spend more money on them than they otherwise would have absent filesharing.
The reason for this is simple: more people were exposed to things they wanted to own legitimate copies of than they would have been absent file sharing.
Who loses in this scenario? The industries where file sharing can't push as much exposure. Booksellers haven't been doing nearly as well recently, because less people are reading newspapers (so no book reviews), using public libraries, and are spending their time (also a limited quantity) consuming other products.
But what the studies have shown, consistently, is that the industries with filesharing have done just fine. Individual actors within have fallen, but individual actors within those industries are always rising and falling, whether "filesharing" is a concern or not.
In a world where "filesharing" is hyped as being the death of everyone, it is an oddity that (a) software, (b) music, and (c) movies are doing just fine (when you go through the honest accounting, rather than the dishonest Hollywood Accounting method designed mostly to hide their profits from the tax man). (D) books, (E) restaurants, and (F) Miscellaneous other entertainments are not doing so hot. Hell, even (G) the brothels aren't doing so well out in Reno.
In the ongoing struggle between A,B,C,D,E,F and G for disposable income, A,B, and C, which are the industries claiming to be "hardest hit" by "piracy", actually are doing quite nicely, and the research proves it. Filesharing isn't harming them, it's keeping people exposed to their products.
As for (H) saving the money for later? The average USA consumer hasn't done that in decades.
Not so.
The law, as originally written, was entirely based on what a person made. And it followed the longstanding legal precedent used in most other laws of this sort, also known as "treble damages."
If you were out selling bootlegs at $5/cd, your "treble damages" would be $15/cd. Enough to take away all your profits, any equipment, and make it absolutely clear that you were being punished.
The first fraud that has been perpetrated in respect to copyright law is the removal of that phrase, which is what allows subhuman MafiAA snakes to put the dumbest shits on a jury that they can and then try to convince them that there were billions of dollars worth of "damages" done by someone. The second fraud is the ridiculous notion of a 1:1 correlation between a shared file and a "lost sale."
Numerous studies have shown that far from being damaging, so-called "piracy" actually is a net benefit to the industry as a whole: the only "artists" who get burned are the talentless, overproduced hacks like Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus who really shouldn't be on top anyways.
You're an idiot.
A judge's ruling that a certain level of "damages" is excessive is very much precedent - whether individually binding, contributory to an overall aggregate of similar decisions, or "persuasive" precedent (essentially similar to Amicus briefs in the way that they can be considered in relation to a current case) - that can affect the damages the MafiAA may be able to extort in future trials.
Vacating a ruling means that you declare the ruling inapplicable and inadmissible to any future proceeding - in essence, "Null and Void." As such, a vacated ruling cannot be cited as precedent, whether binding or persuasive.
Now please run along, little child. The grownups are trying to have a grown-up discussion of important things. Come back in 18 years or so when you have a firm grounding in the real world and how the legal system works.
They also are brazen enough to try to charge any artist who demands to audit the books the cost of the audit... a very, very, very inflated cost of course.
The problem is, the laws they are using to prosecute this are almost entirely inapplicable to the situation.
There was never supposed to be a major nasty punishment in law for noncommercial activity. Copyright laws weren't written to assault someone who photocopies a chapter of a book to study from, or even the whole book. They were written to go after the guy who set up a printing press in a warehouse, or an LP-pressing machine, or a CD-burning machine, started burning bootleg copies and then selling them on the street corner or somewhere else for profit while undercutting the copyright owner.
At points along the way, the dishonest content cartels decided they wanted even more power. Thus we got punishments for noncommercial copying, even though users are supposed to have the right to secure their purchases and back up what they have purchased.
Then we got EULA's and all the crappy stupidity that entails, and a legion of idiot, fuckwitted judges couldn't figure out that if it has the form of a sale (e.g. one-time payment, usage in perpetuity) then it is a SALE. Only a few judges ever have enough brain cells to rub together in order to get it right, like the one who ruled in favor of unbundling Adobe packages and selling the pieces one at a time.
As it turns out, most judges are retarded technophobes who were raised at the teat of assholes like Jack Valenti.
It actually goes on.
But earlier this year, the judge found that amount to be "monstrous and shocking" and reduced the amount to $54,000. Following that, the RIAA informed Thomas-Rasset that it would accept $25,000--less than half of the court-reduced award--if she agreed to ask the judge to "vacate" his decision, which means removing his decision from the record. Thomas-Rasset rejected that offer almost immediately.
The judge's decision stood as a great precedent.
Therefore, the scumwad MafiAA lawyers tried to extort Thomas to have the judge's decision vacated - essentially, make it invalid so that nobody else the MafiAA extortion racket targets can hold up the judge's decision as precedent against them.
Also:
Updated at 8:20 p.m. PT with comment from Thomas-Rasset attorney, and at 9:10 p.m. to emphasize the illegal sharing aspect of the copyright complaint.
Why is it Cnet doesn't say who told them to do that? Some subhuman MafiAA goon lawyer wants to remain anonymous. How typical of them.
Dope-smoking MafiAA accountants. The same people who decide that a multiplatinum album grossing over a billion dollars in sales, for which the band was fronted $45k each in a year, studio time perhaps $500k, physical production run costs possibly $200k, and $200,000 in "tour support" can somehow lose money.
See also (though I usually hate linking to wikipoo-dia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
"500GB Limit."
I love how retards like you fail to understand how bandwidth works.
You're not paying for a certain amount of downloads per month as if you were buying gas. You're paying for a pipe with a certain momentary capacity measurable in a very small time frame, say 100mbit/second.
When they start advertising "high max data speeds" but then implement a cap that works out to a piddly-crap connection worse than dialup (the standard crapass USA ISP like Comcrap, or Coxsuckers at 150GB limit equals 0.45 Mbit/second), they are committing false advertising, plain and simple.
And who were they during most of Bush II, who ran the biggest deficits of all time?
Barack Obama's deficit for just the last two years is bigger than all 8 years of Bush43 in aggregate.
So I really must ask, what illegal substances have you been smoking?
Try again.
Run the numbers comparing the ACTUAL crucial factors:
#1 - did just one party control both Congress and the Presidency?
#2 - Were the Democrats holding Congress?
Remember: CONGRESS WRITES THE BUDGET. "Power of the purse", clearly delineated in the Constitution. All the President has is the power of veto.
Clinton didn't "give us" a surplus. The guys writing the budget from Congress did. Guess which party they were from?
First - FORD pardoned Nixon. Carter didn't. So your whole first paragraph is raw idiocy.
Obama has not wreaked this economy upon us, the Bush administration and the prior Congress did.
"The prior Congress" - you mean the one Obama was a part of as a US Senator, when Obama voted for every last one of the fucked-up policies that said Congress passed and Shrub43 signed...
Clinton fixed a broken economy,
Please, do tell me what alternate reality you came from. The economy was already on the mend well before Clinton got elected, just too late to save Bush41.
Between being scared to death of Hillarycare and reeling from Clinton's tax hikes, the economy took another nosedive until 1994. And that we can blame squarely on Clinton and the Democrats he had in Congress.
You mean like "all our power should come from wind, geothermal, and algae"?
How about "we should nationalize the health care industry"?
How about "fuck it, just send all the jobs overseas and give every social program we can to illegal aliens anyways with no way to pay for it"?
Or the other side, which says to go full-bore laissez-faire economics and will send troops to war at moment's notice without figuring out what it costs, and will happily pay blood money to shithead tin-pot dictators and religious monarchies run by 7th century pedophile cults because they have oil?
Seems like both parties are pretty much batshit insane already.
That was an improvement.
Really? The first two years of Clinton were pretty damn shitty. As I pointed out to someone else, the President isn't half as important as who's running Congress save for being able to put the brakes on what Congress passes.
Thanks to Perot, we got two years of Democrats trying to push all sorts of their favorite tax-tax-tax-spend-spend-spend items, just like we've seen in the past two years now. Without Perot, Bush41 likely would have won, and Congress would likely have stayed Democrat at least until 1996.
About the only thing Perot proved is that if you are a multibillionaire, you can cause a shitstorm in the system by throwing your dishonestly-gained money around.
I live in a state that is completely vote by mail. It is ridiculously easy to register to vote. You can vote for anyone you like. Anyone who doesn't vote is lazy, indifferent or ineligible. They get the representation they deserve. The problem is that I also get the representation that they deserve.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken
So, you'd be from Oregon then? Looks like Tom Cox rather fucked your state over by splitting the vote in 2002, you wound up with that complete slimeball Ted Kulongoski as governor by a tiny margin - very similar to the problem I point out above.