Thankfully, precious few games do I buy for the PS3. Most of my buying goes to the Xbox360.
PS3 utterly lacking a "killer app" game of any sort makes it easy to do. Most of the time, it's just an overly expensive (given that I bought an early edition) DVD/Blu-ray player. I highly suspect that this will continue in the future.
Plus, if I have to take the update from disc, so be it. Should I find the game so important, I'll "accept" it at that point. They still can't push random updates "over the network" if it's unplugged from ethernet and doesn't have an active wireless connection.
But wait till Sony decides to push a "mandatory" update without approval while your box is still "online" for the purpose of media and netflix streaming. And then it bricks your box or removes something you find to be critical for functionality behind your back.
Or maybe they have a falling-out with Netflix and try to kill the Netflix client... or they decide media streaming is "supporting piracy" and eliminate support for all UPnP streaming media servers, leaving streaming media only for the "official site" ones like PSN and Netflix.
Where does it end? With the same guys in charge who thought it was "fair game" to put a rootkit on audio CD's, where do you think they'll decide to stop?
Aaaand that was the sound of the network cable being unplugged from my PS3.
No more chance of my buying games from PSN (not like there were any good ones I don't have on a PS2 disc anyways), or bothering with their updates, or anything else. Fuck 'em. MS at least asks me up front to accept the update, and tells me point-blank that I can play as I will in the solo mode, just not on Xbox Live with a non-updated game. If Sony's going to pull this shit behind my back after bricking two loads of PS3's with faulty updates recently, I'm out.
WTF, did I say I cared about you attacking christianity?
I'm an atheist, you retarded moron. Fuck you and the "moral equivalence" horse you rode in on that makes you think bad behavior anywhere is justifiable.
MOHAMMED: We're commanded to terrorize the disbelievers. And this is a religion like I said.
GRIFFIN (on camera): You're commanded to terrorize the disbelievers?
MOHAMMED: The Quran says very clearly in Arabic language, (SPEAKING ARABIC). This means "terrorize them." It's a command from Allah.
Such a "peaceful" religion... makes me want to join up. Wait, no, what's the opposite of join up? Ah yes, expose their totalitarian violent cult for what it is.
Power companies in the US currently use large-scale battery arrays (think lead-acid car batteries but massively larger) for storage; there are also experiments with creating large-scale flywheel farms for the same purpose.
"If Internet service were properly metered like electricity is,"
Part of the problem is idiots like you who think bandwidth is like electricity. It isn't. Bandwidth is a static quantity, but a momentary measurement of how much data can be transmitted; whether your network is running at 10AM or 10PM, you have exactly the same bandwidth.
It cannot, unlike electricity, be "stored up" for later use, and "conserving" it only helps if you are actually at risk of saturating (read: using every bit) and having programs still requesting more.
"Metering" electricity makes some sense, given a finite generating capacity combined with storage options that allow for the electric company to "save" unused capacity for times when more is needed than they can generate. But there is no use in "metering" bandwidth, because it cannot be stored. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to rip people off.
The problem right now is PEOPLE HAVE NO CHOICE in their ISP.
Or rather, the "choice" is between No ISP, Shitty company A, and if you're REALLY lucky, perhaps Shitty Company B.
My area is an urban area. I'm "lucky" to have cable and DSL competing. Or really not, because it's Comrape and A-Titty-Twister "competing" with each other, which is to say, not competing at all.
We can complain all day long, but we as consumers are fucked, because 90% or better of Americans live in an area where the only ISP has a monopoly, and the other 10% have a duopoly at best if they are lucky. And apparently, nothing short of an act of Congress (and I shudder since Obama and the rest of the Senators/"Representatives" are pretty much bought-off scumbags who don't represent us at all) will fix it.
I still blame the RIAA/MPAA/MafiAA... and add in Clear Channel to the mix.
The death of radio DJ's who actually spun an album now and again was the death of my music-buying habit; it let to me getting burned by a couple groups who had a decent radio single, and the other 12 songs on the album turned out to be pure crap.
I bought Aerosmith's "Get a Grip" album on the strength of a radio DJ playing it; I left "Just Push Play" on the shelf after listening to a friend's copy and realizing it wasn't worth it.
Ever since Bill Clinton signed on to radio consolidation, radio's basically been fucked. Small wonder "talk radio" got so big, their only competition has been precanned shit-music format stations. We used to have a 2 great alt-rock stations in town, then Clear Channel bought them out and turned one into yet another mexicrap station, the other into a "shit-rap that morons without two brain cells to rub together blast from their ghetto cruisers" station... as if we didn't already have 12 of those damn things crapping up the airwaves locally as it stood.
I figured in any discussion like this, a dozen people have already made "Pope Pedobear" jokes, so no need to bother. I went for some more interesting cases.
A little thing called "truth" gets in the way of a lot of this.
For instance, if you examine the truthful historical record, Mohammed was a rapist, murderer, pedophile, and habitual liar. In other words, one hell of a politician. He also REDUCED, rather than enhanced, womens' rights in the region (they never fess up to the fact that his first wife was a "MILF" widow who owned and ran her own business, was more than a decade his senior, and basically married him because she was tired of not gettin' any and wanted a boytoy... when he was done it's lucky if a woman gets $10 and isn't beaten to a bloody pulp when she gets "divorced" by her Muslim Hubby).
LDS/Mormon "prophet" Joseph Smith? Yeah. Saw himself as a "prophet" similar to Jesus, but when the angry villagers were at his door, he whipped out a "pepperbox" gun and started blasting. How jesuslike.
L. Ron Hubbard? The term "delusional psychopath" seems to apply quite well. The lies told about him by his follower can easily fill at least one book if not many, many more.
7th day Adventists? How many times have you freaks predicted the end of the world only to realize your "prophets" are a load of hooey, anyways? Great scam to get donations, though, get people to sell everything off and donate you the money figuring they won't need it after the Rapture anyways...
No kidding. Reading the full post, it's less a "oops we learned our lesson" and more a "oops, we need to find a way to dress it up so less people realize we're working with SuperSpamScamRewards" post.
They need to learn the lesson: DO. NOT. ASSOCIATE. WITH. THOSE. PEOPLE.
If we could target enough companies to make them block off SuperSpamScamRewards and their brethren, then "businesses" like SuperSpamScamRewards would cease to exist.
What I find so surprising is the fact that they're scrapping a mostly-completed shuttle replacement program for... what? Wasting money buying space on Soyuz capsules?
And the rationale? Oh yeah - "fuck the people who don't vote with us." It's no coincidence NASA is on the chopping block, Obama and his crony brigade are controlling the WH and Congress, and the district for had Tom DeLay as their congresscritter for a long time, briefly had a democrat (Nick Lampson, who's a total scumbag), and then Lampson proved to odious to hold on to the seat afterwards.
That NASA budget cuts flowed with Lampson's ouster is no surprise. It's just politics as usual.
I encourage companies to move to single sign-on, since I consider having to memorize 17 passwords for one company to be more hassle than having to change a password frequently.
Single sign-on for a single company is a great idea.
Having your work password, gmail, hotmail, bank password all be the same? BAD idea.
You neglected another possibility: your security restrictions were set by some dumbass in a state legislature who read some paper or book regarding "IT Security" and passed laws and regulations for government agencies...
It depends on where you are and what level of security you need.
Expiring passwords make sense - IF you are in a situation where you run a regular risk of passwords being exposed.
A worse problem is the fact that people use the same password for everything - bank account, hotmail, gmail, work, etc. One of them gets compromised by someone and all of a sudden their whole life is exposed.
Of course, the best way to get a user to be properly educated about securing their information is to have their identity stolen... but by that time it's usually too late.
Homo Sapiens will either evolve into something (or several somethings) else, or die off entirely. Of course, we can argue that we've already managed to fuck up our own evolution pretty good; the number of our members who manage to breed despite incredibly crippling congenital diseases, tendency towards debilitating developmental diseases, or simply managing to survive their own ridiculous stupidity through advancing medical science, is staggering.
We have a (responsible!) liquor store chain in my town. They have a store that is ~1400ft (as the crow flies) from an elementary school. Never a record of the store ever selling to minors, and they've got a store policy of catching and reporting fake ID's to the police.
Last year, the idiot town council changed the limits on liquor licenses from 700ft to 1500 ft, and changed it from "shortest path" to "as the crow flies" measurement, then tried to get the store's liquor license retroactively revoked on the grounds that they didn't meet the new (illegally ex-post-facto) legal standard.
It's ridiculous. But then what do you expect when you live in a town dominated by "no drinking, no dancing, no fun, the-stick-up-our-ass-has-a-stick-up-its-ass" Southern Baptists?
Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
If you want easy access to a web browser, movies, and text from your couch or bed, go with an iPad
Really? There's a web browser on the netbook. Plus, you can tilt it up easier.
Movies? Seems they'll all play on the netbook.
Text? Actually some of us consider the lack of a keyboard a major detriment of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad line. Sacrificing screen space for a "keyboard" setup that has no tactile feedback isn't exactly a pleasant design choice. Plus, if you don't constantly put talcum powder on your hands, you just smudged the hell out of the space you're expecting to watch the aforementioned movies on.
The touchscreen netbooks I've seen are "flippable", turn around to be usable with a stylus like a miniature tablet PC. That's damn useful.
Commentary from others about the battery life being pretty similar, and the fact that you can replace/augment the battery in your netbook yourself rather than having to go through Apple's "highway robbery" level customer disservice department when the built-in battery dies two years down the road...
Slashdot Mirror
Thankfully, precious few games do I buy for the PS3. Most of my buying goes to the Xbox360.
PS3 utterly lacking a "killer app" game of any sort makes it easy to do. Most of the time, it's just an overly expensive (given that I bought an early edition) DVD/Blu-ray player. I highly suspect that this will continue in the future.
Plus, if I have to take the update from disc, so be it. Should I find the game so important, I'll "accept" it at that point. They still can't push random updates "over the network" if it's unplugged from ethernet and doesn't have an active wireless connection.
But wait till Sony decides to push a "mandatory" update without approval while your box is still "online" for the purpose of media and netflix streaming. And then it bricks your box or removes something you find to be critical for functionality behind your back.
Or maybe they have a falling-out with Netflix and try to kill the Netflix client... or they decide media streaming is "supporting piracy" and eliminate support for all UPnP streaming media servers, leaving streaming media only for the "official site" ones like PSN and Netflix.
Where does it end? With the same guys in charge who thought it was "fair game" to put a rootkit on audio CD's, where do you think they'll decide to stop?
*YANK*
Aaaand that was the sound of the network cable being unplugged from my PS3.
No more chance of my buying games from PSN (not like there were any good ones I don't have on a PS2 disc anyways), or bothering with their updates, or anything else. Fuck 'em. MS at least asks me up front to accept the update, and tells me point-blank that I can play as I will in the solo mode, just not on Xbox Live with a non-updated game. If Sony's going to pull this shit behind my back after bricking two loads of PS3's with faulty updates recently, I'm out.
WTF, did I say I cared about you attacking christianity?
I'm an atheist, you retarded moron. Fuck you and the "moral equivalence" horse you rode in on that makes you think bad behavior anywhere is justifiable.
Gotta love the words of the guy who puts the Muslim hate speech up - "We're commanded to terrorize the unbelievers."
Transcript from LexisNexis:
MOHAMMED: We're commanded to terrorize the disbelievers. And this is a religion like I said.
GRIFFIN (on camera): You're commanded to terrorize the disbelievers?
MOHAMMED: The Quran says very clearly in Arabic language, (SPEAKING ARABIC). This means "terrorize them." It's a command from Allah.
Such a "peaceful" religion... makes me want to join up. Wait, no, what's the opposite of join up? Ah yes, expose their totalitarian violent cult for what it is.
and a complete willingness to throw away bad ideas without flowery language.
Uhm.. they didn't throw away the bad ideas. The phoneless iphone for people with congenital gigantism in their hands got sent to market.
Standard USA "DSL" is 1Mbit down, 128k up.
Yeah. We're still stuck with that.
uhm... no.
Electricity Storage Association.
Power companies in the US currently use large-scale battery arrays (think lead-acid car batteries but massively larger) for storage; there are also experiments with creating large-scale flywheel farms for the same purpose.
"If Internet service were properly metered like electricity is,"
Part of the problem is idiots like you who think bandwidth is like electricity. It isn't. Bandwidth is a static quantity, but a momentary measurement of how much data can be transmitted; whether your network is running at 10AM or 10PM, you have exactly the same bandwidth.
It cannot, unlike electricity, be "stored up" for later use, and "conserving" it only helps if you are actually at risk of saturating (read: using every bit) and having programs still requesting more.
"Metering" electricity makes some sense, given a finite generating capacity combined with storage options that allow for the electric company to "save" unused capacity for times when more is needed than they can generate. But there is no use in "metering" bandwidth, because it cannot be stored. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to rip people off.
Anyone remotely honest doesn't have the kind of money needed to run these days, either.
No shit.
The problem right now is PEOPLE HAVE NO CHOICE in their ISP.
Or rather, the "choice" is between No ISP, Shitty company A, and if you're REALLY lucky, perhaps Shitty Company B.
My area is an urban area. I'm "lucky" to have cable and DSL competing. Or really not, because it's Comrape and A-Titty-Twister "competing" with each other, which is to say, not competing at all.
We can complain all day long, but we as consumers are fucked, because 90% or better of Americans live in an area where the only ISP has a monopoly, and the other 10% have a duopoly at best if they are lucky. And apparently, nothing short of an act of Congress (and I shudder since Obama and the rest of the Senators/"Representatives" are pretty much bought-off scumbags who don't represent us at all) will fix it.
I still blame the RIAA/MPAA/MafiAA... and add in Clear Channel to the mix.
The death of radio DJ's who actually spun an album now and again was the death of my music-buying habit; it let to me getting burned by a couple groups who had a decent radio single, and the other 12 songs on the album turned out to be pure crap.
I bought Aerosmith's "Get a Grip" album on the strength of a radio DJ playing it; I left "Just Push Play" on the shelf after listening to a friend's copy and realizing it wasn't worth it.
Ever since Bill Clinton signed on to radio consolidation, radio's basically been fucked. Small wonder "talk radio" got so big, their only competition has been precanned shit-music format stations. We used to have a 2 great alt-rock stations in town, then Clear Channel bought them out and turned one into yet another mexicrap station, the other into a "shit-rap that morons without two brain cells to rub together blast from their ghetto cruisers" station ... as if we didn't already have 12 of those damn things crapping up the airwaves locally as it stood.
This will go well with the official state parasite: politicians.
I figured in any discussion like this, a dozen people have already made "Pope Pedobear" jokes, so no need to bother. I went for some more interesting cases.
A little thing called "truth" gets in the way of a lot of this.
For instance, if you examine the truthful historical record, Mohammed was a rapist, murderer, pedophile, and habitual liar. In other words, one hell of a politician. He also REDUCED, rather than enhanced, womens' rights in the region (they never fess up to the fact that his first wife was a "MILF" widow who owned and ran her own business, was more than a decade his senior, and basically married him because she was tired of not gettin' any and wanted a boytoy... when he was done it's lucky if a woman gets $10 and isn't beaten to a bloody pulp when she gets "divorced" by her Muslim Hubby).
LDS/Mormon "prophet" Joseph Smith? Yeah. Saw himself as a "prophet" similar to Jesus, but when the angry villagers were at his door, he whipped out a "pepperbox" gun and started blasting. How jesuslike.
L. Ron Hubbard? The term "delusional psychopath" seems to apply quite well. The lies told about him by his follower can easily fill at least one book if not many, many more.
7th day Adventists? How many times have you freaks predicted the end of the world only to realize your "prophets" are a load of hooey, anyways? Great scam to get donations, though, get people to sell everything off and donate you the money figuring they won't need it after the Rapture anyways...
This was part of reelection strategy, nothing more.
To paraphrase the speech slightly:
"I'm moving all of NASA's resources to Kennedy/Miami because I may need Florida's electoral votes. Fuck Texas."
Oh, AND the economy is already showing signs of improvement.
If you believe that, you don't know the first thing about economics.
No kidding. Reading the full post, it's less a "oops we learned our lesson" and more a "oops, we need to find a way to dress it up so less people realize we're working with SuperSpamScamRewards" post.
They need to learn the lesson: DO. NOT. ASSOCIATE. WITH. THOSE. PEOPLE.
If we could target enough companies to make them block off SuperSpamScamRewards and their brethren, then "businesses" like SuperSpamScamRewards would cease to exist.
No kidding.
What I find so surprising is the fact that they're scrapping a mostly-completed shuttle replacement program for... what? Wasting money buying space on Soyuz capsules?
And the rationale? Oh yeah - "fuck the people who don't vote with us." It's no coincidence NASA is on the chopping block, Obama and his crony brigade are controlling the WH and Congress, and the district for had Tom DeLay as their congresscritter for a long time, briefly had a democrat (Nick Lampson, who's a total scumbag), and then Lampson proved to odious to hold on to the seat afterwards.
That NASA budget cuts flowed with Lampson's ouster is no surprise. It's just politics as usual.
I encourage companies to move to single sign-on, since I consider having to memorize 17 passwords for one company to be more hassle than having to change a password frequently.
Single sign-on for a single company is a great idea.
Having your work password, gmail, hotmail, bank password all be the same? BAD idea.
1...2...3...4...5.
You neglected another possibility: your security restrictions were set by some dumbass in a state legislature who read some paper or book regarding "IT Security" and passed laws and regulations for government agencies...
It depends on where you are and what level of security you need.
Expiring passwords make sense - IF you are in a situation where you run a regular risk of passwords being exposed.
A worse problem is the fact that people use the same password for everything - bank account, hotmail, gmail, work, etc. One of them gets compromised by someone and all of a sudden their whole life is exposed.
Of course, the best way to get a user to be properly educated about securing their information is to have their identity stolen... but by that time it's usually too late.
Homo Sapiens will either evolve into something (or several somethings) else, or die off entirely. Of course, we can argue that we've already managed to fuck up our own evolution pretty good; the number of our members who manage to breed despite incredibly crippling congenital diseases, tendency towards debilitating developmental diseases, or simply managing to survive their own ridiculous stupidity through advancing medical science, is staggering.
Alcohol regulation gets fucking stupid.
We have a (responsible!) liquor store chain in my town. They have a store that is ~1400ft (as the crow flies) from an elementary school. Never a record of the store ever selling to minors, and they've got a store policy of catching and reporting fake ID's to the police.
Last year, the idiot town council changed the limits on liquor licenses from 700ft to 1500 ft, and changed it from "shortest path" to "as the crow flies" measurement, then tried to get the store's liquor license retroactively revoked on the grounds that they didn't meet the new (illegally ex-post-facto) legal standard.
It's ridiculous. But then what do you expect when you live in a town dominated by "no drinking, no dancing, no fun, the-stick-up-our-ass-has-a-stick-up-its-ass" Southern Baptists?
If you want easy access to a web browser, movies, and text from your couch or bed, go with an iPad
Really?
There's a web browser on the netbook. Plus, you can tilt it up easier.
Movies? Seems they'll all play on the netbook.
Text? Actually some of us consider the lack of a keyboard a major detriment of the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad line. Sacrificing screen space for a "keyboard" setup that has no tactile feedback isn't exactly a pleasant design choice. Plus, if you don't constantly put talcum powder on your hands, you just smudged the hell out of the space you're expecting to watch the aforementioned movies on.
The touchscreen netbooks I've seen are "flippable", turn around to be usable with a stylus like a miniature tablet PC. That's damn useful.
Commentary from others about the battery life being pretty similar, and the fact that you can replace/augment the battery in your netbook yourself rather than having to go through Apple's "highway robbery" level customer disservice department when the built-in battery dies two years down the road...