The bigger problem is that so much of the grind requires having other people to grind with.
And the problem with that is the inherent problem of MMORPG's - namely that over time, the playerbase will wane and stratify, and eventually the people you would really like to play with leave the game and the rest either become asshats, or were already asshats to start with.
Take City of Heroes or Final Fantasy XI as two great examples. In City of Heroes, unless you personally know someone in the game who already has a major supergroup (guild) built up, getting anywhere is going to be a chore. Especially be wary of joining a group if someone from a griefing guild called "Endless" shows up.
Final Fantasy XI? Let's see. Cultural separation problems? Check. Hatefests for anyone not running their character as a predetermined "optimized build" and paying massive $$$ to the gil sellers who camp all the necessary "optimal" boss mobs to drop your needed loot, and grief anyone who comes near? Check.
Courts have repeatedly ruled time and again that if the transaction takes the form of a sale (see: Softman V Adobe for one example) then it is governed by the legal rights of a SALE, and any restrictions of those are unconscionable and therefore unenforceable.
Those rights include, among other things, the right to modify what you have purchased and the right of first sale.
Where it gets fucking stupid is that the software companies - and even some companies selling plastic bits these days - want to try to classify everything as a "license" rather than admit it's a sale. All we really need to do to fix the system is to abolish the "license" crap in the legal code.
You can also drive across the entirety of Britain on one tank of gas, because it's that fucking tiny and it's uniformly in a temperate zone that makes bicycling feasibly almost year-round.
Now try that in, say, Arizona during the month of July. I hope you allotted time to get a shower and change into your work clothes in the morning, and another to get home and do the same. Oh, wait, are we having a drought too?
Energy usage goes up based on where you live. Not everyone lives in shitty little teeny-tiny island nations that get a kick out of trying to out-socalist their neighbors.
There are plenty of American workers Microsquish could hire. Microsquish just wants to pay shit-penny wages for shit-penny code from shit-penny Indians.
And regarding the "very legitimate point of view -- even if not the only point of view" - I call bullshit. Fuck the consumer is never a legitimate point of view.
Try it yourself. Rip a song several times. You will see that in fact, the copies will not be bit-for-bit identical. Consistently very close, but not identical.
Have done. They turn out identical. If yours aren't, you're using archaic software.
Both the individual tracks and the album are creative works. Even if you were to consider the record label copyright solely on the album, in this context, taking of complete songs would have a fair probability of being considered substantially more than de minimus use.
Hm. As opposed to an entire chapter of a book... hey, wait, if you distribute a chapter of a book, or multiple chapters, or all of it, you're still only liable for one work, e.g. the book itself.
They're there to establish factual findings as requested by the court. That's all. You're neither counselors nor judges; neither litigators nor legislators. Your role in the process isn't as grand editor; jury nullification (a) rarely works and (b) has never changed the law. It's a fast way to a mistrial, though. The fact that you don't understand what the jury is there for is proof enough that you're not qualified to make the legal judgments you want to make in the first place. Notice that judges, attorneys, and paralegals almost never serve on juries, either.
How clueless can you be?
The job of a jury is to determine (in criminal court) "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" and in a civil case, "liability based on a preponderance of evidence."
If I'm tasked with finding someone guilt/liable under law X, then as a reasonable, honest, and fair citizen I ought to be able to get and read a copy of law X, to verify that one of the parties in the courtroom (yes, entirely likely including a paid-off judge) hasn't just lied to me about what it says.
If he made that argument at trial, the RIAA would almost certainly have introduced evidence that bit-for-bit identical copies of the songs in question are available on Kazaa, that such an identical copy is unlikely to have occurred if she ripped the song herself
Digital technology is digital technology. Rip the same track, compress with the same software algorithm and bitrate, and you will get the same output every time. If there's one thing digital tech is good at, it's being consistent.
I do not believe there is any mandatory authority on this point for the District of Minnesota, which means that the RIAA lawyers may well have been successful in persuading the judge to adopt a one song, one work basis for calculating statutory damages.
If the "single" even still existed, I'd be tempted to give you benefit of the doubt. The MafiAA has been doing their best to sell "album only" setups for over three decades now.
Hell, part of the reason I can't stand Guitar Hero: World Tour is that their download system is primarily set up for "albums", rather than a la carte.
It also does a lot to poison the potential jury pool for future copyright litigation, which is of great interest to a lawyer who works those kinds of cases on the side of the defense.
One of the crappiest thing about the modern legal system is that if you have any clue about the law (read: you're not a retard from the boonies or the projects who will believe whatever they heard John Stewart/Steven Colbert spouting last night without a filter) you're not likely to be part of the jury pool.
Know what the most likely ways to get yourself kicked of a jury are? - Be an Eagle Scout (or Gold Award Girl Scout). - Be an ethnic nonminority. - Have over a 75 IQ. - Show any indication that you are capable of understanding the law independently. People have actually been kicked off of juries for requesting a written copy of the relevant law in the jury room.
After all, it's much easier to try to say "all whites are evil for slavery" if you don't have to admit that freed blacks actually owned more slaves (on a per capita basis) than whites did.
During college, I knew a lot of African immigrants (as in, people who'd come to the US from Africa, either to stay for good, or to get a degree).
Without exception they agreed on one thing: American blacks are racist dumb shits. They couldn't understand where the "dignity" was in rap "music", hip-hop "culture", or the idea of teaching your kids that it's "acting white" to be smart. And they were constantly assailed by American blacks who bugged them about precisely those things - "acting white", not sounding black when they talked, not listening to the "right" music, not being in the "right" major to be black, etc. They were some of the smartest people I knew, and that's because they held themselves to a high standard, worked hard, and didn't think the government owed them a living like 99% of American blacks seem to.
Political Correctness has always been bullshit. I've been to "America's Black Holocaust Museum" in Milwaukee. You know what? It's a piece of shit. Slavery was bad, but the deep South was never anywhere close to Nazi Germany, and they want to hide the truth that blacks sold blacks into slavery, and there were plenty of black slaveowners in America (over 3000 in New Orleans alone according to the 1860 census).
The so-called "history book" you learned from as a kid was a bastardized, sanitized, rewritten version of "history" that had about as much relation to the truth as a made-for-TV "based on a true story" movie.
These are the same folks who bought the last four copyright extensions with mass "secret" donations and visits by Disney-sponsored hookers to congressional offices.
Just you wait. Obama's in office. For a sizable "donation" to his next campaign and certain congressionals, legislation ensuring this is legal will pass within two months tops. That's what you get when you elect a corrupt Chicago politician to the White House.
Yep. Congress's approval ratings are still lower than Bush's lowest presidential ratings, but because they have Chicago Obama in the White House, they think they can do whatever they want.
Elect a corrupt chicago-style politician, get a corrupt chicago-style white house.
Say what you will about politics otherwise - I prefer when our system is working as intended, and the checks and balances come from competing interests balancing each other out. Let one party get hold of House, Senate, and Presidency all at once, and you get crap like the bailouts, the Sotomayor appointment, and Comrade Obama's Super-Magical Miracle Snake Oil "health care reform."
Yes, you lose access to all the used PSP games that are already out on UMD. That matters (somewhat) to people like me who already have a PSP and have a (small) library of PSP-UMD games that I occasionally re-play:
Every game I own on UMD, I've already converted to ISO so that I can push it onto a memory stick. Cuts down on the annoyingly long UMD load times, makes it so that I can carry 5-6 games without worrying about losing/swapping the UMD cartridges in and out, and saves me up to 25% battery life as well. UMD was a colossal mistake from Sony, if they'd wanted to make the PSP a real success they would have never bothered with it and just put out their titles on pre-made memory cards. They could have fit four memory card slots into the space of the UMD drive.
The only way I can see buying the Go is if/when it gets hacked, so that I can port my current library over. And even then, my old PSP would need to die.
Hint to Sony: When you release the PSP Go, please also release [at least] the top 50% of games from your UMD PSP game catalog as digital downloads from PlayStation Network, so PSP Go owners can buy older, popular games. Really, I'm telling you to make half of your "UMD classic" games available on PSN. Just do it. It's the only way you'll build traction for the PSP Go.
Problem #1: people hate re-paying to get something they already paid for, especially in such a short term. Yes, I know people pay money for old arcade titles or NES/SNES titles on the 360/wii services, and even a few will pay for old Playstation titles, but that's because those are OLD and many people either lost their old copy, broke it, sold it at a garage sale, or remember playing it over at a friend's place. If you turn around and tell people, two years after buying the UMD, "well if you want it on the new device you'll have to buy it again", you'll have a customer revolt.
Problem #2: The PSP, functionally, has problems. 99% of the titles for it are either old Playstation copies, or re-treads of Playstation properties. Lacking a secondary analog stick and enough buttons, playing many of those is way more difficult than it should be.
Problem #3: you can only produce "Grand Theft Auto: Yeah I Fucked Your Mom" so many times before it gets old and boring. It hit "old and boring" 5 years ago as most of its old fans finally grew up.
It's a poor excuse for a study. The underlying issues in (USA) public education today are:
#1 - We don't stratify. In other words, we uniformly put the slowest idiots in with everyone else, rather than putting the brightest in one class and on down the line.
#2 - classes move at the pace of the slowest idiot. The dumb shits hold up class, the mediocre kids learn nothing as well, and the smart kids get so bored (waiting for socially-promoted 8th-grade retards to learn stuff they already mastered in 2nd grade) that they start acting up.
#3 - real standardized testing - you know, anything that might require the kids to have learned something and prove it - has vanished. Between that and social promotion, there is no expectation on the kids to achieve anything, despite clear and repeated case studies and larger-scale studies proving that holding kids to high expectations works. But since standardized testing started to mirror social problems - read: certain ethnic groups (black, illegal immigrant, etc) with near-zero family structure and a subculture that sees intelligence as race treason, were showing very poorly in the standardized tests - more and more of the tests have either been dumbed down to the point of uselessness, or have simply been done away with entirely.
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors,
If you're going to offer the kids money, that's fine. One motivator works as well as another - when I was a kid, for example, a bunch of local restaurants chipped in and gave free meal coupons to any kid who made the honor roll.
First, though, you have to fix your metrics. The fact that they "doubled" achievement on the tests means little when the skills indicated by a "passing" grade on the newly-rebuilt "test" would, 20 years ago, have failed 2-3 grades lower.
As opposed to me buying a shipment of, say, 500 Taiyo Yuden DVD+r's so that I'm set for my monthly backup regimen?
Please.
"We got a dog that smells something that we usually associate with the smell of something that might be in some way be used to commit a crime."
Bullshit. You got the same quality dog as the fucking "drug sniffing" dog that tore apart my luggage in O'Hare because I'd packed (nicely sealed up and everything) a box of frozen bratwurst with a 24-hour gelpack block to bring home as a gift to my roommate. I suppose I COULD be meaning to bludgeon him to death with frozen bratwurst, but I really doubt it.
This sort of "search" crap is beyond stupid. Either search something, or don't, but don't pretend that your "search dog", who in his/her downtime has hobbies that include sniffing and licking his/her own genitalia, is justification for doing so.
But seriously... this is one of the biggest problems with the "paperless" society. Yes, it's nice to have electronic copies of things, but magnetically-stored data (or even optically-stored data) degrades far faster than a paper copy.
We can try and try to hope otherwise, but at the end of the day I worry we're dooming ourselves with our "modernized" recordkeeping. Sure, we have "tidbits" of things from 1000,2000,3000,4000 years ago... but 1000 years from now, most of our own records - much like the oral histories of certain societies that didn't get heavily into good recordkeeping on more solid forms - may well be completely gone.
#1 - the immense amount of pure shovelware out on the Wii currently (face it, the Wii itself may sell well, but
#2 - Because I'm old enough to remember how Big N acts when they are "on top" of the market - how they threw their weight around, forced great games to languish being unable to produce enough copies to sell, forced companies to only sell so many titles per year (leading to the fact that most developers had 3-4 sham companies set up to get around it), how they censored and screwed with games so badly that nobody wanted the US release of certain titles and we missed out on half the early Final Fantasy lineup...
It's sad that Nintendo pioneered it - and moreso because the Wiimote is such a mediocre solution.
Seriously, the more I played Wii Sports Golf and Wii Sports Tennis, the more I knew they'd screwed up. It works well enough for "big" movements - basic tennis swing, big golf swing, bat swing, etc - but for the "fine" motions, such as imparting "spin" to the tennis ball or trying to make a putt, the controller is Simply. Not. Sensitive. Enough.
As the tech matures, it'll get better - but Big N's already, by producing an "add-on" sensor to tweak the sensitivity, admitting their initial setup wasn't good enough.
Re: The Bible, you can see such a scaminario right now.
Just look at the two most recent large-scale cults in existence: Latter-Day Saints and Scientology.
LDS gives away their book. For free. To ANYONE who wants one, two, three, whatever. Yeah, they're kooks and irrepressibly gullible, but once you get past that, they are actually usually pretty good people - strong morality, strong family bonds, strong ethical sense, hyper-polite. If I were looking for a sales force I'd hire them in a heartbeat. Yeah, their men spend 2-3 years on "mission" trying to peddle their religion to others - but if you can walk away from a job like that, from KNOWING you will have doors slammed in your face or worse, you can sell anything. Yes, when you get closer to their central enclave in Utah, they get downright clannish and antisocial towards anyone who won't be converted after repeat attempts. Yes, I would describe their system as ultimately a "Cult." But they're a cult I can put up with and they don't spend their time trying to hide their doctrine, as opposed to our next exhibit...
The Cult of Scientology. What you have here is essentially a giant ponzi scheme that rolled a cross in the door and put collars on the "clergy" (whoops that's "auditors") in order to dodge the law. Scientology is famous for charging you into intense debt just to learn the "religious doctrine", and launching lawsuits and worse at anyone who exposes them. Hell, they even have an official policy for ordering a murder. Be very careful if you ever hear one of them mention R2-45: that's their newspeak for "murder someone", coming from the idea of shooting someone twice (R2) with a.45-caliber gun.
If you're in the Cult, the only way you keep your skin intact is either to (a) become a high ranking member (top level of the ponzi scheme), (b) an indentured slave of the Cult, or (c) be a rich celebrity (Tom Cruise, Greta Van Susteren, etc) who functions as a "recruiter" for the Cult and gets the "services" of the Cult for free.
He published in the huffandpuffington post. Are you all that surprised it, like everything else on that site, is just mindless garbage?
I mean, seriously. I have seen not ONE good article there except the stuff they plagiarize. It seems to be a site that exists solely to push stupidity.
For example:
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Obviously what he really means is that the Internet is stopping the gatekeepers from controlling who can get published. There are more people publishing their own books independently - rather than having to go through, say, Del Rey - than ever before. The comic pages of the newspaper have been replaced by webcomics but that's not necessarily a bad thing either - either you adapt, like Scott Adams, or you don't and you perish.
The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.
He doesn't give a shit about "theft." He hates the idea of the Internet because it removes the need to keep his dumb ass as the distribution "gatekeeper" and skim money off of the hard work of others.
Prior to bittorrent, there was Samba sharing as enabled by several crawler-search setups. Prior to those, there was Napster. Prior to those, there were a zillion sites running FTP (ratio or otherwise). Prior to "the internet", there were BBS'es all over. Prior to that, there was sneakernet.
Go back ~100 years, and dumbshits like this Sony retard were "protesting" and trying to lobby Congress to forbid municipalities from keeping lending libraries (you know, the public library system we all have the right to use for free) because it would "impede sales if people could simply borrow the book instead."
Nobody cares as long as the concentration is very low. Try not cleaning your fish tank for a month or so and see how much your fish care.
A fish tank is not a proper natural system. It lacks the balance - the microbes and smaller organisms that would break down, filter, and "clean" the water - that makes the difference in the real world.
The "filter" for the fish tank is replacing real filters - like the oyster population of Chesapeake Bay - that exist in nature, nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
The bigger problem is that so much of the grind requires having other people to grind with.
And the problem with that is the inherent problem of MMORPG's - namely that over time, the playerbase will wane and stratify, and eventually the people you would really like to play with leave the game and the rest either become asshats, or were already asshats to start with.
Take City of Heroes or Final Fantasy XI as two great examples. In City of Heroes, unless you personally know someone in the game who already has a major supergroup (guild) built up, getting anywhere is going to be a chore. Especially be wary of joining a group if someone from a griefing guild called "Endless" shows up.
Final Fantasy XI? Let's see. Cultural separation problems? Check. Hatefests for anyone not running their character as a predetermined "optimized build" and paying massive $$$ to the gil sellers who camp all the necessary "optimal" boss mobs to drop your needed loot, and grief anyone who comes near? Check.
Bullshit.
Courts have repeatedly ruled time and again that if the transaction takes the form of a sale (see: Softman V Adobe for one example) then it is governed by the legal rights of a SALE, and any restrictions of those are unconscionable and therefore unenforceable.
Those rights include, among other things, the right to modify what you have purchased and the right of first sale.
Where it gets fucking stupid is that the software companies - and even some companies selling plastic bits these days - want to try to classify everything as a "license" rather than admit it's a sale. All we really need to do to fix the system is to abolish the "license" crap in the legal code.
You can also drive across the entirety of Britain on one tank of gas, because it's that fucking tiny and it's uniformly in a temperate zone that makes bicycling feasibly almost year-round.
Now try that in, say, Arizona during the month of July. I hope you allotted time to get a shower and change into your work clothes in the morning, and another to get home and do the same. Oh, wait, are we having a drought too?
Energy usage goes up based on where you live. Not everyone lives in shitty little teeny-tiny island nations that get a kick out of trying to out-socalist their neighbors.
There are plenty of American workers Microsquish could hire. Microsquish just wants to pay shit-penny wages for shit-penny code from shit-penny Indians.
No kidding.
And regarding the "very legitimate point of view -- even if not the only point of view" - I call bullshit. Fuck the consumer is never a legitimate point of view.
Try it yourself. Rip a song several times. You will see that in fact, the copies will not be bit-for-bit identical. Consistently very close, but not identical.
Have done. They turn out identical. If yours aren't, you're using archaic software.
Both the individual tracks and the album are creative works. Even if you were to consider the record label copyright solely on the album, in this context, taking of complete songs would have a fair probability of being considered substantially more than de minimus use.
Hm. As opposed to an entire chapter of a book... hey, wait, if you distribute a chapter of a book, or multiple chapters, or all of it, you're still only liable for one work, e.g. the book itself.
They're there to establish factual findings as requested by the court. That's all. You're neither counselors nor judges; neither litigators nor legislators. Your role in the process isn't as grand editor; jury nullification (a) rarely works and (b) has never changed the law. It's a fast way to a mistrial, though. The fact that you don't understand what the jury is there for is proof enough that you're not qualified to make the legal judgments you want to make in the first place. Notice that judges, attorneys, and paralegals almost never serve on juries, either.
How clueless can you be?
The job of a jury is to determine (in criminal court) "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" and in a civil case, "liability based on a preponderance of evidence."
If I'm tasked with finding someone guilt/liable under law X, then as a reasonable, honest, and fair citizen I ought to be able to get and read a copy of law X, to verify that one of the parties in the courtroom (yes, entirely likely including a paid-off judge) hasn't just lied to me about what it says.
Bullshit.
If he made that argument at trial, the RIAA would almost certainly have introduced evidence that bit-for-bit identical copies of the songs in question are available on Kazaa, that such an identical copy is unlikely to have occurred if she ripped the song herself
Digital technology is digital technology. Rip the same track, compress with the same software algorithm and bitrate, and you will get the same output every time. If there's one thing digital tech is good at, it's being consistent.
I do not believe there is any mandatory authority on this point for the District of Minnesota, which means that the RIAA lawyers may well have been successful in persuading the judge to adopt a one song, one work basis for calculating statutory damages.
If the "single" even still existed, I'd be tempted to give you benefit of the doubt. The MafiAA has been doing their best to sell "album only" setups for over three decades now.
Hell, part of the reason I can't stand Guitar Hero: World Tour is that their download system is primarily set up for "albums", rather than a la carte.
It also does a lot to poison the potential jury pool for future copyright litigation, which is of great interest to a lawyer who works those kinds of cases on the side of the defense.
One of the crappiest thing about the modern legal system is that if you have any clue about the law (read: you're not a retard from the boonies or the projects who will believe whatever they heard John Stewart/Steven Colbert spouting last night without a filter) you're not likely to be part of the jury pool.
Know what the most likely ways to get yourself kicked of a jury are?
- Be an Eagle Scout (or Gold Award Girl Scout).
- Be an ethnic nonminority.
- Have over a 75 IQ.
- Show any indication that you are capable of understanding the law independently. People have actually been kicked off of juries for requesting a written copy of the relevant law in the jury room.
Revisionists and racists mostly.
After all, it's much easier to try to say "all whites are evil for slavery" if you don't have to admit that freed blacks actually owned more slaves (on a per capita basis) than whites did.
During college, I knew a lot of African immigrants (as in, people who'd come to the US from Africa, either to stay for good, or to get a degree).
Without exception they agreed on one thing: American blacks are racist dumb shits. They couldn't understand where the "dignity" was in rap "music", hip-hop "culture", or the idea of teaching your kids that it's "acting white" to be smart. And they were constantly assailed by American blacks who bugged them about precisely those things - "acting white", not sounding black when they talked, not listening to the "right" music, not being in the "right" major to be black, etc. They were some of the smartest people I knew, and that's because they held themselves to a high standard, worked hard, and didn't think the government owed them a living like 99% of American blacks seem to.
Political Correctness has always been bullshit. I've been to "America's Black Holocaust Museum" in Milwaukee. You know what? It's a piece of shit. Slavery was bad, but the deep South was never anywhere close to Nazi Germany, and they want to hide the truth that blacks sold blacks into slavery, and there were plenty of black slaveowners in America (over 3000 in New Orleans alone according to the 1860 census).
The so-called "history book" you learned from as a kid was a bastardized, sanitized, rewritten version of "history" that had about as much relation to the truth as a made-for-TV "based on a true story" movie.
These are the same folks who bought the last four copyright extensions with mass "secret" donations and visits by Disney-sponsored hookers to congressional offices.
Just you wait. Obama's in office. For a sizable "donation" to his next campaign and certain congressionals, legislation ensuring this is legal will pass within two months tops. That's what you get when you elect a corrupt Chicago politician to the White House.
That's also what those mysterious bags of money that just happened to appear on the judge's back doorstep the day before this ruling are about...
Yep. Congress's approval ratings are still lower than Bush's lowest presidential ratings, but because they have Chicago Obama in the White House, they think they can do whatever they want.
Elect a corrupt chicago-style politician, get a corrupt chicago-style white house.
Say what you will about politics otherwise - I prefer when our system is working as intended, and the checks and balances come from competing interests balancing each other out. Let one party get hold of House, Senate, and Presidency all at once, and you get crap like the bailouts, the Sotomayor appointment, and Comrade Obama's Super-Magical Miracle Snake Oil "health care reform."
Yes, you lose access to all the used PSP games that are already out on UMD. That matters (somewhat) to people like me who already have a PSP and have a (small) library of PSP-UMD games that I occasionally re-play:
Every game I own on UMD, I've already converted to ISO so that I can push it onto a memory stick. Cuts down on the annoyingly long UMD load times, makes it so that I can carry 5-6 games without worrying about losing/swapping the UMD cartridges in and out, and saves me up to 25% battery life as well. UMD was a colossal mistake from Sony, if they'd wanted to make the PSP a real success they would have never bothered with it and just put out their titles on pre-made memory cards. They could have fit four memory card slots into the space of the UMD drive.
The only way I can see buying the Go is if/when it gets hacked, so that I can port my current library over. And even then, my old PSP would need to die.
Hint to Sony: When you release the PSP Go, please also release [at least] the top 50% of games from your UMD PSP game catalog as digital downloads from PlayStation Network, so PSP Go owners can buy older, popular games. Really, I'm telling you to make half of your "UMD classic" games available on PSN. Just do it. It's the only way you'll build traction for the PSP Go.
Problem #1: people hate re-paying to get something they already paid for, especially in such a short term. Yes, I know people pay money for old arcade titles or NES/SNES titles on the 360/wii services, and even a few will pay for old Playstation titles, but that's because those are OLD and many people either lost their old copy, broke it, sold it at a garage sale, or remember playing it over at a friend's place. If you turn around and tell people, two years after buying the UMD, "well if you want it on the new device you'll have to buy it again", you'll have a customer revolt.
Problem #2: The PSP, functionally, has problems. 99% of the titles for it are either old Playstation copies, or re-treads of Playstation properties. Lacking a secondary analog stick and enough buttons, playing many of those is way more difficult than it should be.
Problem #3: you can only produce "Grand Theft Auto: Yeah I Fucked Your Mom" so many times before it gets old and boring. It hit "old and boring" 5 years ago as most of its old fans finally grew up.
I have an original PSP, properly modded. It still sits unused unless I want some old NES titles on the go.
No need to upgrade to the "Go".
It's a poor excuse for a study. The underlying issues in (USA) public education today are:
#1 - We don't stratify. In other words, we uniformly put the slowest idiots in with everyone else, rather than putting the brightest in one class and on down the line.
#2 - classes move at the pace of the slowest idiot. The dumb shits hold up class, the mediocre kids learn nothing as well, and the smart kids get so bored (waiting for socially-promoted 8th-grade retards to learn stuff they already mastered in 2nd grade) that they start acting up.
#3 - real standardized testing - you know, anything that might require the kids to have learned something and prove it - has vanished. Between that and social promotion, there is no expectation on the kids to achieve anything, despite clear and repeated case studies and larger-scale studies proving that holding kids to high expectations works. But since standardized testing started to mirror social problems - read: certain ethnic groups (black, illegal immigrant, etc) with near-zero family structure and a subculture that sees intelligence as race treason, were showing very poorly in the standardized tests - more and more of the tests have either been dumbed down to the point of uselessness, or have simply been done away with entirely.
Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors,
If you're going to offer the kids money, that's fine. One motivator works as well as another - when I was a kid, for example, a bunch of local restaurants chipped in and gave free meal coupons to any kid who made the honor roll.
First, though, you have to fix your metrics. The fact that they "doubled" achievement on the tests means little when the skills indicated by a "passing" grade on the newly-rebuilt "test" would, 20 years ago, have failed 2-3 grades lower.
As opposed to me buying a shipment of, say, 500 Taiyo Yuden DVD+r's so that I'm set for my monthly backup regimen?
Please.
"We got a dog that smells something that we usually associate with the smell of something that might be in some way be used to commit a crime."
Bullshit. You got the same quality dog as the fucking "drug sniffing" dog that tore apart my luggage in O'Hare because I'd packed (nicely sealed up and everything) a box of frozen bratwurst with a 24-hour gelpack block to bring home as a gift to my roommate. I suppose I COULD be meaning to bludgeon him to death with frozen bratwurst, but I really doubt it.
This sort of "search" crap is beyond stupid. Either search something, or don't, but don't pretend that your "search dog", who in his/her downtime has hobbies that include sniffing and licking his/her own genitalia, is justification for doing so.
please bring your own toilet paper.
But seriously... this is one of the biggest problems with the "paperless" society. Yes, it's nice to have electronic copies of things, but magnetically-stored data (or even optically-stored data) degrades far faster than a paper copy.
We can try and try to hope otherwise, but at the end of the day I worry we're dooming ourselves with our "modernized" recordkeeping. Sure, we have "tidbits" of things from 1000,2000,3000,4000 years ago... but 1000 years from now, most of our own records - much like the oral histories of certain societies that didn't get heavily into good recordkeeping on more solid forms - may well be completely gone.
Retardball Z? No thanks.
Nope. Getting DX11 functionality still requires you to infect your PC with the Vista Virus.
Sad because of two things:
#1 - the immense amount of pure shovelware out on the Wii currently (face it, the Wii itself may sell well, but
#2 - Because I'm old enough to remember how Big N acts when they are "on top" of the market - how they threw their weight around, forced great games to languish being unable to produce enough copies to sell, forced companies to only sell so many titles per year (leading to the fact that most developers had 3-4 sham companies set up to get around it), how they censored and screwed with games so badly that nobody wanted the US release of certain titles and we missed out on half the early Final Fantasy lineup...
It's sad that Nintendo pioneered it - and moreso because the Wiimote is such a mediocre solution.
Seriously, the more I played Wii Sports Golf and Wii Sports Tennis, the more I knew they'd screwed up. It works well enough for "big" movements - basic tennis swing, big golf swing, bat swing, etc - but for the "fine" motions, such as imparting "spin" to the tennis ball or trying to make a putt, the controller is Simply. Not. Sensitive. Enough.
As the tech matures, it'll get better - but Big N's already, by producing an "add-on" sensor to tweak the sensitivity, admitting their initial setup wasn't good enough.
You elected a chicago mob-style politician to the presidency, you got a chicago mob-style corrupt president, bought and paid for.
Mafia or MafiAA, makes no difference to that kind.
Re: The Bible, you can see such a scaminario right now.
Just look at the two most recent large-scale cults in existence: Latter-Day Saints and Scientology.
LDS gives away their book. For free. To ANYONE who wants one, two, three, whatever. Yeah, they're kooks and irrepressibly gullible, but once you get past that, they are actually usually pretty good people - strong morality, strong family bonds, strong ethical sense, hyper-polite. If I were looking for a sales force I'd hire them in a heartbeat. Yeah, their men spend 2-3 years on "mission" trying to peddle their religion to others - but if you can walk away from a job like that, from KNOWING you will have doors slammed in your face or worse, you can sell anything. Yes, when you get closer to their central enclave in Utah, they get downright clannish and antisocial towards anyone who won't be converted after repeat attempts. Yes, I would describe their system as ultimately a "Cult." But they're a cult I can put up with and they don't spend their time trying to hide their doctrine, as opposed to our next exhibit...
The Cult of Scientology. What you have here is essentially a giant ponzi scheme that rolled a cross in the door and put collars on the "clergy" (whoops that's "auditors") in order to dodge the law. Scientology is famous for charging you into intense debt just to learn the "religious doctrine", and launching lawsuits and worse at anyone who exposes them. Hell, they even have an official policy for ordering a murder. Be very careful if you ever hear one of them mention R2-45: that's their newspeak for "murder someone", coming from the idea of shooting someone twice (R2) with a .45-caliber gun.
If you're in the Cult, the only way you keep your skin intact is either to (a) become a high ranking member (top level of the ponzi scheme), (b) an indentured slave of the Cult, or (c) be a rich celebrity (Tom Cruise, Greta Van Susteren, etc) who functions as a "recruiter" for the Cult and gets the "services" of the Cult for free.
He published in the huffandpuffington post. Are you all that surprised it, like everything else on that site, is just mindless garbage?
I mean, seriously. I have seen not ONE good article there except the stuff they plagiarize. It seems to be a site that exists solely to push stupidity.
For example:
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
Obviously what he really means is that the Internet is stopping the gatekeepers from controlling who can get published. There are more people publishing their own books independently - rather than having to go through, say, Del Rey - than ever before. The comic pages of the newspaper have been replaced by webcomics but that's not necessarily a bad thing either - either you adapt, like Scott Adams, or you don't and you perish.
The Internet has brought people with no regard for the intellectual property of others together with a technology that allows them to easily steal that property and sell or give it away to everyone, with little fear of being caught or prosecuted.
He doesn't give a shit about "theft." He hates the idea of the Internet because it removes the need to keep his dumb ass as the distribution "gatekeeper" and skim money off of the hard work of others.
Prior to bittorrent, there was Samba sharing as enabled by several crawler-search setups. Prior to those, there was Napster. Prior to those, there were a zillion sites running FTP (ratio or otherwise). Prior to "the internet", there were BBS'es all over. Prior to that, there was sneakernet.
Go back ~100 years, and dumbshits like this Sony retard were "protesting" and trying to lobby Congress to forbid municipalities from keeping lending libraries (you know, the public library system we all have the right to use for free) because it would "impede sales if people could simply borrow the book instead."
Nobody cares as long as the concentration is very low. Try not cleaning your fish tank for a month or so and see how much your fish care.
A fish tank is not a proper natural system. It lacks the balance - the microbes and smaller organisms that would break down, filter, and "clean" the water - that makes the difference in the real world.
The "filter" for the fish tank is replacing real filters - like the oyster population of Chesapeake Bay - that exist in nature, nothing more.