McKinnon was originally tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2002 who informed him that he would face community service. The UK prosecution service refused to charge him.
So clearly British law enforcement thought his crime was utterly trivial. Yet as soon as the Americans get involved... bam! Extradition and possibly 70 years in jail. Would someone get 70 years in jail for murder in the US (in a state without the death penalty, of course)? Even if they murdered the President?
I'm sickened by the fact that the current US administration has gone mad with power and does whatever it wants to anybody it feels like, just because it can. I'm more sickened by the fact that the UK government happily submits to every single demand Bush and co make of it. And I had such high hopes for Labour back in 1997. Serves me right for believing that politicians could be anything but scumbags, I guess.
Portables like the DS are more likely to be bought by the 'casual gamer' simply because they can be played in short bursts, then put back in the pocket/handbag/on the coffe table or whatever and forgotten about. They're simple, cheap and easy to use.
This is not the case with consoles. They're fixed to one location (how many people go to the trouble of moving a console and all its assorted cables and gubbins from one room to another?), more expensive (well, PSP aside:p) and the controllers scare off most people who aren't already regular gamers. (My PS2's DualShock has 11 buttons, two analogue sticks, both of which can also be used as buttons, and a d-pad. Is my mother ever going to give that a try? Hell no.) So if you sit down to play a console game, you're practically committing yourself to multiple hours of play, often with a steep learning curve. For probably the majority of people, that's just not something they'd think of doing. It might not even be an option if they have kids.
So if casual gaming really is going to be the 'real next gen', it'll be on portables like the DS - not consoles. Granny Smith will never buy a PS3. But she might buy a DS to play Brain Training, or Sudoku.
Personally, to me the epitome of 'casual gaming' is the kind of twitch-game that can be played for five or ten intense minutes, then put down. Robotron 2084 is still one of my favourite games of all time for exactly this reason.
Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?
That reminds me of when I did my American Studies degree (I'm British); one of the tutors was from New England, and pronounced 'Boston' as 'Bwwwohrrstuhn'. Much amusement was had by students asking him if he could repeat that, as they didn't quite catch it.
But when I think about it, that story does point out a weakness in English - there are vastly more sounds than can be represented by 26 letters, even in combination. For instance, I pronounce the first 'o' in Boston as in 'pot' or 'spot' - a short sound. But how do you differentiate that from other pronunciations like 'more' or 'foam' in text without actually writing 'o' as in 'pot'? (Not that I'm advocating anything as doubleplusungood as Newspeak - although txtspk seems to be doing the same job with no government intervention...)
(MSG4: Substance comes to mind and no I don't care what platform it ends up on)
MGS4 is one of the few next-gen titles I'm really interested in playing, too. However, I do care what platform it ends up on, because I'm not going to shell out £425 for a PS3 to play it! Guess I'll wait for the console to drop to a reasonable price (£130 max) like I did with the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube (and Saturn, and Dreamcast...)
I was on a Nintendo magazine when Superman 64 was coming up for release. I had so much pity for the poor PR guy desperately trying to play it up as a good game that we should devote lots of coverage to when even he knew it was a pile of shit.
The funny thing was, it wasn't the worst N64 game ever released, by a long way. Carmageddon 64, anyone?
£425 for PS3 console.
Probably £60 for one game.
Factor in the fact that you won't be able to buy just the console on its own for the first few months, and will be forced to buy a bundle with a load of crap you don't actually want - let's say that's another £50 of 'value added' material.
Total: £535.
There's the real reason this is happening, right there. Because of Hot Coffee, the shareholders made less money in dividends that quarter than they thought they would from such a guaranteed mega-hit. In any other environment it would be a case of "you gambled, you lost. Boo fucking hoo." But because Wall Street is involved, Reginald Ffat-Cat and his corporate friends get to call in the lawyers to compensate them for their 'loss' - ie, not making as much profit as they were expecting.
While I'd love not have to wear glasses, the idea of zapping my eyes with lasers terrifies me. To even contemplate it, I'd have to be drugged up to - excuse the pun - the eyes. I can't even put in contacts, never mind lie there as a laser burns holes in my cornea...
I kind of like the irony that the central character in the strip - Akiko - looks an awful lot like Hopey from Jaime Hernandez's 'Love & Rockets'. Is this a job for Captain Copyright?
The comic does make a good point, though. The copyright laws (worldwide, not just in the US) are seriously fucked up if corporations are demanding thousands of dollars just because somebody's movie-theme ringtone can be heard in the background of a documentary.
..does the 'blocking' device redirect its beam? If it's over a second, then the means to defeat it is easy enough:
1: Person 1 aims digital camera at 'forbidden' target.
2: Blocking device directs beam at camera.
3: Person 1 sees bright light in viewfinder, gives thumbs-up.
4: Person 2, standing a few feet away, whips up second camera and takes picture.
5: Profit!
And I'm sure somebody smart enough could devise a simple device to cover up a camera's CCD until an instant before the picture was taken. It could be called something like a 'shutter'...
When I was a journalist, MD was great for recording interviews because of the far longer recording time than the usual micro-cassettes. I knew a couple of people who had problems making copies of their own recordings because of Sony's stupid copy management system (SCMA, or something like that? I can't remember), but my MD unit was a Sharp and never gave me any problems at all.
Having worked in the UK games mag field, I think a lot of it comes down to UK games journalists having less 'fear' of advertisers. If British journos think a game is a steaming pile of shit, they'll say exactly that, because editorial and advertising generally work as separate entities. The journalists don't get any commission from the space that advertising sells, so they don't see any need to pull punches if the product sucks. (In fact, I'd say there's often a degree of mutual dislike between editorial and advertising, because editorial see advertising as interfering in the content of their magazine, and ads think that editorial's big mouth will cost them money if they annoy clients.)
Because there's so much competition between the UK mags (the lower cost of entry to the market means we have a lot more of them than the US), any mag that regularly bumps up its scores to suck up to advertisers will be spotted pretty quickly and lose trust with its readers. Giving a 9 to a game that the other mags are giving 6 or 7 can be forgiven as personal preference on the part of the reviewer - once. If it happens four or five times an issue, it'll be noticed. (Except where the mag in question is an 'official' one, where people still buy it no matter how inflated the review scores are...)
Seriously, are they pushing the PS3 as a games console or some kind of 'fantabulous does-everything media contrapuhub with new ultra-shininess'? Because if it's the latter they're trying to sell a product for which the infrastructure is at least a couple of years away (HD-TV is and will remain for some time a minuscule portion of the market, whatever the early adopter contingent like to think), and if it's the former it's insanely overpriced.
Does any game developer need a BR disc to provide a gameplaying experience that right now they can't fit on a DVD-9? Exactly what groundbreaking new gameplay paradigms are they introducing with the PS3?
Just a glance at the PS3 release schedule on IGN (or other sites) doesn't fill me with the desire to open my wallet to experience TeH aweSome. Turok? NHL 2K7? Sonic? WWE Smackdown? NBA 2K7? Rainbow Six? Madden NFL 07? It looks like the same old piss in a new hi-res bottle. And as much as I want to play MGS4, I'm not going to pay the better part of £500 to do so, no matter what resolution I can now watch Stealth in as a side benefit.
If this story is true (considering that it would violate UK laws on the right of first sale, at the very least), then I won't be buying a PS3. Ever. As much as I'd like to play MGS4, and may even possibly be tempted into spending £50 to do so if it gets essentially 10/10 reviews from every source I trust after the price of the PS3 itself drops to a reasonable level (£425 is not reasonable. Nor is £299. £199, we're starting to get closer for a games console), there's no way that I'd do that if I have to pay another £50 for every single other PS3 game I might want to play. 'Annual Sports Update 200X' is not an MGS4, and nor is 'Movie-Themed 3D Platformer That Could Have Been On The N64 If Not For The 720p Graphics'.
Hell, I'd rather they just superglue the disc slot shut and sell it to me as the 'PSMGS4'. In fact, just image the disc to the HDD and don't even bother including the Blu-Ray drive to save me a few quid!:p
How else could he make all those long cellphone calls to his fellow conspirators in which he openly admits to involvement in terrorist activities without somebody at NSA going, "Jeez, is that who I think it is?"
Too bad it didn't protect him against his wife's secretary using a $30 digital recorder from Radio Shack to tape a conversation incriminating him in the assassination of a former president, but then, *everybody* was having a bad day.
I know that OS X 10.4 runs like complete ass with 512mb of RAM and a couple applications open (and don't pretend it doesn't!)
Bull. I'm running 10.4 on a 512Mb eMac and usually have (at least) Firefox, iTunes and Photoshop running, often with Azureus busy as well, and while there's an occasional bit of HDD chug when switching between apps there's no way it can be described as running like, as you say, 'complete ass'. Unless you're running it on a 400Mhz iMac or something.
But yes, I'll agree with you that Apple's attitude towards installed RAM has always been parsimonious in the extreme.
20Gb hard drives? Are we back in 2001? I wouldn't be surprised if the base PS3's '20Gb' drive is actually exactly the same as the non-crippled PS3's 60Gb, just with two platters disabled...
Slashdot Mirror
McKinnon was originally tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2002 who informed him that he would face community service. The UK prosecution service refused to charge him.
So clearly British law enforcement thought his crime was utterly trivial. Yet as soon as the Americans get involved... bam! Extradition and possibly 70 years in jail. Would someone get 70 years in jail for murder in the US (in a state without the death penalty, of course)? Even if they murdered the President?
I'm sickened by the fact that the current US administration has gone mad with power and does whatever it wants to anybody it feels like, just because it can. I'm more sickened by the fact that the UK government happily submits to every single demand Bush and co make of it. And I had such high hopes for Labour back in 1997. Serves me right for believing that politicians could be anything but scumbags, I guess.
Portables like the DS are more likely to be bought by the 'casual gamer' simply because they can be played in short bursts, then put back in the pocket/handbag/on the coffe table or whatever and forgotten about. They're simple, cheap and easy to use.
:p) and the controllers scare off most people who aren't already regular gamers. (My PS2's DualShock has 11 buttons, two analogue sticks, both of which can also be used as buttons, and a d-pad. Is my mother ever going to give that a try? Hell no.) So if you sit down to play a console game, you're practically committing yourself to multiple hours of play, often with a steep learning curve. For probably the majority of people, that's just not something they'd think of doing. It might not even be an option if they have kids.
This is not the case with consoles. They're fixed to one location (how many people go to the trouble of moving a console and all its assorted cables and gubbins from one room to another?), more expensive (well, PSP aside
So if casual gaming really is going to be the 'real next gen', it'll be on portables like the DS - not consoles. Granny Smith will never buy a PS3. But she might buy a DS to play Brain Training, or Sudoku.
Personally, to me the epitome of 'casual gaming' is the kind of twitch-game that can be played for five or ten intense minutes, then put down. Robotron 2084 is still one of my favourite games of all time for exactly this reason.
Bostoners and New Yorkers and Atlanteans pronounce many words in different ways. Who gets to be the official "correct" one?
That reminds me of when I did my American Studies degree (I'm British); one of the tutors was from New England, and pronounced 'Boston' as 'Bwwwohrrstuhn'. Much amusement was had by students asking him if he could repeat that, as they didn't quite catch it.
But when I think about it, that story does point out a weakness in English - there are vastly more sounds than can be represented by 26 letters, even in combination. For instance, I pronounce the first 'o' in Boston as in 'pot' or 'spot' - a short sound. But how do you differentiate that from other pronunciations like 'more' or 'foam' in text without actually writing 'o' as in 'pot'? (Not that I'm advocating anything as doubleplusungood as Newspeak - although txtspk seems to be doing the same job with no government intervention...)
(MSG4: Substance comes to mind and no I don't care what platform it ends up on)
MGS4 is one of the few next-gen titles I'm really interested in playing, too. However, I do care what platform it ends up on, because I'm not going to shell out £425 for a PS3 to play it! Guess I'll wait for the console to drop to a reasonable price (£130 max) like I did with the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube (and Saturn, and Dreamcast...)
I was on a Nintendo magazine when Superman 64 was coming up for release. I had so much pity for the poor PR guy desperately trying to play it up as a good game that we should devote lots of coverage to when even he knew it was a pile of shit.
The funny thing was, it wasn't the worst N64 game ever released, by a long way. Carmageddon 64, anyone?
However, we should emphasize a third place finish for Sony is only one of several possible scenarios.
Several? Er, there's two other scenarios besides Sony comes third. Sony comes first, or Sony comes second.
Unless they're also factoring in the 'Sony gets trampled by Godzilla' and 'the Phantom rules all with its version of Duke Nukem Forever' scenarios.
Delete! Delete! Delete!
So, let's see...
£425 for PS3 console.
Probably £60 for one game.
Factor in the fact that you won't be able to buy just the console on its own for the first few months, and will be forced to buy a bundle with a load of crap you don't actually want - let's say that's another £50 of 'value added' material.
Total: £535.
As the saying goes, fuck that!
earnings results
There's the real reason this is happening, right there. Because of Hot Coffee, the shareholders made less money in dividends that quarter than they thought they would from such a guaranteed mega-hit. In any other environment it would be a case of "you gambled, you lost. Boo fucking hoo." But because Wall Street is involved, Reginald Ffat-Cat and his corporate friends get to call in the lawyers to compensate them for their 'loss' - ie, not making as much profit as they were expecting.
Attractive women never tried to hit on me even before I got an iPod. So I'm really no worse off.
While I'd love not have to wear glasses, the idea of zapping my eyes with lasers terrifies me. To even contemplate it, I'd have to be drugged up to - excuse the pun - the eyes. I can't even put in contacts, never mind lie there as a laser burns holes in my cornea...
The comic does make a good point, though. The copyright laws (worldwide, not just in the US) are seriously fucked up if corporations are demanding thousands of dollars just because somebody's movie-theme ringtone can be heard in the background of a documentary.
1: Person 1 aims digital camera at 'forbidden' target.
2: Blocking device directs beam at camera.
3: Person 1 sees bright light in viewfinder, gives thumbs-up.
4: Person 2, standing a few feet away, whips up second camera and takes picture.
5: Profit!
And I'm sure somebody smart enough could devise a simple device to cover up a camera's CCD until an instant before the picture was taken. It could be called something like a 'shutter'...
When I was a journalist, MD was great for recording interviews because of the far longer recording time than the usual micro-cassettes. I knew a couple of people who had problems making copies of their own recordings because of Sony's stupid copy management system (SCMA, or something like that? I can't remember), but my MD unit was a Sharp and never gave me any problems at all.
Because there's so much competition between the UK mags (the lower cost of entry to the market means we have a lot more of them than the US), any mag that regularly bumps up its scores to suck up to advertisers will be spotted pretty quickly and lose trust with its readers. Giving a 9 to a game that the other mags are giving 6 or 7 can be forgiven as personal preference on the part of the reviewer - once. If it happens four or five times an issue, it'll be noticed. (Except where the mag in question is an 'official' one, where people still buy it no matter how inflated the review scores are...)
Of course it will! They can just put up a torrent... oh, wait.
Does any game developer need a BR disc to provide a gameplaying experience that right now they can't fit on a DVD-9? Exactly what groundbreaking new gameplay paradigms are they introducing with the PS3?
Just a glance at the PS3 release schedule on IGN (or other sites) doesn't fill me with the desire to open my wallet to experience TeH aweSome. Turok? NHL 2K7? Sonic? WWE Smackdown? NBA 2K7? Rainbow Six? Madden NFL 07? It looks like the same old piss in a new hi-res bottle. And as much as I want to play MGS4, I'm not going to pay the better part of £500 to do so, no matter what resolution I can now watch Stealth in as a side benefit.
Hell, I'd rather they just superglue the disc slot shut and sell it to me as the 'PSMGS4'. In fact, just image the disc to the HDD and don't even bother including the Blu-Ray drive to save me a few quid! :p
Woo! A fellow Keeley!
Not that it's going to make me rush out and buy a 360...
Too bad it didn't protect him against his wife's secretary using a $30 digital recorder from Radio Shack to tape a conversation incriminating him in the assassination of a former president, but then, *everybody* was having a bad day.
"Urge to kill... rising..."
I call dibs on the Enterprise!
Bull. I'm running 10.4 on a 512Mb eMac and usually have (at least) Firefox, iTunes and Photoshop running, often with Azureus busy as well, and while there's an occasional bit of HDD chug when switching between apps there's no way it can be described as running like, as you say, 'complete ass'. Unless you're running it on a 400Mhz iMac or something.
But yes, I'll agree with you that Apple's attitude towards installed RAM has always been parsimonious in the extreme.
And by 'customer', they mean 'advertiser'.
20Gb hard drives? Are we back in 2001? I wouldn't be surprised if the base PS3's '20Gb' drive is actually exactly the same as the non-crippled PS3's 60Gb, just with two platters disabled...