This is the same problem porn site operators are having, except with credit card "charge backs" rather than Paypal.
Maybe porn sites are having trouble with chargebacks because there is a higher incidence of fraud by people who want to access them for free?
Someone stole my CC information and used it to pay for porn site access about a year and a half ago. I have no idea how they got ahold of it, but fortunately the site owners were happy to remove the charge once they verified the connection came from an ISP that wasn't mine. It was pretty surreal talking to some girl on the phone and having her tell me that my card had been used to subscribe to "boobranch.com - that's bee-oh-oh-bee-arr-ei-en-see-ehch dot com."
Um, yes. The burning of the Reichstag was a critical point in the rise of the Third Reich. A shocking, sudden terrorist action was used as a pretext for abolishing civil liberties provided by the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. All in the name of "defense of the Fatherland", you understand.
Thank you. Also, there are some theories that the burning was actually staged by the Nazi party itself to justify their actions.
To anyone who thinks my post was some sort of liberal conspiracy to troll about the current US Administration, please have a go at watching this excellent British documentary, which was produced thirty years ago and is one of the finest DVD sets that money can buy.
You will learn a lot of things that aren't generally taught in history classes (at least in the US), like the aforementioned burning of the Reichstag, the Japanese requiring civilians to wear uniforms during the war era, actual film footage of the American Nazi Party at one of their rallies, etc.
One thing The World At War will teach most people with its first episode is that comparing Emperor Dubyah and his band of neo-fascists to Hitler and the Nazis is pretty ridiculous, even though it is sometimes tempting. Dubyah would never, for example, slaughter the entire citizenry of a town and destroy every building in it.
well, JMS did try a Trek-like B5 followup that didnt quite pan out -- Babylon Project Crusade.
He also did Legend of the Rangers as a pilot film for another new series on Sci-Fi. I didn't think it was as bad as Crusade, but it was definitely not B5 quality.
I wish he had done that telepath war film he promised instead. He needs to work in that scene from the future of Garibaldi with the Giant Gun at some point.
During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth.
This is basically what the Axis did in WWII. It's also cropped up in fictional works like 1984, Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, etc.
But you're probably right in that Star Trek has a wider audience than any of those things right now.
The majority of titles worth playing are made in Japan.
Maybe the majority of titles worth playing for people with Japanese game fetishes =P.
Here's what I've played in the last year:
- Legacy of Kain: Defiance - Beyond Good and Evil - Morrowind - P.N. 03 - Homeworld 2 - Ico - F-Zero GX
Here's what I have lined up for the next few months:
- Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay - Dungeon Siege + Expansion
I could three games out of that lot that were made in Japan. The Japanese certainly can make an awesome game, but there are plenty of excellent titles coming out of the West too.
Backups are simply not an issue for the mass market.
Backups are not the issue for audio. Making custom mix CDs or transferring the music to a digitial audio player is.
Any CD that goes in my car is a CD-R for several reasons:
- I don't want the originals to be stolen/melted by the sun/scratched/etc. - I can condense the music off of 50-100 CDs down to 10 or so CD-Rs because I *really* only want to hear maybe 1-2 tracks off of each one when I'm driving, and almost no pre-pressed CD I own is a full 80 minutes in length.
I also rip tons of my CDs to Ogg Vorbis at work for similar reasons - I have something like 100 albums on my hard drive there, so I don't have to keep lugging CDs back and forth and hoping they don't get broken in my bag.
If a record company wants to prevent me from making mix CDs and ripping to Ogg, they won't get any business from me. I think that once more people realize that that's their goal, it will seriously impact their sales figures. Not everyone I know rips music to their hard drive, but everyone makes mix CDs.
I played the Chronicles of Riddick game. The game was good, but the movie sucked!
I think you suck. It must be the influence of your mom =P.
The Riddick film wasn't a masterpiece, but it was a lot of fun and definitely worth the $7 I paid to see it the second time (first was free because I got a pass with my Pitch Black DVD).
There have been a lot of games based on Alien movies that have been good. I remember the Alien III game for the SNES was pretty good.
I think time has made your memories of that awful game fond.
Here are the good Alien-based games I've played:
- Aliens (C64)
Here are the bad Alien-based games I've played:
- Alien (Atari 2600) - Alien 3 (Multiplatform) - Alien Trilogy (PC) * - Aliens (PC - this is the comic-book style one) **
* this one is the absolute worst. The developers were too lazy to make a Ripley model with hair or AI for companions, so she has a shaved head and is alone for the entire game, which is only loosely based on the actual trilogy.
I predict that, if they want to, they can confiscate all of his development systems.
I've seen a number of dev kits sold on eBay without intervention from the manufacturer.
It may be possible for them to confiscate the hardware, but would they really risk generating that kind of ill will from someone who is obviously a big gaming spender?
It's not the rain, it's the dark, cloudy, dreary, scattered showers that get to you.
How can you not like that weather? Except for the scattered showers, it's the best kind.
Now Vancouver, BC, that's a city with depressing weather. I lived there for three years, and it rained something like 2/3 of the time.
I'm not a huge Portland fan, but I thought it was a nice enough city, and it had some neat little micro-tornados (1' wide, 10' or so high) that blew the snow around when I visited it in the winter.
The one thing I've heard about it (besides the crime) that bothers me is that there's apparently some serious racism and de-facto segregation by neighbourhood.
Remember when console games that had serious bugs just didn't get licensed? Boy, those were the days.
I'm sure if you're still willing to pay $50+ for 8-bit games with primitive 2D graphics and FM synth audio, and gameplay engines so simple that they could be developed by a team 1/10th the size of a modern development staff, you could have lots of games with no serious bugs.
UPC labels and those little "plus cards",plus credit card numbers equals it's very, very easy to track people's purchasing.
Some of us have been avoiding shopping at stores with the "optional*" membership cards for that very reason. With RFID it will no longer make a difference.
* they're "optional" if you don't mind paying 2x what something is worth when the retailer decides to put it "on sale" for people with the cards.
Holography is actually really simple to accomplish
Digitally-recorded motion holography is not.
MIT (IIRC) has some people working on it, but the memory and processing requirements are so high that the last time I read about their progress (a year or so ago), they had monochromatic (red) holographs with only the horizontal depth information in the hologram. So you could walk around the image and see the different sides, but not move your head above or below it to see the top and bottom.
I want to have the Death Star display from Return of the Jedi in my house as much as any other dork, but I figure it will be at least 10-20 years. Everything for now is some sort of half-assed kludge like spinning panels or stereoscopic displays.
Actually, I own it and The Road Warrior on DVD. The second one has better costumes for the gang and the post-apocalyptic setting is cool, but I like the first film better. Especially because it doesn't involve blowing up the cool car or include a small child that communicates exclusively in grunts.
don't forget, copyrights don't expire until 70 years after the author's death. You may have to wait a lllloooonnnggg time before anyone has clearance to do a remake.
Look at the lesson of the Tolkien family - wait until the actual creator of the story is dead, then offer money to their children to pimp it out for whatever purposes you want.
That means that JarJar will be killed in episode 3.
Sadly, no.
Apparently there was a rogue faction at ILM that came up with a sub-plot for Episode III that would have let Jar-Jar redeem himself through some sort of sacrifice that ended up leaving him dead, but Lucas nixed it.
A four-word prediction for the OT DVD release: Gungans in the Cantina. "Meesa have the death penalty on twelve systems!"
And because of that people have just become so blind to the reality that Star Wars was always just meant to be a serial in the grand tradition of the 1930's and '40's seriels, and to project anything more than that is just faulty logic and you are simply setting yourself up for disappointment.
Indiana Jones was also made in the tradition of the serials. It *and* the original Star Wars trilogy both managed to have cool characters, interesting stories, and believable fantasy worlds.
All the prequels have is well-choreographed lightsaber fights. I honestly am not interested in any of the characters in them except Palpatine, The Count With the Dorky Name, and Obi-Wan. Anakin has a brief good moment in AotC when he finds his mom and slays the Sand-people, but Lucas had to go and cut to another scene just as it was getting good.
I am normally 100% against piracy, but a few weeks ago I grabbed the laserdisc rips of the OT off of BitTorrent. I am going to buy the official SW DVDs on release day, but I wanted these because Lucas isn't going to include the non-special2-editions*. I have the originals on VHS too, but my VCR has been having problems.
Anyway, I was totally shocked by how much better the films are without the computer effects. Everything looks so much more believable and gritty. A few days later I watched my AotC DVD, and it was amazing how artificial the CG looks in comparison to the puppets and models from the original version of the OT. It's also clear that the actors in the OT were able to do a better job because they were interacting fully with real people, in real sets and locations, instead of maybe having one or two other people present and the whole thing taking place on a bluescreen stage.
* The DVD versions are apparently going to have even more changes than that special editions that have already been released. I have an ominous feeling that they're going to include Gungans inserted in at least one or two places.
No sequel where one of the main characters is listed in the credits as "the feral child" is superior to the original. Plus they blew up the cool car. They blew up the cool car! What the hell was that?! "The last of the V8 interceptors, baby! They sure don't make them like that anymore... and in five minutes you won't be driving it anymore either! Haw!"
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same problem porn site operators are having, except with credit card "charge backs" rather than Paypal.
Maybe porn sites are having trouble with chargebacks because there is a higher incidence of fraud by people who want to access them for free?
Someone stole my CC information and used it to pay for porn site access about a year and a half ago. I have no idea how they got ahold of it, but fortunately the site owners were happy to remove the charge once they verified the connection came from an ISP that wasn't mine. It was pretty surreal talking to some girl on the phone and having her tell me that my card had been used to subscribe to "boobranch.com - that's bee-oh-oh-bee-arr-ei-en-see-ehch dot com."
Um, yes. The burning of the Reichstag was a critical point in the rise of the Third Reich. A shocking, sudden terrorist action was used as a pretext for abolishing civil liberties provided by the Constitution of the Weimar Republic. All in the name of "defense of the Fatherland", you understand.
Thank you. Also, there are some theories that the burning was actually staged by the Nazi party itself to justify their actions.
To anyone who thinks my post was some sort of liberal conspiracy to troll about the current US Administration, please have a go at watching this excellent British documentary, which was produced thirty years ago and is one of the finest DVD sets that money can buy.
You will learn a lot of things that aren't generally taught in history classes (at least in the US), like the aforementioned burning of the Reichstag, the Japanese requiring civilians to wear uniforms during the war era, actual film footage of the American Nazi Party at one of their rallies, etc.
One thing The World At War will teach most people with its first episode is that comparing Emperor Dubyah and his band of neo-fascists to Hitler and the Nazis is pretty ridiculous, even though it is sometimes tempting. Dubyah would never, for example, slaughter the entire citizenry of a town and destroy every building in it.
well, JMS did try a Trek-like B5 followup that didnt quite pan out -- Babylon Project Crusade.
He also did Legend of the Rangers as a pilot film for another new series on Sci-Fi. I didn't think it was as bad as Crusade, but it was definitely not B5 quality.
I wish he had done that telepath war film he promised instead. He needs to work in that scene from the future of Garibaldi with the Giant Gun at some point.
During the course of events, it becomes clear that a high-ranking Starfleet official is using the paranoia surronding the possibility of 'changling' terrorist attacks to repeal rights and declare martial law on earth.
This is basically what the Axis did in WWII. It's also cropped up in fictional works like 1984, Aeon Flux, Equilibrium, etc.
But you're probably right in that Star Trek has a wider audience than any of those things right now.
Honestly, it's pretty damn stupid to not test before releasing as it makes it look unprofessional.
Yes, I imagine they took undebugged code straight from the intern who wrote the entire game and slapped it on the gold master.
How did this get rated insightful?
The majority of titles worth playing are made in Japan.
Maybe the majority of titles worth playing for people with Japanese game fetishes =P.
Here's what I've played in the last year:
- Legacy of Kain: Defiance
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Morrowind
- P.N. 03
- Homeworld 2
- Ico
- F-Zero GX
Here's what I have lined up for the next few months:
- Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
- Dungeon Siege + Expansion
I could three games out of that lot that were made in Japan. The Japanese certainly can make an awesome game, but there are plenty of excellent titles coming out of the West too.
Backups are simply not an issue for the mass market.
Backups are not the issue for audio. Making custom mix CDs or transferring the music to a digitial audio player is.
Any CD that goes in my car is a CD-R for several reasons:
- I don't want the originals to be stolen/melted by the sun/scratched/etc.
- I can condense the music off of 50-100 CDs down to 10 or so CD-Rs because I *really* only want to hear maybe 1-2 tracks off of each one when I'm driving, and almost no pre-pressed CD I own is a full 80 minutes in length.
I also rip tons of my CDs to Ogg Vorbis at work for similar reasons - I have something like 100 albums on my hard drive there, so I don't have to keep lugging CDs back and forth and hoping they don't get broken in my bag.
If a record company wants to prevent me from making mix CDs and ripping to Ogg, they won't get any business from me. I think that once more people realize that that's their goal, it will seriously impact their sales figures. Not everyone I know rips music to their hard drive, but everyone makes mix CDs.
I played the Chronicles of Riddick game. The game was good, but the movie sucked!
I think you suck. It must be the influence of your mom =P.
The Riddick film wasn't a masterpiece, but it was a lot of fun and definitely worth the $7 I paid to see it the second time (first was free because I got a pass with my Pitch Black DVD).
There have been a lot of games based on Alien movies that have been good. I remember the Alien III game for the SNES was pretty good.
I think time has made your memories of that awful game fond.
Here are the good Alien-based games I've played:
- Aliens (C64)
Here are the bad Alien-based games I've played:
- Alien (Atari 2600)
- Alien 3 (Multiplatform)
- Alien Trilogy (PC) *
- Aliens (PC - this is the comic-book style one) **
* this one is the absolute worst. The developers were too lazy to make a Ripley model with hair or AI for companions, so she has a shaved head and is alone for the entire game, which is only loosely based on the actual trilogy.
I predict that, if they want to, they can confiscate all of his development systems.
I've seen a number of dev kits sold on eBay without intervention from the manufacturer.
It may be possible for them to confiscate the hardware, but would they really risk generating that kind of ill will from someone who is obviously a big gaming spender?
It's not the rain, it's the dark, cloudy, dreary, scattered showers that get to you.
How can you not like that weather? Except for the scattered showers, it's the best kind.
Now Vancouver, BC, that's a city with depressing weather. I lived there for three years, and it rained something like 2/3 of the time.
I'm not a huge Portland fan, but I thought it was a nice enough city, and it had some neat little micro-tornados (1' wide, 10' or so high) that blew the snow around when I visited it in the winter.
The one thing I've heard about it (besides the crime) that bothers me is that there's apparently some serious racism and de-facto segregation by neighbourhood.
Remember when console games that had serious bugs just didn't get licensed? Boy, those were the days.
I'm sure if you're still willing to pay $50+ for 8-bit games with primitive 2D graphics and FM synth audio, and gameplay engines so simple that they could be developed by a team 1/10th the size of a modern development staff, you could have lots of games with no serious bugs.
Amid all this confusion
We lose sight of the enemy
Like evil gods of destruction
They move through liquid transparency
=P
UPC labels and those little "plus cards",plus credit card numbers equals it's very, very easy to track people's purchasing.
Some of us have been avoiding shopping at stores with the "optional*" membership cards for that very reason. With RFID it will no longer make a difference.
* they're "optional" if you don't mind paying 2x what something is worth when the retailer decides to put it "on sale" for people with the cards.
Better yet, allegedly one of the exhibits will be the full-size spinner from Blade Runner. That would be worth the price of admission alone.
Sure, no problem. This is the display system I was talking about.
Holography is actually really simple to accomplish
Digitally-recorded motion holography is not.
MIT (IIRC) has some people working on it, but the memory and processing requirements are so high that the last time I read about their progress (a year or so ago), they had monochromatic (red) holographs with only the horizontal depth information in the hologram. So you could walk around the image and see the different sides, but not move your head above or below it to see the top and bottom.
I want to have the Death Star display from Return of the Jedi in my house as much as any other dork, but I figure it will be at least 10-20 years. Everything for now is some sort of half-assed kludge like spinning panels or stereoscopic displays.
the fourth dimension is time.
/nitpick
Only in a model of the universe with three spatial dimensions.
Some headaches, neck pains, pinched nerves, and such can be fixed by one visit.
Chiropractors are basically doing to your back what cracking your knuckles does to your finger joints.
I'm sure it provides a short-term good feeling, but it also explains why people who make use of chiropractors tend to go there *all* of the time.
I'm guessing you didn't see the original Mad Max.
Actually, I own it and The Road Warrior on DVD. The second one has better costumes for the gang and the post-apocalyptic setting is cool, but I like the first film better. Especially because it doesn't involve blowing up the cool car or include a small child that communicates exclusively in grunts.
Industrial Light and Magic is a separate entity from Lucas' creative branch (Lucasfilm).
ILM, Lucasfilm, whatever. I heard the story months ago.
don't forget, copyrights don't expire until 70 years after the author's death. You may have to wait a lllloooonnnggg time before anyone has clearance to do a remake.
Look at the lesson of the Tolkien family - wait until the actual creator of the story is dead, then offer money to their children to pimp it out for whatever purposes you want.
That means that JarJar will be killed in episode 3.
Sadly, no.
Apparently there was a rogue faction at ILM that came up with a sub-plot for Episode III that would have let Jar-Jar redeem himself through some sort of sacrifice that ended up leaving him dead, but Lucas nixed it.
A four-word prediction for the OT DVD release: Gungans in the Cantina. "Meesa have the death penalty on twelve systems!"
And because of that people have just become so blind to the reality that Star Wars was always just meant to be a serial in the grand tradition of the 1930's and '40's seriels, and to project anything more than that is just faulty logic and you are simply setting yourself up for disappointment.
Indiana Jones was also made in the tradition of the serials. It *and* the original Star Wars trilogy both managed to have cool characters, interesting stories, and believable fantasy worlds.
All the prequels have is well-choreographed lightsaber fights. I honestly am not interested in any of the characters in them except Palpatine, The Count With the Dorky Name, and Obi-Wan. Anakin has a brief good moment in AotC when he finds his mom and slays the Sand-people, but Lucas had to go and cut to another scene just as it was getting good.
I am normally 100% against piracy, but a few weeks ago I grabbed the laserdisc rips of the OT off of BitTorrent. I am going to buy the official SW DVDs on release day, but I wanted these because Lucas isn't going to include the non-special2-editions*. I have the originals on VHS too, but my VCR has been having problems.
Anyway, I was totally shocked by how much better the films are without the computer effects. Everything looks so much more believable and gritty. A few days later I watched my AotC DVD, and it was amazing how artificial the CG looks in comparison to the puppets and models from the original version of the OT. It's also clear that the actors in the OT were able to do a better job because they were interacting fully with real people, in real sets and locations, instead of maybe having one or two other people present and the whole thing taking place on a bluescreen stage.
* The DVD versions are apparently going to have even more changes than that special editions that have already been released. I have an ominous feeling that they're going to include Gungans inserted in at least one or two places.
The Road Warrior
No sequel where one of the main characters is listed in the credits as "the feral child" is superior to the original. Plus they blew up the cool car. They blew up the cool car! What the hell was that?! "The last of the V8 interceptors, baby! They sure don't make them like that anymore... and in five minutes you won't be driving it anymore either! Haw!"