So, you are 23 and making an issu about 15 dollars, worried that you might not get your moneys worth.
Some of us have jobs. 15 bucks is nothing, barely a movie and that lasts what 2 hours?
By all means, keep up the argument that a monthly fee is to expensive, but accept the label "cheapo" that comes with it.
Personally, I would have preffered is some games had special servers with say a 50 euro monthly fee and 200 euro deposit. The extra money could go to extra support and the deposit is lost if you are banned. Would clean the servers up, get rid of any gold farmers and make small games a lot more viable with a core userbase. Why does every MMO out there have to chase the lowest common denominator.
If a great ape doesn't like something, your first clue will be that you die. They might look like gentle giants of nature but any great ape is many times stronger then a human being. Try this, you swing yourself up on a branch with one arm holding a baby or tractor tire with the other.
The saying "where does a 400lbs gorilla sit: anywhere it wants to" isn't for nothing.
An orangutan incapable of fighting of a research assistant:p
And when the new employees ask for a raise, you ask them "you ever heard what happened to the people that were here before you when they asked for a raise?"
And they answer "I never met any old employees".
And you answer: "exactly" and then laugh your evil laugh.
His point was that people don't want to believe that some people are just rotten. Your godwinned example would then have to be "Some people just don't want to believe Hitler was just really a bad guy and keep looking for excuses for his actions and how he was so misunderstood and nobody gave him hugs".
This is roughly the problem in europe. We keep lowering jail sentences because punishing people don't work and keep giving hugs and finding excuses for peoples actions. It don't work either because the sad thing is, some people are just rotten. Rotten because they decided their needs are of more importance then anybody else. That they are entitled and nobody else is.
These german ministers are refusing to accept these shooters are just ammoral scum who would have killed no matter what because they simply don't care about anyone. No ban on anything (except guns) is going to stop them. You MIGHT be able to cure them, but only when you allow society to forcibly treat people who have not yet committed any crime. Kinda risky for a politician to suggest.
The RIAA is often likeneded to the mafia, and just as the mafia, they are used to the world behaving in a certain way. These lawyers might be high priced, but something tells me they grew up on cases where money talks. Not the real law of criminal cases or the bitterly fought battles of family court but corporate law. Where you often win just because you got the bigger team and the other side just settles because that is what everyone does.
They are now fighting a real battle against a real lawyer who is as far as I know backed by an extreme heavy weight from harvard and his students. All the bullshit that used to work to get a settlement doesn't work. They didn't pull this motion not because they thought it would work in court but because it worked for them before as bargaining chip in the settlement deal.
There is a real difference between a criminal type lawyer we see in on TV and the far more common business lawyers that draw up contacts and settle disputes.
I don't believe in incompetence, sorry, but these guys ain't that dumb and you would make a grave mistake thinking they are. I do believe in arrogance and the RIAA shows all the signs of it. They think there way works (and lets be honest, it has worked until now).
Also don't forget this, if they are cynical, then they might just be throwing things and see what sticks. Pretty much their tactics with prosecuting John Doe's in the first place. File every motion you can think off, you never know what the judge is crazy enough to accept or the opposition lawyer lets slip by. Because one thing this motion has achieved. More work for a lawyer working for free, more fugde for the judge to get lost in.
Old crap tends to stay around, until something kills it.
What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app? Then MS will have no choice or be known as the OS vendor whose browser ain't good enough.
MS isn't trying to limit IE for nothing, it hopes that nobody dares create a webapp that simply doesn't work under IE. Google has shown with Chrome they are thinking of pushing the envelope, wonder what they got in the pipeline that needs Chrome.
IE6 will die when using it hurts the user. Personally, for private web-apps, ie ALL ie is dead. It is amazing what you can make a webapp do when IE support is dropped.
Ever heard of them? Lucasgames/arts? Were one good too, made quality games, treated their customers rights etc etc. Then management happened. For me the rot set in when a Star Wars game had a third party logo in it.
So Telltale for me is good, for as long as they are good.
Several comments note that Wikipedia is a private company and it can ban whoever it wants to. Dangerous. Wikipedia is becoming bigger then itself, it is no longer just a website. Many see it is a realiable and impartial source of information. I often use wikipedia before google as I am more likely to get the result I want. For that matter, the first page in a google result is often wikipedia.
Wikipedia claims to have no agenda, to be impartial. Yet it has for CoS now decided that THIS is the truth, not what CoS says. Fair enough, but where does it end? What truths are going to be determined next. The holocaust? Certainly denial of it is lying so ban the deniers. But others are less clear. Other exterminations by other countries. The turks, the chinese, the dutch, the americans, the japanese. All of which have shown less then favourable reaction to being pointed out that they are equally guilty of mass extermination against others. What is the official version of american, australian, canadian history relating to the natives at the moment?
CoS is being banned for two reasons. First, it is claimed they use underhanded tactics like scaremongering, lawsuits to silence opposition. But that is true for any religious group, should all religious groups be banned? They also violated the terms of the site. But that as I said is dangerous because it is effectively one individual/company saying how they think so called impartial information should be gathered.
I don't have an answer. You can't constantly have highly biased information being inserted and neither can you have someone else decide that their truth is the truth even if it is about someone else.
Sadly, the truth is often hard to get at and depends entirely on your point of view. You can easily point at the antics of CoS and call it wrong, but then I would look at the antics of your school of faith and wonder what the difference is.
All you can wonder now, who is going to be banned next for pushing their view on articles relating to them.
Remember, wikipedia was NOT supposed to be a regular encyclopedia with a choosen set of editors who get to decide what the view of the institution is. It was supposed to be open to all. Now it isn't.
I thought myself, "what the fuck, why am I paying 32 euro for a couple of razor blades!" and I bought the cheap generic brand 2 blade stuff.
OUCH! Not saying it cut my face, it didn't but there really is a HUGE difference between the "quality" 5 blade razors and the cheap 2 blade kind. It is a smooth shave versus having the hair torn from your face.
Crybaby you might say, or I might just have had a really bad 2 blade razor but still. I ain't going back again.
So if you got a baby soft skin and a 5 o'clock shadow, then more blades are actually a good thing. Or maybe just really sharp blades.
Just ask yourself, why Chrome. What on earth would google do with their own browser? Just one thing and one thing only, try to FORCE all other browsers to increase their capabilities.
If you are involved with the web, then MS/IE is the ISA bus. It is the 8 bit application that still got to be supported. It is keeping the whole web back.
I could right now design a web app that will blow the socks of anything available, and it can never be commercial because it won't run on IE6/IE7 or even IE8. Google is pushing like mad to develop javascript libraries to code around IE so that stuff other browsers properly support can be made to work under IE as well, but the performance impact is a killer. IE is already by far the slowest browser, adding extra javascript to make it more capable is hardly going to help with web-apps.
MS doesn't want web-apps, because it can't control them. More over, their IE team either has secret orders or just isn't competent. You got to wonder what the reason is Opera, Apple, KDE, Mozilla and some others can implement the standards with speed and MS just can't. Lack of resources, hidden agenda or just plain incompetence. Take PNG encoding, MS still hasn't got it right. The official message is they want to support it, so why can't their coders do something everyone else has been doing for years?
So the browser wars are still very much on. But this time it ain't a battle for who sells the most browsers. It is a battle for the internet itself. Their is Google on one side, that wants to have web-based apps and MS which doesn't. As long as IE is the dominant browser, web-apps will have to be either crippled or limit themselves to certain browsers which is economic suicide.
MS doesn't care about standards or even market share, it just wants the web to die and go away. Lets not forget that MS looses money to the web, their encarta offering had to be killed because Wikipedia killed it. Do you really think MS wants to risk fully HTML5 capable browsers killing its office line? google docs is good enough for me and if google docs could ditch IE support it would be even better. That is what MS fears.
The browser wars are over, the battle for the internet has just started.
One where you had to give a rat arse about the ambient temperature to set the fuel mix, where you had to handcrank to get an idea what compression really means. Real manly brakes, none of this ABS crap that required you to anticipate as it would take a while to bring several tons of metal to a full stop. Etc etc. Personally, I love the modern age, where we can concentrate on what we want to achieve not being limited by the tools.
Not just being pedantic, the problem with preventing "crime" is that it is hard to proof you prevented it. There have been no more attacks on US soil, some would say that is evidence that the tactics worked. Others would say this doesn't proof anything.
We do know the tactics in use BEFORE 9/11 did NOT work.
Remember, this, the best fire marshall is one who is going to find it very hard to convince anyone he has done anything. The best after all makes into law sprinklers and alarms into every building and hence never has to put out a single fire.
Just like anal sex, it is better to do it to someone else, then to have it done to you. The Japanese liked fucking the americans up the ass with their cheap copies, but Japan was less the pleased when the korean's asked them to bend over. Korea in turn does not like it one bit that it is has both India and China aiming for its unshielded exhaust port.
Patends are crap when someone else got them, great when you got them.
Take an decent blouse of mine, it still looks like crap on me. Put it on my gf... oh alright my sister, and she looks absolutely hot in it. As Terry Pratchett once noted in a book, for the truly cool, anything they wear looks good.
MS is not cool, it is about as far from cool as you can get with burning yourself. It shouldn't try to be cool. It is like Balmer doing the monkey-dance, it don't fit. He is a boring man and if he tries to be hip, he just end up looking more foolish then he ever could just being boring.
MS search. THAT is a PERFECT name for an MS search engine. It says what it does and who it belongs to. JUST as Micrsoft Word, Internet Explorer and such are great names for a boring company.
stick with your image, it works far better then going against it. Just ask any politician who tried to rap.
Google got away with its name because it was new. MS isn't. Would you buy a IBM mainframe called the iFrame?
They are NOT the cool company. Nobody wants the MS logo (what is it actually?) on their fashion accesory MP3 player. For me to pay the premium that both MS and Apple demand, there got to be something in it that makes the premium worth while. Else I can just buy a FAR more capable music player from say iRiver, that can actually play more then just MP3/WMV/AAC.
Furthermore, Apple has already won the war, the retake lost ground, MS would have to do something innovative. They haven't. HD video output can only be done via a docking station. They never heard of mini-hdmi (or whatever the exact name is)?
HD Radio is a nice gimmick, but if want a portable radio, why would I need to buy a 300+ dollar device? There are cheaper options. Is the MP3/FLAC/ETC part of it also better quality? Got my doubts. For that matter, I am actually willing to bet that the HD radio is raped by the internal circuits till it sounds no better. The Apple devices are the same, terrible audio quality especially if you consider the high price. Silly me for expecting a device that costs 3x as much to sound 3x better:P
It uses a customer version of CE. Why? I can't think of any other reason then to limit cross spread of software. That it will have all kinds of build in limits that make building for it hard and impossible to share music. Exactly like MS has done countless times before including the previous Zunes.
MS just doesn't get it, nobody will buy their device simply for the logo and it ain't going to win over anyone that just wants a good portable music player.
First, the horse needs to be fed wether it is used or not. It also needs a place to run, which means costly ground being taken up.
Carriages ain't all that light. If you want to go long distances you need to change horses meaning spare horses need to be fed 24/7 just in case someone might need them.
Horse fuel is very low density, shipping it all takes a LOT of horses. Car food on the other hand is extremely dense and thousands of cars can be fed with by just one big mother car.
Would the OEM's REALLY fall for this? Would not a single asian company smelling a market dare to break out? Asus did it before, what is to stop them doing it again?
Worse, Apple is bound to release a netbook sooner or later. They would be silly not to and they would not pull this kind of crap. Apple netbook, full OSX as they can charge a premium for that product.
So, I think MS might actually be shooting itself in the foot with this. It ain't the same market anymore. The OEM's not only have tasted freedom, there are more of them now. Who would have thought Asus of all companies would lead the netbook market for a while? That the netbooks would take of like this?
Do you really think netbook makers are going to LIMIT their current hardware to these specs and risk another company shipping linux or just a more expensive version of windows getting all the cash? Don't forget that Intel is pushing a linux for netbooks. Sure, acer made a joke of its version by having it extremely limited and yes, lots of people seem to expect windows when they buy linux, MS might well over-estimate how thight their control is over the market.
MS does this thing because it has a problem with its product and its greed. In theory, everyone could have the ultimate supreme deluxe version of Vista/W7 for say 30 dollars and MS would make billions, they want to make even more and have come up with ways to segment its product into artificially different versions. MS had to pay for development of the ultimate version and in fact has to pay for the development of the different versions as well as the cost of support, different advertising, stocking different versions etc etc. But their greed tells them enough will buy the supreme version to make up for it while still having a seemingly cheap windows on offer to keep linux out.
If they would just sell one cheap do it all version, they would kill linux in a second, safe everyone a major support headache and actually be liked for it. Bt that is not the MS way. Bleed the market for all its if worth, high and low.
You think the RIAA is going to let a silly little thing like possibly mistagged music stop it? Hasn't stopped them before, won't stop them next time.
And it is not about winning from the RIAA in a court case, it is about being able to afford to win. US legal system means you got to have the money to pay the lawyer up front and I am fairly sure the RIAA got more money then you.
Last.fm commited a major error in judgement and CBS showed its colors. Anyone who is smart is going to stop the service. No wait, anyone who is smart NEVER used the service. Giving your music data to a media company in bed with the RIAA? Exactly what part of that sounds like a good idea?
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So, you are 23 and making an issu about 15 dollars, worried that you might not get your moneys worth.
Some of us have jobs. 15 bucks is nothing, barely a movie and that lasts what 2 hours?
By all means, keep up the argument that a monthly fee is to expensive, but accept the label "cheapo" that comes with it.
Personally, I would have preffered is some games had special servers with say a 50 euro monthly fee and 200 euro deposit. The extra money could go to extra support and the deposit is lost if you are banned. Would clean the servers up, get rid of any gold farmers and make small games a lot more viable with a core userbase. Why does every MMO out there have to chase the lowest common denominator.
Humanity, you fail at it.
If a great ape doesn't like something, your first clue will be that you die. They might look like gentle giants of nature but any great ape is many times stronger then a human being. Try this, you swing yourself up on a branch with one arm holding a baby or tractor tire with the other.
The saying "where does a 400lbs gorilla sit: anywhere it wants to" isn't for nothing.
An orangutan incapable of fighting of a research assistant :p
If one mammal can laugh, why not another? We share plenty of other traits.
And when the new employees ask for a raise, you ask them "you ever heard what happened to the people that were here before you when they asked for a raise?"
And they answer "I never met any old employees".
And you answer: "exactly" and then laugh your evil laugh.
His point was that people don't want to believe that some people are just rotten. Your godwinned example would then have to be "Some people just don't want to believe Hitler was just really a bad guy and keep looking for excuses for his actions and how he was so misunderstood and nobody gave him hugs".
This is roughly the problem in europe. We keep lowering jail sentences because punishing people don't work and keep giving hugs and finding excuses for peoples actions. It don't work either because the sad thing is, some people are just rotten. Rotten because they decided their needs are of more importance then anybody else. That they are entitled and nobody else is.
These german ministers are refusing to accept these shooters are just ammoral scum who would have killed no matter what because they simply don't care about anyone. No ban on anything (except guns) is going to stop them. You MIGHT be able to cure them, but only when you allow society to forcibly treat people who have not yet committed any crime. Kinda risky for a politician to suggest.
The RIAA is often likeneded to the mafia, and just as the mafia, they are used to the world behaving in a certain way. These lawyers might be high priced, but something tells me they grew up on cases where money talks. Not the real law of criminal cases or the bitterly fought battles of family court but corporate law. Where you often win just because you got the bigger team and the other side just settles because that is what everyone does.
They are now fighting a real battle against a real lawyer who is as far as I know backed by an extreme heavy weight from harvard and his students. All the bullshit that used to work to get a settlement doesn't work. They didn't pull this motion not because they thought it would work in court but because it worked for them before as bargaining chip in the settlement deal.
There is a real difference between a criminal type lawyer we see in on TV and the far more common business lawyers that draw up contacts and settle disputes.
I don't believe in incompetence, sorry, but these guys ain't that dumb and you would make a grave mistake thinking they are. I do believe in arrogance and the RIAA shows all the signs of it. They think there way works (and lets be honest, it has worked until now).
Also don't forget this, if they are cynical, then they might just be throwing things and see what sticks. Pretty much their tactics with prosecuting John Doe's in the first place. File every motion you can think off, you never know what the judge is crazy enough to accept or the opposition lawyer lets slip by. Because one thing this motion has achieved. More work for a lawyer working for free, more fugde for the judge to get lost in.
Old crap tends to stay around, until something kills it.
What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app? Then MS will have no choice or be known as the OS vendor whose browser ain't good enough.
MS isn't trying to limit IE for nothing, it hopes that nobody dares create a webapp that simply doesn't work under IE. Google has shown with Chrome they are thinking of pushing the envelope, wonder what they got in the pipeline that needs Chrome.
IE6 will die when using it hurts the user. Personally, for private web-apps, ie ALL ie is dead. It is amazing what you can make a webapp do when IE support is dropped.
Ever heard of them? Lucasgames/arts? Were one good too, made quality games, treated their customers rights etc etc. Then management happened. For me the rot set in when a Star Wars game had a third party logo in it.
So Telltale for me is good, for as long as they are good.
Several comments note that Wikipedia is a private company and it can ban whoever it wants to. Dangerous. Wikipedia is becoming bigger then itself, it is no longer just a website. Many see it is a realiable and impartial source of information. I often use wikipedia before google as I am more likely to get the result I want. For that matter, the first page in a google result is often wikipedia.
Wikipedia claims to have no agenda, to be impartial. Yet it has for CoS now decided that THIS is the truth, not what CoS says. Fair enough, but where does it end? What truths are going to be determined next. The holocaust? Certainly denial of it is lying so ban the deniers. But others are less clear. Other exterminations by other countries. The turks, the chinese, the dutch, the americans, the japanese. All of which have shown less then favourable reaction to being pointed out that they are equally guilty of mass extermination against others. What is the official version of american, australian, canadian history relating to the natives at the moment?
CoS is being banned for two reasons. First, it is claimed they use underhanded tactics like scaremongering, lawsuits to silence opposition. But that is true for any religious group, should all religious groups be banned? They also violated the terms of the site. But that as I said is dangerous because it is effectively one individual/company saying how they think so called impartial information should be gathered.
I don't have an answer. You can't constantly have highly biased information being inserted and neither can you have someone else decide that their truth is the truth even if it is about someone else.
Sadly, the truth is often hard to get at and depends entirely on your point of view. You can easily point at the antics of CoS and call it wrong, but then I would look at the antics of your school of faith and wonder what the difference is.
All you can wonder now, who is going to be banned next for pushing their view on articles relating to them.
Remember, wikipedia was NOT supposed to be a regular encyclopedia with a choosen set of editors who get to decide what the view of the institution is. It was supposed to be open to all. Now it isn't.
I thought myself, "what the fuck, why am I paying 32 euro for a couple of razor blades!" and I bought the cheap generic brand 2 blade stuff.
OUCH! Not saying it cut my face, it didn't but there really is a HUGE difference between the "quality" 5 blade razors and the cheap 2 blade kind. It is a smooth shave versus having the hair torn from your face.
Crybaby you might say, or I might just have had a really bad 2 blade razor but still. I ain't going back again.
So if you got a baby soft skin and a 5 o'clock shadow, then more blades are actually a good thing. Or maybe just really sharp blades.
Don't sue the guys who can answer the question "you and what army" with "that is classified information, citizen #674572".
Just ask yourself, why Chrome. What on earth would google do with their own browser? Just one thing and one thing only, try to FORCE all other browsers to increase their capabilities.
If you are involved with the web, then MS/IE is the ISA bus. It is the 8 bit application that still got to be supported. It is keeping the whole web back.
I could right now design a web app that will blow the socks of anything available, and it can never be commercial because it won't run on IE6/IE7 or even IE8. Google is pushing like mad to develop javascript libraries to code around IE so that stuff other browsers properly support can be made to work under IE as well, but the performance impact is a killer. IE is already by far the slowest browser, adding extra javascript to make it more capable is hardly going to help with web-apps.
MS doesn't want web-apps, because it can't control them. More over, their IE team either has secret orders or just isn't competent. You got to wonder what the reason is Opera, Apple, KDE, Mozilla and some others can implement the standards with speed and MS just can't. Lack of resources, hidden agenda or just plain incompetence. Take PNG encoding, MS still hasn't got it right. The official message is they want to support it, so why can't their coders do something everyone else has been doing for years?
So the browser wars are still very much on. But this time it ain't a battle for who sells the most browsers. It is a battle for the internet itself. Their is Google on one side, that wants to have web-based apps and MS which doesn't. As long as IE is the dominant browser, web-apps will have to be either crippled or limit themselves to certain browsers which is economic suicide.
MS doesn't care about standards or even market share, it just wants the web to die and go away. Lets not forget that MS looses money to the web, their encarta offering had to be killed because Wikipedia killed it. Do you really think MS wants to risk fully HTML5 capable browsers killing its office line? google docs is good enough for me and if google docs could ditch IE support it would be even better. That is what MS fears.
The browser wars are over, the battle for the internet has just started.
Oh no, it doesn't.
One where you had to give a rat arse about the ambient temperature to set the fuel mix, where you had to handcrank to get an idea what compression really means. Real manly brakes, none of this ABS crap that required you to anticipate as it would take a while to bring several tons of metal to a full stop. Etc etc. Personally, I love the modern age, where we can concentrate on what we want to achieve not being limited by the tools.
Is there any proof it hasn't?
Not just being pedantic, the problem with preventing "crime" is that it is hard to proof you prevented it. There have been no more attacks on US soil, some would say that is evidence that the tactics worked. Others would say this doesn't proof anything.
We do know the tactics in use BEFORE 9/11 did NOT work.
Remember, this, the best fire marshall is one who is going to find it very hard to convince anyone he has done anything. The best after all makes into law sprinklers and alarms into every building and hence never has to put out a single fire.
A bad one is fighting fires like a hero all day.
Just like anal sex, it is better to do it to someone else, then to have it done to you. The Japanese liked fucking the americans up the ass with their cheap copies, but Japan was less the pleased when the korean's asked them to bend over. Korea in turn does not like it one bit that it is has both India and China aiming for its unshielded exhaust port.
Patends are crap when someone else got them, great when you got them.
Read down a couple of stories. Windows is so good that NASA trained astronauts can't get a windows laptop to play a DVD.
It just works. My ass.
Take an decent blouse of mine, it still looks like crap on me. Put it on my gf... oh alright my sister, and she looks absolutely hot in it. As Terry Pratchett once noted in a book, for the truly cool, anything they wear looks good.
MS is not cool, it is about as far from cool as you can get with burning yourself. It shouldn't try to be cool. It is like Balmer doing the monkey-dance, it don't fit. He is a boring man and if he tries to be hip, he just end up looking more foolish then he ever could just being boring.
MS search. THAT is a PERFECT name for an MS search engine. It says what it does and who it belongs to. JUST as Micrsoft Word, Internet Explorer and such are great names for a boring company.
stick with your image, it works far better then going against it. Just ask any politician who tried to rap.
Google got away with its name because it was new. MS isn't. Would you buy a IBM mainframe called the iFrame?
They are NOT the cool company. Nobody wants the MS logo (what is it actually?) on their fashion accesory MP3 player. For me to pay the premium that both MS and Apple demand, there got to be something in it that makes the premium worth while. Else I can just buy a FAR more capable music player from say iRiver, that can actually play more then just MP3/WMV/AAC.
Furthermore, Apple has already won the war, the retake lost ground, MS would have to do something innovative. They haven't. HD video output can only be done via a docking station. They never heard of mini-hdmi (or whatever the exact name is)?
HD Radio is a nice gimmick, but if want a portable radio, why would I need to buy a 300+ dollar device? There are cheaper options. Is the MP3/FLAC/ETC part of it also better quality? Got my doubts. For that matter, I am actually willing to bet that the HD radio is raped by the internal circuits till it sounds no better. The Apple devices are the same, terrible audio quality especially if you consider the high price. Silly me for expecting a device that costs 3x as much to sound 3x better :P
It uses a customer version of CE. Why? I can't think of any other reason then to limit cross spread of software. That it will have all kinds of build in limits that make building for it hard and impossible to share music. Exactly like MS has done countless times before including the previous Zunes.
MS just doesn't get it, nobody will buy their device simply for the logo and it ain't going to win over anyone that just wants a good portable music player.
First, the horse needs to be fed wether it is used or not. It also needs a place to run, which means costly ground being taken up.
Carriages ain't all that light. If you want to go long distances you need to change horses meaning spare horses need to be fed 24/7 just in case someone might need them.
Horse fuel is very low density, shipping it all takes a LOT of horses. Car food on the other hand is extremely dense and thousands of cars can be fed with by just one big mother car.
By your logic, if the goverment only had Ford motorcars then GM cars ain't an alternative since their operation is geared for Ford.
Doesn't fly my friend.
Would the OEM's REALLY fall for this? Would not a single asian company smelling a market dare to break out? Asus did it before, what is to stop them doing it again?
Worse, Apple is bound to release a netbook sooner or later. They would be silly not to and they would not pull this kind of crap. Apple netbook, full OSX as they can charge a premium for that product.
So, I think MS might actually be shooting itself in the foot with this. It ain't the same market anymore. The OEM's not only have tasted freedom, there are more of them now. Who would have thought Asus of all companies would lead the netbook market for a while? That the netbooks would take of like this?
Do you really think netbook makers are going to LIMIT their current hardware to these specs and risk another company shipping linux or just a more expensive version of windows getting all the cash? Don't forget that Intel is pushing a linux for netbooks. Sure, acer made a joke of its version by having it extremely limited and yes, lots of people seem to expect windows when they buy linux, MS might well over-estimate how thight their control is over the market.
MS does this thing because it has a problem with its product and its greed. In theory, everyone could have the ultimate supreme deluxe version of Vista/W7 for say 30 dollars and MS would make billions, they want to make even more and have come up with ways to segment its product into artificially different versions. MS had to pay for development of the ultimate version and in fact has to pay for the development of the different versions as well as the cost of support, different advertising, stocking different versions etc etc. But their greed tells them enough will buy the supreme version to make up for it while still having a seemingly cheap windows on offer to keep linux out.
If they would just sell one cheap do it all version, they would kill linux in a second, safe everyone a major support headache and actually be liked for it. Bt that is not the MS way. Bleed the market for all its if worth, high and low.
So no computer can be used as evidence eh. Gosh, Enron would have loved that. No more goverment e-mails having to be kept for years and years.
You are silly.
You think the RIAA is going to let a silly little thing like possibly mistagged music stop it? Hasn't stopped them before, won't stop them next time.
And it is not about winning from the RIAA in a court case, it is about being able to afford to win. US legal system means you got to have the money to pay the lawyer up front and I am fairly sure the RIAA got more money then you.
Last.fm commited a major error in judgement and CBS showed its colors. Anyone who is smart is going to stop the service. No wait, anyone who is smart NEVER used the service. Giving your music data to a media company in bed with the RIAA? Exactly what part of that sounds like a good idea?