Because selling the content as an add-on to existing broadband services (Comcast, Verizon DSL, etc) is more lucrative than running their own native ISP.
There are plenty of people who would rather type in an AOL keyword like "Oprah" to get the details on todays show, than to try and remember URLs or fuck with Google for 4 hours to find what they're looking for.
People being willing to pay for AOL is much less amazing to me than people being willing to pay to see slashdot articles 10 minutes early.
The facts are, DHS is made up of what once was INS and Customs.
It's in fact their job to prevent bootlegged products from hitting American markets, so quit trying to spin this story as some kind of ridiculous "war on terror gone crazy" horseshit.
They just hope to get the case heard by an ultra-liberal activist judge who thinks all laws are subjective.
Maybe they'll cite the constitutional right to "live out your childhood fantasy of getting riduculously rich by screwing around with video games all day"
Working for a bad employer sucks, but a company the size of EA has a squadron of lawyers to make sure they're within the letter of the law.
I had an anecdote related to me from someone who recently quit the HR department of some large corporation I cant remember the name of.
Apparently, it was part of their "unwritten" policy to pre-write termination memos and stuff for every single employee, with generic terms like "insubordination" as the reasons. They basically fed a list of employees through a Word template every month.
This way, they could fire Sally for announcing she's pregnant, since her termination was actually decided on months before she told anyone she was pregnant. Basically it's a preemptive measure against any sort of wrongful termination suit.
I once worked in a cubicle under the biggest asshole manager in recorded history. His idea of "inspiring us" was to, each and every morning, walk out, tell us to stop working and listen, and announce that each and every one of us was replacable.
We had it easy, the guys back in the factory worked under some of the worst conditions I'd seen. Temperatures back there would be like 120 in the summer, and the whole place wound up thick with this dust that would just make you itch for days.
That story has a happy ending, though. One morning, he announced again that "each and every one of you is replacable". Each and every one of us walked out.
It was a small enough town to get word around what an awful place it was to work. About three months later the place was gone.
This isn't about gamecube piracy, this is about these cheesy import deals that look like N64 controllers, and plug directly into your AV jacks (like all those Atari deals), and have a bunch of old nintendo games built in.
They sell 'em everywhere, go to any flea market and you can find them. They're as flimsily built as you can imagine. There's a light gun too, for Duck Hunt.
I believe they just have an image of the old 100-in-one NES bootleg from the olden days.
Anyways, they're no doubt illegal. But we're talking about Kid Icarus and Duck Hunt, not Metroid Prime and Resident Evil Zero.
Realize it takes into account popularity of the site, and occurence of the words, and I believe thw word types are ranked too, nouns before verbs before adjectives before adverbs.
The Firefox page is fairly popular, and the words "more" and "than" appear over and over, as with Google. (Uh, googles motto "do no evil" wouldn't hit another word, hmmmmmmmmm)
I found it: The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community.
So these are the assholes who think that tentacle rape magazines and stuff like Heavy Metal should be on the lower rack at 7-11 next to Casper.
Is this just a comic book fan site, and the name is just a joke?
What looming legal threats are there to the comic book industry? I can't find an "our mission" page on their site.
It sounds to me like only an idiot would contribute money to a fund defend Superman or Jughead.
Re:George Broussard of 3d realms' take on this
on
EA Games: The Human Story
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A large part of the public wants video games that are more like movies. They now expect polished cutscenes that are as high a quality as Finding Nemo, they expect all kinds of graphic variety, all kinds of shit.
I'd call Bungie a smaller studio, without MS's backing they'd be gone by now. But look at how all you slashbots hack up Halo. Not enough graphic variety, boring cutscenes, etc.. Halo is an example of a smaller houses success, but it isn't as polished as Epic's Unreal Tournament, so its just crap. Of course, those opinions are based more on anti-microsoft venom than anything else, but the point stands.
It's possible for a small group to pull it off now and then, but it's kind of like a cheap indy film becoming a huge Blockbuster. It happens, but the Blair Witches, Clerks, and Big fat Greeks are the exception, where the big budget Hollywood stuff - LOTR, Star Wars Prequels, Spidermans are the rule.
You have what's essentially a multiple choice ballot with two choices.
You have huge drives to register new voters, get everyone to the polls it doesn't matter who you vote for.
If I were to ask a large population a true or false question that none know the answer to, I'd expect my results to come back about 50-50.
The question asked on election night, as most americans saw it was "which is the lesser of two evils?" There was very little support for either candidate from the unwashed masses. Most were undecided going into the polls. I can only assume they did eenie-meenie-miney-moe.
How many people do you know who went to vote just to get out of work/school for a couple hours?
It's mostly noise, no discernable signal.
We need to return to the write-in ballot. The excuse of multiple choice being easier for machines to count is no longer valid. OCR can read a written ballot just fine.
If I'm undecided, or don't care and am just screwing around and write in "Pee Wee Herman", the noise is easily discarded.
This 51%-49% crap is absolutely meaningless from a statistical point of view. It's not representative of the People. It doesn't mean 51% think Bush is the best man for president, and 49% Kerry.
If we're going to hold on to this two party nonsense, why don't we be honest and just flip a coin every 4 years? Why continue with the charade that its a democratic election?
They need to return to the electoral system thats been used since the very first democracies in ancient Greece. Write the name of the man you want on the piece of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
Same as here. They refer people to Verizon, Verizon ships an AOL install disc with every DSL self-setup package.
AOL wants to provide content, not connectivity.
Because selling the content as an add-on to existing broadband services (Comcast, Verizon DSL, etc) is more lucrative than running their own native ISP.
Sounds like a smart move to me.
That's AOL for broadband, a content service you pay for seperate from your broadband connection.
AOL is shutting down it's own native broadband ISP.
It's not that amazing.
There are plenty of people who would rather type in an AOL keyword like "Oprah" to get the details on todays show, than to try and remember URLs or fuck with Google for 4 hours to find what they're looking for.
People being willing to pay for AOL is much less amazing to me than people being willing to pay to see slashdot articles 10 minutes early.
This is slashdot, and everything MS does is Bill Gates fault even though he doesn't have a real hand in running the show there anymore.
Why should Stan Lee deserve better treatment, just because he's a personal hero of most of the comic book nerds around here?
They don't make a "big bucket of generic lego" anymore, at least I can't find it at Toys'R'Us.
All of their products are 10-piece kits that can only make one movie-tie-in thing and cost 29.99.
It has nothing to do with patents.
The look of the Cube is trademarked. If they used different colors, or maybe little symbols on the stickers, they might have been OK.
It's the same thing as a counterfeit Gucci purse or Rolex.
The facts are, DHS is made up of what once was INS and Customs.
It's in fact their job to prevent bootlegged products from hitting American markets, so quit trying to spin this story as some kind of ridiculous "war on terror gone crazy" horseshit.
So long as MSN gets the hits and mindshare, I doubt they're too worried.
Noone needs to switch from Google. They just have to keep people from switching to Google.
MSN is the default homepage for a gajillion browsers out there. It just has to be good enough to keep them from looking for something different.
Besides, it's still a beta, and TFA says they won't replace much of the core searching until 2005.
They just hope to get the case heard by an ultra-liberal activist judge who thinks all laws are subjective.
Maybe they'll cite the constitutional right to "live out your childhood fantasy of getting riduculously rich by screwing around with video games all day"
Working for a bad employer sucks, but a company the size of EA has a squadron of lawyers to make sure they're within the letter of the law.
I had an anecdote related to me from someone who recently quit the HR department of some large corporation I cant remember the name of.
Apparently, it was part of their "unwritten" policy to pre-write termination memos and stuff for every single employee, with generic terms like "insubordination" as the reasons. They basically fed a list of employees through a Word template every month.
This way, they could fire Sally for announcing she's pregnant, since her termination was actually decided on months before she told anyone she was pregnant. Basically it's a preemptive measure against any sort of wrongful termination suit.
I once worked in a cubicle under the biggest asshole manager in recorded history. His idea of "inspiring us" was to, each and every morning, walk out, tell us to stop working and listen, and announce that each and every one of us was replacable.
We had it easy, the guys back in the factory worked under some of the worst conditions I'd seen. Temperatures back there would be like 120 in the summer, and the whole place wound up thick with this dust that would just make you itch for days.
That story has a happy ending, though. One morning, he announced again that "each and every one of you is replacable". Each and every one of us walked out.
It was a small enough town to get word around what an awful place it was to work. About three months later the place was gone.
This isn't about gamecube piracy, this is about these cheesy import deals that look like N64 controllers, and plug directly into your AV jacks (like all those Atari deals), and have a bunch of old nintendo games built in.
They sell 'em everywhere, go to any flea market and you can find them. They're as flimsily built as you can imagine. There's a light gun too, for Duck Hunt.
I believe they just have an image of the old 100-in-one NES bootleg from the olden days.
Anyways, they're no doubt illegal. But we're talking about Kid Icarus and Duck Hunt, not Metroid Prime and Resident Evil Zero.
No, I don't consider moving porn magazines and adult comics to the top shelf "censorship".
Who cares? Google offers a free service, I don't see why MS can't use it if they want.
I do believe they plan to be more than a second-tier google provider. They may take Google ranks into account with their own system.
Or, they could be getting links from archive.org, or other dead links from other sites.
How do you know those URLs on your site are only indexed in Google, and not on someone elses page, a forum post somewhere, or in the old MSN?
As for the "anti-ms venom" comment, maybe that's not why it's in fred mcgees blog, but that's the only reason it's on slashdot.
Badeepdbeeedpdpdeep THIS IS SLASHDOT NEWS SERVICE!!! HOT OFF THE WIRE - Some guy thinks microsoft is doing something bad!
Realize it takes into account popularity of the site, and occurence of the words, and I believe thw word types are ranked too, nouns before verbs before adjectives before adverbs.
The Firefox page is fairly popular, and the words "more" and "than" appear over and over, as with Google. (Uh, googles motto "do no evil" wouldn't hit another word, hmmmmmmmmm)
Try this one (seriously): more gay than slashdot
Can both crawl up my ass.
And who cares what Jamie Crowell (or whoever), random blogger, thinks MSN might be doing, no doubt based purely on "ms sucks" rhetoric?
yuk yuk yuk
Dont forget the other bastion of modern Democratic thought this election: HEY EVERYBODY, CHENEYS DAUGHTER IS GAY!!!
I found it: The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community.
So these are the assholes who think that tentacle rape magazines and stuff like Heavy Metal should be on the lower rack at 7-11 next to Casper.
They can go get fucked, IMO.
Yeah, they sure got some brains.
If you find the Bush family listing, check out this brilliant entry:
# his brother, Neil Bush
# his cousin, Neil's daughter Lauren Bush
Umm, your brother's daughter is your niece, not your cousin.
Me either.
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund?
Is this just a comic book fan site, and the name is just a joke?
What looming legal threats are there to the comic book industry? I can't find an "our mission" page on their site.
It sounds to me like only an idiot would contribute money to a fund defend Superman or Jughead.
A large part of the public wants video games that are more like movies. They now expect polished cutscenes that are as high a quality as Finding Nemo, they expect all kinds of graphic variety, all kinds of shit.
I'd call Bungie a smaller studio, without MS's backing they'd be gone by now. But look at how all you slashbots hack up Halo. Not enough graphic variety, boring cutscenes, etc.. Halo is an example of a smaller houses success, but it isn't as polished as Epic's Unreal Tournament, so its just crap. Of course, those opinions are based more on anti-microsoft venom than anything else, but the point stands.
It's possible for a small group to pull it off now and then, but it's kind of like a cheap indy film becoming a huge Blockbuster. It happens, but the Blair Witches, Clerks, and Big fat Greeks are the exception, where the big budget Hollywood stuff - LOTR, Star Wars Prequels, Spidermans are the rule.
We should all be smart enough to know this.
You have what's essentially a multiple choice ballot with two choices.
You have huge drives to register new voters, get everyone to the polls it doesn't matter who you vote for.
If I were to ask a large population a true or false question that none know the answer to, I'd expect my results to come back about 50-50.
The question asked on election night, as most americans saw it was "which is the lesser of two evils?" There was very little support for either candidate from the unwashed masses. Most were undecided going into the polls. I can only assume they did eenie-meenie-miney-moe.
How many people do you know who went to vote just to get out of work/school for a couple hours?
It's mostly noise, no discernable signal.
We need to return to the write-in ballot. The excuse of multiple choice being easier for machines to count is no longer valid. OCR can read a written ballot just fine.
If I'm undecided, or don't care and am just screwing around and write in "Pee Wee Herman", the noise is easily discarded.
This 51%-49% crap is absolutely meaningless from a statistical point of view. It's not representative of the People. It doesn't mean 51% think Bush is the best man for president, and 49% Kerry.
If we're going to hold on to this two party nonsense, why don't we be honest and just flip a coin every 4 years? Why continue with the charade that its a democratic election?
They need to return to the electoral system thats been used since the very first democracies in ancient Greece. Write the name of the man you want on the piece of paper.
Did he just come out of a coma or something?
Seriously guys, we can restart this in another 4 years, or 2 if you actually care about the house/senate.
as evidenced by slashdot comments
Do you have a link for the Chernobyl affecting farms in the US comment?
Not that I don't believe you, I just think you believe everything you hear that fits your world view.