Fish can't get to the body. It'd be in a regulation US Navy body bag specifically made for burials at sea, and loaded down with lead weights. It'd definitely be hard to find though.
I'm not sure it works that way. I don't think XBL points are like the gold standard. I mean, you pay $20USD for however many points-- say 500 (Totally made up numbers here, but $0.04 USD per point). The transaction is done at that point, and Microsoft banks the cash, even if you don't spend your points for six months. It's not like you buy your premium horse armor for 415 points, but Microsoft still has to keep $3.40 in escrow to cover the "value" of your unspent points.
In my opinion the number one reason to do this is to decouple the idea of physical value from points. You don't have $3.40 in your XBL wallet, you have 85 points, and when you spend those 85 points to buy some pretty pixels on your screen you're not thinking about the fact that it was once $3.40. The second reason is exactly so they DON'T have to do what you're saying-- have fractional portions of a customer's unspent money laying around. If you still have $3.40 in your account at some point and you stop playing XBL, you're going to try to finagle a refund. When you have 85 Points it's easier for you to let go, because you're already been separated from the idea of it having physical value. The third big reason is that it allows a microtransaction model without paying tons of credit car processing fees. They'd rather sell you 1000 points up front even if you only spend them 100 at a time, rather than pay 10 times the processing fees using credit cards up front for every purchase.
Nothing to do with driving. It's a god given right not to pay taxes, and then complain about the deficit to GDP ratio. Too many Americans don't realize that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society, and that the US has the lowest taxes of any industrialized country in the world.
Then the execs would claim it was "a new genre that didn't stand the test of time," rather than saying, "it was a fragile new idea that we raped over and over until it could only sit in a corner; clutching its knees in catatonic horror and soiling itself. Next please." The fans didn't abandon music games. Companies like Activision took the fans for fools and pumped out overpriced garbage.
I'm in the market for an ereader right now. I've considered everything from the Kobo (I'm in Canada) to the iPad; weighing the pros and cons of LED screens versus eInk, etc. I've decided to buy an eInk device for a few reasons (I'm a heavy reader so I benefit more from the specific pros of those devices), and I'll do so in the next month. I mention this in case Jeff Bezos is trolling Slashdot, because I won't be buying a Kindle, and the reason is almost 100% because of the lack of ePub support. I don't want Amazon telling me that they will deign to allow me to borrow Kindle books from libraries. I want to be borrowing the ePub books that my library is already lending anyway.
I've pretty much ruled out the Kobo because of the difficulty of entering text (which I don't see myself doing very often, but it's plausible), and so I've decided I'm most likely going to be getting a Nook. I'm in Canada. There are no Barnes & Noble stores here, but the device works fine if you don't need 3G support. This means I'm willing to make a 6 hour round trip to buy a device from Amazon's competitor (to skip dealing with high shipping fees and Customs crap) because of one feature that could have easily been added in software updates by now, and which they seem to be totally obstinate in not adding. You don't need a partner program with 11,000 US libraries when you can just add ePub support and, poof, suddenly your device can work with what thousands of libraries are already doing.
I think Amazon is suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome, and if they're not careful they're going to get thrashed in the market they invented. They'll end up like Diamond and Creative, who were early to the MP3 player market right at the time when the demand had bubbled up to that magical point where a device can really take off, but got destroyed because another company did it better.
Artificially inflate version number? What the heck does that even mean? It's still going to be "Firefox 4" when it hits release. No one stupid enough to care about "it's version 12!" is smart enough to be downloading a beta. It's not like they're pulling a Slackware or something and going with Firefox 7, or worse, Firefox XP, or Firefox 2011.
The major advantages of Amtrak are lack of security and the space. Sadly, for high speed trains, I'm sure the first will be removed, and who knows about the second.
Do you know how much kinetic energy a train has moving at 250mph? What, do you want terrorists hijacking trains and driving them into skyscrapers? Why don't you love America?:(
force a radical shakeup of the frieght companies operating priorities
Do you like drinking orange juice while it's still fresh? Do you like being able to buy a mango in Boston in December? Then don't fuck with the railroads. I'm in Canada in February and I can get fresh pineapple, and if you fuck with that I WILL CUT YOU.
they've required stations here to censor Dire Straits "Money for Nothing", despite that the song is written as a monologue describing the actual views of a real person of rock stars from the 80s.
You don't think the lyric "that little faggot's got his own jet airplane. that little faggot he's a millionaire" might be worthy of censoring? I'm a big Dire Straits fan, but I can see why they don't want that playing at drive time. At least that makes sense. I want to know who turned the radio version of Eminem's "Love the Way You Lie" from-- "I'm gonna tie her to the bed and set this house on fire" to "I'm gonna ___ her to the ___ and ___ this ___ on _____".
And then add in that on top of your line speed limit AND your monthly cap, they also use DPI to do heavy throttling. A lot of us up here would have simply dealt with either caps OR speed limits OR throttling, but we starting seeing red when we're expected to tolerate all three. While prices keep going UP.
Right, this is Canada. I was on Rogers before switching to Distributel back in November. 36 dollars a month gets your 3mbps cable with a 15GB monthly cap, and you'll pay 2.50 for every gigabyte you go over. When I lived in the US, I could get 6mbps uncapped DSL for 25 dollars a month. And not only are they capping data transfers here, but they're also using draconian DPI to throttle basically everything. At least with Distributel (a Bell wholesaler) I still have to deal with Bell's throttling, but I don't have to worry about a cap. This CRTC decision was going to mean the end of that for me. It would put wholesalers and resellers like Distributel and Teksavvy in an impossible position and most likely drive them out of business. All of this is happening with an infrastructure that was paid for by the Canadian taxpayers while Bell Canada was a government monopoly.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I've seen both sides of this (having lived in both the US and Canada), and that you can Comcast can kiss my ass. Internet service in Canada already makes the US look like some futuristic technological wonderland, and this was going to set Canadian internet service back by a decade or more. There's already a significant lack of ISP competition up here, and this is a decision that was blatantly aimed at making it impossible for companies like Netflix to compete with Bell and Rogers in-house offerings. For probably 95 percent of Canadians, your phone, your internet, and your television service all come from the same person, and it's very likely one of two or three companies.
I can't help but notice your sig. Guess what? Your dialup plan gets you basically the same thing as 36 dollars will get you from a Canadian *CABLE* provider.
I'm in Ontario. My corner store has all of the scratch tickets loose in a sort of tray behind glass. You ask for one, and the slide out the tray and set it on the counter to let you pick which ticket you want. I wasn't aware that this conferred any sort of advantage, since your odds are the same no matter what... (unless you have the sort of tickets mentioned in TFA)
No joke. I'd hate to see how long it takes them to release the records of a governor who actually served a full term. And they're saying the volume of requests was a factor? Whether they get 1 request or 1 million, they only have to go through the data once. This is some combination of administrative incompetence and whitewashing the Tea Party's golden gi-- oh wait, even they're sick of her, and they're on the Michelle Bachmann bandwagon now.
Perhaps with enough publicity from this case, the "members" of the NAACP will realize that throwing a tantrum is not useful activism. Unfortunately, it's more likely that the various police involved will be targeted next, along with their supporters, families, and barbers.
There are legitimate reasons to transport savegames from console to console, but not to specifically hack the savegame file on your PC first in such a way that the achievements for that savegame can be transferred from one gamer tag to another. That's what they're checking for.
Here are a pair of tweets from Stephen Toulouse, the head of Microsoft's Xbox Policy and Enforcement Division.
"@Shaddz We confirmed there were cheated achievements and gave the parent the details. This wasnt a "he played too good" situation at all."
"@Shaddz I confirmed that achievements were illegitimately modified on the account and contacted the customer directly w/ specifics"
From user zzzaap: "@Stepto ppl seem to think XBL banned that autistic boy on the basis XBL knew he was autistic.I know u said he did cheat but comment on this"
The reply: "@zzzaap We had no idea. I won't be providing any more detail, the only person who gets the proof is the mom.:>"
Cheating is cheating. If being so labeled has a strong emotional impact, then perhaps someone will learn a valuable lesson.
Mom has the greatest motivation to lie of any of them. Her child has a terrible handicap that must be so painful to see as a parent, and she wants desperately to tell herself that there's a silver lining in that he's a gaming savant. If she has to admit to herself that her son is just a cheater, his status as a special snowflake is gone.
You make two false assumptions that invalidate your premise:
Microsoft's cheat detection is entirely qualitative— based on assumptions, gut feelings, and "I think the kid's cheating," rather than having any quantitative technical component, such as detecting that he downloaded gamesaves to inflate his achievements.
That the child's autism changes anything at all, and that because he is autistic, he must also be a savant.
Yes, his undeniable skill at video gaming and the sheer force of his savantism reached out to his Xbox's hard drive and altered checksums in such a way that his account would be flagged as having cheated. You think Microsoft's anti-cheat enforcement is entirely qualitative? They were able to ban one of my consoles for having modified firmware even though I never took it on Live, downloaded DLC, &c. You think they can't spot someone artificially inflating their Gamerscore?
Take a second, breathe deeply, be intellectually honest with yourself, and apply Occam's Razor. What's more likely: that Microsoft is engaging in an unfair and oppressive campaign against gaming savants (never mind that that's not how autism actually works) at the highest levels of their company, or that an 11 year old cheated at a video game? I find it actually more offensive that everyone's first reaction to this story is that the kid is being oppressed for having autism, which must clearly make him an unstoppable video game ninja, and that we should all be so lucky as to be autistic too.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw Goody Stallman with the Devil!
Fish can't get to the body. It'd be in a regulation US Navy body bag specifically made for burials at sea, and loaded down with lead weights. It'd definitely be hard to find though.
Microsoft owns a chunk of Facebook, so I doubt it.
I'm not sure it works that way. I don't think XBL points are like the gold standard. I mean, you pay $20USD for however many points-- say 500 (Totally made up numbers here, but $0.04 USD per point). The transaction is done at that point, and Microsoft banks the cash, even if you don't spend your points for six months. It's not like you buy your premium horse armor for 415 points, but Microsoft still has to keep $3.40 in escrow to cover the "value" of your unspent points.
In my opinion the number one reason to do this is to decouple the idea of physical value from points. You don't have $3.40 in your XBL wallet, you have 85 points, and when you spend those 85 points to buy some pretty pixels on your screen you're not thinking about the fact that it was once $3.40. The second reason is exactly so they DON'T have to do what you're saying-- have fractional portions of a customer's unspent money laying around. If you still have $3.40 in your account at some point and you stop playing XBL, you're going to try to finagle a refund. When you have 85 Points it's easier for you to let go, because you're already been separated from the idea of it having physical value. The third big reason is that it allows a microtransaction model without paying tons of credit car processing fees. They'd rather sell you 1000 points up front even if you only spend them 100 at a time, rather than pay 10 times the processing fees using credit cards up front for every purchase.
Nothing to do with driving. It's a god given right not to pay taxes, and then complain about the deficit to GDP ratio. Too many Americans don't realize that taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society, and that the US has the lowest taxes of any industrialized country in the world.
Then the execs would claim it was "a new genre that didn't stand the test of time," rather than saying, "it was a fragile new idea that we raped over and over until it could only sit in a corner; clutching its knees in catatonic horror and soiling itself. Next please." The fans didn't abandon music games. Companies like Activision took the fans for fools and pumped out overpriced garbage.
I'm in the market for an ereader right now. I've considered everything from the Kobo (I'm in Canada) to the iPad; weighing the pros and cons of LED screens versus eInk, etc. I've decided to buy an eInk device for a few reasons (I'm a heavy reader so I benefit more from the specific pros of those devices), and I'll do so in the next month. I mention this in case Jeff Bezos is trolling Slashdot, because I won't be buying a Kindle, and the reason is almost 100% because of the lack of ePub support. I don't want Amazon telling me that they will deign to allow me to borrow Kindle books from libraries. I want to be borrowing the ePub books that my library is already lending anyway.
I've pretty much ruled out the Kobo because of the difficulty of entering text (which I don't see myself doing very often, but it's plausible), and so I've decided I'm most likely going to be getting a Nook. I'm in Canada. There are no Barnes & Noble stores here, but the device works fine if you don't need 3G support. This means I'm willing to make a 6 hour round trip to buy a device from Amazon's competitor (to skip dealing with high shipping fees and Customs crap) because of one feature that could have easily been added in software updates by now, and which they seem to be totally obstinate in not adding. You don't need a partner program with 11,000 US libraries when you can just add ePub support and, poof, suddenly your device can work with what thousands of libraries are already doing.
I think Amazon is suffering from Not Invented Here syndrome, and if they're not careful they're going to get thrashed in the market they invented. They'll end up like Diamond and Creative, who were early to the MP3 player market right at the time when the demand had bubbled up to that magical point where a device can really take off, but got destroyed because another company did it better.
Artificially inflate version number? What the heck does that even mean? It's still going to be "Firefox 4" when it hits release. No one stupid enough to care about "it's version 12!" is smart enough to be downloading a beta. It's not like they're pulling a Slackware or something and going with Firefox 7, or worse, Firefox XP, or Firefox 2011.
The major advantages of Amtrak are lack of security and the space. Sadly, for high speed trains, I'm sure the first will be removed, and who knows about the second.
Do you know how much kinetic energy a train has moving at 250mph? What, do you want terrorists hijacking trains and driving them into skyscrapers? Why don't you love America? :(
force a radical shakeup of the frieght companies operating priorities
Do you like drinking orange juice while it's still fresh? Do you like being able to buy a mango in Boston in December? Then don't fuck with the railroads. I'm in Canada in February and I can get fresh pineapple, and if you fuck with that I WILL CUT YOU.
And they'll still statistically get hired over me, the guy who didn't finish college, but who's smarter than the lot of them.
they've required stations here to censor Dire Straits "Money for Nothing", despite that the song is written as a monologue describing the actual views of a real person of rock stars from the 80s.
You don't think the lyric "that little faggot's got his own jet airplane. that little faggot he's a millionaire" might be worthy of censoring? I'm a big Dire Straits fan, but I can see why they don't want that playing at drive time. At least that makes sense. I want to know who turned the radio version of Eminem's "Love the Way You Lie" from-- "I'm gonna tie her to the bed and set this house on fire" to "I'm gonna ___ her to the ___ and ___ this ___ on _____".
And then add in that on top of your line speed limit AND your monthly cap, they also use DPI to do heavy throttling. A lot of us up here would have simply dealt with either caps OR speed limits OR throttling, but we starting seeing red when we're expected to tolerate all three. While prices keep going UP.
Right, this is Canada. I was on Rogers before switching to Distributel back in November. 36 dollars a month gets your 3mbps cable with a 15GB monthly cap, and you'll pay 2.50 for every gigabyte you go over. When I lived in the US, I could get 6mbps uncapped DSL for 25 dollars a month. And not only are they capping data transfers here, but they're also using draconian DPI to throttle basically everything. At least with Distributel (a Bell wholesaler) I still have to deal with Bell's throttling, but I don't have to worry about a cap. This CRTC decision was going to mean the end of that for me. It would put wholesalers and resellers like Distributel and Teksavvy in an impossible position and most likely drive them out of business. All of this is happening with an infrastructure that was paid for by the Canadian taxpayers while Bell Canada was a government monopoly.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I've seen both sides of this (having lived in both the US and Canada), and that you can Comcast can kiss my ass. Internet service in Canada already makes the US look like some futuristic technological wonderland, and this was going to set Canadian internet service back by a decade or more. There's already a significant lack of ISP competition up here, and this is a decision that was blatantly aimed at making it impossible for companies like Netflix to compete with Bell and Rogers in-house offerings. For probably 95 percent of Canadians, your phone, your internet, and your television service all come from the same person, and it's very likely one of two or three companies.
I can't help but notice your sig. Guess what? Your dialup plan gets you basically the same thing as 36 dollars will get you from a Canadian *CABLE* provider.
I'm in Ontario. My corner store has all of the scratch tickets loose in a sort of tray behind glass. You ask for one, and the slide out the tray and set it on the counter to let you pick which ticket you want. I wasn't aware that this conferred any sort of advantage, since your odds are the same no matter what... (unless you have the sort of tickets mentioned in TFA)
I use Adblock Plus, so I'm not entirely sure I take your point.
And I'll never buy another eBook the first time I see an ad in one. We balance out. Books are about immersion, and having ads will ruin it for me.
No joke. I'd hate to see how long it takes them to release the records of a governor who actually served a full term. And they're saying the volume of requests was a factor? Whether they get 1 request or 1 million, they only have to go through the data once. This is some combination of administrative incompetence and whitewashing the Tea Party's golden gi-- oh wait, even they're sick of her, and they're on the Michelle Bachmann bandwagon now.
Are you trying to say that transparency of government is not an important enough topic to protest?
Perhaps with enough publicity from this case, the "members" of the NAACP will realize that throwing a tantrum is not useful activism. Unfortunately, it's more likely that the various police involved will be targeted next, along with their supporters, families, and barbers.
There are legitimate reasons to transport savegames from console to console, but not to specifically hack the savegame file on your PC first in such a way that the achievements for that savegame can be transferred from one gamer tag to another. That's what they're checking for.
Here are a pair of tweets from Stephen Toulouse, the head of Microsoft's Xbox Policy and Enforcement Division.
:>"
"@Shaddz We confirmed there were cheated achievements and gave the parent the details. This wasnt a "he played too good" situation at all."
"@Shaddz I confirmed that achievements were illegitimately modified on the account and contacted the customer directly w/ specifics"
From user zzzaap: "@Stepto ppl seem to think XBL banned that autistic boy on the basis XBL knew he was autistic.I know u said he did cheat but comment on this"
The reply: "@zzzaap We had no idea. I won't be providing any more detail, the only person who gets the proof is the mom.
Cheating is cheating. If being so labeled has a strong emotional impact, then perhaps someone will learn a valuable lesson.
Mom has the greatest motivation to lie of any of them. Her child has a terrible handicap that must be so painful to see as a parent, and she wants desperately to tell herself that there's a silver lining in that he's a gaming savant. If she has to admit to herself that her son is just a cheater, his status as a special snowflake is gone.
Yes, his undeniable skill at video gaming and the sheer force of his savantism reached out to his Xbox's hard drive and altered checksums in such a way that his account would be flagged as having cheated. You think Microsoft's anti-cheat enforcement is entirely qualitative? They were able to ban one of my consoles for having modified firmware even though I never took it on Live, downloaded DLC, &c. You think they can't spot someone artificially inflating their Gamerscore?
Take a second, breathe deeply, be intellectually honest with yourself, and apply Occam's Razor. What's more likely: that Microsoft is engaging in an unfair and oppressive campaign against gaming savants (never mind that that's not how autism actually works) at the highest levels of their company, or that an 11 year old cheated at a video game? I find it actually more offensive that everyone's first reaction to this story is that the kid is being oppressed for having autism, which must clearly make him an unstoppable video game ninja, and that we should all be so lucky as to be autistic too.