Meaning no disrespect to Sony or Nintendo, or video game journalists in general, but it's kind of moronic to compare sales of the two when both of these companies are selling as many as they can make.
Actually, it's not. How many people are going to buy both a Wii and a PS3? Regardless of the reason why, the fact that Wii sales are soundly outstripping PS3 sales is very bad news for Sony, because almost every person who buys a Wii now is one person who won't be buying a PS3 later when Sony gets their act together.
For average Joes like you and me, if I tell you that you owe me money, and you fear damage to your credit report if you don't pay me but you don't actually think that you do owe me, you can write "paid under protest" underneath where I would endorse the check, and then sue me to get your money back. The court won't hold it against you that you paid the bill if you make it clear to the court that you never considered yourself to be liable for the debt.*
The fact that we're talking about multi-bazillion dollar corporations doesn't mean this concept shouldn't still apply.
(* As a side note, the new electronic bank records for checks makes this a lot more viable as proof, because the fact that the bank has on record that they cashed the check with "paid under protest" already written on it means that the defendant can't claim you wrote it after the fact. Also, banks have to send you an official copy of their record of the check upon request - the copy you get with your bank statement may get accepted in small claims court, but it's not what the law considers "official".)
How about revoking some of the pro-monopoly laws that exist
I can see it now: instead of a series of telephone poles along my street with maybe ten cables and wires running along them, it'll be a solid wall of copper and fiber, one for each company providing a service.
Oh, wait - if everyone had to run their own cable on the poles, the expense would be so high that nobody would make any money (except whoever owns the poles). That must be why some companies pay other companies to use their cables. This sounds vaguely familiar.
Even with deregulation, you're still going to have oligopoly status in the broadband market (as opposed to the duopoly status we have today), and that oligopoly status will still lead last-mile ISPs to try to double dip by charging content providers who aren't their direct customers and to try to block services that they wish to provide by themselves like VoD and VoIP.
By the way, you make a lot of generalistic claims without providing any justification for those claims. Instead of saying things like "regulation is bad" or "regulation restricts technology", you need to provide some specifics on why you think network neutrality won't work if you plan on convincing people, because those generalistic claims aren't always true.
My question (modulo a sibling post explaining that this is actually about clenching shut the a[nalog]-hole via ICT) is how Microsoft will implement such an agreement with Sony if/when it comes into effect. Will this be a forced patch of some sort, or does Vista phone home every time you play a Blu-Ray disc to see whether the ICT agreement is now being enforced?
Note that the Supreme Court denied the petition for a writ of certiorari - fancy talk for "they decided not to hear the case". Their rules state that if any four (out of nine) justices vote in favor of granting the writ, the court will hear the case.
What this means is that the court decided by a vote of at least 6-3 not to hear the case. In many cases, though, this has less to do with the factual merits of the case than it does the fact that there is no conflict among lower federal courts on the issue.
Some string theorists believe dark matter may be gravitons, emitted by matter on adjacent branes, that intersect our own universe's brane, resulting in a gravitational distortion that becomes huge at cosmological scales. A similar concept is used to explain why the gravity exhibited by real matter in our own universe has a strength many orders of magnitude smaller than the other forces - most of the gravitons leave our universe's brane, while the mediating particles of other forces (gluons, photons, etc.) are constrained to move within the brane.
Being "Speaker-Elect" means absolutely jack shit. Pelosi was nothing more than another member of Congress until the House elected her as Speaker last Thursday.
It's hilarious every time they do this. They start with a picture of some guy's face from 500 feet away that looks like a big skin-colored blur, and by the time they're done enhancing it, you can see right up the guy's nose. Of course, they want to keep it realistic: to show that you can only enhance an image so much, his nose hairs are slightly pixelated.
He'd probably just veto the bill, and I wouldn't be surprised if Congress overrode the veto. Balance of power often trumps political affiliation, which is part of why Specter, a moderate Republican, had introduced this bill.
Even if he did sign it with a signing statement, how would that make a difference? What would the executive branch do, not bother showing up to court for the lawsuit?
Rather than censor teh Intarweb, here's a better idea. Let these punk-ass kids have their fifteen minutes of fame. Then videotape their fifteen hours of community service and put that on YouTube.
The idea of losing net neutrality is nothing compared to the threat we face from Howard Berman's rise to power as chair of the IP subcommittee. He is fully in the pocket of the content cabal, and I suspect that that subcommittee will see a whirlwind tour of every draconian fair-use-revoking freedom-hating DRM-infested idea ever put to paper.
And to think we were so close to having Berman promote himself to where he wouldn't be able to do any damage by chairing whatever foreign relations committee it was he was looking at. We would have had Rick Boucher chairing this committee, which would have been a serious victory for fair use advocates worldwide.
I wonder how much the content cabal paid Berman not to take the better job.
Maybe the grandparent poster meant "approximately less". If somebody told me that one was approximately less than zero, I'd approximately believe them.
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly doesn't preclude them from it, but most people still won't buy more than one of them.
Good advice, especially if you have reason to believe that the would-be creditor may not be around to file suit against later.
Meaning no disrespect to Sony or Nintendo, or video game journalists in general, but it's kind of moronic to compare sales of the two when both of these companies are selling as many as they can make.
Actually, it's not. How many people are going to buy both a Wii and a PS3? Regardless of the reason why, the fact that Wii sales are soundly outstripping PS3 sales is very bad news for Sony, because almost every person who buys a Wii now is one person who won't be buying a PS3 later when Sony gets their act together.
For average Joes like you and me, if I tell you that you owe me money, and you fear damage to your credit report if you don't pay me but you don't actually think that you do owe me, you can write "paid under protest" underneath where I would endorse the check, and then sue me to get your money back. The court won't hold it against you that you paid the bill if you make it clear to the court that you never considered yourself to be liable for the debt.*
The fact that we're talking about multi-bazillion dollar corporations doesn't mean this concept shouldn't still apply.
(* As a side note, the new electronic bank records for checks makes this a lot more viable as proof, because the fact that the bank has on record that they cashed the check with "paid under protest" already written on it means that the defendant can't claim you wrote it after the fact. Also, banks have to send you an official copy of their record of the check upon request - the copy you get with your bank statement may get accepted in small claims court, but it's not what the law considers "official".)
How about revoking some of the pro-monopoly laws that exist
I can see it now: instead of a series of telephone poles along my street with maybe ten cables and wires running along them, it'll be a solid wall of copper and fiber, one for each company providing a service.
Oh, wait - if everyone had to run their own cable on the poles, the expense would be so high that nobody would make any money (except whoever owns the poles). That must be why some companies pay other companies to use their cables. This sounds vaguely familiar.
Even with deregulation, you're still going to have oligopoly status in the broadband market (as opposed to the duopoly status we have today), and that oligopoly status will still lead last-mile ISPs to try to double dip by charging content providers who aren't their direct customers and to try to block services that they wish to provide by themselves like VoD and VoIP.
By the way, you make a lot of generalistic claims without providing any justification for those claims. Instead of saying things like "regulation is bad" or "regulation restricts technology", you need to provide some specifics on why you think network neutrality won't work if you plan on convincing people, because those generalistic claims aren't always true.
A USB controller still has to have some method of A/D conversion if the sticks are analog. That's what the patent claims to cover.
Every single piece of software ever written has bugs.
I dunno. I've never had a buffer overrun trying to print "Hello world".
I don't know about you, but I make a concerted effort not to watch any version.
Do I have to ask -permission- to watch this stuff now?
Not yet. But soon.
My question (modulo a sibling post explaining that this is actually about clenching shut the a[nalog]-hole via ICT) is how Microsoft will implement such an agreement with Sony if/when it comes into effect. Will this be a forced patch of some sort, or does Vista phone home every time you play a Blu-Ray disc to see whether the ICT agreement is now being enforced?
I mean, each pound of dark matter weighs over ten thousand pounds, so light moving at 90% of the speed of light seems pretty reasonable to me.
Note that the Supreme Court denied the petition for a writ of certiorari - fancy talk for "they decided not to hear the case". Their rules state that if any four (out of nine) justices vote in favor of granting the writ, the court will hear the case.
What this means is that the court decided by a vote of at least 6-3 not to hear the case. In many cases, though, this has less to do with the factual merits of the case than it does the fact that there is no conflict among lower federal courts on the issue.
Some string theorists believe dark matter may be gravitons, emitted by matter on adjacent branes, that intersect our own universe's brane, resulting in a gravitational distortion that becomes huge at cosmological scales. A similar concept is used to explain why the gravity exhibited by real matter in our own universe has a strength many orders of magnitude smaller than the other forces - most of the gravitons leave our universe's brane, while the mediating particles of other forces (gluons, photons, etc.) are constrained to move within the brane.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology .
Being "Speaker-Elect" means absolutely jack shit. Pelosi was nothing more than another member of Congress until the House elected her as Speaker last Thursday.
It's hilarious every time they do this. They start with a picture of some guy's face from 500 feet away that looks like a big skin-colored blur, and by the time they're done enhancing it, you can see right up the guy's nose. Of course, they want to keep it realistic: to show that you can only enhance an image so much, his nose hairs are slightly pixelated.
Also, if you forget which is the right one, you can visit the FTC's website at http://www.ftc.gov/ and navigate to "For Consumers" -> "Credit".
Many crowbars today are printed with the warning label: "Do not use to pry."
I had an actual word in mind for "C". What's "D" stand for?
In Soviet Russia, the Ori hallow you!
He'd probably just veto the bill, and I wouldn't be surprised if Congress overrode the veto. Balance of power often trumps political affiliation, which is part of why Specter, a moderate Republican, had introduced this bill.
Even if he did sign it with a signing statement, how would that make a difference? What would the executive branch do, not bother showing up to court for the lawsuit?
I think you mean "RTFC".
Rather than censor teh Intarweb, here's a better idea. Let these punk-ass kids have their fifteen minutes of fame. Then videotape their fifteen hours of community service and put that on YouTube.
The idea of losing net neutrality is nothing compared to the threat we face from Howard Berman's rise to power as chair of the IP subcommittee. He is fully in the pocket of the content cabal, and I suspect that that subcommittee will see a whirlwind tour of every draconian fair-use-revoking freedom-hating DRM-infested idea ever put to paper.
And to think we were so close to having Berman promote himself to where he wouldn't be able to do any damage by chairing whatever foreign relations committee it was he was looking at. We would have had Rick Boucher chairing this committee, which would have been a serious victory for fair use advocates worldwide.
I wonder how much the content cabal paid Berman not to take the better job.
Maybe the grandparent poster meant "approximately less". If somebody told me that one was approximately less than zero, I'd approximately believe them.
More or less.
Wally: Bingo, sir.