It's not news that they made money selling their own music online. What's news is how much money. With no record company to take a cut, the artists are getting rich. And the RIAA is not getting any of it.
I think that this event is newsworthy simply because of how many people it will convince that digital distribution without DRM can be profitable. Yes, that's already been proven, just not with so many zeros at the end.
Who modded this guy up? Why? It's a pretty senseless prediction. You're going to say that the show won't succeed before it has even been cast? Based on what information do you make that prediction?
Bionic Woman was a big hit for NBC... so how can anyone say that this new show won't be just as big? And don't get me started on Battlestar Galactica...
Being a re-hash of an 80's show does not mean that the new show will suck.
Are you kidding me? Are we still talking about this? You are so desperate not to lose an argument with a stranger on the frakin internet that you are now contradicting yourself? You have issues, bub.
Because you did say it would have worked. You said exactly that. Scroll up and read it.
Me: You want us to believe that Rubin wanted to change the band's name to KKK in an effort to enhance album sales? On what planet does it work like that?
You: It works on the same planet that Marilyn Manson, N.W.A, 50 cent, and Madonna sold millions of records.
If you choose to reply to this, I won't answer. This argument is nonsensical. I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Lies, all lies. I am The Black Crowes, all five of them, and I never saw you at the meetings.
You want us to believe that Rubin wanted to change the band's name to KKK in an effort to enhance album sales? On what planet does it work like that? Maybe on Bizarro world... so what time is your flight back there? Be sure not to miss it, AC.
I read the same Wikipedia entry you did, and I've never heard of any of those people, except the teletubbies (and in all fairness, that album did kick ass).
And what's more important, he was simply the A&R man for most of his career... he scouted the talent, but he didn't produce many records, from what I can tell.
I'd never utter his name in the same breath as Rick Rubin's.
This all totally off topic anyhow, but who cares! Thanks for replying. You're one of three who read my post!
Now...not saying that Simon Cowell is anything great, but for a top record producer to have never heard of someone that familiar to everyone else...that's just weird.
So you point that out why? Are you trying to imply that Rick Rubin is out of touch with popular culture? Surely not, because that would be totally asinine. Rick Rubin practically invented popular culture one day in 1985 when he said to Run-DMC "Hey, I think you guys should cover this old Aerosmith song...". The rest, as they say, is history. And that's just one of his contributions. Cowell does what again? Judges some TV talent show?
I sorta doubt that Rubin never heard of the guy in the literal sense. I think that he meant that Cowell has a truly pathetic resume as a producer, compared to what Rubin has done. He was dissing Cowell, and saying that Cowell is not in his league. And even if he did mean it in the literal sense... so what? Rubin doesn't watch American Idol? So what?
Rubin is a great music producer, and Cowell is a TV personality. Simple as that. And if you want to refute that, please name a few albums that Cowell has produced.
I haven't seen Regarding Henry, mostly because it looked so stupid in the commercial.
That said, it's hardly proof that the new movie will suck. Hopefully people don't judge you primarily on work that you did 16 years ago, but rather weight the more recent stuff more heavily.
I agree with all of that. I think that economic bounty depicted in Star Trek is based on the idea that we will eventually be able to create energy so cheaply that it's finally "too cheap to meter", and the rather more fantastic idea that we will then be able to use that power to create any object we desire, from a perfect copy of ourselves to a bowl of chicken soup.
If we can actually real that level of technology, it will solve a lot of problems, but it's hardly a utopia. There will still be plenty of reasons for us to fight with each other.
Sorry we all held a gun to your head and forced you to participate... I promise I'll stop.
You're totally correct - leisure pursuits, especially those that have to do with fantasy realms, are totally... illogical. I'm going to go teach a kid to read, while planting a tree at the same time.
Don't let me catch you anywhere near that Xbox, ok? That would make you a hypocrite. And you're not that, right? You're a grown man of 30 plus, with very important things to do! Like bitch on the internets!
I basically agree with you. I'd rather that they just "reboot" the thing, and then we won't have to concern ourselves with what went before. It worked well for Batman and James Bond, and Kirk is essentially just such a character.
The problem here is that Nimoy is in it, and maybe the Shat too. I want them both to be in it. The idea appeals to me. So how to do we both reboot, and also have them in it?
It's not impossible. They could still portray elderly versions of the two main characters, but simply from a different continuity.
I agree that many fans seem to be dying to pick this thing apart based on the most scant of all evidence - internet speculation. How about we all chill out, and wait until we've seen the movie to start hating it? Or at the very least until we have a few confirmed plot details.
This has to mean there's more time travel. They should have renamed the franchise "Time Trek". Let me guess, old Spock travels the to past, ie the era in which the film is set, and does something that (supposedly) ties up assorted loose plot ends. Sigh.
(Mind, I've got nothing against a good time travel yarn. Operative word being "good".)
Yes, it has to mean more time travel, in the same sense that it has to mean that this is finally the Trek where Spock will pull out his pointy Vulcan member and make tender love to Kirk. Which is to say, it doesn't have to mean that at all.
This is just speculation. It doesn't have to mean squat. So please, don't sigh yet. There's nothing to sigh about... yet.
That said, if it is a lame time travel plot, I'll be sighing and crying right along with you. I also agree that not all time travel plots are lame. First Contact was one of my favorite Trek movies, and so was The Voyage Home.
But I have a hard time seeing how a time travel plot will seem anything but tiresome. As others have pointed out, it's usually the same - timeline is polluted, and our heroes have to put it right.
The reason that it worked for me in First Contact is the fact that the movie was so well done that I was able to overlook the somewhat trite main plot. The borg queen was a great villain, the comedic moments worked, without being obtrusive, and the action sequences were fun.
Compare that to Nemesis... I didn't really buy the main villain, the action sequences felt over-blown and didn't seem to flow as part of the plot, and there was little humor.
I'm fine with JJ blowing the canon open. Caveat: I'm not a Trek fan.
I appreciate that die hard fans will be upset by that, however my feeling is that Star Trek has basically had about 12 plot lines that have essentially been recycled in various guises throughout all the seasons. They've finally flogged that deceased horse one too many times.
If you are not a fan, why did you watch so much of it that you were able to discern the 12 typical plotlines? I don't watch shows that I don't enjoy, at least not more than a couple eps.
The fundamental issues I see is the utopian nature of the universe Roddenberry created. Ignoring the probability or possibility of human nature being so utterly warped into an utopia (I personally can't suspend my disbelief that far), as a basis for a TV or movie it's all very nice and all, but it makes for dull writing and little drama.
You're left with creating drama by have characters behave out of character by alien possession or secret starfleet order etc etc etc. Or time travel (which is a clichéd story, almost always in any medium - paradox, protect timeline, yawn blah blah, seen it a thousand times)
The Star Trek universe is vast. Some of the societies in it could be called utopias, but certainly not all. Is the Klingon Empire any sort of utopia? Sure, the people of Earth don't war with each other, are not racist, and don't need to carry cash on them. But given that a ton of hostiles are out there, it's hard to see how it can be called a universe free from conflict.
I agree with you that the whole alien possession plot has been done to death, but that's not the same as saying that the whole Trek universe needs to be burned to the ground. Abrams just needs to be creative and original, and most importantly, tell a story that is for some reason compelling. He's been able to do that in the past with some success.
No, Star Trek needs its ass kicked. I'm not entirely sure that JJ Abrams is the best guy to do that, but he's probably better than anyone who's been in charge of that franchise for the past 20 years.
To me, it's pretty easy to say that the universe should get it's ass kicked... it's a lot harder to actually make specific suggestions on ways to tell a great story in the Star Trek universe. All that you've come up with is to avoid the major cliches... fair enough, and I agree.
Now, does anyone have an actual idea? Let's hope Abrams does. That's why they pay him the big bucks, right?
To me, the Batman folks did this the right way. They updated the look of the characters, without totally betraying the original source material. They managed to tell a sophisticated story with a theme that feels relevant to today's society, and they treated the subject matter seriously - don't go "campy", whatever you do.
The speculated plot from the article does sound a heck of a lot like First Contact... so much so that I would be very surprised if it's correct. Abrams can come up with something a bit more original than that... can't he?
The original series did just that on several occasions - Scotty was in 66 episodes out of 80 episodes produced (80 if you include the original un-aired pilot). Nimoy is the only actor who was in all 80.
And even then, Scotty often had little actual screen time. As beloved as he is, especially here at the dot, he was really a second-tier character.
And I'm really confused by the announcement that Chekov has been cast. It makes me wonder if a significant amount of the action will take place during Kirk's academy years, as has been predicted in several places. Chekov was a lot younger than Kirk, and can't have been at the academy at the same time.
No, the home business users that I very often talked to in my old job we not even aware there was such a thing as home business package. And like you, many couldn't have afforded it if they did know. They didn't know that their upload speed had been capped, either, until they asked me why it took so long to upload 2 GB of images. Users who are tech-savvy enough to know that they have asymmetrical connections are a real minority in my experience.
So what kind of data sets are you working with that you're worried that you might download more than 100 GB of it in a month? Whatever it is, I don't think that people like you are a large percentage of Comcast's customers. Are you a grad student who wants to download and analyze SETI data or something? Those are some large files I guess...
I'm not really disagreeing with your point per se... I just can't think who needs to download 100 GB of stuff in a month for work, whether they are a small business owner or someone working from home.
I certainly do agree with you that it's sneaky of Comcast to not tell us the monthly limit.
No, I don't think this will hurt any home business. I can't think of any that would reach the cap limits that people have been discussing - whether it's 100 GB or 300 GB a month, few businesses need to download that much information in a month.
Photographers can generate large amounts of date, and videographers even more. But they don't download that data to their home office nearly as often as they need to upload it - to the printer, to the web site that hosts their images, to where ever people are using the data.
So it's the cap on upload speeds that kills this type of home business vastly more than the cap on total data per month. I worked at a digital photography website until recently, and photographers could never understand why it took all night to upload a whole weddings worth (or sports tournament, etc) of image files. Very very few of them were aware of the fact that their upload speed was vastly slower than the download speed they could get.
And this is obviously not pirated content. These are the people who created the content, attempting to use it in a totally legal way to make money, and Comcast is not making it easy for them. People in this situation really don't have a good option available to them. Their only choice is to start the upload before they go to bed, and let it work all night long. Customers want the images to be available right away. Photographers sell most of their images and prints soon after the event. But with the current state of broadband in the US, that takes a while.
With such sound legal advise as this available online, it's hard to see how all lawyers don't instantly go out of business...
I'm pretty sure that Comcast would emerge the victor if you chose to tangle with them in the courts. Even if you banded together with other people who had been shut off, the legal firepower that you could muster would be truly pathetic compared to Comcast's army of blue-haired lawyers.
I'm not a lawyer (as I assume you must be), so I really can't say whether your statement has legal merit or not, but even if it did, you'd still lose.
I don't understand why you're so hesitant to use BitTorrent on your Comcast connection. I use it on mine quite a bit. I must never have hit 100 gigs, but I can't be far off. And that's true for other people I know.
I think that part of it is that I always make sure the ratio of the torrent gets back to 1.0 before I shut it off. That essentially limits me to 44 kBp/s down, as well as up, which puts a cap on my downloading for the month.
Do that, and they'll never shut you off. I'm pretty sure that one has to either have faster ups than 44 or else be a leech to get shut down.
For one, are the graphics really that much better on the PS3? I don't see a ton of difference when I demo the two side by side at the store. And besides, most people (including me) don't have a high def tv to enjoy the full graphical goodness anyhow.
Plus, who ever said that the PC version would be gimped? That wasn't the case with any of the previous PC versions - they could all take advantage of the PC's superior firepower (specifically, they could run at a higher resolution that the console versions). What makes you so sure this time is going to be different?
And finally, if space on the dvd is such a big issue, why not just put the game on 2? Would it really be the end of the world? There's just no way to accomplish that?
My attitude is that Sony messed up the next gen, by making it so expensive that I can't afford it. If GTA4 was PS3 only, then I would probably not play it until 2010, when a PS3 finally dips below the $250 mark.
And they did it so that they could win their format war - betamax all over again. If all the corporations involved could have agreed on a standard (ONE standard), then the cost of the drives would be dropping faster. But instead, we get this BS.
Don't get me wrong... I hate MS too. For totally different reasons. But they're pretty much the good guy, in this particular battle. Maybe not good. More like the lesser of two evils.
My post was meant to defend the CRPG in general, but not to say that they are better or as good as the paper games. While CRPGs are the "children" of the old TSR games, the apple has fallen rather far from the tree, in many ways. And you pointed most of them out, in very eloquent fashion.
In many ways, the computer games are a less rich experience, simply because the computer can't do anything but present a very rigid system, with a finite number of outcomes. The beauty of the paper system is the the Dungeon Master is a human being, who can adjust to his players on the fly. If you can come up with a novel solution to a problem (setting the roof on fire), then a good DM can accommodate your creativity into the experience.
The problem is, however, that finding a great Dungeon Master is sorta like finding a great drummer for your rock band - it's damn hard. If you're lucky enough to have a good one, well woohoo, rock on. If you're stuck with a mediocre one, then the experience of all of the players suffers. And if all you have is a crappy one, well, it's maybe better to just go play a PC game.
There are other reasons why a traditional RPG may not be feasible. It's hard to get a group of people together in the same room. What do you do when you're in the middle of a campaign, and Erc the dwarf can't show up because his wife is sick? Do you have someone else play the dwarf?
And where do you have this game? It takes up a decent amount of space, and it can get pretty animated, as you know, and sometimes parents, spouses, and roommates get pissed off. There's usually a mess to clean up after, as well.
So while I think that there will always be a place for the old style of play, I think it's understandable why people enjoy the computer variety.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not news that they made money selling their own music online. What's news is how much money. With no record company to take a cut, the artists are getting rich. And the RIAA is not getting any of it. I think that this event is newsworthy simply because of how many people it will convince that digital distribution without DRM can be profitable. Yes, that's already been proven, just not with so many zeros at the end.
Who modded this guy up? Why? It's a pretty senseless prediction. You're going to say that the show won't succeed before it has even been cast? Based on what information do you make that prediction?
Bionic Woman was a big hit for NBC... so how can anyone say that this new show won't be just as big? And don't get me started on Battlestar Galactica...
Being a re-hash of an 80's show does not mean that the new show will suck.
Are you kidding me? Are we still talking about this? You are so desperate not to lose an argument with a stranger on the frakin internet that you are now contradicting yourself? You have issues, bub.
Because you did say it would have worked. You said exactly that. Scroll up and read it.
Me: You want us to believe that Rubin wanted to change the band's name to KKK in an effort to enhance album sales? On what planet does it work like that?
You: It works on the same planet that Marilyn Manson, N.W.A, 50 cent, and Madonna sold millions of records.
If you choose to reply to this, I won't answer. This argument is nonsensical. I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
And all controversy is created equal? Madonna dressing in S&M gear is the same thing as a southern rock band appearing to endorse the KKK?
So if the southern fried white racist formula works so well, please name one such act with a gold album. Just one.
I guess all controversy is not created equal, is it? Think a bit more before you post here again, this exchange was pretty embarrassing for you.
Is that right? I must have missed the albums where those artists implied that they were members of the KKK. Which album was it again?
Besides, 50 and NWA are black. They can play the race card all they want. The Black Crowes are a white Southern rock band.
And Madonna? Huh? Yeah she's shocking, but in a sexual way. That really has nothing at all to do with what we're talking about. Nothing. At all.
Lies, all lies. I am The Black Crowes, all five of them, and I never saw you at the meetings.
You want us to believe that Rubin wanted to change the band's name to KKK in an effort to enhance album sales? On what planet does it work like that? Maybe on Bizarro world... so what time is your flight back there? Be sure not to miss it, AC.
Boycott ACs!
I read the same Wikipedia entry you did, and I've never heard of any of those people, except the teletubbies (and in all fairness, that album did kick ass).
And what's more important, he was simply the A&R man for most of his career... he scouted the talent, but he didn't produce many records, from what I can tell.
I'd never utter his name in the same breath as Rick Rubin's.
This all totally off topic anyhow, but who cares! Thanks for replying. You're one of three who read my post!
Now...not saying that Simon Cowell is anything great, but for a top record producer to have never heard of someone that familiar to everyone else...that's just weird.
So you point that out why? Are you trying to imply that Rick Rubin is out of touch with popular culture? Surely not, because that would be totally asinine. Rick Rubin practically invented popular culture one day in 1985 when he said to Run-DMC "Hey, I think you guys should cover this old Aerosmith song...". The rest, as they say, is history. And that's just one of his contributions. Cowell does what again? Judges some TV talent show?
I sorta doubt that Rubin never heard of the guy in the literal sense. I think that he meant that Cowell has a truly pathetic resume as a producer, compared to what Rubin has done. He was dissing Cowell, and saying that Cowell is not in his league. And even if he did mean it in the literal sense... so what? Rubin doesn't watch American Idol? So what?
Rubin is a great music producer, and Cowell is a TV personality. Simple as that. And if you want to refute that, please name a few albums that Cowell has produced.
I haven't seen Regarding Henry, mostly because it looked so stupid in the commercial.
That said, it's hardly proof that the new movie will suck. Hopefully people don't judge you primarily on work that you did 16 years ago, but rather weight the more recent stuff more heavily.
I agree with all of that. I think that economic bounty depicted in Star Trek is based on the idea that we will eventually be able to create energy so cheaply that it's finally "too cheap to meter", and the rather more fantastic idea that we will then be able to use that power to create any object we desire, from a perfect copy of ourselves to a bowl of chicken soup.
If we can actually real that level of technology, it will solve a lot of problems, but it's hardly a utopia. There will still be plenty of reasons for us to fight with each other.
Sorry we all held a gun to your head and forced you to participate... I promise I'll stop.
You're totally correct - leisure pursuits, especially those that have to do with fantasy realms, are totally... illogical. I'm going to go teach a kid to read, while planting a tree at the same time.
Don't let me catch you anywhere near that Xbox, ok? That would make you a hypocrite. And you're not that, right? You're a grown man of 30 plus, with very important things to do! Like bitch on the internets!
I basically agree with you. I'd rather that they just "reboot" the thing, and then we won't have to concern ourselves with what went before. It worked well for Batman and James Bond, and Kirk is essentially just such a character.
The problem here is that Nimoy is in it, and maybe the Shat too. I want them both to be in it. The idea appeals to me. So how to do we both reboot, and also have them in it?
It's not impossible. They could still portray elderly versions of the two main characters, but simply from a different continuity.
I agree that many fans seem to be dying to pick this thing apart based on the most scant of all evidence - internet speculation. How about we all chill out, and wait until we've seen the movie to start hating it? Or at the very least until we have a few confirmed plot details.
Sorry! An alien artifact took over my mind for a bit there! Darn thing, I keep meaning to sell it on ebay, for all the trouble it's caused me.
If it's not Scottish, it's crap! So that means that just one Trek regular is not crap! Nevermind the fact that Doohan was a Canuck...
This has to mean there's more time travel. They should have renamed the franchise "Time Trek". Let me guess, old Spock travels the to past, ie the era in which the film is set, and does something that (supposedly) ties up assorted loose plot ends. Sigh. (Mind, I've got nothing against a good time travel yarn. Operative word being "good".)
Yes, it has to mean more time travel, in the same sense that it has to mean that this is finally the Trek where Spock will pull out his pointy Vulcan member and make tender love to Kirk. Which is to say, it doesn't have to mean that at all.
This is just speculation. It doesn't have to mean squat. So please, don't sigh yet. There's nothing to sigh about... yet.
That said, if it is a lame time travel plot, I'll be sighing and crying right along with you. I also agree that not all time travel plots are lame. First Contact was one of my favorite Trek movies, and so was The Voyage Home. But I have a hard time seeing how a time travel plot will seem anything but tiresome. As others have pointed out, it's usually the same - timeline is polluted, and our heroes have to put it right.
The reason that it worked for me in First Contact is the fact that the movie was so well done that I was able to overlook the somewhat trite main plot. The borg queen was a great villain, the comedic moments worked, without being obtrusive, and the action sequences were fun.
Compare that to Nemesis... I didn't really buy the main villain, the action sequences felt over-blown and didn't seem to flow as part of the plot, and there was little humor.
I'm fine with JJ blowing the canon open. Caveat: I'm not a Trek fan.
I appreciate that die hard fans will be upset by that, however my feeling is that Star Trek has basically had about 12 plot lines that have essentially been recycled in various guises throughout all the seasons. They've finally flogged that deceased horse one too many times.
If you are not a fan, why did you watch so much of it that you were able to discern the 12 typical plotlines? I don't watch shows that I don't enjoy, at least not more than a couple eps.
The fundamental issues I see is the utopian nature of the universe Roddenberry created. Ignoring the probability or possibility of human nature being so utterly warped into an utopia (I personally can't suspend my disbelief that far), as a basis for a TV or movie it's all very nice and all, but it makes for dull writing and little drama.
You're left with creating drama by have characters behave out of character by alien possession or secret starfleet order etc etc etc. Or time travel (which is a clichéd story, almost always in any medium - paradox, protect timeline, yawn blah blah, seen it a thousand times)
The Star Trek universe is vast. Some of the societies in it could be called utopias, but certainly not all. Is the Klingon Empire any sort of utopia? Sure, the people of Earth don't war with each other, are not racist, and don't need to carry cash on them. But given that a ton of hostiles are out there, it's hard to see how it can be called a universe free from conflict.
I agree with you that the whole alien possession plot has been done to death, but that's not the same as saying that the whole Trek universe needs to be burned to the ground. Abrams just needs to be creative and original, and most importantly, tell a story that is for some reason compelling. He's been able to do that in the past with some success.
No, Star Trek needs its ass kicked. I'm not entirely sure that JJ Abrams is the best guy to do that, but he's probably better than anyone who's been in charge of that franchise for the past 20 years.
To me, it's pretty easy to say that the universe should get it's ass kicked... it's a lot harder to actually make specific suggestions on ways to tell a great story in the Star Trek universe. All that you've come up with is to avoid the major cliches... fair enough, and I agree.
Now, does anyone have an actual idea? Let's hope Abrams does. That's why they pay him the big bucks, right?
To me, the Batman folks did this the right way. They updated the look of the characters, without totally betraying the original source material. They managed to tell a sophisticated story with a theme that feels relevant to today's society, and they treated the subject matter seriously - don't go "campy", whatever you do.
The speculated plot from the article does sound a heck of a lot like First Contact... so much so that I would be very surprised if it's correct. Abrams can come up with something a bit more original than that... can't he?
Yeah, because the Spock character was always about the awesome kung fu. To do him any other way would be a total betrayal...
You just can't have Spock without Scotty.
The original series did just that on several occasions - Scotty was in 66 episodes out of 80 episodes produced (80 if you include the original un-aired pilot). Nimoy is the only actor who was in all 80.
And even then, Scotty often had little actual screen time. As beloved as he is, especially here at the dot, he was really a second-tier character.
And I'm really confused by the announcement that Chekov has been cast. It makes me wonder if a significant amount of the action will take place during Kirk's academy years, as has been predicted in several places. Chekov was a lot younger than Kirk, and can't have been at the academy at the same time.
No, the home business users that I very often talked to in my old job we not even aware there was such a thing as home business package. And like you, many couldn't have afforded it if they did know. They didn't know that their upload speed had been capped, either, until they asked me why it took so long to upload 2 GB of images. Users who are tech-savvy enough to know that they have asymmetrical connections are a real minority in my experience.
So what kind of data sets are you working with that you're worried that you might download more than 100 GB of it in a month? Whatever it is, I don't think that people like you are a large percentage of Comcast's customers. Are you a grad student who wants to download and analyze SETI data or something? Those are some large files I guess...
I'm not really disagreeing with your point per se... I just can't think who needs to download 100 GB of stuff in a month for work, whether they are a small business owner or someone working from home.
I certainly do agree with you that it's sneaky of Comcast to not tell us the monthly limit.
No, I don't think this will hurt any home business. I can't think of any that would reach the cap limits that people have been discussing - whether it's 100 GB or 300 GB a month, few businesses need to download that much information in a month.
Photographers can generate large amounts of date, and videographers even more. But they don't download that data to their home office nearly as often as they need to upload it - to the printer, to the web site that hosts their images, to where ever people are using the data. So it's the cap on upload speeds that kills this type of home business vastly more than the cap on total data per month. I worked at a digital photography website until recently, and photographers could never understand why it took all night to upload a whole weddings worth (or sports tournament, etc) of image files. Very very few of them were aware of the fact that their upload speed was vastly slower than the download speed they could get.
And this is obviously not pirated content. These are the people who created the content, attempting to use it in a totally legal way to make money, and Comcast is not making it easy for them. People in this situation really don't have a good option available to them. Their only choice is to start the upload before they go to bed, and let it work all night long. Customers want the images to be available right away. Photographers sell most of their images and prints soon after the event. But with the current state of broadband in the US, that takes a while.
With such sound legal advise as this available online, it's hard to see how all lawyers don't instantly go out of business...
I'm pretty sure that Comcast would emerge the victor if you chose to tangle with them in the courts. Even if you banded together with other people who had been shut off, the legal firepower that you could muster would be truly pathetic compared to Comcast's army of blue-haired lawyers.
I'm not a lawyer (as I assume you must be), so I really can't say whether your statement has legal merit or not, but even if it did, you'd still lose.
God bless America!
I don't understand why you're so hesitant to use BitTorrent on your Comcast connection. I use it on mine quite a bit. I must never have hit 100 gigs, but I can't be far off. And that's true for other people I know.
I think that part of it is that I always make sure the ratio of the torrent gets back to 1.0 before I shut it off. That essentially limits me to 44 kBp/s down, as well as up, which puts a cap on my downloading for the month.
Do that, and they'll never shut you off. I'm pretty sure that one has to either have faster ups than 44 or else be a leech to get shut down.
I think it's a bit early to get this excited.
For one, are the graphics really that much better on the PS3? I don't see a ton of difference when I demo the two side by side at the store. And besides, most people (including me) don't have a high def tv to enjoy the full graphical goodness anyhow.
Plus, who ever said that the PC version would be gimped? That wasn't the case with any of the previous PC versions - they could all take advantage of the PC's superior firepower (specifically, they could run at a higher resolution that the console versions). What makes you so sure this time is going to be different?
And finally, if space on the dvd is such a big issue, why not just put the game on 2? Would it really be the end of the world? There's just no way to accomplish that?
My attitude is that Sony messed up the next gen, by making it so expensive that I can't afford it. If GTA4 was PS3 only, then I would probably not play it until 2010, when a PS3 finally dips below the $250 mark.
And they did it so that they could win their format war - betamax all over again. If all the corporations involved could have agreed on a standard (ONE standard), then the cost of the drives would be dropping faster. But instead, we get this BS.
Don't get me wrong... I hate MS too. For totally different reasons. But they're pretty much the good guy, in this particular battle. Maybe not good. More like the lesser of two evils.
Weezer isn't in the 80's one - Weezer is in Guitar Hero 3. Two different games, bro.
My post was meant to defend the CRPG in general, but not to say that they are better or as good as the paper games. While CRPGs are the "children" of the old TSR games, the apple has fallen rather far from the tree, in many ways. And you pointed most of them out, in very eloquent fashion.
In many ways, the computer games are a less rich experience, simply because the computer can't do anything but present a very rigid system, with a finite number of outcomes. The beauty of the paper system is the the Dungeon Master is a human being, who can adjust to his players on the fly. If you can come up with a novel solution to a problem (setting the roof on fire), then a good DM can accommodate your creativity into the experience.
The problem is, however, that finding a great Dungeon Master is sorta like finding a great drummer for your rock band - it's damn hard. If you're lucky enough to have a good one, well woohoo, rock on. If you're stuck with a mediocre one, then the experience of all of the players suffers. And if all you have is a crappy one, well, it's maybe better to just go play a PC game.
There are other reasons why a traditional RPG may not be feasible. It's hard to get a group of people together in the same room. What do you do when you're in the middle of a campaign, and Erc the dwarf can't show up because his wife is sick? Do you have someone else play the dwarf?
And where do you have this game? It takes up a decent amount of space, and it can get pretty animated, as you know, and sometimes parents, spouses, and roommates get pissed off. There's usually a mess to clean up after, as well.
So while I think that there will always be a place for the old style of play, I think it's understandable why people enjoy the computer variety.