Once she refused, they suddenly informed her the product was out of stock, but they later said they could get it to her by Friday if she paid for a $150 warranty.
What's unusual about that?
The item will magically be in stock for her if she spends the extra $150, but if she doesn't then there are no cameras. Best Buy et al don't pull that kind of crap - they want to sell accessories and warranties, but they also want to sell the main products, and if someone doesn't want the extra stuff they won't prevent someone from doing just that until they give in to their demands.
Cannonballs bounce when they've been fired. Once they hit the ground, they tend to be moving so fast that they can still fly off in a near random direction, causing even more damage. So.. yeah.. Bricks don't hang in the sky, but cannonballs definitely bounce.
Do you really expect a lawyer like Jack Thompson to have any idea about such petty things as 'legal precedent?' He's too busy threatening little kids with legal action for playing games;_;
Must've been a while since you were in high school, my friend. Quotes and plot points are the entire basis of teaching literature these days. I never got a course in understanding Olde English while I was reading Hamlet in high school. What I did get was quizzed on the exact quote of Hamlet's entire soliloquy. Or however that word is spelled.. In any case, memorizing the lines didn't help me understand what he was saying, and I could've written down his actual meaning easily enough in a much more succinct manner, but I needed to know the speech in its entirety, despite the fact that it holds no true merit other than being able to spout it whenever I feel like.
If they wanted to put the classics in plain English, that's one thing. Instead of Hamlet asking "To be, or not to be," he could easily just be asking about whether it is worthwhile to live or die. That's dumbed down, and far from classic, but it isn't butchered. "2B NT2B?=???" is plain stupid. If I didn't know the original line, I'd never have any idea wtf it said. Did Hamlet decide to take up some advanced algebra all of a sudden?
"Given the odds of a botched test vs the odds of fighting off the AIDS virus he can easily enough be forgiven for assuming the first test was screwed up"
What about the odds of the second test being botched?
It's not Google's fault that AJAX doesn't work on Konqueror, but it's not his fault for liking Konqueror. The obvious problem is the lack of Konqueror's writers to support AJAX.
DHS Agent: Mr. President, we're having trouble reading this hard drive.:(
Bush: Cant read it? I knew I should've worked harder on No Child Left Behind. -_-;;
GameGuard actually is now running on several other games including Gunbound and MapleStory, both of which were hacked extensively prior to picking up gameguard. The reason none of the hacks you know of are blocked by gameguard is because the ones that don't work... don't work. Hackers don't tend to spread useless hacks around.
What determines probable cause to monitor possible terrorist suspects? From your post it seems obvious that it takes a lot less paperwork to monitor a suspect. How much paperwork does it take to make someone a suspect once you have probable cause? How many weeks or months of investigation goes into finding a terrorist to wiretap into oblivion?
And of course, you'll never tell the guys you're watching that they're being monitored, because that'd totally defeat the purpose of trying to catch them and anyone they might associate with.
Meh. I don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories or civil rights deterioration rants, but I can see bad ideas when they present themselves. The Patriot Act has the potential to turn anyone the government feels like watching into a terrorist, whether they've actually done anything or not. That doesn't mean anyone actually DOES that, but the potential exists. I think that's where most of the outrage exists. That and all the general dislike of anything George W Bush thinks is a good idea.
It's hard to take people seriously when they make a public spectacle of themselves.
Well then this t-shirt fits in well with old Jack, doesn't it? I heard the interview he had where he literally accuses EA of "collaborating with the porn industry," because they don't regulate mods to The Sims.
Face it: the only point of such a lawyer is to attract attention and elicit a response. Around here we call that "trolling" and such behavior is appropriately dismissed as irrelevant. It should come to no surprise that such behavior offline is similarly disregarded.
I am an American citizen, and I am, like most American citizens, more-or-less completely unaware of what our government is doing in foreign countries.
From some of the stuff in your comment I can guess you're in Iraq or somewhere in the middle east that we've decided to make a warzone. So you obviously have all the right in the world to say what you believe.
I have one qualm with your dissertation however. You constantly refer to America as the people in the country and/or those running the politics.
Although political leaders in America are elected by the citizens, we the citizens have no further control of government. Many citizens dislike our current administration, but we cannot change it. We cannot impeach a leader who hasn't broken a law.
Your problems are with American foreign policy, with our President, with our Army. Please don't lump the citizens in with that group. The only wrong we have done is be ignorant enough to elect an idiot like George Bush for president twice in a row.
Well in all fairness, Arnold's proposed change to the constitution isn't really a bad one. He just wants to change the "Natural born American citizen" prerequisite for becoming President. It's kind of unfair anyway, isn't it? What if some guy from England or France thinks he can do it better? He can come here and run and be totally humiliated just like anyone else who clearly isn't the home breed.
Remember playing Duck Hunt when you were 8 and holding the gun right up next to the screen? Yeah. FPS games will be like that. Headshot! Headshot! Headshot! Freakin screen sitter.
Did you even play X2? Or did you just read the reviews and decide it wasn't worth playing?
As horrible as the premise of the game is, the story is more original than FFX's and the game system is more enjoyable. There hasn't been a job system in a numbered FF game since 5j. And it was LOADS better than the freakin idiotic sphere grid.
Really I've not seen any of the FF games have the same story twice. Some similarities are always there, like "Save the planet!" but that's the point of the game.
If you see something wrong with the company wanting to remake one of the most popular video games in history and not just their own catalog, maybe you're just complaining for the sole purpose of complaining.
You don't know much about what you're talking about, apparently.
You say L2 and R2 are such horrible buttons because of their placement. And then directly following that, you say your friends found a way to not bother with it.... You don't NEED your fingers on the buttons at all times, especially if (as you say) you aren't using the buttons very often.
Go play SSX, you know the PS2 launch title or one of its' sequels. It makes use of every shoulder button, and it is easily one of the most fun sports games you could ever ask for. The controller adds to the experience here, it does not degrade it.
For you to then complain about the placement of the face buttons is idiotic. Guess what? They're placed in the exact same manner as GASP the SNES controller widely heralded as the harbinger of controller salvation. Here's a small newsflash for you: A square (grid with 4 points, button layout) is just a circle with straight lines. The buttons are laid out in a circle, not a grid. Just LOOK at the controller, you can SEE the circular casing.
Don't use Triangle and Circle much do you? You must not play RPGs. 99% of RPGs actually don't use the Square button at all and make use of triangle for the menu, circle for cancel, and X for accept, or talk. And check this out, the ** Warriors series from Koei use all 4 face buttons with the 'main' buttons being square (attack) and triangle (charge attack). X is jump and circle is special attack.
If you can name a mainstream 32-bit and up console whose controller used every single button in the most comfortable possible layout in every single game, you're a much better man than I. I hate the layout for some games on GameCube with it's awkward d-pad and freaky sized face buttons. I hate the layout of MOST games on the X-Box, but maybe that's just because I dislike console FPS games which are the most popular xbox titles.
Of the games I own at least, the PS2 controller has far and away the best functionality. Maybe you just need to play different games.
I don't think the article is disputing that games are popular.
The article is trying (and doing a poor job of it) to list the things that make bad games. It's a common conception that newer games suck compared to their oldschool counterparts. And you know, that's really not far from the truth.
What the gaming industry needs is to move away from FPSs and into more diverse areas. The RPGFPS and Story-driven FPS are innovative but are as far as you can take the FPS genre. Oh, I guess Tactical-FPS (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell) counts now too..
We need to discover NEW genres. Katamari Damacy and Nintendogs are good starts. I hope PC games begind to follow suit.
Video game companies do police themselves. That's why the ESRB exists. Your analogy is somewhat flawed, in that for a fifteen year old kid to get into an R rated movie, he has to buy a ticket, get past the ticket taker guy, and then manage to not get caught in the theater if anyone comes looking. Movie theaters police themselves. The companies that make the movies don't. The same goes for the games industry. A publisher makes a game and releases it to retail (like a movie to a theater) and it's then the job of the retail clerks to stop the little kids from getting the big games. Which brings me all the way back to the beginning of my post. Movie companies created the movie ratings board to help theater employees keep people from seeing inappropriate content, the same way game companies created the ESRB to help retail employees from doing the same. Really this law is giving retailers the same responsibilities as the movie theaters. I don't think they've done this with movies yet.. why are they doing it with games? A kid can buy an R rated film with no fine for the retailer but the kid can't go to an R rated film at the theater... I hadn't thought of that when I started this post, now it makes me wonder how long before senator Clinton catches on to something so obvious you almost can't see it x.x
Exactly what Kyoto supporters want. Bring the middle class into the lower class through regulations and taxes rather than uplifting the lower class through opportunity and expansion of the industry base.
To my knowledge, George W. Bush doesn't support Kyoto.
I have no understanding of how corporate lawsuits can take so long. Perhaps someone can explain to me why it could take years to figure out who wins.
AMD's original press release offers some conjecture and lots of facts that make their point. The most scathing being Intel's guilty plea in Japan to the EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR.
If guilty(japan) then guilty(everywhere). Right?
It shouldn't take an hour to explain to a judge and jury that Intel has already plead guilty to the crime in another country and AMD wants them to be guilty in America too. That should barely take 15 minutes. The lawyers/judge/jury don't even need to be tech-savvy to understand that.
And what can Intel even argue? "We did it in Japan but our business practices are different in the US," doesn't sound very convincing considering Japan is a much smaller market than America and considering that some of the Japanese companies involved like Sony ship to the States.
Intel is saying AMDs problems are their own fault? Basically that Intel wouldn't have done the anticompetitive behavior if AMD weren't competition >.> but that's the entire point.
But anyway - how can it take so damn long to prove the obvious? Anyone know?
It's Benjamin Franklin, the guy on the US $100 bill.
The quote in question is something to the effect of "A country that will sacrifice civil liberty for security shall have neither." Not verbatim, but I think that's pretty close.
Intel is screwed either way, isn't it? They won't accept it because there are plenty of benchmarks out there in the web showing AMD performance over Intel products and they don't need to have AMD put on this show to prove it. On the reverse of that, if they don't accept the challenge, they're giving AMD the community chest, so to speak. AMD will always be able to say they gave Intel a chance at proving they were faster, and Intel refused. The reasons behind their refusal are irrelevant, and AMD can say whatever they like about it.
I agree this is marketing money that could be better spent elsewhere. I don't think pointing out architecture differences is the way to go, though. Nothing gets customers to dislike you more than proving that they're stupid, and average Joe consumer doesn't know jack about processors. He might know that Mhz are good, but when you start talking about transistors and wattage and bus latency he'll not only lose interest but feel offended that they're trying to tell him something he didn't know. At least, that's how American consumers react...
Slashdot Mirror
Once she refused, they suddenly informed her the product was out of stock, but they later said they could get it to her by Friday if she paid for a $150 warranty.
What's unusual about that? The item will magically be in stock for her if she spends the extra $150, but if she doesn't then there are no cameras. Best Buy et al don't pull that kind of crap - they want to sell accessories and warranties, but they also want to sell the main products, and if someone doesn't want the extra stuff they won't prevent someone from doing just that until they give in to their demands.
Unfortunately the doctor's oath holds no merit anymore.. All that seems to matter is if your patient has money ._.
Cannonballs bounce when they've been fired. Once they hit the ground, they tend to be moving so fast that they can still fly off in a near random direction, causing even more damage. So.. yeah.. Bricks don't hang in the sky, but cannonballs definitely bounce.
Do you really expect a lawyer like Jack Thompson to have any idea about such petty things as 'legal precedent?' He's too busy threatening little kids with legal action for playing games ;_;
Must've been a while since you were in high school, my friend. Quotes and plot points are the entire basis of teaching literature these days. I never got a course in understanding Olde English while I was reading Hamlet in high school. What I did get was quizzed on the exact quote of Hamlet's entire soliloquy. Or however that word is spelled.. In any case, memorizing the lines didn't help me understand what he was saying, and I could've written down his actual meaning easily enough in a much more succinct manner, but I needed to know the speech in its entirety, despite the fact that it holds no true merit other than being able to spout it whenever I feel like. If they wanted to put the classics in plain English, that's one thing. Instead of Hamlet asking "To be, or not to be," he could easily just be asking about whether it is worthwhile to live or die. That's dumbed down, and far from classic, but it isn't butchered. "2B NT2B?=???" is plain stupid. If I didn't know the original line, I'd never have any idea wtf it said. Did Hamlet decide to take up some advanced algebra all of a sudden?
Hold on a second...
"Given the odds of a botched test vs the odds of fighting off the AIDS virus he can easily enough be forgiven for assuming the first test was screwed up"
What about the odds of the second test being botched?
It's not Google's fault that AJAX doesn't work on Konqueror, but it's not his fault for liking Konqueror. The obvious problem is the lack of Konqueror's writers to support AJAX.
That might be exactly what George Bush was thinking! *holds up flame shield*
DHS Agent: Mr. President, we're having trouble reading this hard drive. :(
Bush: Cant read it? I knew I should've worked harder on No Child Left Behind. -_-;;
If your solar cell is smaller, doesn't it logically cost less to make?
GameGuard actually is now running on several other games including Gunbound and MapleStory, both of which were hacked extensively prior to picking up gameguard. The reason none of the hacks you know of are blocked by gameguard is because the ones that don't work ... don't work. Hackers don't tend to spread useless hacks around.
What determines probable cause to monitor possible terrorist suspects? From your post it seems obvious that it takes a lot less paperwork to monitor a suspect. How much paperwork does it take to make someone a suspect once you have probable cause? How many weeks or months of investigation goes into finding a terrorist to wiretap into oblivion?
And of course, you'll never tell the guys you're watching that they're being monitored, because that'd totally defeat the purpose of trying to catch them and anyone they might associate with.
Meh. I don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories or civil rights deterioration rants, but I can see bad ideas when they present themselves. The Patriot Act has the potential to turn anyone the government feels like watching into a terrorist, whether they've actually done anything or not. That doesn't mean anyone actually DOES that, but the potential exists. I think that's where most of the outrage exists. That and all the general dislike of anything George W Bush thinks is a good idea.
It's hard to take people seriously when they make a public spectacle of themselves.
Well then this t-shirt fits in well with old Jack, doesn't it? I heard the interview he had where he literally accuses EA of "collaborating with the porn industry," because they don't regulate mods to The Sims.
Face it: the only point of such a lawyer is to attract attention and elicit a response. Around here we call that "trolling" and such behavior is appropriately dismissed as irrelevant. It should come to no surprise that such behavior offline is similarly disregarded.
Fixed.
... Wow. You've got quite a giant wall of text.
I am an American citizen, and I am, like most American citizens, more-or-less completely unaware of what our government is doing in foreign countries.
From some of the stuff in your comment I can guess you're in Iraq or somewhere in the middle east that we've decided to make a warzone. So you obviously have all the right in the world to say what you believe.
I have one qualm with your dissertation however. You constantly refer to America as the people in the country and/or those running the politics.
Although political leaders in America are elected by the citizens, we the citizens have no further control of government. Many citizens dislike our current administration, but we cannot change it. We cannot impeach a leader who hasn't broken a law.
Your problems are with American foreign policy, with our President, with our Army. Please don't lump the citizens in with that group. The only wrong we have done is be ignorant enough to elect an idiot like George Bush for president twice in a row.
Well in all fairness, Arnold's proposed change to the constitution isn't really a bad one. He just wants to change the "Natural born American citizen" prerequisite for becoming President. It's kind of unfair anyway, isn't it? What if some guy from England or France thinks he can do it better? He can come here and run and be totally humiliated just like anyone else who clearly isn't the home breed.
Remember playing Duck Hunt when you were 8 and holding the gun right up next to the screen? Yeah. FPS games will be like that. Headshot! Headshot! Headshot! Freakin screen sitter.
Did you even play X2? Or did you just read the reviews and decide it wasn't worth playing?
As horrible as the premise of the game is, the story is more original than FFX's and the game system is more enjoyable. There hasn't been a job system in a numbered FF game since 5j. And it was LOADS better than the freakin idiotic sphere grid.
Really I've not seen any of the FF games have the same story twice. Some similarities are always there, like "Save the planet!" but that's the point of the game.
If you see something wrong with the company wanting to remake one of the most popular video games in history and not just their own catalog, maybe you're just complaining for the sole purpose of complaining.
Gripe gripe gripe.
You don't know much about what you're talking about, apparently.
You say L2 and R2 are such horrible buttons because of their placement. And then directly following that, you say your friends found a way to not bother with it.... You don't NEED your fingers on the buttons at all times, especially if (as you say) you aren't using the buttons very often.
Go play SSX, you know the PS2 launch title or one of its' sequels. It makes use of every shoulder button, and it is easily one of the most fun sports games you could ever ask for. The controller adds to the experience here, it does not degrade it.
For you to then complain about the placement of the face buttons is idiotic. Guess what? They're placed in the exact same manner as GASP the SNES controller widely heralded as the harbinger of controller salvation. Here's a small newsflash for you: A square (grid with 4 points, button layout) is just a circle with straight lines. The buttons are laid out in a circle, not a grid. Just LOOK at the controller, you can SEE the circular casing.
Don't use Triangle and Circle much do you? You must not play RPGs. 99% of RPGs actually don't use the Square button at all and make use of triangle for the menu, circle for cancel, and X for accept, or talk. And check this out, the ** Warriors series from Koei use all 4 face buttons with the 'main' buttons being square (attack) and triangle (charge attack). X is jump and circle is special attack.
If you can name a mainstream 32-bit and up console whose controller used every single button in the most comfortable possible layout in every single game, you're a much better man than I. I hate the layout for some games on GameCube with it's awkward d-pad and freaky sized face buttons. I hate the layout of MOST games on the X-Box, but maybe that's just because I dislike console FPS games which are the most popular xbox titles.
Of the games I own at least, the PS2 controller has far and away the best functionality. Maybe you just need to play different games.
I don't think the article is disputing that games are popular. The article is trying (and doing a poor job of it) to list the things that make bad games. It's a common conception that newer games suck compared to their oldschool counterparts. And you know, that's really not far from the truth. What the gaming industry needs is to move away from FPSs and into more diverse areas. The RPGFPS and Story-driven FPS are innovative but are as far as you can take the FPS genre. Oh, I guess Tactical-FPS (Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell) counts now too.. We need to discover NEW genres. Katamari Damacy and Nintendogs are good starts. I hope PC games begind to follow suit.
Video game companies do police themselves. That's why the ESRB exists.
Your analogy is somewhat flawed, in that for a fifteen year old kid to get into an R rated movie, he has to buy a ticket, get past the ticket taker guy, and then manage to not get caught in the theater if anyone comes looking.
Movie theaters police themselves. The companies that make the movies don't.
The same goes for the games industry. A publisher makes a game and releases it to retail (like a movie to a theater) and it's then the job of the retail clerks to stop the little kids from getting the big games. Which brings me all the way back to the beginning of my post.
Movie companies created the movie ratings board to help theater employees keep people from seeing inappropriate content, the same way game companies created the ESRB to help retail employees from doing the same.
Really this law is giving retailers the same responsibilities as the movie theaters. I don't think they've done this with movies yet.. why are they doing it with games? A kid can buy an R rated film with no fine for the retailer but the kid can't go to an R rated film at the theater... I hadn't thought of that when I started this post, now it makes me wonder how long before senator Clinton catches on to something so obvious you almost can't see it x.x
Exactly what Kyoto supporters want. Bring the middle class into the lower class through regulations and taxes rather than uplifting the lower class through opportunity and expansion of the industry base.
To my knowledge, George W. Bush doesn't support Kyoto.
I have no understanding of how corporate lawsuits can take so long. Perhaps someone can explain to me why it could take years to figure out who wins.
AMD's original press release offers some conjecture and lots of facts that make their point. The most scathing being Intel's guilty plea in Japan to the EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR.
If guilty(japan) then guilty(everywhere). Right?
It shouldn't take an hour to explain to a judge and jury that Intel has already plead guilty to the crime in another country and AMD wants them to be guilty in America too. That should barely take 15 minutes. The lawyers/judge/jury don't even need to be tech-savvy to understand that.
And what can Intel even argue? "We did it in Japan but our business practices are different in the US," doesn't sound very convincing considering Japan is a much smaller market than America and considering that some of the Japanese companies involved like Sony ship to the States.
Intel is saying AMDs problems are their own fault? Basically that Intel wouldn't have done the anticompetitive behavior if AMD weren't competition >.> but that's the entire point.
But anyway - how can it take so damn long to prove the obvious? Anyone know?
*googled*
The actual quote is "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"
It's Benjamin Franklin, the guy on the US $100 bill. The quote in question is something to the effect of "A country that will sacrifice civil liberty for security shall have neither." Not verbatim, but I think that's pretty close.
Intel is screwed either way, isn't it? They won't accept it because there are plenty of benchmarks out there in the web showing AMD performance over Intel products and they don't need to have AMD put on this show to prove it. On the reverse of that, if they don't accept the challenge, they're giving AMD the community chest, so to speak. AMD will always be able to say they gave Intel a chance at proving they were faster, and Intel refused. The reasons behind their refusal are irrelevant, and AMD can say whatever they like about it.
I agree this is marketing money that could be better spent elsewhere. I don't think pointing out architecture differences is the way to go, though. Nothing gets customers to dislike you more than proving that they're stupid, and average Joe consumer doesn't know jack about processors. He might know that Mhz are good, but when you start talking about transistors and wattage and bus latency he'll not only lose interest but feel offended that they're trying to tell him something he didn't know. At least, that's how American consumers react...