A RTFA shows that the site in question encourages you to either disable your browser cache or use a javascript-based alternative. They also note that the scammers could work around it but the fact that a lot of them HAVEN'T says something....
Had last run WU a day or two before this patch came out. And unfortuntaely was reading this article from a dorm LAN instead of either my apartment or work LAN's, which are fire-walled.:(
FYI, what I got hit with was actually a variant of a different worm updated to use this exploit, meaning the worst may be yet to come when someone splices this onto a worm that actually does damage. Once I got updated virus defs from another machine and rebooted in safe mode Norton ate the thing for lunch no problem. Only their write-up says that the virus makes reg key changes that weren't there. And now I have no idea whether some of the massive pile of alphabet soup in my process manager is residual virus stuff or not. Sigh.
I would love to read about this, but a cursory exam of the linked sites didn't appear to turn up the articles in question. I presume because the articles are in forthcoming print editions that the publishers aren't giving away for free so that people will buy the things. (If I'm wrong, some responder deserves an informative mod.) In which case, this "news post" says "if you want information, you can go buy this magazine". If that's news, are the editors going to start publishing "in this issue" blurbs for all the major gaming mags now?
I mean, I'm okay with it cause I'm not sure I want anyone willing to participate in this sort of contest reproducing. But we're not even talking about humiliating yourself for national TV exposure (leading to lucrative endorsements) and a million dollar purse a la Survivor. Maybe the guy was just competitive and really wanted to win and maybe he decided midway through that the girl wasn't a keeper, but let me tell you that *I* wouldn't want to risk every girl I ever try to date in the future finding out via Google that I'd done that for $200 in gaming hardware (not to mention friends, tens of thousands of people at the game, and anyone watching on TV if it was televised)....
According to the article's own statistics, broadband can cost from 2-5 times more a month unless you're upgrading from the most expensive dial-up to the cheapest broadband. That's not counting the cost of a cable modem. Even taking their slimmest example of "only $8 more a month" adds up to $108 over the first year of use. I'm willing to pay that extra cash (split four ways amongst roommies with bundled cable and a house LAN). But why should someone who DOESN'T need the bandwidth (being happy to do something else while waiting counts as not needing it) have to pay for it anyway to avoid being branded as a luddite who can't set the clock on their VCR (article's terms, not mine)?
Site's apparantly just slow rather than dead, and the truth is worse than the Slashdot blurb makes it look. The quote (bolding mine):
"TV-Turnoff Week Works!
According to hundreds of responses to our TV-Turnoff Week follow-up surveys, 90 percent of responding participants reduced their TV-viewing as a result of participating."
Who's going to go to the bother of responding to the survey to say how the whole exercise was a waste of their time? This isn't even an attempt at a scientific poll and should have been reviewed with more scrutiny by the editors.
Well, the site appears to be/.'ed, but the claim seems to be remarkably self-apparant. Who's going to take part in a TV-turnoff week? Ignoring those of you who plan to cheat with your TIVO and binge the next week, it's generally going to be people who want to watch less TV. It would seem that driving up their participation (especially via cheating) will simply make their "90% of participants watch less TV afterwards" figure drop like a rock.
Meanwhile, the flight of intelligent consumers from the TV market will give "content" producers even less reason to produce quality product, as their market will have left. Overall, this project sounds like a bad idea for everyone involved except those who've already resolved to quit TV anyways. If that's you, why are you waiting for Quit TV week?
I certainly recognize that I might get more play time out of a month in a good MMO than a $50 boxed game, but the difference is I can get my full value for the boxed game even if I don't play it like I have no life or *gasp* put it down and come back months later.
I'm currently playing the online version of the Lord of the Rings CCG. This game does have the unfortunate CCG pricing model (i.e. the more you pay, the better options you have) but it's certainly possible for a player with a good idea of what they want to get a tourney winning quality deck for around $50-70. (This approach requires lots of camping in the trade lobby to find people willing to give you stuff you need for the limited stuff you have, but that time investment is no worse than any other MMO.)
Anyways, the good news to the otherwise somewhat newbie-unfriendly pricing is that there's no mandatory recurring fee to keep the collection that you have. (There's an optional $10 monthly membership that gives you more than $10 worth of stuff and is intended essentially as a loss leader, since members get a 20-40% discount on further purchases, encouraging you to spend more. The membership pays for itself for anyone spending at least $10 a month on the game, but again, is optional if you know you won't be playing for a few months and want to cancel it until you come back or just want to cut yourself off.) This means that I'm not getting significantly worse value for my money dollar for dollar than the people who spend hours and hours playing, as one does in a monthly fee use it or lose it payment scheme.
The CCG model does require a certain resignation that every so often you'll face someone who destroys your puny deck with their massively larger collection. This also, from what I hear, is common on PvP MMO's (LOTRO is PVP only, there are no AI opponents yet, even for tutorial). But at least here once you get started, all that matters is how well the ~70 or so cards you brought to the table work together to win you the game. Not how much time you've spent (though playtesting will help you pick which cards to bring), not how much the 70 cards you have are worth, and DEFINITELY not how much the cards from each of your collections that aren't being used this game are worth. Knowing you've beaten someone who spent 10 times as much as you on the game? Priceless.
The Chinese are threatening to put a base on the moon, and Bush wants to pre-empt them by establishing a military presence there first. Of course, this would be controversial, so why not claim that it's a testing ground for a trip to Mars that will never be funded? If the moon base actually happens (at a cost of 400 times or more the meager $1 Billion Bush pledged so he could claim to be for going to Mars), they can always claim the money ran out and call off the Mars thing later.
I remember a while back the Miami Herald found 20 odd "missing" children from foster care the state "couldn't" find by calling the childrens' relatives and determining that a parent had taken the child back in violation of the custody agreements. This isn't necessarily a value judgement on the FLA police - they may be overworked, underfunded, etc. It just seems that a minute of the time of the police officer who took the confession to explain to EB exactly how badly an appearence in small claims court would go for them and this whole story would never have happened.
There was a discussion on this topic over on the Games page a week or two ago RE: recurring charges for an X-Box Live subscription. The consensus seemed to be that Chargebacks should only be granted in cases where the merchandise wasn't delivered in the first place (amongst other criteria). Whether some over-worked/under-interested customer service person will give you one anyway (and whether the company then disputes your chargeback) is a separate question.
I think that small claims court is probably the most likely to provide relief for this type of problem. I *believe* that you can sue mail-order companies in your jurisdiction and they'll lose by default if they don't show to contest - quite possibly not worth their time. What exactly the court usually does in a case like this where the company has carefully not kept any record of their promise of a refund (i.e. it's a strictly he said/they said) if it goes to trial, I'm not sure.:(
There are very few companies that deliver content worth the cost of an expansion pack as is. (The only one I can think of off-hand has a name that starts with B and means a fierce snowstorm, though there was those few famous free expansions to the original IWD and WC Prophecy (that prompted me to go buy the original games off the bargin bin).) If the prices were low enough, I'd consider it. But most companies I suspect won't be able to or interested in selling their content that cheaply.
Actually, Baldur's Gate has a reasonable model - a world you can wander aroud in as you like that can paste new additions onto the world map relatively easily. Had Interplay not cannibilized BIS, I'd consider paying 20-30 for an initial package and $5 a month for a new area. No idea if that's as profitable for them as selling the game for full price upfront though - I never made it more than a few chapters into the original BG cause I was really busy at the time, and I'm sure they'd have made less money had I been paying as I go....
A quick scan of verizonwireless.com shows phones starting at $9.99. Yes, that model is web enabled, and yes there's a required contract (though having to sign a contract is a separate question from having to "pay for hundreds of features that I will never use"), but how much less does the poster expect the phone to cost? No, there isn't any way to take a top of the line sleek cool looking phone and sell its unwanted features back to the company to get it for a price of your choosing, but I'm afraid that's the way the world works. Hope the poster never has to shop for a new car....
Was the lack of mid-summer releases. Not as huge a deal now that I'm out of school, but it always seemed that the big titles I wanted to play would release in the late Sept-Nov window so as to be peaking around X-Mas. Good concept for boosting sales, I suppose, except for the minor problem where that's when school starts, ergo when my time for playing games drops off. Did it prevent me from getting my first choice game (e.g. the newest Final Fantasy)? Never. Did it mean that I didn't ever get to my third choice game (or sometimes even my second) because all my limited playing time was going into the one I bought first? Almost every year. The mid-summer dead time worked out great for the local Blockbuster, but had one of the games I actually wanted released during that window, they would have gotten my money instead.
The reason why Nintendo "lost" Square back in the N64 days is because they made the dumb decision to market another cartridge-based console when that way meant higher production costs per game, ergo lower profits per game sold at the same price, and greatly limited the storage capacity available for games. That and their attempt to strong arm Square into exclusivity agreements. For that matter, Sony wouldn't BE in the business if Nintendo hadn't thought they could bully around Sony on their own terms over the SNES CD-ROM drive - when they said "our way or the highway" to the giant, Sony shrugged and set up the failed product as the PS1.
Bottom line is that when you make a title exclusive to a console, you narrow your potential market considerably. You're not going to do that unless they're either cutting you a REALLY good deal, or you're the market leader anyways. ("Why yes, I'd like to sink three years and who knows how much money into developing an exclusive title for the last place console that may or may not have been replaced by the time the game comes out. Where do I sign up?")
I recognize that exclusive titles are an important part of building your console's identity, and that their quality will be better than that of a port cause they'll be optimized for your system, but people like the article writers also need to recognize that there's only so much Nintendo can do to convince developers they WANT to go exclusive. At the moment, IMO, Nintendo is defined by the lowest price point amongst the consoles, and some of the best first party games in the business. Once they manage to build on that and convert it to market share, THEN they might try to get more exclusives.
Quote Liberman: "I call on the entertainment companies - they've got a right to do that, but they have a responsibility not to do it if we want to raise the next generation of our sons to treat women with respect."
Ignoring the question of whether his characterization of the game is accurate, what about my responsibility as a parent to "raise the next generation of our sons to treat women with respect"? To make a judgement about what my children should and should not watch/play? To point out whether certain content is right or wrong? Yes, I realize that working parents may not have a lot of time to spend on these things, but if THAT is the problem, then WHY hunt for a scapegoat?
In my view, the answer is sheer self interest on the part of Uncle Joe. For years and years he's been peddling this tired argument to tell parents that it's not their fault if their kids turn out badly due to their own neglect. A lot more popular than telling your constituents they're doing a bad job parenting. I don't respect Lieberman for this point alone, and hope he doesn't get the nomination - I don't know what I'll do in Nov if he does.
With the exception of the time various rebates and a gift card combined to get me the collector's edition of WarIII for $5 more than the regular, I don't keep boxes, and can rarely tell you what happens to the manual. I'd gladly download a game, provided it was reasonably achievable over my connection, especially if it supports the developer more. However, I've got three conditions that are dealbreakers if they're not met.
1. I won't pay money for something that expires (e.g. MMORPG's). I like to play RPG's, which can take months to complete if you're not working full time on it (even for a single playthrough, much less if you replay with more than one of the possible characters, take the BG/ID series or even Diablo II), and I should be able to leave a game when I get bored and come back to finish it whenever I feel like it.
2. I won't pay money for something that can't be reinstalled. Why should I be forced to keep a game on my hard drive indefinitely just to satisfy condition 1? In practice, especially with developers sometimes going out of business, that means I'd probably need the ability to burn CD's (a key wouldn't be a dealbreaker if it wasn't excessively inconvenient).
3. I am NOT providing a dedicated broadband (or phone) line to my game consoles. Period. I suppose I *might* consider hooking one up to the net if it was only a matter of running a reasonable length of ethernet cable to my router and it didn't throttle the house bandwidth too much. If the distance between the TV with the consoles and the nearest router is unreasonably long, my console doesn't go on the net and I don't buy games for it online unless they can be downloaded to my computer and burned to an appropriate CD. Otherwise, see 1 and 2.
Sound-containing ads (I presume the Flash-based things some others have complained of?). I have to keep my computer on mute in order to surf at school, lest movie clips and what-not suddenly start blasting over the speakers. I realize that advertisers don't want to pay for ads that no one notices, and websites are hard enough to support as is, but this sort of thing IMO goes too far.
None of these tops in my view the most clever intrusive ad tactic I've ever seen (in my pre- "block html graphics" days). There was a porn spam that obscured part of their own ad with a picture of a pop-up window that had a "close" X on it. Of course, clicking on the X, as most of us do by instinct, had the same effect as clicking anywhere else on the ad. If only these folks would apply their ingenuity to good instead of evil....
So when a company's spy/adware makes you see pop-ups for a competitor which might, for instance, have been used to give links to Penthouse on Playboy.com, we dislike it. That whole Verisign wild card debacle, which could have misdirected someone typing the like of "playboyu.com" (hitting the key next to "y" by accident) made us furious. But letting google and the like profit off of a company's trademark, we (by which I mean the poster and a decent chunk of the comments) think is okay. Why?
I hate to let companies take words out of circulation as much as the next guy. But, no matter what folks with dictionary.com links may think, the word Playboy is associated with porn in most people's minds primarily because of the magazine. If some website buries meta keywords about Playboy somewhere and gets picked up as a google result, that's that site's fault, not google's. But when Google willingly sells people the right to have their competing service appear with more emphasis at the top of the search results than the actual intended search of the user? It doesn't look any different from a competing pop-up ad to me, only Mozilla won't block the google references for me.
Not that MS wouldn't repeat the same party line, but I coulda sworn I saw a very similar if not identical quote when iTunes for Windows came out a few months back. It just jumped out at me (then and now) for the sheer absurdity of MS arguing FOR choice....
You're right, of course, that as an enforcible mandate, the Amendment applies only to the government. The ideals behind First Amendment rights, however, are universal. While we don't have any basis to sue Symantec in court over this, we DO have a right, and indeed a responsibility to fight them with the means we DO have, such as boycotting their software so they get the message. As I said in my China example, once third parties, who control enough of the public's access to information, censor pervasively enough, the government doesn't need to anymore.
And then there's always the question of what happens when/if a public library, technically a government entity, installs this privately created software.....
Is to fight to uphold the rights of people we really disagree with. This is exactly what went down with Hillary's biography in China - the Govt didn't have to censor it because the publisher did it on their own. Of course, the picture of the world we get still runs through the likes of "Fair and Balanced' news rooms, but blocking off net sites in a way that users might not even realize is happening just can't be allowed to stand....
Seriously, if the RIAA is good for its word and doesn't sue (or turn over to individual labels contact info for) anyone who files for amnesty (and stops downloading/listening to RIAA artists), what do they get out of this? Nothing really but another publicity stunt. And what does the person filing get? Well, if the RIAA already knew who they were, they're prolly being sued and thus ineligible, so all they're accomplishing is handing over a notarized admission of guilt. This one is a pretty much no-brainer. Though yesterday's User Friendly prolly said it best....
Winning an award after the show bows for an episode about ghosts of the past.:) Also note how Buffy creator Joss Whedon has three of the nominated episodes (for his other two shows, "Angel" and the late "Firefly") while the other two noms belong to "Enterprize". It's a small world these days.....
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't see the images, then that 419'er is toast.
A RTFA shows that the site in question encourages you to either disable your browser cache or use a javascript-based alternative. They also note that the scammers could work around it but the fact that a lot of them HAVEN'T says something....
Had last run WU a day or two before this patch came out. And unfortuntaely was reading this article from a dorm LAN instead of either my apartment or work LAN's, which are fire-walled. :(
FYI, what I got hit with was actually a variant of a different worm updated to use this exploit, meaning the worst may be yet to come when someone splices this onto a worm that actually does damage. Once I got updated virus defs from another machine and rebooted in safe mode Norton ate the thing for lunch no problem. Only their write-up says that the virus makes reg key changes that weren't there. And now I have no idea whether some of the massive pile of alphabet soup in my process manager is residual virus stuff or not. Sigh.
I would love to read about this, but a cursory exam of the linked sites didn't appear to turn up the articles in question. I presume because the articles are in forthcoming print editions that the publishers aren't giving away for free so that people will buy the things. (If I'm wrong, some responder deserves an informative mod.) In which case, this "news post" says "if you want information, you can go buy this magazine". If that's news, are the editors going to start publishing "in this issue" blurbs for all the major gaming mags now?
I mean, I'm okay with it cause I'm not sure I want anyone willing to participate in this sort of contest reproducing. But we're not even talking about humiliating yourself for national TV exposure (leading to lucrative endorsements) and a million dollar purse a la Survivor. Maybe the guy was just competitive and really wanted to win and maybe he decided midway through that the girl wasn't a keeper, but let me tell you that *I* wouldn't want to risk every girl I ever try to date in the future finding out via Google that I'd done that for $200 in gaming hardware (not to mention friends, tens of thousands of people at the game, and anyone watching on TV if it was televised)....
According to the article's own statistics, broadband can cost from 2-5 times more a month unless you're upgrading from the most expensive dial-up to the cheapest broadband. That's not counting the cost of a cable modem. Even taking their slimmest example of "only $8 more a month" adds up to $108 over the first year of use. I'm willing to pay that extra cash (split four ways amongst roommies with bundled cable and a house LAN). But why should someone who DOESN'T need the bandwidth (being happy to do something else while waiting counts as not needing it) have to pay for it anyway to avoid being branded as a luddite who can't set the clock on their VCR (article's terms, not mine)?
"TV-Turnoff Week Works!
According to hundreds of responses to our TV-Turnoff Week follow-up surveys, 90 percent of responding participants reduced their TV-viewing as a result of participating."
Who's going to go to the bother of responding to the survey to say how the whole exercise was a waste of their time? This isn't even an attempt at a scientific poll and should have been reviewed with more scrutiny by the editors.
Well, the site appears to be /.'ed, but the claim seems to be remarkably self-apparant. Who's going to take part in a TV-turnoff week? Ignoring those of you who plan to cheat with your TIVO and binge the next week, it's generally going to be people who want to watch less TV. It would seem that driving up their participation (especially via cheating) will simply make their "90% of participants watch less TV afterwards" figure drop like a rock.
Meanwhile, the flight of intelligent consumers from the TV market will give "content" producers even less reason to produce quality product, as their market will have left. Overall, this project sounds like a bad idea for everyone involved except those who've already resolved to quit TV anyways. If that's you, why are you waiting for Quit TV week?
I'm currently playing the online version of the Lord of the Rings CCG. This game does have the unfortunate CCG pricing model (i.e. the more you pay, the better options you have) but it's certainly possible for a player with a good idea of what they want to get a tourney winning quality deck for around $50-70. (This approach requires lots of camping in the trade lobby to find people willing to give you stuff you need for the limited stuff you have, but that time investment is no worse than any other MMO.)
Anyways, the good news to the otherwise somewhat newbie-unfriendly pricing is that there's no mandatory recurring fee to keep the collection that you have. (There's an optional $10 monthly membership that gives you more than $10 worth of stuff and is intended essentially as a loss leader, since members get a 20-40% discount on further purchases, encouraging you to spend more. The membership pays for itself for anyone spending at least $10 a month on the game, but again, is optional if you know you won't be playing for a few months and want to cancel it until you come back or just want to cut yourself off.) This means that I'm not getting significantly worse value for my money dollar for dollar than the people who spend hours and hours playing, as one does in a monthly fee use it or lose it payment scheme.
The CCG model does require a certain resignation that every so often you'll face someone who destroys your puny deck with their massively larger collection. This also, from what I hear, is common on PvP MMO's (LOTRO is PVP only, there are no AI opponents yet, even for tutorial). But at least here once you get started, all that matters is how well the ~70 or so cards you brought to the table work together to win you the game. Not how much time you've spent (though playtesting will help you pick which cards to bring), not how much the 70 cards you have are worth, and DEFINITELY not how much the cards from each of your collections that aren't being used this game are worth. Knowing you've beaten someone who spent 10 times as much as you on the game? Priceless.
The Chinese are threatening to put a base on the moon, and Bush wants to pre-empt them by establishing a military presence there first. Of course, this would be controversial, so why not claim that it's a testing ground for a trip to Mars that will never be funded? If the moon base actually happens (at a cost of 400 times or more the meager $1 Billion Bush pledged so he could claim to be for going to Mars), they can always claim the money ran out and call off the Mars thing later.
I remember a while back the Miami Herald found 20 odd "missing" children from foster care the state "couldn't" find by calling the childrens' relatives and determining that a parent had taken the child back in violation of the custody agreements. This isn't necessarily a value judgement on the FLA police - they may be overworked, underfunded, etc. It just seems that a minute of the time of the police officer who took the confession to explain to EB exactly how badly an appearence in small claims court would go for them and this whole story would never have happened.
There was a discussion on this topic over on the Games page a week or two ago RE: recurring charges for an X-Box Live subscription. The consensus seemed to be that Chargebacks should only be granted in cases where the merchandise wasn't delivered in the first place (amongst other criteria). Whether some over-worked/under-interested customer service person will give you one anyway (and whether the company then disputes your chargeback) is a separate question.
:(
I think that small claims court is probably the most likely to provide relief for this type of problem. I *believe* that you can sue mail-order companies in your jurisdiction and they'll lose by default if they don't show to contest - quite possibly not worth their time. What exactly the court usually does in a case like this where the company has carefully not kept any record of their promise of a refund (i.e. it's a strictly he said/they said) if it goes to trial, I'm not sure.
There are very few companies that deliver content worth the cost of an expansion pack as is. (The only one I can think of off-hand has a name that starts with B and means a fierce snowstorm, though there was those few famous free expansions to the original IWD and WC Prophecy (that prompted me to go buy the original games off the bargin bin).) If the prices were low enough, I'd consider it. But most companies I suspect won't be able to or interested in selling their content that cheaply.
Actually, Baldur's Gate has a reasonable model - a world you can wander aroud in as you like that can paste new additions onto the world map relatively easily. Had Interplay not cannibilized BIS, I'd consider paying 20-30 for an initial package and $5 a month for a new area. No idea if that's as profitable for them as selling the game for full price upfront though - I never made it more than a few chapters into the original BG cause I was really busy at the time, and I'm sure they'd have made less money had I been paying as I go....
A quick scan of verizonwireless.com shows phones starting at $9.99. Yes, that model is web enabled, and yes there's a required contract (though having to sign a contract is a separate question from having to "pay for hundreds of features that I will never use"), but how much less does the poster expect the phone to cost? No, there isn't any way to take a top of the line sleek cool looking phone and sell its unwanted features back to the company to get it for a price of your choosing, but I'm afraid that's the way the world works. Hope the poster never has to shop for a new car....
Was the lack of mid-summer releases. Not as huge a deal now that I'm out of school, but it always seemed that the big titles I wanted to play would release in the late Sept-Nov window so as to be peaking around X-Mas. Good concept for boosting sales, I suppose, except for the minor problem where that's when school starts, ergo when my time for playing games drops off. Did it prevent me from getting my first choice game (e.g. the newest Final Fantasy)? Never. Did it mean that I didn't ever get to my third choice game (or sometimes even my second) because all my limited playing time was going into the one I bought first? Almost every year. The mid-summer dead time worked out great for the local Blockbuster, but had one of the games I actually wanted released during that window, they would have gotten my money instead.
The reason why Nintendo "lost" Square back in the N64 days is because they made the dumb decision to market another cartridge-based console when that way meant higher production costs per game, ergo lower profits per game sold at the same price, and greatly limited the storage capacity available for games. That and their attempt to strong arm Square into exclusivity agreements. For that matter, Sony wouldn't BE in the business if Nintendo hadn't thought they could bully around Sony on their own terms over the SNES CD-ROM drive - when they said "our way or the highway" to the giant, Sony shrugged and set up the failed product as the PS1.
Bottom line is that when you make a title exclusive to a console, you narrow your potential market considerably. You're not going to do that unless they're either cutting you a REALLY good deal, or you're the market leader anyways. ("Why yes, I'd like to sink three years and who knows how much money into developing an exclusive title for the last place console that may or may not have been replaced by the time the game comes out. Where do I sign up?")
I recognize that exclusive titles are an important part of building your console's identity, and that their quality will be better than that of a port cause they'll be optimized for your system, but people like the article writers also need to recognize that there's only so much Nintendo can do to convince developers they WANT to go exclusive. At the moment, IMO, Nintendo is defined by the lowest price point amongst the consoles, and some of the best first party games in the business. Once they manage to build on that and convert it to market share, THEN they might try to get more exclusives.
Quote Liberman: "I call on the entertainment companies - they've got a right to do that, but they have a responsibility not to do it if we want to raise the next generation of our sons to treat women with respect."
Ignoring the question of whether his characterization of the game is accurate, what about my responsibility as a parent to "raise the next generation of our sons to treat women with respect"? To make a judgement about what my children should and should not watch/play? To point out whether certain content is right or wrong? Yes, I realize that working parents may not have a lot of time to spend on these things, but if THAT is the problem, then WHY hunt for a scapegoat?
In my view, the answer is sheer self interest on the part of Uncle Joe. For years and years he's been peddling this tired argument to tell parents that it's not their fault if their kids turn out badly due to their own neglect. A lot more popular than telling your constituents they're doing a bad job parenting. I don't respect Lieberman for this point alone, and hope he doesn't get the nomination - I don't know what I'll do in Nov if he does.
With the exception of the time various rebates and a gift card combined to get me the collector's edition of WarIII for $5 more than the regular, I don't keep boxes, and can rarely tell you what happens to the manual. I'd gladly download a game, provided it was reasonably achievable over my connection, especially if it supports the developer more. However, I've got three conditions that are dealbreakers if they're not met. 1. I won't pay money for something that expires (e.g. MMORPG's). I like to play RPG's, which can take months to complete if you're not working full time on it (even for a single playthrough, much less if you replay with more than one of the possible characters, take the BG/ID series or even Diablo II), and I should be able to leave a game when I get bored and come back to finish it whenever I feel like it. 2. I won't pay money for something that can't be reinstalled. Why should I be forced to keep a game on my hard drive indefinitely just to satisfy condition 1? In practice, especially with developers sometimes going out of business, that means I'd probably need the ability to burn CD's (a key wouldn't be a dealbreaker if it wasn't excessively inconvenient). 3. I am NOT providing a dedicated broadband (or phone) line to my game consoles. Period. I suppose I *might* consider hooking one up to the net if it was only a matter of running a reasonable length of ethernet cable to my router and it didn't throttle the house bandwidth too much. If the distance between the TV with the consoles and the nearest router is unreasonably long, my console doesn't go on the net and I don't buy games for it online unless they can be downloaded to my computer and burned to an appropriate CD. Otherwise, see 1 and 2.
Sound-containing ads (I presume the Flash-based things some others have complained of?). I have to keep my computer on mute in order to surf at school, lest movie clips and what-not suddenly start blasting over the speakers. I realize that advertisers don't want to pay for ads that no one notices, and websites are hard enough to support as is, but this sort of thing IMO goes too far. None of these tops in my view the most clever intrusive ad tactic I've ever seen (in my pre- "block html graphics" days). There was a porn spam that obscured part of their own ad with a picture of a pop-up window that had a "close" X on it. Of course, clicking on the X, as most of us do by instinct, had the same effect as clicking anywhere else on the ad. If only these folks would apply their ingenuity to good instead of evil....
I hate to let companies take words out of circulation as much as the next guy. But, no matter what folks with dictionary.com links may think, the word Playboy is associated with porn in most people's minds primarily because of the magazine. If some website buries meta keywords about Playboy somewhere and gets picked up as a google result, that's that site's fault, not google's. But when Google willingly sells people the right to have their competing service appear with more emphasis at the top of the search results than the actual intended search of the user? It doesn't look any different from a competing pop-up ad to me, only Mozilla won't block the google references for me.
Not that MS wouldn't repeat the same party line, but I coulda sworn I saw a very similar if not identical quote when iTunes for Windows came out a few months back. It just jumped out at me (then and now) for the sheer absurdity of MS arguing FOR choice....
You're right, of course, that as an enforcible mandate, the Amendment applies only to the government. The ideals behind First Amendment rights, however, are universal. While we don't have any basis to sue Symantec in court over this, we DO have a right, and indeed a responsibility to fight them with the means we DO have, such as boycotting their software so they get the message. As I said in my China example, once third parties, who control enough of the public's access to information, censor pervasively enough, the government doesn't need to anymore. And then there's always the question of what happens when/if a public library, technically a government entity, installs this privately created software.....
Is to fight to uphold the rights of people we really disagree with. This is exactly what went down with Hillary's biography in China - the Govt didn't have to censor it because the publisher did it on their own. Of course, the picture of the world we get still runs through the likes of "Fair and Balanced' news rooms, but blocking off net sites in a way that users might not even realize is happening just can't be allowed to stand....
Seriously, if the RIAA is good for its word and doesn't sue (or turn over to individual labels contact info for) anyone who files for amnesty (and stops downloading/listening to RIAA artists), what do they get out of this? Nothing really but another publicity stunt. And what does the person filing get? Well, if the RIAA already knew who they were, they're prolly being sued and thus ineligible, so all they're accomplishing is handing over a notarized admission of guilt. This one is a pretty much no-brainer. Though yesterday's User Friendly prolly said it best....
Winning an award after the show bows for an episode about ghosts of the past. :) Also note how Buffy creator Joss Whedon has three of the nominated episodes (for his other two shows, "Angel" and the late "Firefly") while the other two noms belong to "Enterprize". It's a small world these days.....