The.com,.net, and.org domains have meant absolutely jack-squat for years now. May as well open up the field.
Of course, this means a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]" -- this ought to be interesting.
Did the update actually do anything to the Wii Shop Channel (other than making it inaccessible without the update)? Or was that simply a ruse to get everybody to apply an update that is really designed for a totally different purpose?
This is basically what the "Privacy Manager" feature does on American networks like AT&T, albeit a bit more restrictive. It would answer any calls with no Caller ID automatically, and allow people to record their name; then the Privacy Manager would call you and ask if you want to take the call (similar to the way a collect call works). It would let through all calls with valid Caller ID, though, instead of using a whitelist. We used to have it on our old landline service; unfortunately, our current VoIP provider doesn't offer it.
I'd get one of these in a heartbeat. We already screen our calls based on the Caller ID info displayed anyway, so it would be a nice added step. (I'd love to set up an Asterisk box, but definitely don't have the time...)
That's why you treat a two-income household like a one-income one. Make sure your day-to-day necessities (food, shelter, clothing, utilities) are covered entirely by the lower of the two incomes, so in an emergency where one of the two "engines" fails, you still have enough power to stay flying.
The second income should act more like a turbocharger or afterburner -- it goes toward savings, luxuries, and/or paying principals on loans down faster.
My parents did this for twenty years, and although we may not have had all the flashy stuff I wished for when I was a kid, we were always safe in the instances where my dad was laid off. I'd do it as well, except that my wife stays home to watch our daughter. But if she decides to get a job when our daughter reaches school age, I'll continue with the same philosophy.
If that's true, why is the official Nintendo SD card for the Wii made by SanDisk?
And also, who do you recommend? The market has been flooded with so many lousy Chinese knockoffs these days, I have no idea which companies are actually decent.
Has anybody else noticed a ludicrously slow transfer speed when transferring files to and from an SD card? I have a SanDisk 2GB card -- not exactly a no-name brand -- and copying even a small Virtual Console game to the card takes minutes. If a block is roughly equal to 128k (that's an estimate given that a 2GB card holds roughly 20,000 blocks), I calculated the transfer rate to be about twice the speed of a 1.44MB floppy drive. Nearly 100 times slower than the theoretical maximum transfer rate of an SD card.
Maybe they're trying to keep that retro experience going by giving you mid-1980's transfer speeds too.
Yeah, we really ought to do the same thing with Los Angeles, too. I mean, it's one of the most earthquake-prone places on earth. Why are people rebuilding and living there?
The powers in the music, movie, and television industries want to keep our transfer speeds as low as possible. Otherwise, every single one of us will turn into horrible, filthy media pirates.
There are no technical reasons whatsoever. It is entirely fabricated by cartels who want to control the United States populace, and these same cartels either own or are in collusion with the ISPs.
Seems awfully close to the commercials DirecTV has been putting out about the horribly ugly, semi-truck-sized boxes required for cable and fiber-optic connections.
Yeah, what the heck is up with that? I get these weird bouts of nostalgia sometimes for the 1940s and 1950s, when I was born in 1979.
I always figure it's a yearning for the idealized versions of these times that we see through television and movies. Glad to see that others actually feel like that sometimes, though.
You know, if you are so damned lazy that you're complaining about changing DVDs every ten hours, maybe you should get off the couch and get a little exercise every now and then.
I can understand this argument for albums that didn't fit on a single LP, or movies that didn't fit on a single laserdisc, but the whole "I don't wanna have to change disks" complaint for games seems lazy at best, and fishing for reasons to bitch at worst.
Besides, as many others have pointed out, the new "install to HDD" feature will probably let a user load the entire game onto the hard drive, and use a single disc for ownership verification. Which, of course, throws that whole moronic argument out the window.
I'll admit quite freely that it does harm certain people whose livelihoods were based on the fact that it was very difficult and/or expensive to share perfect copies of music, movies, games, and other data. But you better get used to it, because you aren't going to stop it. Nobody is.
This is an honest-to-goodness sea change in the American -- possibly the world -- economy, made possible by the ability to cheaply store, copy, and transfer huge amounts of information. The propogation of pirated material was inevitable once this happened.
If the attitude that persists today had existed in the past, the printing press would've been outlawed because it put thousands of hand illuminators out of business, and owning an automobile would've been a imprisonable offense because it adversely affected so many people who made their livings on horse-driven carriages.
Yep, you and thousands of others are going to be harmed, and in some cases pretty badly too. That's too damned bad. Deal with it, or die out trying to cling to an outdated business model.
You know, that's not a bad idea... I wonder if we could get a bill passed preventing the RIAA from doing this kind of thing on the basis that it's terrorism against the people of this country. Unfortunately, you forget that the definition of "terrorism" has been altered. It no longer means "promoting the fear of death in the general public" -- this is now the definition of "being patriotic" and "supporting your country." Nowadays, terrorism means "stuff done blowed up."
Maybe it is being already done, but why not just encrypt the info as it is being sent? One year later...
RIAA Lobbyist: Mr. Speaker, I stand before you to inform you of the greatest threat to national security in the history of the United States: encryption. Allowing everyday citizens to have access to encryption, and transmit encrypted information over the Internet, will let Al Qaida, Iraq, Iran and North Korea collaborate right under our noses and lead to massive 9/11's throughout the United States! Also, child pornography.
Speaker: Goodness! We must outlaw all encryption in the hands of non-governmental, non-military, and non-media-cartel citizens in order to protect the country and our children! All in favor?
The majority of Congress, desperate to pander to the "USA fuck yeah" and "think of the children" votes: AYE!
Small and ever-dwindingly sane minority in Congress: Isn't there a chance that you might, you know, abuse this power somehow?
The rest of Congress: Pfft. Obviously you're all child-raping terrorists. Probably commies, too. Why do you hate America and children?
---
Remember, folks, you can get anything at all passed as long as it is against terrorism and/or child pornography. Be sure to frame any potential new laws as defending against one or both of those bogeymen, and you'll never lose!
Help start up a public service: make sure to spread the word to every high school student you know, telling them exactly which schools are eavesdropping on all of their Internet traffic. Broadcast it via every means possible. Let them know that if they decide to attend that school, every IM conversation, every email, every website they visit while on campus will be scrutinized by the administration for possible "illegal behavior."
How many prospective college students are going to choose a university that is actively spying on them 24/7?
Slashdot Mirror
The .com, .net, and .org domains have meant absolutely jack-squat for years now. May as well open up the field.
Of course, this means a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]" -- this ought to be interesting.
Did the update actually do anything to the Wii Shop Channel (other than making it inaccessible without the update)? Or was that simply a ruse to get everybody to apply an update that is really designed for a totally different purpose?
This is basically what the "Privacy Manager" feature does on American networks like AT&T, albeit a bit more restrictive. It would answer any calls with no Caller ID automatically, and allow people to record their name; then the Privacy Manager would call you and ask if you want to take the call (similar to the way a collect call works). It would let through all calls with valid Caller ID, though, instead of using a whitelist. We used to have it on our old landline service; unfortunately, our current VoIP provider doesn't offer it.
I'd get one of these in a heartbeat. We already screen our calls based on the Caller ID info displayed anyway, so it would be a nice added step. (I'd love to set up an Asterisk box, but definitely don't have the time...)
That's why you treat a two-income household like a one-income one. Make sure your day-to-day necessities (food, shelter, clothing, utilities) are covered entirely by the lower of the two incomes, so in an emergency where one of the two "engines" fails, you still have enough power to stay flying.
The second income should act more like a turbocharger or afterburner -- it goes toward savings, luxuries, and/or paying principals on loans down faster.
My parents did this for twenty years, and although we may not have had all the flashy stuff I wished for when I was a kid, we were always safe in the instances where my dad was laid off. I'd do it as well, except that my wife stays home to watch our daughter. But if she decides to get a job when our daughter reaches school age, I'll continue with the same philosophy.
If that's true, why is the official Nintendo SD card for the Wii made by SanDisk?
And also, who do you recommend? The market has been flooded with so many lousy Chinese knockoffs these days, I have no idea which companies are actually decent.
Has anybody else noticed a ludicrously slow transfer speed when transferring files to and from an SD card? I have a SanDisk 2GB card -- not exactly a no-name brand -- and copying even a small Virtual Console game to the card takes minutes. If a block is roughly equal to 128k (that's an estimate given that a 2GB card holds roughly 20,000 blocks), I calculated the transfer rate to be about twice the speed of a 1.44MB floppy drive. Nearly 100 times slower than the theoretical maximum transfer rate of an SD card.
Maybe they're trying to keep that retro experience going by giving you mid-1980's transfer speeds too.
Will they refund me the extra amount of money I'm paying for the "Performance" speed tier during that "lower priority" time? No? You don't say!
Friday:
All Members of EFF Mysteriously Vanish
From China or Korea within two months after DECE is introduced: six or seven players that are "DECE-region-free".
they were able to achieve throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second
Unfortunately, what they didn't tell you was that all those bits were zeroes.
If you don't understand that "interweb" is a tongue-in-cheek term, then you don't deserve to be on the interweb.
How is this any different from multiple enormous Californian cities lying directly on top of multiple active fault lines?
Yeah, we really ought to do the same thing with Los Angeles, too. I mean, it's one of the most earthquake-prone places on earth. Why are people rebuilding and living there?
The powers in the music, movie, and television industries want to keep our transfer speeds as low as possible. Otherwise, every single one of us will turn into horrible, filthy media pirates.
There are no technical reasons whatsoever. It is entirely fabricated by cartels who want to control the United States populace, and these same cartels either own or are in collusion with the ISPs.
Seems awfully close to the commercials DirecTV has been putting out about the horribly ugly, semi-truck-sized boxes required for cable and fiber-optic connections.
Yeah, what the heck is up with that? I get these weird bouts of nostalgia sometimes for the 1940s and 1950s, when I was born in 1979.
I always figure it's a yearning for the idealized versions of these times that we see through television and movies. Glad to see that others actually feel like that sometimes, though.
Oh hell, I forgot that AT&T bought Cingular out... a while ago.
Wasn't Cingular running that ad campaign before the switch, though? I could have sworn they were, but that may just be my addled brain shorting out.
Cingular loves to tout "More bars in more places".
"Higher signal-to-noise ratio across a broader range of the United States" just isn't quite as catchy a slogan.
I guess we were misinformed. Peer to peer transmission of data is wonderful... as long as the Right People are the only ones allowed to use it.
You know, if you are so damned lazy that you're complaining about changing DVDs every ten hours, maybe you should get off the couch and get a little exercise every now and then.
I can understand this argument for albums that didn't fit on a single LP, or movies that didn't fit on a single laserdisc, but the whole "I don't wanna have to change disks" complaint for games seems lazy at best, and fishing for reasons to bitch at worst.
Besides, as many others have pointed out, the new "install to HDD" feature will probably let a user load the entire game onto the hard drive, and use a single disc for ownership verification. Which, of course, throws that whole moronic argument out the window.
I'll admit quite freely that it does harm certain people whose livelihoods were based on the fact that it was very difficult and/or expensive to share perfect copies of music, movies, games, and other data. But you better get used to it, because you aren't going to stop it. Nobody is.
This is an honest-to-goodness sea change in the American -- possibly the world -- economy, made possible by the ability to cheaply store, copy, and transfer huge amounts of information. The propogation of pirated material was inevitable once this happened.
If the attitude that persists today had existed in the past, the printing press would've been outlawed because it put thousands of hand illuminators out of business, and owning an automobile would've been a imprisonable offense because it adversely affected so many people who made their livings on horse-driven carriages.
Yep, you and thousands of others are going to be harmed, and in some cases pretty badly too. That's too damned bad. Deal with it, or die out trying to cling to an outdated business model.
What the hell's a "marshy dro"? One of those new-fangled rap gentlemen all the kids think is "crunk"?
RIAA Lobbyist: Mr. Speaker, I stand before you to inform you of the greatest threat to national security in the history of the United States: encryption. Allowing everyday citizens to have access to encryption, and transmit encrypted information over the Internet, will let Al Qaida, Iraq, Iran and North Korea collaborate right under our noses and lead to massive 9/11's throughout the United States! Also, child pornography.
Speaker: Goodness! We must outlaw all encryption in the hands of non-governmental, non-military, and non-media-cartel citizens in order to protect the country and our children! All in favor?
The majority of Congress, desperate to pander to the "USA fuck yeah" and "think of the children" votes: AYE!
Small and ever-dwindingly sane minority in Congress: Isn't there a chance that you might, you know, abuse this power somehow?
The rest of Congress: Pfft. Obviously you're all child-raping terrorists. Probably commies, too. Why do you hate America and children?
---
Remember, folks, you can get anything at all passed as long as it is against terrorism and/or child pornography. Be sure to frame any potential new laws as defending against one or both of those bogeymen, and you'll never lose!
Help start up a public service: make sure to spread the word to every high school student you know, telling them exactly which schools are eavesdropping on all of their Internet traffic. Broadcast it via every means possible. Let them know that if they decide to attend that school, every IM conversation, every email, every website they visit while on campus will be scrutinized by the administration for possible "illegal behavior."
How many prospective college students are going to choose a university that is actively spying on them 24/7?