Help other folks out. Set yourself up as a proxy, advertise yourself as "Free Wi-Fi" too, and let everyone else (at least, everyone who connects through you) safely use the scumbag's paid wi-fi connection for free.
But if you must have some innocent fun, you really should have your machine mirror images so that they're returned upside-down. Not all of them, just a very few that meet some criteria based on a hash of the user's MAC address or something. Imagine their confusion when their buddy's laptop shows the picture normally and they're sitting there thinking, "What the...!!?"
With all due respect, my god, that game looks complicated. No wonder major publishers turned it down.
If you have a game with lots of rules and intricacies, I suspect you'd just about have to publish it yourself. I think that the big manufacturers are more interested in games that have mass appeal: games that are really simple to pick up and play, that take maybe five minutes to learn the rules and jump in, and that can be played by (and are at least somewhat interesting to) at least mid-teenagers.
I'm not saying that there isn't a market for other games, just that such games will never reach the mass appeal of something like Monopoly, Sorry!, Trivial Pursuit, and so on. And if one of the big companies is going to invest the money into manufacturing, marketing, and distributing your game, it's reasonable for them to expect to have to have at least a big enough market to recoup that investment and pay its CEO.
So if you go to publishers and they turn you down flat, don't take it personally. Someone like Hasbro is probably not the ideal company to publish your game anyway. If I were you, I'd seek out smaller publishers.
Oh, and you mentioned a "nerd factor" and your "Trek fan" wife. Keep in mind that if your game includes someone else's intellectual property to any great extent, you're going to have to deal with licensing issues as well.
And speaking of intellectual property, for god's sake, make sure you patent your rules, copyright any materials in it, and trademark your logos and designs. I am not a lawyer, but if you're serious about selling your game for profit, you really need to invest the money into seeing one first. If your game is as good as you think it is, you definitely don't want to see your game being sold on store shelves by someone like Hasbro after they tell you that it sucks and would never sell.
Well, first of all, when I said prefers, I wasn't sure what the agreements were. I thought that Sirius had the NFL exclusively, but I wasn't sure. I just remember seeing the commercials (Peyton Manning and Terry Bradshaw, wasn't it?) where Sirius was pitching their NFL coverage and figured that they probably had the agreement, but again, I wasn't sure, and if I was wrong, I didn't want 50 posts telling me I was an idiot for saying that there weren't NFL games on XM. (Even though, as it turns out, that's the case.)
shrug
Yeah, but why are they upset at anyone other than the agencies (like the NFL, NBA etc) who are signing these exclusivity contracts?
This is precisely right. The problem with things such as NFL games only being on Sirius isn't a problem with anticompetitveness, it's a problem with exclusive licensing agreements. I hate them with a purple passion you cannot measure, and yes, they're extremely evil for consumers. I wish that this issue would be taken up by lawmakers. Not that I have all the answers; any kind of law that addresses that would have to be careful to not trample on the rights of people to sell their product (in this case, entertainment events) to who they want, but still, there's got to be a better way to do things than what's going on now.
Besides, if you extend the argument that XM and Sirius should be allowed to combine based on the one station being able to carry football and baseball, then wouldn't it make sense for all stations in a regional area to be owned by a single company? Or even for one company to own all television networks for the sake of convenience of broadcast rights? If we allow all satellite radio networks to be owned by one company, I don't see a huge leap to allowing all terrestrial television networks being owned by one company, and that would be absolutely horrible.
Go with what your brain knows to be true, not what your heart desires for the short-term.
I don't like having to choose a car based on which satellite radio service comes pre-installed
So don't. Either choose your radio service based on what is installed in the car, or have a satellite radio system for whichever system you want installed by a third-party store. Problem solved!
Frankly, it's probably all this exclusivity that has caused me not to purchase either system.
Actually, there's really not a lot of exclusivity between the two services. They both have rock stations, rap stations, country stations, etc. I didn't even know that Oprah had a show on XM, and I only know that Stern has a show on Sirius because of all of the hoopla around him leaving the broadcast airwaves. I think that the NFL prefers one service over another, and past that, I really don't know of anything else except maybe some talk personalities that I've probably never heard of.
So as long as the services are separate, you'll have to live without either Oprah or Stern (neither of which, in my humble opinion, is much of a sacrifice). But each service also has to be price-competitive and service-competitive to keep you from switching. They have to periodically roll out new features and improve the quality of existing features to keep up with the other. And they have to pay Joe Talkshow a decent salary to keep him from going to the other. Those things, again in my humble opinion, are preferable to having Oprah and Stern on just one service.
That antitrust scrutiny is there for a reason, and in this case, it's very well justified.
One interesting thing I read about their choice (ThinkFree) is that they offer software you can install on your own server to store your documents safely and securely. If you're a company, you could run your own ThinkFree server, presumably with as much security and encryption you want. Or heck, since it only costs $30 per year, I suppose you could run your own ThinkFree server with any security and encryption you want, access your documents anywhere, and still come out way ahead financially if you're willing to give up some of the high-end features of native suites.
I do not have the attention span of a flea on crack.
It's not about your attention span, it's about the fundamental purpose of television: Entertainment.
Believe it or not, even education can be entertaining if presented in the right format. If I only wanted education, I wouldn't watch PBS, I would take a class or study a book. But when I watch PBS or Discovery or any of the other "educational" channels, I'm really shooting for entertainment that appeals to me in an intelligent, well-thought-out manner, not just seeking to learn something for the sake of learning something.
I yearn for impartial & unbiased educational programming that I enjoyed in my youth. Now-a-days it seems that if they don't "wow" you in the first 10 seconds they think they have failed.
Not me, I hated those shows. When I was young, I watched things like The Electric Company ("HEY YOU GUYYYYYYYS!"), 3-2-1 Contact, Schoolhouse Rock, Cosmos, and so on. Plenty of "wow" factor along with fantastic educational content.
I'm also curious why you used the adjectives "impartial" and "unbiased." Are you implying the Myth Busters, Nova, and other such shows are somehow "partial" and "biased" because they're flashy? Are fun and educational mutually exclusive concepts to you?
I wish someone would mod this up, because you're right on the money, so to speak. "Wrongful termination" lawsuits are a joke when you live in an at-will state such as mine. Unless you're protected under a specific law (such, as mentioned, as discrimination laws), employers can fire you at any time for any reason. Yes, even for things such as leaving a work site to take care of basic medical needs.
When these kinds of laws were set up, it was the assumption of those that passed them that no employer in their right mind would actually be coldhearted enough to do such stuff. Obviously, they underestimated just the kind of soulless bastards they were dealing with, and many companies, especially large corporations, make no bones about exploiting laws like this to the fullest of their advantage.
Wal-Mart figured out a long time ago that it doesn't make a damned bit of difference what they do to screw over communities and its employees. As long as they put enough cheap shit on their shelves, people will still come in there and shop, no matter how much it destroys their community. They know the psychology at work: offer people a concrete and tangible advantage ("get cheap shit here"), and it will win out every time over abstract notions of what's right and wrong or what will ultimately destroy the communities people live in.
Next time, read the fucking post before saying asinine things like:
Selling things for a profit isn't evil.
Where did I say that selling things for a profit is evil? I didn't, you idiots, and I made a deliberate and conscious effort not to, because I don't believe it myself. What I said is that selling things for a profit doesn't make anyone less evil. Did I say it makes them more evil? No, you're reading shit into my posts that I didn't put in there, and they're evil for reasons, some of which have little to do with profit.
Since you're too damned stupid to understand simple English, let me spell it out in baby words: Wal-Mart is evil. Wal-Mart does something that makes them more profit that also just happens to encourage environmental friendliness. Wal-Mart is not less evil as a result.
Got it? I hope so, because it seems like a pretty excruciatingly simple concept to me. If Enron had embezzled millions of dollars of employee's retirement funds to run "conserve electricity, save the environment" ads to get some sort of green endorsement from environmental organizations, would it be less evil as a result? Hell, no! I see this as exactly the same kind of thing.
Wal-Mart stands to make just as much or even more money off of this kind of thing as they did before. What they're doing, they're not doing out of any sense of virtue, it's simply a business decision.
So they make lots of money up front on light bulbs—money they can invest and earn returns on—instead of a little money all along. Plus, if Wal-Mart uses their buying power to get these light bulbs for pennies on the dollar and make more money off of them at the cash register, plus get to use "We're environmentally friendly!" in their ads, they stand to greatly profit from this move.
I'm not seeing how this makes them any less evil. If they sell the bulbs for less profit, then I'd say maybe a little less evil. (Which I assume they're not, correct me if I'm wrong. TFA is a registration site.)
It seems to me that the only people who are less evil are the people spending a lot of money up front to buy the bulbs, not the store that's selling them. And even then, since the bulbs are cheaper to use in the long run, even that's debatable. I switched to these bulbs throughout my house years ago, and I've never had to replace one, and my power bill went down pretty dramatically.
20 percent [of video files downloaded from P2P sites] was TV show content
And this is a crying shame.
I download television show content myself. What I can get on iTunes, I get on iTunes and pay $2 per show, or buy a whole season at a time. What I can't, I seek elsewhere, including P2P networks. I don't download movies at all, because I can simply get them on DVD.
The fact is that I'm not going to pay $50 a month for cable or satellite for something that's, frankly, not worth that much to me. Television and movie studios can either get compensation for their stuff by making it available to me in a manner I want (iTunes/timely release of DVDs), or they can get bupkiss when I download it for free, an option that I'd really rather avoid, to be honest.
If, god forbid, the industry succeeds somehow in making television shows impossible to download, then I simply won't watch their stuff at all. Most of it has that little value to me.
It's all so stupid. I can't believe there's an industry out there that is so desperate to stop the pirates that they're willing to forego billions of dollars, yet here we are, living it.
If someone gave you the choice of making $1 billion for making a television show, but the show is pirated to an extent such that over half the people who watch it don't pay you, or making $500 million for making a television show with little or no piracy of it at all with a much, much smaller audience, which would you prefer?
Yeah, me too. Stupid, huh?
As for porn, I don't care. I've only seen a few porn movies myself, and I don't find them exciting. I honestly think that porn is one of those things that everyone thinks they're supposed to be really into, so they watch it and act like it's a big deal; but realistically, once you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all. People get naked and do it, ho hum. Check out this other one where... Um... People get naked and do it, ho hum. But you know, whatever. I guess if there's anything I don't understand about that is why people still buy DVDs or the naughty channels on cable when they can pretty much get anything they want over the Internet.
Just as a point of interest - you can in fact do exactly this. And its not complicated, there are ready-made apps for $29 that do precisely the thing you are describing.
Just as a point of interest (since I'm pretty sure this thread is long dead by now), the piece of software that you linked to doesn't convert DVDs to be playable on your PSP/PS3. It converts MP4 files to be playable. There is a difference, and to go from DVD to MP4, you'll also need this piece of software, which is $35. And, of course, that one doesn't mention anything about ripping encrypted DVDs, which is what most people are looking to do. Since it doesn't mention it, I can only assume that it doesn't, which means that I'm looking for yet another piece of software to decrypt the DVD or otherwise rip it to MP4.
In other words, like I said, it's not just a button click, and if you want to do it, you're either in for some cash layouts or else a long and complicated process. And, of course, none of this negates the fact that no matter what method you use, it's still illegal under the DMCA.
So, you are saying that it's bogus that if you have the extended warranty, say from BestBuy, and you go back with your broke system and they replace it on the spot with a brand new one and all you had to do was walk in the store?
Yes, it's bogus. You're proceeding from the assumption that everything you're going to buy will break. In reality, very few things we buy will break. Let's pretend that over the next five years, you buy $10000 of stuff with extended warranties. An average extended warranty costs around 15% (using the $60 for $400 protection that Micro Center was offering me). That's $1500. Now let's say that your Xbox breaks in six months, so you take it back. Let's also say that a $500 computer monitor you bought breaks and you take it back. You've spent $1500 to save yourself $900, and I'm sorry, but that's pretty dumb. That's not even considering the fact that over time, things get cheaper, and you've spent $1500 to save yourself less than $900.
By the way, they are selling a POS, the 360's have an extremely high failure rate which is what they were trying to tell you.
Depends on how you define "high." Maybe it's higher than the industry average. But if you run the numbers, like I said, the only justification for a $60 extended warranty is if the failure rate from 90 days to two years is 15%. It's not even remotely close to that by any stretch of the imagination.
Some 40% to 60% of consumers actually WANT the extended warranty and some 20% to 30% make an extended warranty part of the decision to purchase a product at a certain retailer
And 27.9% of statistics are made up on the spot. This is one of them. I can honestly say that in all my life, among all of my friends that have a decent amount of disposable income and in all of the geeky circles I run in, I have never once—not one single time—ever heard anyone ever say anything that remotely resembled the availability of an extended warranty plan being part of anyone's purchasing decision for anything.
But then again, I typically run with a pretty smart crowd.
it's called peace of mind
This kind of reminds me of a conversation my dad and I had once. He found some seedy little web site that said that if you would pay them $32.50, they would sign you up to take online surveys that would pay you $5 to $75 for each. He told me he was going to sign up for it because, hey, it's only $32.50. It's not like it's a lot of money, and if he just got one of those $75 payouts for a survey, it would be more than worth it.
I explained to my dad that it was a scam, but he kept insisting that it was only $32.50, and it might be worth it just to give it a shot.
You seem to kind of have the same philosophy. You keep thinking, "Hey, my stuff probably won't break, but it's not a lot of money, so let me gamble on the possibility that it will." Well, if you would rather that Circuit City or Best Buy or wherever have your hard-earned cash instead of you to spend on other things, then be my guest. I guess that's why the people who own those companies are very, very rich and you're, well, probably not.
For what it's worth, though, my dad didn't sign up for that scam. But then, he was a relatively smart cookie most of the time, too, and would listen to reason.
Yup, you are right, totally bogus. Complete waste of money.
Here are a few reason why I disagree. I guess time will tell which of us is right.
Multimedia playback, internet capability via the web browser/keyboard/mouse, linux, and blu-ray built in have the PS3 off to a good start.
The Xbox 360 also has multimedia playback. It can play DVDs out of the box, and one can purchase high def movies and television shows online to play.
I'm certain Microsoft has more in store as far as the Internet goes, but keep in mind that most people don't use their videogame console to browse the web.
Most users don't want to use a keyboard or mouse with their videogame console.
Most users don't care about Linux on their videogame console. Again, that's what computers are for.
Contrary to what Sony wants to believe, most users don't watch movies using media such as Blu-ray discs on their videogame consoles. I much prefer the Xbox's philosophy: If you want to watch high def movies, we have a piece of equipment you can add. We're not going to force you to buy one with every console we sell.
The 360 doesn't have HD-DVD yet and the only way it's going to be available in the near future is via external add-on so I really think that will come into play as well.
Yes, the 360 does indeed have HD-DVD. And yes, it is an add-on. I think that most people will like that. You have the choice of whether you want to pay for it or not. Microsoft isn't forcing you to buy it with their console. As a result, their console is considerably less expensive without giving up any of it's primary usage capabilities—gaming—and Microsoft was able to get a lot of the systems out and on the market a lot quicker than Sony has.
Finally, the PSP/PS3 combination is pretty neat.
Not very many people have PSPs. Honestly, I bought one because I thought they were going to be the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not. Their potential never materialized, and I've been sorely disappointed at the lack of cool stuff for mine. The games aren't that good, the UMD movies are dead, and I haven't even turned the thing on in a year or so. I wish I could go back in time and slap myself silly for buying one. Maybe now that the PS3 is out, I can get a little something back for it on eBay.
The fact that you can sync them up, and hopefully stream remotely to the PSP from the PS3 over the internet is an awesome feature for those who like to show off to their friends.
This sounds like a marketing clip if ever I heard one. This assumes that: 1) people even have a PSP, 2) people carry their PSP around with them, 3) people have wireless access to the Internet everywhere they take their PSP, 4) people's friends will care what's on their PSP or PS3, 5) people will actually want to watch movies on a four-inch screen. Is PSP/PS3 communication neat? Sure. Is it a reason to buy either? No.
When I can rip my DVDs onto my computer and have it stream them to my PSP or PS3, come back and talk to me. (Yes, I know there's probably some long, complicated, illegal procedure to do this, but we're talking about what average consumers can do.)
360 also has Xbox live, which you can't leave out of the equation.
No, you can't. Every review I have read says that the Xbox Live service is head and shoulders above Sony's online service.
But are people really going to be willing to pay $15 a month in the longterm?
As has already been pointed out, it's not $15 a month. It's less than $5 a month. And considering how much better the Xbox Live service is over Sony's, yes, I think that paying less than $5 a month for it is more than reasonable.
Also, the Xbox will be hampered by competing factions in Microsoft to push Windows Media Center as a valid platform
I'd love to see this competition broadcast, complete with color commentary.
"Folks, I've seen a lot of things, but the intensity at our competition here today is intangible. The absence of pressure is really heating up! I can tell that our contestants are both going to give it their none, their best zero percent. Our favorite to win today is Dan. I interviewed him before the match, let's take a look at it now."
(Dan) "Well, Jim, it's taken a lot of not working hard to get to this level. I think that if I had to credit one thing with my success, it's my unwillingness to do everything it takes to win. I've also been totally uncommitted to the game since I was a kid. I guess I've just always had that lack of focus that it takes to get to this level."
I just mentioned in another thread a few minute ago that Micro Center is offering a $100 rebate on Xbox 360s, both the core and pro systems. For the core system, that would end up being $200.
Now, that being said, beware the nickel-and-diming:
You have to pay $300 up-front and wait for the rebate to get to you, and make sure you take the check and deposit it in the bank. It's a bit of a hassle, but hopefully for $100, you won't forget.
If you pick up a few accessories and a game or two, that could easily push you $200 or more higher.
You have to put up with their pushy salespeople trying to sell you an extended warranty contract. Don't buy it. Aside from the fact that all of these contracts are totally bogus, Microsoft just extended the manufacturer's warranty from 90 days to a year.
If you want to play online, you'll also have to subscribe to Xbox Live, which is an additional fee.
So if you're just looking for something that will play the fancy new Xbox 360 and classic old Xbox games, you can get it now for $200. If you're looking to build it out to any degree, you should indeed probably wait.
Well, your first one would have not only been well within the warranty, but well within the return policy of the store where you bought it. Just pack it up, take it back with your receipt, and get a new one.
statistically speaking the odds aren't in your favor
That's really hard to believe. If it were true, then these stores (and Microsoft) would be losing money for offering these warranties, and since they don't (and in fact, as pointed out, make a huge profit from them), I'd say that the odds are much, much better that my Xbox 360 will work fine for quite a while.
If you do the math, using $60 as the figure for the two-year warranty that was offered to me, given that an Xbox Pro system costs $400, that means that for the odds to not be in my favor, one in every six Xbox 360s sold would have to break sometime between three months and two years. Actually, given that the price of the Xbox 360 will likely be much lower in two years, it would be even more than that, but for simplicity's sake, let's just say one in six.
I've heard all the stuff about overheating problems and such (I have mine in an open area, with several inches of clearance on either side of it and a foot or so above it), but come on, one in six? I'm sure that some folks have had your kind of luck and had two break, but I can't imagine one in six Xbox 360s breaking in the first two years. If it were that high, Microsoft would be positively going out of business for the number of units that would be returned in the first 90 days, and there's no way in hell they would bump that warranty up retroactively to a full year.
So thanks, I'm more than willing to roll the dice on that one, and that's a great analogy. If you pay $60 for an extended warranty, you're basically gambling $60 on your Xbox 360 breaking between 90 days and two years, a bet that almost every Xbox owner will lose when their console is still working fine after two years and beyond.
Well, I'm really pushing the karma, so I swear, I'll leave this thread completely alone after this, and feel free to mod it down if you want. (My preferred mod tag is "Off-Topic," because that's what this post is, as it's pretty much solely intended for its parent post. I'm not trolling, so get it right.)
Before I get into any sort of argument about evolution these days, I ask a pretty simple question that will determine whether or not it's worthwhile to go any further: Is there anything whatsoever, any evidence in any scientific field, that, if discovered, could possibly convince you that that the story of creation in Genesis is not the literal truth?
If the answer is no, then going any further is pointless. If they won't believe decades of rigorous scientific research and overwhelming compelling evidence, they sure as hell aren't going to believe you, and trying to convince them isn't really arguing about the subject, it's more like pointless bickering.
Our readers can relax this year: Religion and politics are off the table, and n-dimensional geometry is on instead.
I've got karma to burn, so let's use some up.
You stop right there, mister.
I don't care what kind of "proof" this seedy Perelman character says he has. In Leviticus, The Bible makes it clear that in a closed 3-mainfold, there non-spherical loops that can be continually tightened to a point. Who are you going to believe, Grigori Perelman, or God? If you even try to put this proof in my kid's math book, I'm going to demand more stickers! Slashdot obviously wants the terrorists to win!
Apologies to any real mathematicians out there, that was the best twisting of Poincaré Conjecture I could come up for the sake of this joke based on Wikipedia's article. And while I hope that while everyone realizes that I'm kidding, I also hope that some folks realize that I'm kinda not. The vast majority of people who insist that such things as evolution aren't true sound to me pretty much like I just did, because the vast majority of people who I argue with over the subject start from the premise, "It says in Genesis..."
Thank goodness. 90 days just isn't long enough to find all design flaws in a product, especially if you consider that there are probably a bunch of Xbox 360s sitting around in closets or under trees for a month or so before they actually get used. I wonder how many people didn't buy an Xbox 360 because of the really short warranty. I also wonder how many people are going to kick themselves now for buying one of those ripoff extended warranties.
I got mine at Micro Center a couple of weeks ago, which is currently offering a $100 rebate on both the core nad pro systems. If I were Microsoft, though, I'd be really pissed off at Micro Center. I had one sales person on the floor ask several times if I wanted to upgrade the 90-day warranty. "Are you sure? It's a great deal! And look at what you get!..." Of course being intelligent, I turned it down, over and over, ad nauseum.
When I got to the cash register, the checkout person asked yet again. When I declined, she actually said, "You really should get it. A lot of people have been bringing them back."
If I were even the least bit paranoid, I would have simply left my $600 or so of merchandise (the system, plus a couple of games, a controller, and a battery charger) sitting right there on the counter and walked out. Why the hell would I buy a product that the store clerks keep telling me, and seem convinced to the core, is defective? If I were Microsoft, I'd be tempted to stop selling any Xbox 360s to Micro Center at all. Stores telling customers repeatedly that your product is broken is most heinously not cool.
Fortunately, I'm not as gullible as a lot of people, and I'm not so willing to part with my sixty-something dollars for something that is statistically highly unlikely to happen.
Maybe this will help to take some of the wind out of their "sales" and get them to stop trying to scare the hell out of their customers.
Still, a hundred bucks back sure does take a little bit of the sting out of having to listen to their stupidity. If I were just a tiny bit more spiteful, I would drive up there today and tell them, "Hah hah!"
Oh, and P.S., a couple of weeks later, everything's working fine.;-) My gamertag is Skippus. Look me up and maybe we'll throw down with some Texas Hold'em.
Point me to a page with a "small flash component" that will, without any kind of interaction whatsoever, echo whatever is in my clipboard to me. I'd like to see a Firefox equivalent of this page.
A bit pricey, no? $300 for a flashlight? A $3600 capaccino machine?
Maybe I'm just poor or cheap, but most of these are outrageous. Who is their target audience? Fortune 500 execs?
Amen! I'm always amused at "gift guides" that are composed of items that are hundreds of dollars. Just how the hell much money do these people think my family is worth at Christmas? A really expensive Christmas gift to me is around $50. If I were married, I'd probably spring for $100 or so for my wife.
Yet I see guides like this, hear radio ads telling me to by diamonds that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, or even to do something stupid like buy a new car for my hypothetical wife. A new car? Do these people honestly think I would make such a huge decision without the knowledge, full acceptance, and blessing of my wife?
Am I just the world's biggest cheapskate?
Wait, no, I think I know what's going on here. They want me to think I'm a cheapskate if I don't buy hundreds of dollars worth of crap for my family for Christmas.
Well, I'm sorry, the joke's on them. I think that along with the lesser-expensive gifts I give to my family, a really nice one is not begging them for money the rest of the year because I'd be in debt beyond my imagination for burning through money like that. And call me crazy, but I also think that a really nice gift for one's spouse instead of earrings or a new car that you don't need is—gasp!—a realistic plan for retiring some day so that we can spend wonderful decades together without having to work our asses off for useless junk like, well, a $300 flashlight or a $3600 cappuccino maker!
Honestly, $300 for a fucking flashlight? If someone game me one of those, I wouldn't be grateful, I'd be extremely condescending. "You spend $300 for a fucking flashlight? Did you win the lottery, or are you just too damned stupid to know that you can get a really good one at Target for less than $10?"
What scares this geek is that there are obviously people out there who actually buy this junk. What's doubly scary is that they're pitching it to my friends and family as if I actually would want any of this crap. God, I hope they're not that stupid.
My god, I don't know how I've missed this one. It's the most scary thing I've seen in a long time. I like to think I'm pretty savvy, and I stay up with all of the latest scoop, but this is the first I've read about this gaping security hole.
For the past half hour, I've been showing people I work with this exploit (I'm sorry, I refuse to call it a "feature"), and everyone's been forwarding e-mails to their home account with two pieces of information: 1) The ScriptingMagic site URL to play with at home and show other people, and 2) the Firefox URL to install as soon as they get off today.
Thank god I've been using Firefox for a couple of years or so now. This is unbelievable. The thought that an IE window in my background could have been sitting there all along, quietly capturing and reporting everything I put in my clipboard, is just unbelievable.
Slashdot Mirror
Help other folks out. Set yourself up as a proxy, advertise yourself as "Free Wi-Fi" too, and let everyone else (at least, everyone who connects through you) safely use the scumbag's paid wi-fi connection for free.
But if you must have some innocent fun, you really should have your machine mirror images so that they're returned upside-down. Not all of them, just a very few that meet some criteria based on a hash of the user's MAC address or something. Imagine their confusion when their buddy's laptop shows the picture normally and they're sitting there thinking, "What the...!!?"
With all due respect, my god, that game looks complicated. No wonder major publishers turned it down.
If you have a game with lots of rules and intricacies, I suspect you'd just about have to publish it yourself. I think that the big manufacturers are more interested in games that have mass appeal: games that are really simple to pick up and play, that take maybe five minutes to learn the rules and jump in, and that can be played by (and are at least somewhat interesting to) at least mid-teenagers.
I'm not saying that there isn't a market for other games, just that such games will never reach the mass appeal of something like Monopoly, Sorry!, Trivial Pursuit, and so on. And if one of the big companies is going to invest the money into manufacturing, marketing, and distributing your game, it's reasonable for them to expect to have to have at least a big enough market to recoup that investment and pay its CEO.
So if you go to publishers and they turn you down flat, don't take it personally. Someone like Hasbro is probably not the ideal company to publish your game anyway. If I were you, I'd seek out smaller publishers.
Oh, and you mentioned a "nerd factor" and your "Trek fan" wife. Keep in mind that if your game includes someone else's intellectual property to any great extent, you're going to have to deal with licensing issues as well.
And speaking of intellectual property, for god's sake, make sure you patent your rules, copyright any materials in it, and trademark your logos and designs. I am not a lawyer, but if you're serious about selling your game for profit, you really need to invest the money into seeing one first. If your game is as good as you think it is, you definitely don't want to see your game being sold on store shelves by someone like Hasbro after they tell you that it sucks and would never sell.
Well, first of all, when I said prefers, I wasn't sure what the agreements were. I thought that Sirius had the NFL exclusively, but I wasn't sure. I just remember seeing the commercials (Peyton Manning and Terry Bradshaw, wasn't it?) where Sirius was pitching their NFL coverage and figured that they probably had the agreement, but again, I wasn't sure, and if I was wrong, I didn't want 50 posts telling me I was an idiot for saying that there weren't NFL games on XM. (Even though, as it turns out, that's the case.)
shrug
This is precisely right. The problem with things such as NFL games only being on Sirius isn't a problem with anticompetitveness, it's a problem with exclusive licensing agreements. I hate them with a purple passion you cannot measure, and yes, they're extremely evil for consumers. I wish that this issue would be taken up by lawmakers. Not that I have all the answers; any kind of law that addresses that would have to be careful to not trample on the rights of people to sell their product (in this case, entertainment events) to who they want, but still, there's got to be a better way to do things than what's going on now.
Besides, if you extend the argument that XM and Sirius should be allowed to combine based on the one station being able to carry football and baseball, then wouldn't it make sense for all stations in a regional area to be owned by a single company? Or even for one company to own all television networks for the sake of convenience of broadcast rights? If we allow all satellite radio networks to be owned by one company, I don't see a huge leap to allowing all terrestrial television networks being owned by one company, and that would be absolutely horrible.
AT&T gives much, much more money to politicians.
Go with what your brain knows to be true, not what your heart desires for the short-term.
So don't. Either choose your radio service based on what is installed in the car, or have a satellite radio system for whichever system you want installed by a third-party store. Problem solved!
Actually, there's really not a lot of exclusivity between the two services. They both have rock stations, rap stations, country stations, etc. I didn't even know that Oprah had a show on XM, and I only know that Stern has a show on Sirius because of all of the hoopla around him leaving the broadcast airwaves. I think that the NFL prefers one service over another, and past that, I really don't know of anything else except maybe some talk personalities that I've probably never heard of.
So as long as the services are separate, you'll have to live without either Oprah or Stern (neither of which, in my humble opinion, is much of a sacrifice). But each service also has to be price-competitive and service-competitive to keep you from switching. They have to periodically roll out new features and improve the quality of existing features to keep up with the other. And they have to pay Joe Talkshow a decent salary to keep him from going to the other. Those things, again in my humble opinion, are preferable to having Oprah and Stern on just one service.
That antitrust scrutiny is there for a reason, and in this case, it's very well justified.
One interesting thing I read about their choice (ThinkFree) is that they offer software you can install on your own server to store your documents safely and securely. If you're a company, you could run your own ThinkFree server, presumably with as much security and encryption you want. Or heck, since it only costs $30 per year, I suppose you could run your own ThinkFree server with any security and encryption you want, access your documents anywhere, and still come out way ahead financially if you're willing to give up some of the high-end features of native suites.
It's not about your attention span, it's about the fundamental purpose of television: Entertainment.
Believe it or not, even education can be entertaining if presented in the right format. If I only wanted education, I wouldn't watch PBS, I would take a class or study a book. But when I watch PBS or Discovery or any of the other "educational" channels, I'm really shooting for entertainment that appeals to me in an intelligent, well-thought-out manner, not just seeking to learn something for the sake of learning something.
Not me, I hated those shows. When I was young, I watched things like The Electric Company ("HEY YOU GUYYYYYYYS!"), 3-2-1 Contact, Schoolhouse Rock, Cosmos, and so on. Plenty of "wow" factor along with fantastic educational content.
I'm also curious why you used the adjectives "impartial" and "unbiased." Are you implying the Myth Busters, Nova, and other such shows are somehow "partial" and "biased" because they're flashy? Are fun and educational mutually exclusive concepts to you?
I wish someone would mod this up, because you're right on the money, so to speak. "Wrongful termination" lawsuits are a joke when you live in an at-will state such as mine. Unless you're protected under a specific law (such, as mentioned, as discrimination laws), employers can fire you at any time for any reason. Yes, even for things such as leaving a work site to take care of basic medical needs.
When these kinds of laws were set up, it was the assumption of those that passed them that no employer in their right mind would actually be coldhearted enough to do such stuff. Obviously, they underestimated just the kind of soulless bastards they were dealing with, and many companies, especially large corporations, make no bones about exploiting laws like this to the fullest of their advantage.
Wal-Mart figured out a long time ago that it doesn't make a damned bit of difference what they do to screw over communities and its employees. As long as they put enough cheap shit on their shelves, people will still come in there and shop, no matter how much it destroys their community. They know the psychology at work: offer people a concrete and tangible advantage ("get cheap shit here"), and it will win out every time over abstract notions of what's right and wrong or what will ultimately destroy the communities people live in.
Next time, read the fucking post before saying asinine things like:
Where did I say that selling things for a profit is evil? I didn't, you idiots, and I made a deliberate and conscious effort not to, because I don't believe it myself. What I said is that selling things for a profit doesn't make anyone less evil. Did I say it makes them more evil? No, you're reading shit into my posts that I didn't put in there, and they're evil for reasons, some of which have little to do with profit.
Since you're too damned stupid to understand simple English, let me spell it out in baby words: Wal-Mart is evil. Wal-Mart does something that makes them more profit that also just happens to encourage environmental friendliness. Wal-Mart is not less evil as a result.
Got it? I hope so, because it seems like a pretty excruciatingly simple concept to me. If Enron had embezzled millions of dollars of employee's retirement funds to run "conserve electricity, save the environment" ads to get some sort of green endorsement from environmental organizations, would it be less evil as a result? Hell, no! I see this as exactly the same kind of thing.
Wal-Mart stands to make just as much or even more money off of this kind of thing as they did before. What they're doing, they're not doing out of any sense of virtue, it's simply a business decision.
One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night.
So they make lots of money up front on light bulbs—money they can invest and earn returns on—instead of a little money all along. Plus, if Wal-Mart uses their buying power to get these light bulbs for pennies on the dollar and make more money off of them at the cash register, plus get to use "We're environmentally friendly!" in their ads, they stand to greatly profit from this move.
I'm not seeing how this makes them any less evil. If they sell the bulbs for less profit, then I'd say maybe a little less evil. (Which I assume they're not, correct me if I'm wrong. TFA is a registration site.)
It seems to me that the only people who are less evil are the people spending a lot of money up front to buy the bulbs, not the store that's selling them. And even then, since the bulbs are cheaper to use in the long run, even that's debatable. I switched to these bulbs throughout my house years ago, and I've never had to replace one, and my power bill went down pretty dramatically.
And this is a crying shame.
I download television show content myself. What I can get on iTunes, I get on iTunes and pay $2 per show, or buy a whole season at a time. What I can't, I seek elsewhere, including P2P networks. I don't download movies at all, because I can simply get them on DVD.
The fact is that I'm not going to pay $50 a month for cable or satellite for something that's, frankly, not worth that much to me. Television and movie studios can either get compensation for their stuff by making it available to me in a manner I want (iTunes/timely release of DVDs), or they can get bupkiss when I download it for free, an option that I'd really rather avoid, to be honest.
If, god forbid, the industry succeeds somehow in making television shows impossible to download, then I simply won't watch their stuff at all. Most of it has that little value to me.
It's all so stupid. I can't believe there's an industry out there that is so desperate to stop the pirates that they're willing to forego billions of dollars, yet here we are, living it.
If someone gave you the choice of making $1 billion for making a television show, but the show is pirated to an extent such that over half the people who watch it don't pay you, or making $500 million for making a television show with little or no piracy of it at all with a much, much smaller audience, which would you prefer?
Yeah, me too. Stupid, huh?
As for porn, I don't care. I've only seen a few porn movies myself, and I don't find them exciting. I honestly think that porn is one of those things that everyone thinks they're supposed to be really into, so they watch it and act like it's a big deal; but realistically, once you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all. People get naked and do it, ho hum. Check out this other one where... Um... People get naked and do it, ho hum. But you know, whatever. I guess if there's anything I don't understand about that is why people still buy DVDs or the naughty channels on cable when they can pretty much get anything they want over the Internet.
Just as a point of interest (since I'm pretty sure this thread is long dead by now), the piece of software that you linked to doesn't convert DVDs to be playable on your PSP/PS3. It converts MP4 files to be playable. There is a difference, and to go from DVD to MP4, you'll also need this piece of software, which is $35. And, of course, that one doesn't mention anything about ripping encrypted DVDs, which is what most people are looking to do. Since it doesn't mention it, I can only assume that it doesn't, which means that I'm looking for yet another piece of software to decrypt the DVD or otherwise rip it to MP4.
In other words, like I said, it's not just a button click, and if you want to do it, you're either in for some cash layouts or else a long and complicated process. And, of course, none of this negates the fact that no matter what method you use, it's still illegal under the DMCA.
Ever heard of a little concept called paragraphs?
Yes, it's bogus. You're proceeding from the assumption that everything you're going to buy will break. In reality, very few things we buy will break. Let's pretend that over the next five years, you buy $10000 of stuff with extended warranties. An average extended warranty costs around 15% (using the $60 for $400 protection that Micro Center was offering me). That's $1500. Now let's say that your Xbox breaks in six months, so you take it back. Let's also say that a $500 computer monitor you bought breaks and you take it back. You've spent $1500 to save yourself $900, and I'm sorry, but that's pretty dumb. That's not even considering the fact that over time, things get cheaper, and you've spent $1500 to save yourself less than $900.
Depends on how you define "high." Maybe it's higher than the industry average. But if you run the numbers, like I said, the only justification for a $60 extended warranty is if the failure rate from 90 days to two years is 15%. It's not even remotely close to that by any stretch of the imagination.
And 27.9% of statistics are made up on the spot. This is one of them. I can honestly say that in all my life, among all of my friends that have a decent amount of disposable income and in all of the geeky circles I run in, I have never once—not one single time—ever heard anyone ever say anything that remotely resembled the availability of an extended warranty plan being part of anyone's purchasing decision for anything.
But then again, I typically run with a pretty smart crowd.
This kind of reminds me of a conversation my dad and I had once. He found some seedy little web site that said that if you would pay them $32.50, they would sign you up to take online surveys that would pay you $5 to $75 for each. He told me he was going to sign up for it because, hey, it's only $32.50. It's not like it's a lot of money, and if he just got one of those $75 payouts for a survey, it would be more than worth it.
I explained to my dad that it was a scam, but he kept insisting that it was only $32.50, and it might be worth it just to give it a shot.
You seem to kind of have the same philosophy. You keep thinking, "Hey, my stuff probably won't break, but it's not a lot of money, so let me gamble on the possibility that it will." Well, if you would rather that Circuit City or Best Buy or wherever have your hard-earned cash instead of you to spend on other things, then be my guest. I guess that's why the people who own those companies are very, very rich and you're, well, probably not.
For what it's worth, though, my dad didn't sign up for that scam. But then, he was a relatively smart cookie most of the time, too, and would listen to reason.
At least we agree on something.
Here are a few reason why I disagree. I guess time will tell which of us is right.
Yes, the 360 does indeed have HD-DVD. And yes, it is an add-on. I think that most people will like that. You have the choice of whether you want to pay for it or not. Microsoft isn't forcing you to buy it with their console. As a result, their console is considerably less expensive without giving up any of it's primary usage capabilities—gaming—and Microsoft was able to get a lot of the systems out and on the market a lot quicker than Sony has.
Not very many people have PSPs. Honestly, I bought one because I thought they were going to be the Next Big Thing(tm). They're not. Their potential never materialized, and I've been sorely disappointed at the lack of cool stuff for mine. The games aren't that good, the UMD movies are dead, and I haven't even turned the thing on in a year or so. I wish I could go back in time and slap myself silly for buying one. Maybe now that the PS3 is out, I can get a little something back for it on eBay.
This sounds like a marketing clip if ever I heard one. This assumes that: 1) people even have a PSP, 2) people carry their PSP around with them, 3) people have wireless access to the Internet everywhere they take their PSP, 4) people's friends will care what's on their PSP or PS3, 5) people will actually want to watch movies on a four-inch screen. Is PSP/PS3 communication neat? Sure. Is it a reason to buy either? No.
When I can rip my DVDs onto my computer and have it stream them to my PSP or PS3, come back and talk to me. (Yes, I know there's probably some long, complicated, illegal procedure to do this, but we're talking about what average consumers can do.)
No, you can't. Every review I have read says that the Xbox Live service is head and shoulders above Sony's online service.
As has already been pointed out, it's not $15 a month. It's less than $5 a month. And considering how much better the Xbox Live service is over Sony's, yes, I think that paying less than $5 a month for it is more than reasonable.
Not near
I'd love to see this competition broadcast, complete with color commentary.
"Folks, I've seen a lot of things, but the intensity at our competition here today is intangible. The absence of pressure is really heating up! I can tell that our contestants are both going to give it their none, their best zero percent. Our favorite to win today is Dan. I interviewed him before the match, let's take a look at it now."
(Dan) "Well, Jim, it's taken a lot of not working hard to get to this level. I think that if I had to credit one thing with my success, it's my unwillingness to do everything it takes to win. I've also been totally uncommitted to the game since I was a kid. I guess I've just always had that lack of focus that it takes to get to this level."
I just mentioned in another thread a few minute ago that Micro Center is offering a $100 rebate on Xbox 360s, both the core and pro systems. For the core system, that would end up being $200.
Now, that being said, beware the nickel-and-diming:
So if you're just looking for something that will play the fancy new Xbox 360 and classic old Xbox games, you can get it now for $200. If you're looking to build it out to any degree, you should indeed probably wait.
Well, your first one would have not only been well within the warranty, but well within the return policy of the store where you bought it. Just pack it up, take it back with your receipt, and get a new one.
That's really hard to believe. If it were true, then these stores (and Microsoft) would be losing money for offering these warranties, and since they don't (and in fact, as pointed out, make a huge profit from them), I'd say that the odds are much, much better that my Xbox 360 will work fine for quite a while.
If you do the math, using $60 as the figure for the two-year warranty that was offered to me, given that an Xbox Pro system costs $400, that means that for the odds to not be in my favor, one in every six Xbox 360s sold would have to break sometime between three months and two years. Actually, given that the price of the Xbox 360 will likely be much lower in two years, it would be even more than that, but for simplicity's sake, let's just say one in six.
I've heard all the stuff about overheating problems and such (I have mine in an open area, with several inches of clearance on either side of it and a foot or so above it), but come on, one in six? I'm sure that some folks have had your kind of luck and had two break, but I can't imagine one in six Xbox 360s breaking in the first two years. If it were that high, Microsoft would be positively going out of business for the number of units that would be returned in the first 90 days, and there's no way in hell they would bump that warranty up retroactively to a full year.
So thanks, I'm more than willing to roll the dice on that one, and that's a great analogy. If you pay $60 for an extended warranty, you're basically gambling $60 on your Xbox 360 breaking between 90 days and two years, a bet that almost every Xbox owner will lose when their console is still working fine after two years and beyond.
Well, I'm really pushing the karma, so I swear, I'll leave this thread completely alone after this, and feel free to mod it down if you want. (My preferred mod tag is "Off-Topic," because that's what this post is, as it's pretty much solely intended for its parent post. I'm not trolling, so get it right.)
Before I get into any sort of argument about evolution these days, I ask a pretty simple question that will determine whether or not it's worthwhile to go any further: Is there anything whatsoever, any evidence in any scientific field, that, if discovered, could possibly convince you that that the story of creation in Genesis is not the literal truth?
If the answer is no, then going any further is pointless. If they won't believe decades of rigorous scientific research and overwhelming compelling evidence, they sure as hell aren't going to believe you, and trying to convince them isn't really arguing about the subject, it's more like pointless bickering.
I've got karma to burn, so let's use some up.
You stop right there, mister.
I don't care what kind of "proof" this seedy Perelman character says he has. In Leviticus, The Bible makes it clear that in a closed 3-mainfold, there non-spherical loops that can be continually tightened to a point. Who are you going to believe, Grigori Perelman, or God? If you even try to put this proof in my kid's math book, I'm going to demand more stickers! Slashdot obviously wants the terrorists to win!
Apologies to any real mathematicians out there, that was the best twisting of Poincaré Conjecture I could come up for the sake of this joke based on Wikipedia's article. And while I hope that while everyone realizes that I'm kidding, I also hope that some folks realize that I'm kinda not. The vast majority of people who insist that such things as evolution aren't true sound to me pretty much like I just did, because the vast majority of people who I argue with over the subject start from the premise, "It says in Genesis..."
Thank goodness. 90 days just isn't long enough to find all design flaws in a product, especially if you consider that there are probably a bunch of Xbox 360s sitting around in closets or under trees for a month or so before they actually get used. I wonder how many people didn't buy an Xbox 360 because of the really short warranty. I also wonder how many people are going to kick themselves now for buying one of those ripoff extended warranties.
I got mine at Micro Center a couple of weeks ago, which is currently offering a $100 rebate on both the core nad pro systems. If I were Microsoft, though, I'd be really pissed off at Micro Center. I had one sales person on the floor ask several times if I wanted to upgrade the 90-day warranty. "Are you sure? It's a great deal! And look at what you get!..." Of course being intelligent, I turned it down, over and over, ad nauseum.
When I got to the cash register, the checkout person asked yet again. When I declined, she actually said, "You really should get it. A lot of people have been bringing them back."
If I were even the least bit paranoid, I would have simply left my $600 or so of merchandise (the system, plus a couple of games, a controller, and a battery charger) sitting right there on the counter and walked out. Why the hell would I buy a product that the store clerks keep telling me, and seem convinced to the core, is defective? If I were Microsoft, I'd be tempted to stop selling any Xbox 360s to Micro Center at all. Stores telling customers repeatedly that your product is broken is most heinously not cool.
Fortunately, I'm not as gullible as a lot of people, and I'm not so willing to part with my sixty-something dollars for something that is statistically highly unlikely to happen.
Maybe this will help to take some of the wind out of their "sales" and get them to stop trying to scare the hell out of their customers.
Still, a hundred bucks back sure does take a little bit of the sting out of having to listen to their stupidity. If I were just a tiny bit more spiteful, I would drive up there today and tell them, "Hah hah!"
Oh, and P.S., a couple of weeks later, everything's working fine. ;-) My gamertag is Skippus. Look me up and maybe we'll throw down with some Texas Hold'em.
Point me to a page with a "small flash component" that will, without any kind of interaction whatsoever, echo whatever is in my clipboard to me. I'd like to see a Firefox equivalent of this page.
Amen! I'm always amused at "gift guides" that are composed of items that are hundreds of dollars. Just how the hell much money do these people think my family is worth at Christmas? A really expensive Christmas gift to me is around $50. If I were married, I'd probably spring for $100 or so for my wife.
Yet I see guides like this, hear radio ads telling me to by diamonds that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, or even to do something stupid like buy a new car for my hypothetical wife. A new car? Do these people honestly think I would make such a huge decision without the knowledge, full acceptance, and blessing of my wife?
Am I just the world's biggest cheapskate?
Wait, no, I think I know what's going on here. They want me to think I'm a cheapskate if I don't buy hundreds of dollars worth of crap for my family for Christmas.
Well, I'm sorry, the joke's on them. I think that along with the lesser-expensive gifts I give to my family, a really nice one is not begging them for money the rest of the year because I'd be in debt beyond my imagination for burning through money like that. And call me crazy, but I also think that a really nice gift for one's spouse instead of earrings or a new car that you don't need is—gasp!—a realistic plan for retiring some day so that we can spend wonderful decades together without having to work our asses off for useless junk like, well, a $300 flashlight or a $3600 cappuccino maker!
Honestly, $300 for a fucking flashlight? If someone game me one of those, I wouldn't be grateful, I'd be extremely condescending. "You spend $300 for a fucking flashlight? Did you win the lottery, or are you just too damned stupid to know that you can get a really good one at Target for less than $10?"
What scares this geek is that there are obviously people out there who actually buy this junk. What's doubly scary is that they're pitching it to my friends and family as if I actually would want any of this crap. God, I hope they're not that stupid.
I didn't say it would be superior to us, I said it would be superior to our national policymakers. ;-)
My god, I don't know how I've missed this one. It's the most scary thing I've seen in a long time. I like to think I'm pretty savvy, and I stay up with all of the latest scoop, but this is the first I've read about this gaping security hole.
For the past half hour, I've been showing people I work with this exploit (I'm sorry, I refuse to call it a "feature"), and everyone's been forwarding e-mails to their home account with two pieces of information: 1) The ScriptingMagic site URL to play with at home and show other people, and 2) the Firefox URL to install as soon as they get off today.
Thank god I've been using Firefox for a couple of years or so now. This is unbelievable. The thought that an IE window in my background could have been sitting there all along, quietly capturing and reporting everything I put in my clipboard, is just unbelievable.