I didn't realize at the time by ripping my music into WMP that it was placing restrictions on the music.
Other players play the files just fine. I have multiple computers in the house, I share the music across a file server, and I play the music across Linux and Windows. I have iRiver mp3 players which play the music just fine.
But iTunes won't play them.
Since then, I've been converting my entire library regardless into DRM-free mp3's with CDex. However it is a slow process. Regardles, iTunes is the first thing I found that wouldn't play my legally owned music. So much for "it just works".
You are correct. In that regard, companies like Novell could be hit financially in a suit if it was shown they sold a product that infringed upon patents. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation turns back to the EU who demanded MS open up their products and libraries more for interoperability with other OS'es. Linux has a stronger hold in the EU, and the EU has already proven they will rule against MS. Does MS really want to open that legal battle again?
Again, given the possibility of legal repercussions that affect every Linux distro and user, I think Novell should have consulted the Linux Foundation and EFF to consider all legal options first.
However, an easy and profitable solution presented it, and I believe they rushed to judgment.
My original post in this thread repeated that it was an unscientific poll, but many Apple fanboys are using numbers like "99.9%" or "95%", which quite frankly are ridiculous to assume given this article.
A similiar thing is happening with the XBox 360's. Microsoft keeps saying that is a very small minority that has any problems, and then you hear how certain service centers are getting 2,500 360's in every day. How some users a year later on are their 11th and 12 boxes. Who do you believe? The countless users who report the problems, or the company who insists the problems don't exist.
In both these cases, both with Microsoft and Apple, they have deleted postings about problems and attempting to obfuscate facts in that matter. Thusly I am less likely to trust them. At the same time, people will problems are often more likely to be vocal than those who had no problems. So their data is likely skewed.
A rational human being will assume that the numbers lie somewhere between the 50% and 95-99.5% numbers. Regardless, I wrote that the simple fact is that there wasn't a need to alter the activation process and make things proprietary. This kind of tactic would be blasted by the entire community if Microsoft did it. I guarantee it. Apple claims their products "just work", and perhaps that is the case with some of their products, but not all of them.
I work in IT for a large newspaper. We have all kinds of platforms here from Solaris, Unix, Linux, Windows, AS400, and yes Macs. I don't use them, don't care for them, but I do have to support them. People do have problems with them. It isn't like the Mac commercials are true. People act like they are immune to crashing or glitches. The Linux community will tell you the same about their software. In reality, everyone has imperfect products. The disadvantage Microsoft has is that a driver will cause the entire system to crash, but otherwise, everyone is subject to malfunctions.
When people gloss over flaws and pretend a product is inherently superior, when in reality it has comparable flaws to other products, that is inane. When people blindly worship a company and swear it can do no wrong, that is fanaticism. Am I saying Apple is evil and horrible? No. In this particular instance, I think they made a mistake.
As for the Microsoft fine, it was for bundling. The EU demanded that Microsoft release a version of Windows without the media player. Netscape's big fight was how Windows bundled IE by default. Google is upset that Microsoft puts in a default search engine. Bundling, bundling, bundling. Everyone is upset about bundling, but again, Apple gets a free pass. Am I accusing Apple of being as evil as Microsoft? Again, no. But in this one case, they are using the same tactic that is otherwise deemed to be evil.
I love how you deem it is more important that you don't have to wait, than the next guy receiving a working product. Let's apply this axiom to any other industry. Let's say doctors rushed through surgery so families didn't have to wait. 38% of surgeries have extra complications, but everyone has quicker surgeries. 100 is bigger than 38, so clearly this is an advantage. IF you think speed trumps a working product, then quite frankly I'm just going to dismiss you here and now.
Again, you pull out a number of 95% and are confident about it. Where do you get that number? You say the poll can be completely dismissed as unscientific, but nothing is more unscientific than just making up data out of thin air and claiming it is fact.
Please return when you have an interest in responding with logic and objectivity.
...is that there wasn't a general claim "that we believe one or more patents may have been infringed upon" but rather a very specific claim that they know some 200 specific patents were violated.
If they know exactly how many were allegedly violated, then they have already done their research.
Here is the funny thing. If M$ released that list, immediately people would score the code of the Linux/GNU system to verify the claims. In the possibility that M$ has a legitimate claim, people would write new workaround-code and destroy M$'s case. If the claims are shown to be less than legitimate, it detroys M$'s case.
M$ has nothing to gain by releasing this information, and everything to lose. This is a huge scare tactic, that may work to scare large businesses away from considering what may turn out to be illegal software. And why migrate if you may be forced to migrate back?
This is a rotten tactic, but a very effective and insidious one. Luckily, I don't think this will destroy Linux, as Linus pointed out, many of the basic patents of a GUI that M$ may be referring to are likely pretty much public domain at this point. If anything, there is prior art from vast numbers of previous GUIs that M$ copied, so it is absurd to think they invented everything, let alone own exclusive rights to it.
When companies like Novell were first approached by M$, they should have gone to the Linux Foundation, or EFF. Instead they took a payday that inherently casts a doubt of suspision upon the entire Linux community. And while I was a fan of SuSe and many of the things they did, I will never again advocate the use of any Novell products, nor any major distro/vendor that strikes such a deal.
Convert my files - I ripped my entire CD collection I own into WMP. iTunes won't touch any of those songs or play them because they are WMA's with DRM. Other players will play them just fine. Our two MP3 players play them just fine. iTunes is demanding that I convert 20 gigs of music to suit its whims. That is bullshit, but rather a cold-hard fact. So much for "it just works" when it fails to serve the primary purpose, playing my music.
As for the browser interface, again that is subjective. The first time I open iTunes it doesn't ask me where my music is, it scans my entire computer, taking forever, and loads all kinds of small crappy sound effects into the library. It however, completely misses that I have a mapped drive to my file server with my music collection. Those files are thrown into one huge playlist (of junk sound effects). I don't immediately see a good way to pull up certain media, not that it matters, because it won't put my music into the library.
Looking through the menu I then see an option to display the browser, where I get three little menus to select genre, artist, etc. WMP has a quick dropdown in the top right at all times, in addition to the big tree-view on the left. Within the tree view I can pull up dynamic playlists, artists, albums, genres, etc. The tree provides a logical structure to organize my collection. And Amarok blows both completely out of the water. Check out the Amarok 2 playlist and see what a real media player looks like.
And as far as album art, I have THOUSANDS of songs, and various media players had no problem picking up the album art jpgs in the folders are the album art. Various media players automatically pull album art and metadata from the web. iTunes was going to force me to manually associate pictures with all my music by hand, or force me to enter my credit card to download the media from their store.
Complete bullshit?
Again, a simple fact. This is simply how the software operates. We keep hearing "it just works" but I can't get basic functionality out of it. Both WMP and Amarok also have CD burning built in. If iTunes has this feature, it was not readily apparent.
I just did something crazy. Everyone is telling me how incredible every Apple product is, so I just installed iTunes again to give it another whirl.
It wants to covert my music files before it will play them, the browser interface is poor, and it wants my credit card information to display album art.
That was a big waste. I hate 90% of Microsoft products out there, and I openly advocate Amarok for all Linux users, but on Microsoft boxes, I have to go with WMP.
Something doesn't add up right. Anytime I've purchased a phone, it worked when I left the store. I didn't need to do anything else.
Last time I checked, Microsoft got hit with a fine over half a BILLION dollars for bundling their media player. If I want to watch something with the Quicktime codec, Apple bundles iTunes into the Quicktime download, and forces people to download iTunes if you want to activate their phone. And apparently, if you have a 64-bit OS, you need to change your OS as well.
How exactly is that an improvement?
What was the number? Some 38% are still unresolved. Clearly this is a huge improvement over walking out of the store with a working phone.
I will never understand this site. People blast Microsoft all day long for forcing people to do things in proprietary ways, and then give Apple a free pass for the same tactics.
Objective, reasonable human beings should be able to call out what they see.
Activation of the iPhone is unnecessarily proprietary, and a hassle. And quite frankly I run Win x64, and Gentoo x64 at home. If an Apple representative told me I needed to format my computer and install another OS for their phone, I'd be flat-out irate. But again, this is a huge improvement in your eyes.
The few friends I know who bought them, walked into stores and didn't fight lines. They were readily available on the shelves. And I checked AT&T's website myself. It is listed as being in stock.
Kevin Smith talked about buying one. He didn't wait in line either. Again, he just walked down to the Apple store, walked in, and walked out with one.
If they sold out on launch-day specifically, it was due to an artificially created limited number for that day.
My wife and I checked earlier today because we heard how people were selling them for $900 on eBay. There were several auctions with 5 minutes left that were still at $200 for a brand new iPhone. You know what. I still wouldn't buy one. I have a Samsung SGH-D807 that I got not only for free, but for -$15 thanks to an instant in-store rebate. I have a gig memory card that I got for $9, and I love it. It plays my music, has a pretty screen, visualizations, I can download games to it, download full TV episodes, etc. And having owned a PDA, I'd rather operate my phone easily with one hand than pull out a stylus. Honestly, I'd try one if it was free, but I still wouldn't jump at a $200 price tag let alone a $600 tag.
Generally a product of this hype sells out, which it has not. If you can show me articles showing that it is selling out everywhere everyday, I'd love to read them. But I've seen about ten that have stated quite clearly they are sitting on store shelves.
Vendors generally don't have the logistics to restock daily. That's just absurd. I take it you've never worked retail. Why ship daily? People don't want to make orders daily, do inventory daily, or receive daily. If Apple produced X phones, and you have demand for X phones for the week or month, that's what you order. You don't order enough only to last the day, especially with the hype. You order as many as Apple will give you.
1 - You seem to suggest the iPhone is selling out like mad. Funny, countless reports show the phone is still in stock everywhere, not just at the usual AT&T stores, but in Apple stores, and available on the web. For the most hyped-product of the year, it didn't sell out right away. Let's say 20% of the country has AT&T Cingular (which may be generous). Of those, how many are eligible for new phones this minute? Of that group, how many absolutely had to have the iPhone on launch day? Of that group, how many of them had the money to actually purchase it?
I'm not sure they sold 1 million units.
2 - You suggested they could be operating at 99.9% effectiveness with activation. Perhaps you didn't RTFA let alone the paragraph summary. It was an unscientific poll, but the results still showed half of iPhone owners reported problems.
50% > 0.1%
Those figures aren't remotely in the same ballpark. After you brush up a bit on your reading skills and math, I'll start giving you a bit more credit.
It isn't like they are a new company or haven't done this before.
When other new huge phones launch, there is often a flurry of activations, and I do believe AT&T has been in the phone business a while.
Let's be honest here. The problem is that this is new in how they're handling activation. Because Apple has a such a large say in this whole process, it suddenly becomes less clear who is responsible for what. You introduce new policies, procedures and hardware at once, you're going to get SNAFUs.
This isn't being a hater, but simply being objective. Apple has done some things rather well, and others not so well. For a company that does claim to have things "just work", they made the activation process more complicated than it needs to be.
Actually that is reverse logic. The reason they use a 32-bit browser (on 64-bit versions of XP, Vista or Linux) is because they can't get Flash or Java to install without workarounds.
There is a x64 Java RE and JDK, but not a x64 plugin?
And again, given that Gnash and alternatives compile just fine in 64-bit mode, and that there is a 64-bit Flash for SPARC, why no 64-bit Flash for Linux or Windows?
That's odd. I've seen breakdowns of his films that pretty much point-by-point show how almost every "fact" he uses is made up, how he edits together clips to produce misleading footage, how he makes up census numbers, and just flat-out lies at almost every turn.
"This plaque says X" when it says Y.
The sad thing is that he tries to champion good causes, but even the die-hard Democrats often distance themselves very far from him because his tactics are so piss-poor.
Encouraging people to get the facts rather than accept Moore's opinions carte-blanche is anything but evil.
I don't want to pull up the link from work, but given that you both referenced The Flying Car and YouTube, you should search YouTube for Kevin Smith's short "The Flying Car".
You may be correct in that a failure may be immenent. However, there are two huge pieces to the puzzle. 1 is designing a craft that can handle space, and 2 is actually getting it to successfully launch.
One could argue that you shouldn't waste a whole bunch of money on an expensive craft it you're only going to destroy it in a failed attempt to launch.
Or maybe they could only afford to focus on one area and decided to make a cheap craft.
I did play Vice City. I own all the GT games including the GB title, and the original two.
And I'm pretty sure on the Rampage, it said "Kill All Haitians". I could be mistaken however. It is quite assumptive however of you to think I've never played the game when I referenced it pretty clearly.
Microsoft will just pay more bloggers to get their PageRank up. More impressive is when people can alter search results by cross-posting something so many times. A famous trick was so many people specifically referred to Microsoft as "Who is more evil than Satan himself" and the phrase was so specific, that pretty soon search engines took that specific response, and pointed directly to microsoft.com
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't realize at the time by ripping my music into WMP that it was placing restrictions on the music.
Other players play the files just fine. I have multiple computers in the house, I share the music across a file server, and I play the music across Linux and Windows. I have iRiver mp3 players which play the music just fine.
But iTunes won't play them.
Since then, I've been converting my entire library regardless into DRM-free mp3's with CDex. However it is a slow process. Regardles, iTunes is the first thing I found that wouldn't play my legally owned music. So much for "it just works".
Thanks for the link!
You are correct. In that regard, companies like Novell could be hit financially in a suit if it was shown they sold a product that infringed upon patents. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation turns back to the EU who demanded MS open up their products and libraries more for interoperability with other OS'es. Linux has a stronger hold in the EU, and the EU has already proven they will rule against MS. Does MS really want to open that legal battle again?
Again, given the possibility of legal repercussions that affect every Linux distro and user, I think Novell should have consulted the Linux Foundation and EFF to consider all legal options first.
However, an easy and profitable solution presented it, and I believe they rushed to judgment.
My original post in this thread repeated that it was an unscientific poll, but many Apple fanboys are using numbers like "99.9%" or "95%", which quite frankly are ridiculous to assume given this article.
A similiar thing is happening with the XBox 360's. Microsoft keeps saying that is a very small minority that has any problems, and then you hear how certain service centers are getting 2,500 360's in every day. How some users a year later on are their 11th and 12 boxes. Who do you believe? The countless users who report the problems, or the company who insists the problems don't exist.
In both these cases, both with Microsoft and Apple, they have deleted postings about problems and attempting to obfuscate facts in that matter. Thusly I am less likely to trust them. At the same time, people will problems are often more likely to be vocal than those who had no problems. So their data is likely skewed.
A rational human being will assume that the numbers lie somewhere between the 50% and 95-99.5% numbers. Regardless, I wrote that the simple fact is that there wasn't a need to alter the activation process and make things proprietary. This kind of tactic would be blasted by the entire community if Microsoft did it. I guarantee it. Apple claims their products "just work", and perhaps that is the case with some of their products, but not all of them.
I work in IT for a large newspaper. We have all kinds of platforms here from Solaris, Unix, Linux, Windows, AS400, and yes Macs. I don't use them, don't care for them, but I do have to support them. People do have problems with them. It isn't like the Mac commercials are true. People act like they are immune to crashing or glitches. The Linux community will tell you the same about their software. In reality, everyone has imperfect products. The disadvantage Microsoft has is that a driver will cause the entire system to crash, but otherwise, everyone is subject to malfunctions.
When people gloss over flaws and pretend a product is inherently superior, when in reality it has comparable flaws to other products, that is inane. When people blindly worship a company and swear it can do no wrong, that is fanaticism. Am I saying Apple is evil and horrible? No. In this particular instance, I think they made a mistake.
As for the Microsoft fine, it was for bundling. The EU demanded that Microsoft release a version of Windows without the media player. Netscape's big fight was how Windows bundled IE by default. Google is upset that Microsoft puts in a default search engine. Bundling, bundling, bundling. Everyone is upset about bundling, but again, Apple gets a free pass. Am I accusing Apple of being as evil as Microsoft? Again, no. But in this one case, they are using the same tactic that is otherwise deemed to be evil.
I love how you deem it is more important that you don't have to wait, than the next guy receiving a working product. Let's apply this axiom to any other industry. Let's say doctors rushed through surgery so families didn't have to wait. 38% of surgeries have extra complications, but everyone has quicker surgeries. 100 is bigger than 38, so clearly this is an advantage. IF you think speed trumps a working product, then quite frankly I'm just going to dismiss you here and now.
Again, you pull out a number of 95% and are confident about it. Where do you get that number? You say the poll can be completely dismissed as unscientific, but nothing is more unscientific than just making up data out of thin air and claiming it is fact.
Please return when you have an interest in responding with logic and objectivity.
...is that there wasn't a general claim "that we believe one or more patents may have been infringed upon" but rather a very specific claim that they know some 200 specific patents were violated.
If they know exactly how many were allegedly violated, then they have already done their research.
Here is the funny thing. If M$ released that list, immediately people would score the code of the Linux/GNU system to verify the claims. In the possibility that M$ has a legitimate claim, people would write new workaround-code and destroy M$'s case. If the claims are shown to be less than legitimate, it detroys M$'s case.
M$ has nothing to gain by releasing this information, and everything to lose. This is a huge scare tactic, that may work to scare large businesses away from considering what may turn out to be illegal software. And why migrate if you may be forced to migrate back?
This is a rotten tactic, but a very effective and insidious one. Luckily, I don't think this will destroy Linux, as Linus pointed out, many of the basic patents of a GUI that M$ may be referring to are likely pretty much public domain at this point. If anything, there is prior art from vast numbers of previous GUIs that M$ copied, so it is absurd to think they invented everything, let alone own exclusive rights to it.
When companies like Novell were first approached by M$, they should have gone to the Linux Foundation, or EFF. Instead they took a payday that inherently casts a doubt of suspision upon the entire Linux community. And while I was a fan of SuSe and many of the things they did, I will never again advocate the use of any Novell products, nor any major distro/vendor that strikes such a deal.
Convert my files - I ripped my entire CD collection I own into WMP. iTunes won't touch any of those songs or play them because they are WMA's with DRM. Other players will play them just fine. Our two MP3 players play them just fine. iTunes is demanding that I convert 20 gigs of music to suit its whims. That is bullshit, but rather a cold-hard fact. So much for "it just works" when it fails to serve the primary purpose, playing my music.
As for the browser interface, again that is subjective. The first time I open iTunes it doesn't ask me where my music is, it scans my entire computer, taking forever, and loads all kinds of small crappy sound effects into the library. It however, completely misses that I have a mapped drive to my file server with my music collection. Those files are thrown into one huge playlist (of junk sound effects). I don't immediately see a good way to pull up certain media, not that it matters, because it won't put my music into the library.
Looking through the menu I then see an option to display the browser, where I get three little menus to select genre, artist, etc. WMP has a quick dropdown in the top right at all times, in addition to the big tree-view on the left. Within the tree view I can pull up dynamic playlists, artists, albums, genres, etc. The tree provides a logical structure to organize my collection. And Amarok blows both completely out of the water. Check out the Amarok 2 playlist and see what a real media player looks like.
And as far as album art, I have THOUSANDS of songs, and various media players had no problem picking up the album art jpgs in the folders are the album art. Various media players automatically pull album art and metadata from the web. iTunes was going to force me to manually associate pictures with all my music by hand, or force me to enter my credit card to download the media from their store.
Complete bullshit?
Again, a simple fact. This is simply how the software operates. We keep hearing "it just works" but I can't get basic functionality out of it. Both WMP and Amarok also have CD burning built in. If iTunes has this feature, it was not readily apparent.
I just did something crazy. Everyone is telling me how incredible every Apple product is, so I just installed iTunes again to give it another whirl.
It wants to covert my music files before it will play them, the browser interface is poor, and it wants my credit card information to display album art.
That was a big waste. I hate 90% of Microsoft products out there, and I openly advocate Amarok for all Linux users, but on Microsoft boxes, I have to go with WMP.
It improved the experience for 95% of the buyers?
Then why did 50% of them report problems?
Something doesn't add up right. Anytime I've purchased a phone, it worked when I left the store. I didn't need to do anything else.
Last time I checked, Microsoft got hit with a fine over half a BILLION dollars for bundling their media player. If I want to watch something with the Quicktime codec, Apple bundles iTunes into the Quicktime download, and forces people to download iTunes if you want to activate their phone. And apparently, if you have a 64-bit OS, you need to change your OS as well.
How exactly is that an improvement?
What was the number? Some 38% are still unresolved. Clearly this is a huge improvement over walking out of the store with a working phone.
I will never understand this site. People blast Microsoft all day long for forcing people to do things in proprietary ways, and then give Apple a free pass for the same tactics.
Objective, reasonable human beings should be able to call out what they see.
Activation of the iPhone is unnecessarily proprietary, and a hassle. And quite frankly I run Win x64, and Gentoo x64 at home. If an Apple representative told me I needed to format my computer and install another OS for their phone, I'd be flat-out irate. But again, this is a huge improvement in your eyes.
The few friends I know who bought them, walked into stores and didn't fight lines. They were readily available on the shelves. And I checked AT&T's website myself. It is listed as being in stock.
Kevin Smith talked about buying one. He didn't wait in line either. Again, he just walked down to the Apple store, walked in, and walked out with one.
If they sold out on launch-day specifically, it was due to an artificially created limited number for that day.
My wife and I checked earlier today because we heard how people were selling them for $900 on eBay. There were several auctions with 5 minutes left that were still at $200 for a brand new iPhone. You know what. I still wouldn't buy one. I have a Samsung SGH-D807 that I got not only for free, but for -$15 thanks to an instant in-store rebate. I have a gig memory card that I got for $9, and I love it. It plays my music, has a pretty screen, visualizations, I can download games to it, download full TV episodes, etc. And having owned a PDA, I'd rather operate my phone easily with one hand than pull out a stylus. Honestly, I'd try one if it was free, but I still wouldn't jump at a $200 price tag let alone a $600 tag.
Generally a product of this hype sells out, which it has not. If you can show me articles showing that it is selling out everywhere everyday, I'd love to read them. But I've seen about ten that have stated quite clearly they are sitting on store shelves.
Vendors generally don't have the logistics to restock daily. That's just absurd. I take it you've never worked retail. Why ship daily? People don't want to make orders daily, do inventory daily, or receive daily. If Apple produced X phones, and you have demand for X phones for the week or month, that's what you order. You don't order enough only to last the day, especially with the hype. You order as many as Apple will give you.
If you weren't posting AC someone might mod you insightful or funny.
Two other things.
1 - You seem to suggest the iPhone is selling out like mad. Funny, countless reports show the phone is still in stock everywhere, not just at the usual AT&T stores, but in Apple stores, and available on the web. For the most hyped-product of the year, it didn't sell out right away. Let's say 20% of the country has AT&T Cingular (which may be generous). Of those, how many are eligible for new phones this minute? Of that group, how many absolutely had to have the iPhone on launch day? Of that group, how many of them had the money to actually purchase it?
I'm not sure they sold 1 million units.
2 - You suggested they could be operating at 99.9% effectiveness with activation. Perhaps you didn't RTFA let alone the paragraph summary. It was an unscientific poll, but the results still showed half of iPhone owners reported problems.
50% > 0.1%
Those figures aren't remotely in the same ballpark. After you brush up a bit on your reading skills and math, I'll start giving you a bit more credit.
It isn't like they are a new company or haven't done this before.
When other new huge phones launch, there is often a flurry of activations, and I do believe AT&T has been in the phone business a while.
Let's be honest here. The problem is that this is new in how they're handling activation. Because Apple has a such a large say in this whole process, it suddenly becomes less clear who is responsible for what. You introduce new policies, procedures and hardware at once, you're going to get SNAFUs.
This isn't being a hater, but simply being objective. Apple has done some things rather well, and others not so well. For a company that does claim to have things "just work", they made the activation process more complicated than it needs to be.
Just activate in-store like any other cell phone.
That is having it "just work".
Can you install Linux on the Egg?
Perhaps it crashed because it was running the other OS.
And most people on the planet are pretty upset, even the ones with digital watches.
Actually that is reverse logic. The reason they use a 32-bit browser (on 64-bit versions of XP, Vista or Linux) is because they can't get Flash or Java to install without workarounds.
There is a x64 Java RE and JDK, but not a x64 plugin?
And again, given that Gnash and alternatives compile just fine in 64-bit mode, and that there is a 64-bit Flash for SPARC, why no 64-bit Flash for Linux or Windows?
That's odd. I've seen breakdowns of his films that pretty much point-by-point show how almost every "fact" he uses is made up, how he edits together clips to produce misleading footage, how he makes up census numbers, and just flat-out lies at almost every turn.
"This plaque says X" when it says Y.
The sad thing is that he tries to champion good causes, but even the die-hard Democrats often distance themselves very far from him because his tactics are so piss-poor.
Encouraging people to get the facts rather than accept Moore's opinions carte-blanche is anything but evil.
I don't want to pull up the link from work, but given that you both referenced The Flying Car and YouTube, you should search YouTube for Kevin Smith's short "The Flying Car".
It really is great.
Fling those carts into space! Phone home already!
You may be correct in that a failure may be immenent. However, there are two huge pieces to the puzzle. 1 is designing a craft that can handle space, and 2 is actually getting it to successfully launch.
One could argue that you shouldn't waste a whole bunch of money on an expensive craft it you're only going to destroy it in a failed attempt to launch.
Or maybe they could only afford to focus on one area and decided to make a cheap craft.
They should have sent up this instead. It would have been more fitting.
s trial_(Atari_2600)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terre
iPerbole©
I did play Vice City. I own all the GT games including the GB title, and the original two.
And I'm pretty sure on the Rampage, it said "Kill All Haitians". I could be mistaken however. It is quite assumptive however of you to think I've never played the game when I referenced it pretty clearly.
Imagine the outcry if and when this title allows you in first-person gore-mode to hunt down and kill various ethnicities.
This is worse than "Kill all Haitans" in GTA:VC.
Microsoft will just pay more bloggers to get their PageRank up. More impressive is when people can alter search results by cross-posting something so many times. A famous trick was so many people specifically referred to Microsoft as "Who is more evil than Satan himself" and the phrase was so specific, that pretty soon search engines took that specific response, and pointed directly to microsoft.com