This is in addition to the fact that the US did not choose a single 1st generation standard (GSM, CDMA, whatever), which fragmented the market even more.
First generation was AMPS (analog cellular). GSM and cdmaOne are 2G. CDMA2000 and UMTS are 3G.
You have got to be kidding. News that isn't balanced is propoganda. Why not just listen to a broadcast saying. "Be well citizens, everything is fine. sleep now... sleeeeppp"
We already have that, it's called Fox News.;)
Yes every issue has sides, often more than two. if it didnt have sides it wouldnt be an issue.
Not every viewpoint deserves to be taken seriously, and in many cases, reporting both (or more) "sides" of an issue is inherently misleading. For example, if Think Tank X employs two crackpot scientists and puts out a press release saying the moon is made of green cheese, it would be poor journalism indeed to report the story as "Some scientists believe the moon is made of cheese; others disagree".
Yet in many cases, that's exactly what they do in the name of "balance", because some people have the idea that whenever there's a "pro" and "con" position to any issue, they need to give both sides exactly as much time and attention, regardless of how well-accepted those positions are in the real world or how well they match up with facts. They go out of their way to avoid making obvious judgements about sources and evidence, and as a result, audiences get a skewed view of reality.
Who's to say that non-DRM WMA files are not just restricted with a known key? This actually makes sense because WMA was designed to be a digital restriction format from the start.
Wow... speculate much? The burden of proof is on you, buddy. Do you have any fact-based reason to believe that unrestricted WMA files are encrypted?
Re:Is DRM evil, or are media companies evil?
on
Info on Intel's Viiv DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yes, I'm sure that everyone would welcome DRM that isn't used as a means to screw consumers.
One question: What possible use could DRM have besides screwing consumers?
Seriously! As far as I can tell, screwing consumers is the only thing DRM is good for. It prevents you from doing what you want to do with the data on your computer. That doesn't help you, it only hurts you.
Unlike CDs, DVDs, or other forms of media, console video games are well labeled that they are intended for use only on their particular machine, and the machine is clearly labeled that it only plays it's associated games.
Just because they tell you what they're doing doesn't excuse their behavior. I should be able to run homebrew games or backups on a game console that I paid for. If Sony wants to retain control of the machine, they should rent or lease it to me instead of selling it.
A modchip is a fairly high barrier to entry.
Well, the PSX had a higher barrier to entry than the Dreamcast or Sega CD, but not much higher. It wasn't necessary to install a mod chip; you could plug a cheat device (except the name-brand GameShark) into the expansion port and use it to swap discs, or if you felt reckless, just prop the door open and swap the disc while it was spinning.
The PSP is software hackable, and you can see what that is doing to game sales. Even the few good games that are out for it are widely pirated.
I'm not familiar with PSP sales figures, so could you provide some evidence here? I'm sure you're aware that the number of illegal copies != the number of sales lost to piracy. I find it hard to believe that piracy is making more of an impact on the PSP than it did on the PSX - anyone with a CD burner and a game enhancer could rent and copy all the PlayStation games they wanted.
My grandparents on their farm in B.F. North Dakota didn't get electricity or telephone service until *they* paid to have the lines ran. That is how America used to work.
Yes, there was a time when not everyone realized what an important social benefit electricity was. And it sucked. Hell, my great-great-grandparents in the Wild West didn't even get law enforcement until *they* rounded themselves up a posse and took the law into their own hands. You know what, that sucked too.
Some things are provided just fine by the market, and if some people can't get them because the market doesn't serve them, that's all right because those things aren't very important anyway. But other things--like law enforcement, electricity, telephone service, and mail (some would add health care, and now apparently broadband internet access)--are such important benefits that we the people, through the government, shove our hands into the market and force it to address the needs of those people who would otherwise be unprofitable.
I don't know about you, but *I* don't want the country I live in to be one where people go without basic services like electricity or telecom just because they don't fit into the local monopoly's business model. If you have a better alternative to government mandates that would make sure everyone can get those basic services, then let's hear it; so far, this seems to be the best way.
Now people just sit around with their hands out and whining, "Where's mine?"
What a tired and inaccurate whine. This isn't about handouts, it's about subsidizing key services for people who can't effectively get them on their own. You might as well complain about public fire departments, because after all, *you* can afford your own alarm and sprinkler system, and your grandparents got along just fine with a few buckets and a well; if Joe Sixpack down the street doesn't want his home to burn down, he can just start a neighborhood bucket brigade, or put in years of hard work and someday own his own sprinkler system, right?
If you want to argue that broadband internet access isn't important enough to warrant a universal mandate, then go ahead and argue that... but you seem to be arguing instead that the government shouldn't mandate any sort of universal service at all, which is just laughable.
I guess you missed that "HA!" in my post. We looked into satellite broadband, but quickly realized that it's a joke, with latencies of 500-1500 ms making games, VPNs, and SSH next to unusable. Even surfing the web seemed no faster than with dialup. And for $90 a month, last I checked, the speeds were only comparable to basic $30/month DSL.
With a free WiFi zone downtown, they would've been better off sticking to dialup and then driving into town whenever they needed to download a large file than paying for satellite internet service.
They need to keep their hands out of the whole thing and let the market fist fight it out.
I disagree. If they had done that with telephone service back in the day, most rural homes still wouldn't have landline service, and probably wouldn't have had any phone access until satellite and cellular phones became available.
Why? Because those customers aren't profitable. The phone companies don't want to build lines stretching all the way out to Bumfuck, Wyoming just to serve a dozen customers. That's a perfectly reasonable decision for the phone companies, but it sure sucks for those customers.
And why do those customers have phone service today? Because of government mandates. We as a society decided that phone service is important enough that everyone should have access to it, whether it's profitable or not. So as a result, everyone with phone service pays a small fee to make it possible for otherwise-unprofitable customers to get phone service.
Look at the situation with broadband today. My parents live 5 minutes outside of a city of 150,000+ people, but they couldn't get anything better than ISDN until about last year. Many people in rural areas still have no choice other than dialup (or satellite--HA!). The market will not address those customers anytime soon without a little push in the right direction.
In both the press conferences for follow-up questions pertaining to the 2000 and 2001 stock report for investors, which were available online in audio files on Sony's website for months after the publication of their annual report, Sony openly discussed how the PS2 is profitable on each unit sold.
If you want the specific figures, I suggest you look for recordings or transcripts of those press conferences.
If it's as easy to pirate games on the PS3 as it was on the Sega Dreamcast, Sony's in for a lot of trouble. They'll lose money on each console they sell, then they won't make it back because people are pirating their games instead of purchasing them.
Who says Sony will lose money on each console they sell? They made money on PS2 sales.
I hope the PS3 copy protection is enough of a failure to teach Sony a lesson: next time, they should focus on releasing a game console, not on harming consumers with DRM schemes.
They don't need copy protection to be successful. As another poster mentioned, the original PlayStation was easily modded to play copied games, and yet it went on to be far more successful than its competitors. The Nintendo 64, for example, had much more effective copy protection - just try copying a rented cartridge game!
It's one of the only stores that I know of that often has a few hundred lbs of moving merchandise on a moving forklift several feet above customers heads. So, I don't want someone who's just done a line at the wheel.
Problem is, the kind of drug testing employers do--analysis of urine to find the metabolites of illegal drugs--won't catch this at all. They can only detect past use, and for some drugs (e.g. marijuana) "past use" can go back several weeks.
There are other methods that can test whether someone is actually under the influence of a drug right now, but they're more expensive and obviously must be done at least every day when an employee arrives, so employers don't really use them.
I'm not a drug user by any means (other than tobacco on rare occasions and good quality liquor infrequently), but I also don't shop at stores with an open no-drug policy. Home Depot doesn't get my business anymore, and I openly let them know that I think their policy is ridiculous.
I like this idea. Any clue where I might be able to find a list of stores that drug test their employees (or a list of stores that don't)?
Well, the way it's done here in the US is you go to the grocery store and buy a phone top-up card with cash. The card has a code on it, which you type into your phone to apply the credit to your account. Since it's a prepaid account, not a monthly plan, there is no "bill" - if your account balance drops to zero, your phone just stops working until you bring it back up.
With some prepaid phone companies (Virgin Mobile, at least) you don't even need to give your name. You need a name on the account, but you can tell them your name is Superfly Johnson and they'll just nod and wink. They certainly can't verify your age.
Outside the US, where GSM is the standard, I suppose you can just buy a prepaid SIM at the store and plug it into your phone, without even having to make up a fake name.
In Spokane--the largest metropolitan area between Seattle and Minneapolis, IIRC--there are no indie theaters. None. The closest thing we have is a club downtown that projects old silent movies onto the building across the street at night, and the occasional film festival nights at the AMC 20-plex.
The horse and buggy distro system of people paying for a CD with liner notes has been superseded by people leeching MP3s off torrent sites for free. There's no way any label or artist can compete with that.
Indeed. What they can do, however, is adapt to it by getting out of the business of selling copies of bits, and stick to the core business of actually writing and performing music, by insisting on getting paid for the time they put into it, rather than getting a little tiny payment for each copy sold. New technology has made obsolete the old system of distributing musical bits on pieces of plastic, but human creativity will always be valuable in itself.
Hate to be the one upper here, but I remember a game that had a wheel, and it was DARK BROWN to defeat photo copiers, too./i.
The original SimCity was like that - it had a code chart, printed in black ink on dark red paper, with a few facts about dozens of cities. Try to copy it in a regular photocopier and you'd just get a black page.
Luckily, even back in that era, color copiers could replace one color with another. The helpful guy at Kinko's was able to make a perfectly readable copy with reddish-black text on a white background.
Yeah, the first versions of Visual Basic ran on DOS and didn't have the GUI builders that later versions did. I'm not quite sure what qualified them as basic of the "visual" variety, it's not like you had to type your code in with your eyes shut in other basics.
As others have pointed out, this is incorrect - the very first version of VB ran on Windows and included a GUI builder. VB/DOS came later, but it included a "GUI" builder that was much the same, with text-mode forms made out of line-drawing characters.
Perhaps you're thinking of QuickBasic, the DOS Basic compiler that came before VB, or QBasic, the stripped-down QuickBasic interpreter that came with later versions of DOS.
Or maybe you're thinking of Visual C++, which in fact was not "visual" in any sense other than (1) you could look at your source code as you typed it in and (2) it came with a dialog box resource editor like every other Windows IDE. It wasn't until Borland C++Builder (and Visual C++.NET, several years later) that there was a Windows C++ IDE with a GUI builder.
On Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates's doubloon servers, there's no subscription fee; instead, you pay with a special currency called doubloons as a delivery charge on various items (which usually need to be replaced every 30-60 days) and for badges that let you participate in different parts of the game (which also need to be replaced every month). A labor badge lets you work in shops, a captain's badge lets you start your own crew, etc.
The only way doubloons enter the economy is when they're purchased with cash for around 25 cents each. They disappear once they're spent on items or badges. However, you can trade them for the other currency, pieces of eight, which flows freely from NPCs - most transactions are done in POE, including wagers and the non-delivery-charge cost of items. But unlike in Second Life, you can't [officially] change doubloons back into dollars.
The result is that players with a lot of time but little money can just play the hell out of the game and earn enough POE to trade for doubloons, and players with a lot of money but little time can buy doubloons and trade them for POE as needed. (I spent around $50 to get enough capital to start up a couple shops, and now they're successful enough that I may never need to pay cash for doubloons again.) Players with neither can still play the game for free, but some parts of it will be closed off to them. The system seems to work really well.
I believe the founding fathers meant exactly what they wrote in the constitution, and that it only requires that you actually read it for it to be effective.
So, would you say the First Amendment doesn't apply to online writings? There was no internet when the Constitution was written, so the founders couldn't possibly have meant for the word "press" to refer to a technology that wouldn't exist for 200 more years, and "speech" technically doesn't cover written materials.
Verizon Wireless offers unlimited BroadbandAccess for $60/month if you also have a voice plan. Without a voice plan, it's $80/month.
BroadbandAccess is their name for EV-DO, i.e. average speeds of 400-700 kbps, up to 2.4 Mbps. Unfortunately, EV-DO is only available in major cities; everywhere else, you have to fall back to 1xRTT at 60-100 kbps (up to 144 kbps).
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This is in addition to the fact that the US did not choose a single 1st generation standard (GSM, CDMA, whatever), which fragmented the market even more.
First generation was AMPS (analog cellular). GSM and cdmaOne are 2G. CDMA2000 and UMTS are 3G.
You have got to be kidding. News that isn't balanced is propoganda. Why not just listen to a broadcast saying. "Be well citizens, everything is fine. sleep now... sleeeeppp"
;)
We already have that, it's called Fox News.
Yes every issue has sides, often more than two. if it didnt have sides it wouldnt be an issue.
Not every viewpoint deserves to be taken seriously, and in many cases, reporting both (or more) "sides" of an issue is inherently misleading. For example, if Think Tank X employs two crackpot scientists and puts out a press release saying the moon is made of green cheese, it would be poor journalism indeed to report the story as "Some scientists believe the moon is made of cheese; others disagree".
Yet in many cases, that's exactly what they do in the name of "balance", because some people have the idea that whenever there's a "pro" and "con" position to any issue, they need to give both sides exactly as much time and attention, regardless of how well-accepted those positions are in the real world or how well they match up with facts. They go out of their way to avoid making obvious judgements about sources and evidence, and as a result, audiences get a skewed view of reality.
Who's to say that non-DRM WMA files are not just restricted with a known key? This actually makes sense because WMA was designed to be a digital restriction format from the start.
Wow... speculate much? The burden of proof is on you, buddy. Do you have any fact-based reason to believe that unrestricted WMA files are encrypted?
Yes, I'm sure that everyone would welcome DRM that isn't used as a means to screw consumers.
One question: What possible use could DRM have besides screwing consumers?
Seriously! As far as I can tell, screwing consumers is the only thing DRM is good for. It prevents you from doing what you want to do with the data on your computer. That doesn't help you, it only hurts you.
Unlike CDs, DVDs, or other forms of media, console video games are well labeled that they are intended for use only on their particular machine, and the machine is clearly labeled that it only plays it's associated games.
Just because they tell you what they're doing doesn't excuse their behavior. I should be able to run homebrew games or backups on a game console that I paid for. If Sony wants to retain control of the machine, they should rent or lease it to me instead of selling it.
A modchip is a fairly high barrier to entry.
Well, the PSX had a higher barrier to entry than the Dreamcast or Sega CD, but not much higher. It wasn't necessary to install a mod chip; you could plug a cheat device (except the name-brand GameShark) into the expansion port and use it to swap discs, or if you felt reckless, just prop the door open and swap the disc while it was spinning.
The PSP is software hackable, and you can see what that is doing to game sales. Even the few good games that are out for it are widely pirated.
I'm not familiar with PSP sales figures, so could you provide some evidence here? I'm sure you're aware that the number of illegal copies != the number of sales lost to piracy. I find it hard to believe that piracy is making more of an impact on the PSP than it did on the PSX - anyone with a CD burner and a game enhancer could rent and copy all the PlayStation games they wanted.
Performance testing already exists. The obstacle is in getting employers to use performance tests instead of UA and other past-use tests.
My grandparents on their farm in B.F. North Dakota didn't get electricity or telephone service until *they* paid to have the lines ran. That is how America used to work.
Yes, there was a time when not everyone realized what an important social benefit electricity was. And it sucked. Hell, my great-great-grandparents in the Wild West didn't even get law enforcement until *they* rounded themselves up a posse and took the law into their own hands. You know what, that sucked too.
Some things are provided just fine by the market, and if some people can't get them because the market doesn't serve them, that's all right because those things aren't very important anyway. But other things--like law enforcement, electricity, telephone service, and mail (some would add health care, and now apparently broadband internet access)--are such important benefits that we the people, through the government, shove our hands into the market and force it to address the needs of those people who would otherwise be unprofitable.
I don't know about you, but *I* don't want the country I live in to be one where people go without basic services like electricity or telecom just because they don't fit into the local monopoly's business model. If you have a better alternative to government mandates that would make sure everyone can get those basic services, then let's hear it; so far, this seems to be the best way.
Now people just sit around with their hands out and whining, "Where's mine?"
What a tired and inaccurate whine. This isn't about handouts, it's about subsidizing key services for people who can't effectively get them on their own. You might as well complain about public fire departments, because after all, *you* can afford your own alarm and sprinkler system, and your grandparents got along just fine with a few buckets and a well; if Joe Sixpack down the street doesn't want his home to burn down, he can just start a neighborhood bucket brigade, or put in years of hard work and someday own his own sprinkler system, right?
If you want to argue that broadband internet access isn't important enough to warrant a universal mandate, then go ahead and argue that... but you seem to be arguing instead that the government shouldn't mandate any sort of universal service at all, which is just laughable.
REally? $90.00 a month sattelite broadband.
I guess you missed that "HA!" in my post. We looked into satellite broadband, but quickly realized that it's a joke, with latencies of 500-1500 ms making games, VPNs, and SSH next to unusable. Even surfing the web seemed no faster than with dialup. And for $90 a month, last I checked, the speeds were only comparable to basic $30/month DSL.
With a free WiFi zone downtown, they would've been better off sticking to dialup and then driving into town whenever they needed to download a large file than paying for satellite internet service.
They need to keep their hands out of the whole thing and let the market fist fight it out.
I disagree. If they had done that with telephone service back in the day, most rural homes still wouldn't have landline service, and probably wouldn't have had any phone access until satellite and cellular phones became available.
Why? Because those customers aren't profitable. The phone companies don't want to build lines stretching all the way out to Bumfuck, Wyoming just to serve a dozen customers. That's a perfectly reasonable decision for the phone companies, but it sure sucks for those customers.
And why do those customers have phone service today? Because of government mandates. We as a society decided that phone service is important enough that everyone should have access to it, whether it's profitable or not. So as a result, everyone with phone service pays a small fee to make it possible for otherwise-unprofitable customers to get phone service.
Look at the situation with broadband today. My parents live 5 minutes outside of a city of 150,000+ people, but they couldn't get anything better than ISDN until about last year. Many people in rural areas still have no choice other than dialup (or satellite--HA!). The market will not address those customers anytime soon without a little push in the right direction.
If you want the specific figures, I suggest you look for recordings or transcripts of those press conferences.
If it's as easy to pirate games on the PS3 as it was on the Sega Dreamcast, Sony's in for a lot of trouble. They'll lose money on each console they sell, then they won't make it back because people are pirating their games instead of purchasing them.
Who says Sony will lose money on each console they sell? They made money on PS2 sales.
I hope the PS3 copy protection is enough of a failure to teach Sony a lesson: next time, they should focus on releasing a game console, not on harming consumers with DRM schemes.
They don't need copy protection to be successful. As another poster mentioned, the original PlayStation was easily modded to play copied games, and yet it went on to be far more successful than its competitors. The Nintendo 64, for example, had much more effective copy protection - just try copying a rented cartridge game!
Silent Hill is a console game, so the submitter most likely is playing on a TV at 50/60 Hz anyway.
It's one of the only stores that I know of that often has a few hundred lbs of moving merchandise on a moving forklift several feet above customers heads. So, I don't want someone who's just done a line at the wheel.
Problem is, the kind of drug testing employers do--analysis of urine to find the metabolites of illegal drugs--won't catch this at all. They can only detect past use, and for some drugs (e.g. marijuana) "past use" can go back several weeks.
There are other methods that can test whether someone is actually under the influence of a drug right now, but they're more expensive and obviously must be done at least every day when an employee arrives, so employers don't really use them.
I'm not a drug user by any means (other than tobacco on rare occasions and good quality liquor infrequently), but I also don't shop at stores with an open no-drug policy. Home Depot doesn't get my business anymore, and I openly let them know that I think their policy is ridiculous.
I like this idea. Any clue where I might be able to find a list of stores that drug test their employees (or a list of stores that don't)?
So how do you pay the bill without a card?
Well, the way it's done here in the US is you go to the grocery store and buy a phone top-up card with cash. The card has a code on it, which you type into your phone to apply the credit to your account. Since it's a prepaid account, not a monthly plan, there is no "bill" - if your account balance drops to zero, your phone just stops working until you bring it back up.
With some prepaid phone companies (Virgin Mobile, at least) you don't even need to give your name. You need a name on the account, but you can tell them your name is Superfly Johnson and they'll just nod and wink. They certainly can't verify your age.
Outside the US, where GSM is the standard, I suppose you can just buy a prepaid SIM at the store and plug it into your phone, without even having to make up a fake name.
In Spokane--the largest metropolitan area between Seattle and Minneapolis, IIRC--there are no indie theaters. None. The closest thing we have is a club downtown that projects old silent movies onto the building across the street at night, and the occasional film festival nights at the AMC 20-plex.
The horse and buggy distro system of people paying for a CD with liner notes has been superseded by people leeching MP3s off torrent sites for free. There's no way any label or artist can compete with that.
Indeed. What they can do, however, is adapt to it by getting out of the business of selling copies of bits, and stick to the core business of actually writing and performing music, by insisting on getting paid for the time they put into it, rather than getting a little tiny payment for each copy sold. New technology has made obsolete the old system of distributing musical bits on pieces of plastic, but human creativity will always be valuable in itself.
Whoops, I guess that Preview button is there for a reason.
Hate to be the one upper here, but I remember a game that had a wheel, and it was DARK BROWN to defeat photo copiers, too./i.
The original SimCity was like that - it had a code chart, printed in black ink on dark red paper, with a few facts about dozens of cities. Try to copy it in a regular photocopier and you'd just get a black page.
Luckily, even back in that era, color copiers could replace one color with another. The helpful guy at Kinko's was able to make a perfectly readable copy with reddish-black text on a white background.
Yeah, the first versions of Visual Basic ran on DOS and didn't have the GUI builders that later versions did. I'm not quite sure what qualified them as basic of the "visual" variety, it's not like you had to type your code in with your eyes shut in other basics.
.NET, several years later) that there was a Windows C++ IDE with a GUI builder.
As others have pointed out, this is incorrect - the very first version of VB ran on Windows and included a GUI builder. VB/DOS came later, but it included a "GUI" builder that was much the same, with text-mode forms made out of line-drawing characters.
Perhaps you're thinking of QuickBasic, the DOS Basic compiler that came before VB, or QBasic, the stripped-down QuickBasic interpreter that came with later versions of DOS.
Or maybe you're thinking of Visual C++, which in fact was not "visual" in any sense other than (1) you could look at your source code as you typed it in and (2) it came with a dialog box resource editor like every other Windows IDE. It wasn't until Borland C++Builder (and Visual C++
Developers are not permitted to build Custom Clients that are multi-headed or interoperable with any other IM network.
Do you suppose IRC counts as an "IM network"?
Why do I ask? No reason...
On Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates's doubloon servers, there's no subscription fee; instead, you pay with a special currency called doubloons as a delivery charge on various items (which usually need to be replaced every 30-60 days) and for badges that let you participate in different parts of the game (which also need to be replaced every month). A labor badge lets you work in shops, a captain's badge lets you start your own crew, etc.
The only way doubloons enter the economy is when they're purchased with cash for around 25 cents each. They disappear once they're spent on items or badges. However, you can trade them for the other currency, pieces of eight, which flows freely from NPCs - most transactions are done in POE, including wagers and the non-delivery-charge cost of items. But unlike in Second Life, you can't [officially] change doubloons back into dollars.
The result is that players with a lot of time but little money can just play the hell out of the game and earn enough POE to trade for doubloons, and players with a lot of money but little time can buy doubloons and trade them for POE as needed. (I spent around $50 to get enough capital to start up a couple shops, and now they're successful enough that I may never need to pay cash for doubloons again.) Players with neither can still play the game for free, but some parts of it will be closed off to them. The system seems to work really well.
I believe the founding fathers meant exactly what they wrote in the constitution, and that it only requires that you actually read it for it to be effective.
So, would you say the First Amendment doesn't apply to online writings? There was no internet when the Constitution was written, so the founders couldn't possibly have meant for the word "press" to refer to a technology that wouldn't exist for 200 more years, and "speech" technically doesn't cover written materials.
About 60 percent of students attending public four-year colleges pay less than $6,000 for tuition and fees per year.
$8000 isn't an entire college education, but it's nothing to scoff at. The $2000 price tag on that HDTV set could pay for a quarter all by itself.
Verizon Wireless offers unlimited BroadbandAccess for $60/month if you also have a voice plan. Without a voice plan, it's $80/month.
BroadbandAccess is their name for EV-DO, i.e. average speeds of 400-700 kbps, up to 2.4 Mbps. Unfortunately, EV-DO is only available in major cities; everywhere else, you have to fall back to 1xRTT at 60-100 kbps (up to 144 kbps).