Well I haven't had that problem with the games I own so far. I transferred my guitar hero save over to a friend's console, and also transferred all of my saved data when reformatting the HDD. I certainly wouldn't place all the blame on Sony if a game developer has asked that save data be non-transferable for some weird reason..
PS3s have USB ports and the built in OS lets you back up your saved data easily to them. You're just spreading unecessary FUD without knowing what you are talking about.. I don't want to be overly critical because I end up doing similar things from time to time, but you just end up looking silly if you make baseless accusations like that.
You can back up your saved games easily to a USB flash drive from the main menu. You don't really need to back up anything else really, you can reinstall games from the original disc, and you don't actually need to have any media on the PS3 since you can stream it. I might consider backing up my save data next time I do an upgrade though:s This particular one was fine on my PS3, as were all the ones beforehand. The only time I've reformatted my HDD so far was to create a Linux partition.
Since this problem can be fixed by simply reformatting the HD, obviously the actual firmware is fine, it's what has been installed on the HD that's borked..
I doubt 'people' would be harmed - most people would be quite happy to no longer be getting adverts because the costs are becoming prohibitive to businesses. Presumably it would be the businesses themselves that are harmed when google can change its ad prices to anything it wants because of a monopoly position. If I don't like a company's ethics, I'm not going to buy any of its shared shares - I think that would help them much more than harm them, unless as you say millions of people do the same thing and vote against whatever evil they see happening. But again that surely just benefits the creators of the company due to massively inflated share prices. You don't want to be rewarding those guys for being jerks otherwise they'll just go out and do the same thing over again.
Text messaging costs as much as it does purely to rip people off. The same as some companies charge over a quid for a poorly sampled proprietary ringtone. I used to spend maybe £10-£20 a month on texts until I realised how stupid it was and just started trying to be more organised and basically only using my phone for receiving texts rather than replying to them. Sure, I lost a lot of friends, but the savings were worth it!
Actually, these days I pay nothing for my texts because I have a company phone, but I still try not to be stupid with unecessary texting and "hi, we'll be there in 5 minutes" pointless phonecalls, etc. People eschew good organisation these days and instead waste money on their phones.. sometimes a text can easily be worth 10p (20 cents, except in the UK it's always cost that much, it never used to be 5p), but most of the time I expect it isn't. The size limit is pathetic too, I often end up getting up to the 3 texts limit if I'm sending any more than a yea or nay answer.. then again I'm quite a verbose person.
What does it mean if you're both? I am, working at a small to medium sized company, I do the network admin but also write apps for different in-house departments and maintain another app that our clients use.
I enjoy coding more than any other part of my job, and I used to code just for fun before (from about when I was 12-13 up until I did my CS degree), but I'd say the sysadmin stuff involves a lot more pressure because you are in charge of making sure that everything is running smoothly, and it's your ass on the line if the VPN/email/whatever goes down. A smart sysadmin will identify areas that can be improved and act upon them. I have a few things I'd like to improve but I often don't make time for them, or I just don't want to break what we already have in place. Mostly because our network is used by our US office as well as our UK office, so I can't really do any serious maintenance until midnight if I don't want to disrupt everyone:/ I wish they'd sort out their filing so that the different offices didn't need to use the same set of files..
If all legs were exactly the same, then yes legs wouldn't be so sexy. Always walking everywhere can be quite boring too sometimes, believe me, so sometimes it's nice to use wheels, wings, rotors, impellers, whatever.
I have come to the decision that asses are scientifically more important than breasts. Better to have a lower sense of gravity for balance purposes. And hawtness. Oh yes indeed, the hawtness:D
Yep I think I must have been getting two experiments mixed up. I think they must have been both in the same chapter as they are kind of related - I'm sure there was one with short term memory loss patients being shown paintings and rating them just to prove the concept of a person's aesthetic tastes actually changing to prefer things that they already have, rather than it just being an entirely 'false happiness' as some could say about the photographs experiment. It is 'false' in a way, but it leads to real happiness.
I can't remember the exact experiment for the photographs, but I don't think that they were forced to switch. I think that one group was given the choice of which picture to take (I think one group may have had the choice to change it later if they wished, can't remember), and another group were just given their second favourite (or whatever) picture. The group that didn't have a choice ended up liking the picture they received even more, while the ones that had the choice kept wondering if they had made the right one, and ended up being less happy about the picture that they had taken. I know that was definitely the result even if I can't remember the actual experiment!
Any companies that the government tries to pull this stunt on should just move elsewhere. I'm sure there would be a public outcry if eBay said "fine, we're not dealing with you jerks anymore". I've heard that the French public are quite good at their protesting - they brought the country to a standstill when the government tried to increase fuel taxes..
It is the way of it. If someone wants money and power, there are generally ways to get it. Those that aren't interested aren't going to be putting as much time towards open source governance anyway. I'm not saying the current system is the right one, and I hate corruption, but open sourcing everything isn't going to get rid of all corruption either.
Those power-hungry, corrupt, egomaniacal people will still be able to manipulate people as much as they currently are. Having the ability to vote on individual issues will help a little, but not entirely, because the public is easily manipulated through education and media. Most people who write OSS are quite intelligent, so I wouldn't mind if they had legislative power. Now, instead imagine that instead it was the inhabitants of MySpace, or the viewers of Fox News that had control over the law. Would you want that? How does open source government deal with the fact that a lot of people are dumb and easily manipulated? The ones with money are still going to be the ones who can push their own agenda the most, unless advertising and campaigning was made illegal. But if it was, they'd pay people to vote for it to be made legal. Meh.
Okay, I hadn't clicked through any links, I'd just read the first page. After a teeny bit more reading I can see some pretty nasty flaws though:
If the majority in any local district gets to decide the law, what's to stop a large bunch of psychopaths moving somewhere and saying that murder is okay in their town? That's pretty extreme but the same kind of thing could apply to copyright and that type of thing. You'd still get people or corporations moving to certain areas where their nefarious schemes can be done legally.
You also need people to run the computer voting you are using, and those people can be bought too. I don't think there's any way of fully weeding out corruption unless everyone is a computer expert and can ensure that no dodgy dealings are going on. I think there will always be focuses of power in certain areas, you can't get rid of the need for authority and leadership. Even (or should I say, especially) something like wikipedia needs rules and admins who have power over the general public.
Well, I mean from a purely physical point of view, the world is a lot more interesting (though sadly sometimes in a negative way, as you point out) because of physical differences. I find amusement in different breast shapes. I'm sure I'd be happy with one set of breasts attached to a special someone, but while I'm single I can honestly say that I quite enjoy the variety!
I'm sure you do love your wife's breasts, but that is presumably mostly because they are a part of your wife and you love her. They also are 'your' personal set of breasts so aesthetically you will also come to find them even more pleasing because of this.
People subconsciously come to prefer things that they own - they tested it on people with short term memory loss, getting them to rate some paintings on an aesthetic scale, then 'gave' them one of the paintings, came back later when the people had forgotten about the whole thing, and then asked them again to rate the paintings, and people rated the ones they were given as higher than before. I can't find a reference for this (I have a feeling it was in Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising but despite that being about the human brain I'm not sure how it fits into that context, so maybe I read it elsewhere), so take it with a pinch of salt if you will.
Personally I can vouch for that theory though, as I never used to find medium-smaller breasts interesting until I went out with someone who had fairly small breasts. Yes, she had a freakin awesome ass, but I learned to love her breasts too. I also tend to find women more attractive if I like their personality, and consider even good looking women to be 'ugly' overall if they are evil bitches.
While I think the guy is over-reacting, personally I also think that people who say the RIAA is going to "die" may be going a bit far too. It will keep limping (well, it's hardly limping, I'm sure they still make metric assloads of money) on until it either gets the point or is left as a niche market.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but when you say
This is true no matter how many artists sign up with you. If "people want to buy it" then these measures are unnecessary. If people don't want to buy it then the industry needs to either fail or find something that people do want.
It's difficult applying that logic to something that can be freely copied and distributed with minimal effort. You're right that if people don't buy the product, then the business has failed - but people don't really 'want' to buy anything. If you could get exact replicas of any physical products for free with a widely available magical duplication machine, a lot of people would do it it.
However, I think if the prices were sensible on the original product, most people's sense of decency and self interest would cause them to pay sensible prices. Hopefully they would reason that if current gen tech is copied for free then the producers of the tech have no reason to keep researching and create more. Some people are just selfish pricks though.
If we were living in a utopian society where everyone has everything they need and people do research on open source software and hardware for fun (and 3D printing machines can build anything very cheaply), then that's fine - but until we develop a new form of society then that's not going to work.
Perhaps this kind of society will be possible in a roundabout way once we invent proper neural interfaces, and people can create their own realities in computers - then they really will be able to copy any existing virtual objects freely. They'd still need to keep their physical body alive though, so unless it was combined with some form of communism or something then you'd still need money..
I think the word actually embodies western culture quite well. We take something, consume it, and throw it away. That's even true when it comes to music in some cases, as in with trashy pop that gets to number one one week and then is gone the next. Despite the fact that digital files are not technically 'consumed' (unless they have some kind of DRM that deletes them after a few days), IMO the the word is fairly accurate even in its economic and political context. Consumers are the ones that make use of all the goods and services that the market provides (ie anyone who isn't self sufficient).
Personally I'd say the RIAA views its customers more as cattle to be slaughtered, and processed in such a way that no part is 'wasted'. Only they don't realise that in slaughtering every last cow they can right now, they are forgetting that they need to leave some behind to create future generations and further profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I haven't had that problem with the games I own so far. I transferred my guitar hero save over to a friend's console, and also transferred all of my saved data when reformatting the HDD. I certainly wouldn't place all the blame on Sony if a game developer has asked that save data be non-transferable for some weird reason..
PS3s have USB ports and the built in OS lets you back up your saved data easily to them. You're just spreading unecessary FUD without knowing what you are talking about.. I don't want to be overly critical because I end up doing similar things from time to time, but you just end up looking silly if you make baseless accusations like that.
You can back up your saved games easily to a USB flash drive from the main menu. You don't really need to back up anything else really, you can reinstall games from the original disc, and you don't actually need to have any media on the PS3 since you can stream it. I might consider backing up my save data next time I do an upgrade though :s This particular one was fine on my PS3, as were all the ones beforehand. The only time I've reformatted my HDD so far was to create a Linux partition.
Since this problem can be fixed by simply reformatting the HD, obviously the actual firmware is fine, it's what has been installed on the HD that's borked..
My system was fine with the update btw *shrug*
Do you even know, what a number field is
It's where they grow new numbers, right?
PS: Do you, even, know: how to use correct punctuation?1!?!?!?
It's about making rude words on an upside down calculator. I'm not sure what numbers and operators they're pressing either.
A more holistic approach is required in order to get people to want the thing in the first place
Yeah, people are never drawn in by flashy gimmicks, are they?
I doubt 'people' would be harmed - most people would be quite happy to no longer be getting adverts because the costs are becoming prohibitive to businesses. Presumably it would be the businesses themselves that are harmed when google can change its ad prices to anything it wants because of a monopoly position. If I don't like a company's ethics, I'm not going to buy any of its shared shares - I think that would help them much more than harm them, unless as you say millions of people do the same thing and vote against whatever evil they see happening. But again that surely just benefits the creators of the company due to massively inflated share prices. You don't want to be rewarding those guys for being jerks otherwise they'll just go out and do the same thing over again.
Text messaging costs as much as it does purely to rip people off. The same as some companies charge over a quid for a poorly sampled proprietary ringtone. I used to spend maybe £10-£20 a month on texts until I realised how stupid it was and just started trying to be more organised and basically only using my phone for receiving texts rather than replying to them. Sure, I lost a lot of friends, but the savings were worth it!
Actually, these days I pay nothing for my texts because I have a company phone, but I still try not to be stupid with unecessary texting and "hi, we'll be there in 5 minutes" pointless phonecalls, etc. People eschew good organisation these days and instead waste money on their phones.. sometimes a text can easily be worth 10p (20 cents, except in the UK it's always cost that much, it never used to be 5p), but most of the time I expect it isn't. The size limit is pathetic too, I often end up getting up to the 3 texts limit if I'm sending any more than a yea or nay answer.. then again I'm quite a verbose person.
What does it mean if you're both? I am, working at a small to medium sized company, I do the network admin but also write apps for different in-house departments and maintain another app that our clients use.
I enjoy coding more than any other part of my job, and I used to code just for fun before (from about when I was 12-13 up until I did my CS degree), but I'd say the sysadmin stuff involves a lot more pressure because you are in charge of making sure that everything is running smoothly, and it's your ass on the line if the VPN/email/whatever goes down. A smart sysadmin will identify areas that can be improved and act upon them. I have a few things I'd like to improve but I often don't make time for them, or I just don't want to break what we already have in place. Mostly because our network is used by our US office as well as our UK office, so I can't really do any serious maintenance until midnight if I don't want to disrupt everyone :/ I wish they'd sort out their filing so that the different offices didn't need to use the same set of files..
If all legs were exactly the same, then yes legs wouldn't be so sexy. Always walking everywhere can be quite boring too sometimes, believe me, so sometimes it's nice to use wheels, wings, rotors, impellers, whatever.
I have come to the decision that asses are scientifically more important than breasts. Better to have a lower sense of gravity for balance purposes. And hawtness. Oh yes indeed, the hawtness :D
Yep I think I must have been getting two experiments mixed up. I think they must have been both in the same chapter as they are kind of related - I'm sure there was one with short term memory loss patients being shown paintings and rating them just to prove the concept of a person's aesthetic tastes actually changing to prefer things that they already have, rather than it just being an entirely 'false happiness' as some could say about the photographs experiment. It is 'false' in a way, but it leads to real happiness.
I can't remember the exact experiment for the photographs, but I don't think that they were forced to switch. I think that one group was given the choice of which picture to take (I think one group may have had the choice to change it later if they wished, can't remember), and another group were just given their second favourite (or whatever) picture. The group that didn't have a choice ended up liking the picture they received even more, while the ones that had the choice kept wondering if they had made the right one, and ended up being less happy about the picture that they had taken. I know that was definitely the result even if I can't remember the actual experiment!
I suppose I should qualify evil with "selfish whiny and stuck up" rather than sadistic, which is just hawt.[/masochism]
Damn my unintentional geeky aphrodisiacity. Just run now woman.. uh I mean girl - while you still have a chance!
Actually, I just used a motorised pump. Best to keep fresh for the ladies!
Perhaps he's a necrophiliac!?
You deserve a pat on the head for such shameless punnage.
Any companies that the government tries to pull this stunt on should just move elsewhere. I'm sure there would be a public outcry if eBay said "fine, we're not dealing with you jerks anymore". I've heard that the French public are quite good at their protesting - they brought the country to a standstill when the government tried to increase fuel taxes..
It is the way of it. If someone wants money and power, there are generally ways to get it. Those that aren't interested aren't going to be putting as much time towards open source governance anyway. I'm not saying the current system is the right one, and I hate corruption, but open sourcing everything isn't going to get rid of all corruption either.
Those power-hungry, corrupt, egomaniacal people will still be able to manipulate people as much as they currently are. Having the ability to vote on individual issues will help a little, but not entirely, because the public is easily manipulated through education and media. Most people who write OSS are quite intelligent, so I wouldn't mind if they had legislative power. Now, instead imagine that instead it was the inhabitants of MySpace, or the viewers of Fox News that had control over the law. Would you want that? How does open source government deal with the fact that a lot of people are dumb and easily manipulated? The ones with money are still going to be the ones who can push their own agenda the most, unless advertising and campaigning was made illegal. But if it was, they'd pay people to vote for it to be made legal. Meh.
Okay, I hadn't clicked through any links, I'd just read the first page. After a teeny bit more reading I can see some pretty nasty flaws though:
If the majority in any local district gets to decide the law, what's to stop a large bunch of psychopaths moving somewhere and saying that murder is okay in their town? That's pretty extreme but the same kind of thing could apply to copyright and that type of thing. You'd still get people or corporations moving to certain areas where their nefarious schemes can be done legally.
You also need people to run the computer voting you are using, and those people can be bought too. I don't think there's any way of fully weeding out corruption unless everyone is a computer expert and can ensure that no dodgy dealings are going on. I think there will always be focuses of power in certain areas, you can't get rid of the need for authority and leadership. Even (or should I say, especially) something like wikipedia needs rules and admins who have power over the general public.
Perhaps if she were sunbathing in a mountainous valley? No matter which way she's lying you're going to have to cope with major peaks and valleys.
Now there's a good idea for a hiking holiday if ever there was one :)
Well, I mean from a purely physical point of view, the world is a lot more interesting (though sadly sometimes in a negative way, as you point out) because of physical differences. I find amusement in different breast shapes. I'm sure I'd be happy with one set of breasts attached to a special someone, but while I'm single I can honestly say that I quite enjoy the variety!
I'm sure you do love your wife's breasts, but that is presumably mostly because they are a part of your wife and you love her. They also are 'your' personal set of breasts so aesthetically you will also come to find them even more pleasing because of this.
People subconsciously come to prefer things that they own - they tested it on people with short term memory loss, getting them to rate some paintings on an aesthetic scale, then 'gave' them one of the paintings, came back later when the people had forgotten about the whole thing, and then asked them again to rate the paintings, and people rated the ones they were given as higher than before. I can't find a reference for this (I have a feeling it was in Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising but despite that being about the human brain I'm not sure how it fits into that context, so maybe I read it elsewhere), so take it with a pinch of salt if you will.
Personally I can vouch for that theory though, as I never used to find medium-smaller breasts interesting until I went out with someone who had fairly small breasts. Yes, she had a freakin awesome ass, but I learned to love her breasts too. I also tend to find women more attractive if I like their personality, and consider even good looking women to be 'ugly' overall if they are evil bitches.
While I think the guy is over-reacting, personally I also think that people who say the RIAA is going to "die" may be going a bit far too. It will keep limping (well, it's hardly limping, I'm sure they still make metric assloads of money) on until it either gets the point or is left as a niche market.
I generally agree with what you're saying, but when you say
This is true no matter how many artists sign up with you. If "people want to buy it" then these measures are unnecessary. If people don't want to buy it then the industry needs to either fail or find something that people do want.
It's difficult applying that logic to something that can be freely copied and distributed with minimal effort. You're right that if people don't buy the product, then the business has failed - but people don't really 'want' to buy anything. If you could get exact replicas of any physical products for free with a widely available magical duplication machine, a lot of people would do it it.
However, I think if the prices were sensible on the original product, most people's sense of decency and self interest would cause them to pay sensible prices. Hopefully they would reason that if current gen tech is copied for free then the producers of the tech have no reason to keep researching and create more. Some people are just selfish pricks though.
If we were living in a utopian society where everyone has everything they need and people do research on open source software and hardware for fun (and 3D printing machines can build anything very cheaply), then that's fine - but until we develop a new form of society then that's not going to work.
Perhaps this kind of society will be possible in a roundabout way once we invent proper neural interfaces, and people can create their own realities in computers - then they really will be able to copy any existing virtual objects freely. They'd still need to keep their physical body alive though, so unless it was combined with some form of communism or something then you'd still need money..
I think the word actually embodies western culture quite well. We take something, consume it, and throw it away. That's even true when it comes to music in some cases, as in with trashy pop that gets to number one one week and then is gone the next. Despite the fact that digital files are not technically 'consumed' (unless they have some kind of DRM that deletes them after a few days), IMO the the word is fairly accurate even in its economic and political context. Consumers are the ones that make use of all the goods and services that the market provides (ie anyone who isn't self sufficient).
Personally I'd say the RIAA views its customers more as cattle to be slaughtered, and processed in such a way that no part is 'wasted'. Only they don't realise that in slaughtering every last cow they can right now, they are forgetting that they need to leave some behind to create future generations and further profits.