Not only that, but some of the most dangerous driving happens in much slower speed zones, for example residential areas, or around schools. How is this going to stop drivers from ploughing over children at 40 mph?
So? What's your point. Its also not going to stop kids from eating too much sugar. But is the fact that it doesn't stop 100% of all problem activity actually relevant to anything?
Are you against bicycle helmets because they don't do anything to stop broken ribs? Are you against crumple zones because they don't prevent fire? Are you against seatbelts because they don't do one damn thing thing to stop missiles (and might even delay you getting out of your car if you see one coming?!! Oh noes!
So you are stuck with the crap build in stereo also kids like to put in there own amps so the sound limit may not work that well then.
This would be used to limit their (mis)use of YOUR car. One would presume that if they are installing stereos and amps, its their car, and if its their car, they'll own the 'adult' keys for it anyway.
"While there are a few situations I've been in where the ability to exceed 80 mph has been critical to safety (getting out from behind dangerous drivers on the freeway who are liable to cause a pileup, for instance), that's not the point."
I guess you drive in excess of 80 all the time. Because there is always another driver further up ahead liable to cause a pileup. And some of them don't even give an indication they are going to cause a pileup until they do... so you should pass those too, just in case.;)
In fact you'll be safest if:
a) you are in front b) nobody behind you is gaining on you
I'm sure californians will feel very safe knowing they can't access every single horsepower to get off that bridge before it collapses in an earthquake.
Riiiiight... so the golden gate bridge is bucking and swaying, cars all around you are coming to a stop... and your going to slam on the gas in your Porsche? You won't get 10 meters before you have an accident on the bridge at the best of times... and your going to do during or in the immediate aftermath of an major earthquake...
And I don't mean without which you would not like the society. I mean there cannot be a society.
Define "society" first.
Because by my definition a society is a community of people living together for the purpose of mutual benefit, including mutual protection and security. If it were to permit maliciously killing each other -- that would fail the test of being a society.
The only time you make excellent money is when you become a superstar.
Ok.
If the RIAA didn't exist, that will almost never happen,
It would happen with the same unlikeliness it happens now.
while with it, you stand a pretty good chance
Uh, no you don't. You stand a terrible chance. First you have to get signed, which is brutally hard, and if you do get signed for the most part, they -decide- exactly how big you get.
(and basically no chance if you are against it).
Primarily because they've muscled you out of all the major places you might have a chance of getting major exposure. If they didn't exist, anyone would have a shot of getting that exposure, not just 'signed bands'.
So artists put up with the RIAA because they'd otherwise probably be looking at flipping burgers and doing gigs on the weekends.
And even after signing this is usually their fate. The RIAA meaning Warner/Sony/EMI/Universal screw the vast majority of the artists they sign.
The internet has made that not quite as true, but they'll still probably never be able to book a large venue.
Again, because they are competing with bands backed by a 900-lb gorilla. Take away the gorilla and bands will still rise to the top and fill large venues. They'll even hire people to do PR, and negotiate merchandise deals, and crap like that.
The dude says has has $20/week for food/transport/clothes, etc. Whatever he's doing, he's doing it wrong.
If he's looking to sustain himself for life then yeah, if he's in one of those many transitional parts of life then no. I had lots of friends coming out of school, or going to university, or comeing out of university, or after being laid off from a good job, or going through a divorce etc, picking up what they could get and living life like that for a while. They all eventually improved their station, but it takes time.
Oh, and that $20 (actually ~$18) cellphone rate? Thats total. monthly + airtime. What's the trick? PAYG, and don't live on the damn phone.
18$/mo @ say 25c minute = 72 minutes a month. ~2.4 minutes a day. Hell, you can't even look for a job on that kind of ration, never mind conduct business.
I use over 1500 minutes a month, and pay around 56$. That works out to under an hour a day, and doesn't remotely qualify as 'living on the phone'. Someone with a $40 phone is living pretty frugally in my books. A $20 phone is someone who doesn't use it.
"it's not MY fault, it's the fault of people with good jobs". Please...waa waa waa.
But the reality is that any "lost revenue" is not his "fault". He's not whining that he should be entitled to free music, he's pointing out, rightly, that his infringement doesn't make any difference to the industries bottom line.
If he couldn't consume for free, he wouldn't consume at all. Perhaps he shouldn't consume, but that's separate question.
Mine costs triple that. I couldn't bring it down to save my life. If I had your deal at ~$20/mo I'd end up paying hundreds a month in airtime. If he says he HAS to have a phone at $40/month, why not take him at his word. Maybe if he shaves $20 bucks of his plan, it will cost him hundreds. Sure he could talk less, but that might mean not talking to clients, again costing him hundreds...
Instead of being 'stuck in the house', a second job, or school to get a better job, might be in order. And NetZero is only $9.95/month..:)
1) Going to school costs money, and likely conflicts with work. 2) Getting a 2nd job likely conflicts with his first job, and usually results in massive stress. Lots of people CAN'T just get a 2nd job. If you work a mc-job or mall-job for example, where they seemingly schedule staff blindfolded with a dart board, you can't possible hope to find a compatible 2nd job, and if you limit your availability at one job to give your self some gaurantee for the other one, they more often than not retaliate by dropping you down to 1 shift every two weeks... meaning you now have no job.
Getting a 2nd job for a lot of people usually means finding a 1st job that has static reliable hours first, before they can even think about getting a 2nd job. And who knows, maybe he's looking for a new, better, first job, that's as good as his current job but with better hours. It doesn't happen overnight.
And Netzero? Please.
Don't use your apparent insolvency to justify why you think you are entitled to music for free.
He's not saying he's entitled. He's saying he's not costing the industry anything, because if he couldn't download the songs for free its not like he would buy them. He's saying, rightly, that "losses" due to copyright infringement are inherently false because the majority of the billions of dollars of "lost revenue" don't exist. For a lot of people, including him: if they couldn't consume for free they wouldn't consume at all.
That said, I doubt there's any normally-functioning adult unaware of the concept. How else would they buy real estate? Cars? Or even go to a garage sale? If someone actually bought a house without negotiating it, they might as well change their name to Sucker McShit-For-Brains right now.
I'm sure there are few who are 'unaware' of the concept. However, LOTS of people suck at it, and have near zero practice at it. How many times do you buy a house or car after all? With a house you have an agent acting as a proxy. And a lot of people buying a car don't get anywhere near the deal they could. And dickering over $1 items at a garage sale isn't the same. I'm terrible at haggling, and I KNOW I'm terrible at it, I still bring my father out when I'm car shopping, because I know he's far better at it. And as bad as I am I know of many many many people who are MUCH MUCH worse than me.
(Actually I'm only really terrible at buying stuff I want... I'm actually pretty good when negotiating on behalf of someone else; so I bring in others when I'm buying something -- and in kind, others bring me in when they are buying something. I don't think this is unsual either... when you care about the item your dealing for I think you're far more likely to cave... while if you are negotiating on behalf of someone else you are much more prepared to walk.)
Although seriously, if you are REALLY into driving shell out for a track day at a local track with an in-car instructor. Games don't hold a candle to the real thing...
One little flaw, they may be highly flammable but they are also highly transportable. If the plane EXPLODED, and if the hikers were where it exploded, sure.
1) depending on the environment the hikers could have walked within 50 yards from the crash site and not seen it.
2) even if he didn't survive, or died away from the crash site, animals could have wandered off with stuff either from the crash site, or from the site where he passed away.
As someone else said a bear might easily be interested in taking a bite out of a leather wallet, or briefcase. It might also rip through a bag cotaining perhaps a sweater, and then strew its contents of anything it wasn't interested in along it path. Contents which might be moved further by weather or other animals...
1) Everyone I give my email address to is given a different alias, in the form 'myname-alias.validation@mydomain.com'. 'validation' is basically the hash of the salted alias, with different salting recipes for different pattern-matches just to make life difficult for spammers.
Ok. So you effectively made the most complicated whitelist imaginable. Except instead of whitelisting your contacts, you've added a layer of indirection and whitelist a code your contacts must send you instead.
I've seen the same thing implemented many times before by giving each contact a passcode and requiring them to include it in the subject line of all correspondence. I do give you props for embedding it into the address instead of the subject line, as that will let you use it for automated systems, like websites that 'extort' an address, etc.
Aside from the fact that some people and businesses get seriously weirded out when they're told to email you at 'myusername-theircompanyname.longhexstring@mydomain.org', it works BRILLIANTLY.
Yes, if torpedoing usability was your goal. What happens when you send something to someone and they reply? Do they have to use your unique address to reply? What do you do when you need write an email address out or give it over the phone? goofball-yourdomain-a23fbf32a4e544303... good times. Or if someone forwards your message to a 3rd person to reply to you...
My email has gone from "worthless due to the avalanche of spam" to "for all intents and purposes, spam-free", and has stayed that way for almost six years now.
I manage the same with spamassassin, amavisd etc and a couple custom rules. And my mail server processes some 30,000 messages a day as well, for a business with half a dozen employees. We get maybe 8 or so spam through a day, and less than half a dozen false positives a month. (Most of which are due to other people sending from domains that publish SPA records and then don't follow what they've published...ie their own damned fault.)
But for the world's Slashdot Elite, it's a nice, elegant solution (as long as you've got your own domain name or ten and have either a dedicated server or a hosting account somewhere with shell and script access so you can run Procmail.
I wouldn't call it elegant. Clever yes, but not elegant.
Anything sent to 'myname@mydomain.com' automatically bounces with message to go to my website and obtain an alias to use for contacting me. Ditto, for the first message addressed to a given 'alias' whose 'validation' is invalid (thereafter they're unceremoniously sent to/dev/null).
Do you even score it for spam at all or do you just generate a lot of needless backscatter?
At the end of the day, I'm not really seeing the advantage of your solution over a moderately sophisticated white-listing + grey-listing solution.
They consented to play on using a format that cannot be secured. So the answer is "yes".
You seem to be using 'consented' in a rather absurd manner.
By that logic, if I get mugged on the way home today its because I consented to walk home along routes that I cannot ensure are secured.
Of course, I could elect not to walk, but then I apparently consent to get carjacked because I consent to drive along routes I cannot ensure are secured...
I'm sure they accept -some- risk that cheating is possible, but they certainly don't consent to be cheated, and I would further argue that most of them have absolutely no concept of the level of risk they are taking on, and that most of them would make different choices if they actually understood the risk.
Seriously, if you think playing online amounts to consent to be cheated, then its no wonder you you thought your analogy wasn't false. Hell, by that twisted logic I perhaps it wasn't.
Re:This is news? How?
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HD Wii By 2011?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Its the gamers who want something to buy beyond Zelda or Mario.
meh, there's lots to play out there. Radiant Dawn, Mercury Meltdown, Zack&Wiki, Metroid3, Godfather,...
I dunno, there are easily 20+ games that are more than difficult enough to be a 'gamers' game. And there are several 'casual' titles that are worthy of play too, and then there's plenty to to be had on the Virtual Console/WiiWare. I just can't be that sympathetic; there is plenty of value there.
And honestly, if you are consuming titles at such a high a rate that the Wii library is 'woefully inadequate', you've already got at least 1 of the other consoles in addition to the Wii, and possibly a DS or PSP to boot.
If that is you, and you are still complaining about the lack of titles... then your expectations are out of whack, or you are skipping tons of good quality games... probably both.
Re:This is news? How?
on
HD Wii By 2011?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Nintendo has already said they want to go to shorter release cycles. This would put the Wii at four years. I actually expect a new Wii a lot shorter than that.
Beats me.
Although I do expect a WiiHD is going to be a lot harder sell. They had a lot of hype with the Wii and sold--and still selling--based off of it.
Right, the Wii is just a fad. Keep telling yourself that.
But a lot of these Wiis are now sitting around collecting dust waiting for decent games.
An asinine observation. Its true of EVERY system, and everyone's definition of 'decent games' is different. A lot of PS3 are collecting dust too, and xbox360s too.
That said, consider the Wii Fit is still a total sell out after moving 2 million units. To me that pretty much blows your theory that everyone is waiting around for something to buy.
A couple cult following titles and a few lackluster first part titles. They have been been greeted with a lot of hope, and some good reviews from some Nintendo friendly reviewers. But I don't know a lot of people still playing their copies of SMG, MK, or even Brawl.
Same could be said of any of the franchise games for any of the consoles.
I just think it's going to be a hard sell the next around of systems, where they are going to have to show some major titles with some real lasting appeal are going to come.
Like what? Halo 3? Call of Duty? Complete with an achievement system so they can be ranked against 15-year-olds around the world? Yeah, the casuals are going to be lining up to get on that bus. Get real.
Does anyone really think the "casual" gamers who got on board with Wii Play and Wii Fit are going to go buy another system for Wii Play 2 and Wii Fit 2 when they bought the first ones and it sat in the corner a couple of weeks after they had it?
If they think it will be fun and entertain them for a while? Yes.
They don't need to play it 10 hours a week every week to feel they got good value. Even if they pull it out once a month or so for parties or when the grandkids come over, or they play the odd game of tennis, they're happy with their purchase. When the next version comes out, if it has something they want, they'll buy it.
It really is that simple.
Finally, if current trends are an indication: if they launched a "Wii 2" today, they'd sell a quarter million a week easily, and that's assuming the 30 million people who already have a Wii DON'T upgrade. They don't even NEED to 'convert' Wii owners, the untapped market is still large enough.
Of course, they will market to Wii owners as well, and some significant percentage WILL upgrade. A LOT of people are more than satisfied with their purchase. Hell, if they manage to sell a Wii 2 to just half the Wii 1 owners and don't sell a single unit to anyone else, they'll still outsell the PS3.
But there is very real confidence level difference. And the confidence level for honesty that is achieved in a real casino is orders of magnitude better than what is achieved by online gambling sites.
Real casinos are regulated, financially audited, the equipment is tested and certified, and periodically re-tested. I concede that you'll never be certain that the system isn't rigged, but you can be reasonably certain it isn't.
Well, in Gmail's case, you can use POP3 and store a copy locally.
You can, but do you? How many people do this? And that's just gmail, which is just glorified webmail.
A lot of the stuff going on with 'cloud computing' isn't piggybacking on decades old standards, and has no real fallbacks.
How do you back up your facebook content?
Not really; it's either one or the other, or a split of both. You can't have legal currency stored under your mattress while still having it in the bank at the same time; if you could, you'd be able to just continually withdraw as much as you'd ever need.
Right, that's what makes your DATA different. With DATA you CAN have it in multiple places at once. You can have it under your mattress and in the cloud at the same time... in theory at least. In practice its rarely that easy.
I agree that without a backup there is a risk, but it's not the world-ending thing that RMS makes it out to be.
What good is the 'freedom' to do what you want with your software and your data if you subscribe to someone elses software, and give them control over your data?
Imagine a world with strong protections over real property rights, but everyone has been convinced to live in hotels where the property isn't yours so the rights don't apply, at least not to you.
Gmail, for example, has a terms of service and a privacy policy detailing exactly what they can and cannot do with your information. Most other companies do as well (by law?) and it's usually pretty easy to access.?
Its also a pretty user unfriendly document for the vast majority of these services, including google.
Ultimately you are giving your data to a third party, but I think it's paranoia to say that you should make sure your data never gets stored on the internet.
Agreed. But where is your backup, and how do you access it?
That's like keeping your money under your mattress instead of putting it in a bank -- the bank could, theoretically, take your money and disappear, but it's not at all likely.
Not quite, because with your data, it can (and should) be simultaneously under your mattress AND in a bank. With most web applications, its JUST in the bank, which is just as dumb as as having it just under your mattress.
And as the banks have shown us recently, they do fail.
The trouble with cloud apps isn't just that they host your data, but that they usually host it in proprietary ways, and make it inconvenient to back up yourself, and even if you can back it up, you find that you usually need their services to actually use it. e.g. the backup is really only useful to restore it back to their service; it doesn't do you much good if their service ceases to exist.
This is false. It can take awhile to catch it (as is seen in the AP/UB story),...
So is it safe to play now? That's the question that needs answering. Or is there another scam going that hasn't been caught yet. You don't know.
but statistical analysis will always show if weird things are happening.
Eventually. But what good is that?
People who play seriously online use tools like Poker Tracker, Hold'em Manager, Poker Office, etc to keep track of their own play, wins/losses and whatnot.
Someone noticed something odd about the win rate of a few players. They mentioned it to someone else; who looked and found the same thing. It kept going until the evidence was so great that it couldn't be a statistical anomaly.
And 4 years later they got caught.
"A few players" should have retired their accounts, and spun up new ones every now and then.
Or after 3 years, should have just plain retired and taken their millions to another country. How sure are you this didn't happen too with other teams? Or isn't happening right now?
The real difficulty is in getting sites to admit when something shady has been going on. AP and UB denied that anything had happened for ages. Until the bad press started showing up and it became too much for them to ignore.
So not only does it take YEARS to unmask systematic cheating, but the online houses aren't cooperating to solve the issue faster. That doesn't exactly install confidence...
As I originally said, there is no way to reliably ensure cheating isn't taking place. Sure if it is taking place, one day, we'll know about it, maybe. But the smart criminals will have moved on before then... and meanwhile the new criminals will still be under the statistical radar.
In round numbers, it's a trillion dollar bailout. That's about a 50% one year increase in the federal budget.
So far...
In ten years or so, it'll probably be recompensed, maybe at a loss, maybe at a profit. Let's say it'll be at a 50% loss, so we'll get 500 billion back.
In scale, that's similar to a typical US household, earning $60,000, getting a loan for $30,000, buying a expensive car, then selling it for $15,000 ten years from now.
A typical US household can't afford to do that. A whole country of them doing it all together doesn't somehow magically make the fact that they can't afford it go away.
It's a bitch and a half, but it's not the ruin of the economy.
Not by itself. But its part of a larger spiral. It devalues the dollar, making imports more expensive in a country that relies HEAVILY on imports. Meanwhile local and foreign investors pull their money out of the USA because they are losing money hand over fist and the risk of losing it all is climbing, which exacerbates the credit crunch by removing capital, raising unemployment, and further devaluing the dollar.
Still, the trillion dollar bailout MAY soften the landing, or let it turn around faster with less acute pain than otherwise. I'm not against public intervention on this scale, but the plan they've got on the table right now is utterly idiotic.
Hell, if we simply instituted a freeze in government growth, we would be running a surplus in about four years, and would probably have made back the trillion dollars within ten years.
If the economy spirals into a depression there will be no 'running a surplus in about four years', assuming they could actually freeze spending (which is pretty unlikely).
Don't let the panic on the TV reports spook you. That's what they want.
Agreed. TV reporters are thoughtless ass hats.
Also, buying videogames, and other such pastimes, are absolutely necessarily to keep the economy growing.
In other words: "Set aside whats good for you and put whats good for the economy, for the country, ahead of your own interests."
I believe that's called "communism", one of the dirtiest words one can say in the U-S-of-A.(*)
Advocating to just hang in there is UTTERLY futile. Its only going to work if everyone does it. However, the people that pull out, convert their money to gold, foreign assets, whatever, etc hedging against US currency devaluation, bank failures, further stock market declines, etc start doing better than their peers who stick with the US economy. And that just motivates more and more people to pull out.
Globally the best course of action is to ride it out together, you are right. But individually the best strategy is to get yours out while you can. In a society founded on capitalism and everyone for himself... well... working for the global otpimum is about as likely as a functioning communist system spontaneously happening.
Its ironic because the people calling out for this sort of 'sacrifice whats best for you for whats best for the economy, and it will work out..." includes the staunch free-market libertarians. Yet 'just keep spending and carrying on as normal' is fundamentally a communist and anti-free-market strategy.
(*) Communism as defined by members of society allocating resources for the greater good rather than for their own personal benefit, in the beleif that by serving the greater good. Specifically communism DOESN'T require a state-run-dictatorship allocating resources centrally. Many small communes, for example, are entirely democratic, and the 'sacrifices' are voluntary instead of coerced. It just doesn't work on a larger scale for a variety of reasons. And it won't work to save the US economy for those same reasons.
It is the PC version of 'like a chinaman on rice', therefore using this phrase makes you a revisionist racist arsehole and a politically correct twat all at the same time.
I'd never head that before, so I looked into it "like a chinaman on rice" has 5 hits on google. FIVE. For a racist slur it doesn't get much play. "like white on rice" on the other hand has about 6.5 million hits. Not that google hits mean much, but for an idiom to have 5 hits on google... well... that's not an idiom at all, that's something someone said once.
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Not only that, but some of the most dangerous driving happens in much slower speed zones, for example residential areas, or around schools. How is this going to stop drivers from ploughing over children at 40 mph?
So? What's your point. Its also not going to stop kids from eating too much sugar. But is the fact that it doesn't stop 100% of all problem activity actually relevant to anything?
Are you against bicycle helmets because they don't do anything to stop broken ribs? Are you against crumple zones because they don't prevent fire? Are you against seatbelts because they don't do one damn thing thing to stop missiles (and might even delay you getting out of your car if you see one coming?!! Oh noes!
So you are stuck with the crap build in stereo also kids like to put in there own amps so the sound limit may not work that well then.
This would be used to limit their (mis)use of YOUR car. One would presume that if they are installing stereos and amps, its their car, and if its their car, they'll own the 'adult' keys for it anyway.
"While there are a few situations I've been in where the ability to exceed 80 mph has been critical to safety (getting out from behind dangerous drivers on the freeway who are liable to cause a pileup, for instance), that's not the point."
I guess you drive in excess of 80 all the time. Because there is always another driver further up ahead liable to cause a pileup. And some of them don't even give an indication they are going to cause a pileup until they do... so you should pass those too, just in case. ;)
In fact you'll be safest if:
a) you are in front
b) nobody behind you is gaining on you
Good luck with that. :)
I'm sure californians will feel very safe knowing they can't access every single horsepower to get off that bridge before it collapses in an earthquake.
Riiiiight... so the golden gate bridge is bucking and swaying, cars all around you are coming to a stop... and your going to slam on the gas in your Porsche? You won't get 10 meters before you have an accident on the bridge at the best of times... and your going to do during or in the immediate aftermath of an major earthquake...
And I don't mean without which you would not like the society. I mean there cannot be a society.
Define "society" first.
Because by my definition a society is a community of people living together for the purpose of mutual benefit, including mutual protection and security. If it were to permit maliciously killing each other -- that would fail the test of being a society.
The only time you make excellent money is when you become a superstar.
Ok.
If the RIAA didn't exist, that will almost never happen,
It would happen with the same unlikeliness it happens now.
while with it, you stand a pretty good chance
Uh, no you don't. You stand a terrible chance. First you have to get signed, which is brutally hard, and if you do get signed for the most part, they -decide- exactly how big you get.
(and basically no chance if you are against it).
Primarily because they've muscled you out of all the major places you might have a chance of getting major exposure. If they didn't exist, anyone would have a shot of getting that exposure, not just 'signed bands'.
So artists put up with the RIAA because they'd otherwise probably be looking at flipping burgers and doing gigs on the weekends.
And even after signing this is usually their fate. The RIAA meaning Warner/Sony/EMI/Universal screw the vast majority of the artists they sign.
The internet has made that not quite as true, but they'll still probably never be able to book a large venue.
Again, because they are competing with bands backed by a 900-lb gorilla. Take away the gorilla and bands will still rise to the top and fill large venues. They'll even hire people to do PR, and negotiate merchandise deals, and crap like that.
Man, it's about time that countries which value free speech got rid of sedition laws.
Agreed.
What constitutes "sedition" is so vague, anyway, that the laws should be struck on just that basis.
Don't worry, we'll keep refining the meaning over time until its crystal clear. ;)
http://www.issuepedia.org/Night_Watch
The horrid acting and overall cheesiness in Babylon 5 becomes less noticeable the more you watch.
True the first time through. It suffers badly on repeat viewings though.
The dude says has has $20/week for food/transport/clothes, etc. Whatever he's doing, he's doing it wrong.
If he's looking to sustain himself for life then yeah, if he's in one of those many transitional parts of life then no. I had lots of friends coming out of school, or going to university, or comeing out of university, or after being laid off from a good job, or going through a divorce etc, picking up what they could get and living life like that for a while. They all eventually improved their station, but it takes time.
Oh, and that $20 (actually ~$18) cellphone rate? Thats total. monthly + airtime. What's the trick? PAYG, and don't live on the damn phone.
18$/mo @ say 25c minute = 72 minutes a month. ~2.4 minutes a day. Hell, you can't even look for a job on that kind of ration, never mind conduct business.
I use over 1500 minutes a month, and pay around 56$. That works out to under an hour a day, and doesn't remotely qualify as 'living on the phone'. Someone with a $40 phone is living pretty frugally in my books. A $20 phone is someone who doesn't use it.
"it's not MY fault, it's the fault of people with good jobs". Please...waa waa waa.
But the reality is that any "lost revenue" is not his "fault". He's not whining that he should be entitled to free music, he's pointing out, rightly, that his infringement doesn't make any difference to the industries bottom line.
If he couldn't consume for free, he wouldn't consume at all. Perhaps he shouldn't consume, but that's separate question.
No you don't. My cell costs less than 1/2 that.
Mine costs triple that. I couldn't bring it down to save my life. If I had your deal at ~$20/mo I'd end up paying hundreds a month in airtime. If he says he HAS to have a phone at $40/month, why not take him at his word. Maybe if he shaves $20 bucks of his plan, it will cost him hundreds. Sure he could talk less, but that might mean not talking to clients, again costing him hundreds...
Instead of being 'stuck in the house', a second job, or school to get a better job, might be in order. And NetZero is only $9.95/month..:)
1) Going to school costs money, and likely conflicts with work.
2) Getting a 2nd job likely conflicts with his first job, and usually results in massive stress. Lots of people CAN'T just get a 2nd job. If you work a mc-job or mall-job for example, where they seemingly schedule staff blindfolded with a dart board, you can't possible hope to find a compatible 2nd job, and if you limit your availability at one job to give your self some gaurantee for the other one, they more often than not retaliate by dropping you down to 1 shift every two weeks... meaning you now have no job.
Getting a 2nd job for a lot of people usually means finding a 1st job that has static reliable hours first, before they can even think about getting a 2nd job. And who knows, maybe he's looking for a new, better, first job, that's as good as his current job but with better hours. It doesn't happen overnight.
And Netzero? Please.
Don't use your apparent insolvency to justify why you think you are entitled to music for free.
He's not saying he's entitled. He's saying he's not costing the industry anything, because if he couldn't download the songs for free its not like he would buy them. He's saying, rightly, that "losses" due to copyright infringement are inherently false because the majority of the billions of dollars of "lost revenue" don't exist. For a lot of people, including him: if they couldn't consume for free they wouldn't consume at all.
That said, I doubt there's any normally-functioning adult unaware of the concept. How else would they buy real estate? Cars? Or even go to a garage sale? If someone actually bought a house without negotiating it, they might as well change their name to Sucker McShit-For-Brains right now.
I'm sure there are few who are 'unaware' of the concept. However, LOTS of people suck at it, and have near zero practice at it. How many times do you buy a house or car after all? With a house you have an agent acting as a proxy. And a lot of people buying a car don't get anywhere near the deal they could. And dickering over $1 items at a garage sale isn't the same. I'm terrible at haggling, and I KNOW I'm terrible at it, I still bring my father out when I'm car shopping, because I know he's far better at it. And as bad as I am I know of many many many people who are MUCH MUCH worse than me.
(Actually I'm only really terrible at buying stuff I want... I'm actually pretty good when negotiating on behalf of someone else; so I bring in others when I'm buying something -- and in kind, others bring me in when they are buying something. I don't think this is unsual either... when you care about the item your dealing for I think you're far more likely to cave... while if you are negotiating on behalf of someone else you are much more prepared to walk.)
If you are really into driving, PS3 is the only answer.
err.... if you are really into driving, the PC is the only answer.
Logitech is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to some of the stuff out there...
Stuff like:
http://www.act-labs.com/race_combo3.htm
Although seriously, if you are REALLY into driving shell out for a track day at a local track with an in-car instructor. Games don't hold a candle to the real thing...
One little flaw, they may be highly flammable but they are also highly transportable. If the plane EXPLODED, and if the hikers were where it exploded, sure.
1) depending on the environment the hikers could have walked within 50 yards from the crash site and not seen it.
2) even if he didn't survive, or died away from the crash site, animals could have wandered off with stuff either from the crash site, or from the site where he passed away.
As someone else said a bear might easily be interested in taking a bite out of a leather wallet, or briefcase. It might also rip through a bag cotaining perhaps a sweater, and then strew its contents of anything it wasn't interested in along it path. Contents which might be moved further by weather or other animals...
1) Everyone I give my email address to is given a different alias, in the form 'myname-alias.validation@mydomain.com'. 'validation' is basically the hash of the salted alias, with different salting recipes for different pattern-matches just to make life difficult for spammers.
Ok. So you effectively made the most complicated whitelist imaginable. Except instead of whitelisting your contacts, you've added a layer of indirection and whitelist a code your contacts must send you instead.
I've seen the same thing implemented many times before by giving each contact a passcode and requiring them to include it in the subject line of all correspondence. I do give you props for embedding it into the address instead of the subject line, as that will let you use it for automated systems, like websites that 'extort' an address, etc.
Aside from the fact that some people and businesses get seriously weirded out when they're told to email you at 'myusername-theircompanyname.longhexstring@mydomain.org', it works BRILLIANTLY.
Yes, if torpedoing usability was your goal. What happens when you send something to someone and they reply? Do they have to use your unique address to reply? What do you do when you need write an email address out or give it over the phone? goofball-yourdomain-a23fbf32a4e544303... good times. Or if someone forwards your message to a 3rd person to reply to you...
My email has gone from "worthless due to the avalanche of spam" to "for all intents and purposes, spam-free", and has stayed that way for almost six years now.
I manage the same with spamassassin, amavisd etc and a couple custom rules. And my mail server processes some 30,000 messages a day as well, for a business with half a dozen employees. We get maybe 8 or so spam through a day, and less than half a dozen false positives a month. (Most of which are due to other people sending from domains that publish SPA records and then don't follow what they've published...ie their own damned fault.)
But for the world's Slashdot Elite, it's a nice, elegant solution (as long as you've got your own domain name or ten and have either a dedicated server or a hosting account somewhere with shell and script access so you can run Procmail.
I wouldn't call it elegant. Clever yes, but not elegant.
Anything sent to 'myname@mydomain.com' automatically bounces with message to go to my website and obtain an alias to use for contacting me. Ditto, for the first message addressed to a given 'alias' whose 'validation' is invalid (thereafter they're unceremoniously sent to /dev/null).
Do you even score it for spam at all or do you just generate a lot of needless backscatter?
At the end of the day, I'm not really seeing the advantage of your solution over a moderately sophisticated white-listing + grey-listing solution.
They consented to play on using a format that cannot be secured. So the answer is "yes".
You seem to be using 'consented' in a rather absurd manner.
By that logic, if I get mugged on the way home today its because I consented to walk home along routes that I cannot ensure are secured.
Of course, I could elect not to walk, but then I apparently consent to get carjacked because I consent to drive along routes I cannot ensure are secured...
I'm sure they accept -some- risk that cheating is possible, but they certainly don't consent to be cheated, and I would further argue that most of them have absolutely no concept of the level of risk they are taking on, and that most of them would make different choices if they actually understood the risk.
Seriously, if you think playing online amounts to consent to be cheated, then its no wonder you you thought your analogy wasn't false. Hell, by that twisted logic I perhaps it wasn't.
Its the gamers who want something to buy beyond Zelda or Mario.
meh, there's lots to play out there. Radiant Dawn, Mercury Meltdown, Zack&Wiki, Metroid3, Godfather, ...
I dunno, there are easily 20+ games that are more than difficult enough to be a 'gamers' game. And there are several 'casual' titles that are worthy of play too, and then there's plenty to to be had on the Virtual Console/WiiWare. I just can't be that sympathetic; there is plenty of value there.
And honestly, if you are consuming titles at such a high a rate that the Wii library is 'woefully inadequate', you've already got at least 1 of the other consoles in addition to the Wii, and possibly a DS or PSP to boot.
If that is you, and you are still complaining about the lack of titles... then your expectations are out of whack, or you are skipping tons of good quality games... probably both.
Nintendo has already said they want to go to shorter release cycles. This would put the Wii at four years. I actually expect a new Wii a lot shorter than that.
Beats me.
Although I do expect a WiiHD is going to be a lot harder sell. They had a lot of hype with the Wii and sold--and still selling--based off of it.
Right, the Wii is just a fad. Keep telling yourself that.
But a lot of these Wiis are now sitting around collecting dust waiting for decent games.
An asinine observation. Its true of EVERY system, and everyone's definition of 'decent games' is different. A lot of PS3 are collecting dust too, and xbox360s too.
That said, consider the Wii Fit is still a total sell out after moving 2 million units. To me that pretty much blows your theory that everyone is waiting around for something to buy.
A couple cult following titles and a few lackluster first part titles. They have been been greeted with a lot of hope, and some good reviews from some Nintendo friendly reviewers. But I don't know a lot of people still playing their copies of SMG, MK, or even Brawl.
Same could be said of any of the franchise games for any of the consoles.
I just think it's going to be a hard sell the next around of systems, where they are going to have to show some major titles with some real lasting appeal are going to come.
Like what? Halo 3? Call of Duty? Complete with an achievement system so they can be ranked against 15-year-olds around the world? Yeah, the casuals are going to be lining up to get on that bus. Get real.
Does anyone really think the "casual" gamers who got on board with Wii Play and Wii Fit are going to go buy another system for Wii Play 2 and Wii Fit 2 when they bought the first ones and it sat in the corner a couple of weeks after they had it?
If they think it will be fun and entertain them for a while? Yes.
They don't need to play it 10 hours a week every week to feel they got good value. Even if they pull it out once a month or so for parties or when the grandkids come over, or they play the odd game of tennis, they're happy with their purchase. When the next version comes out, if it has something they want, they'll buy it.
It really is that simple.
Finally, if current trends are an indication: if they launched a "Wii 2" today, they'd sell a quarter million a week easily, and that's assuming the 30 million people who already have a Wii DON'T upgrade. They don't even NEED to 'convert' Wii owners, the untapped market is still large enough.
Of course, they will market to Wii owners as well, and some significant percentage WILL upgrade. A LOT of people are more than satisfied with their purchase. Hell, if they manage to sell a Wii 2 to just half the Wii 1 owners and don't sell a single unit to anyone else, they'll still outsell the PS3.
You can't ensure in a casino either...
In that there can be no 100% guarantee, I agree.
But there is very real confidence level difference. And the confidence level for honesty that is achieved in a real casino is orders of magnitude better than what is achieved by online gambling sites.
Real casinos are regulated, financially audited, the equipment is tested and certified, and periodically re-tested. I concede that you'll never be certain that the system isn't rigged, but you can be reasonably certain it isn't.
Online casinos are a whole different ballgame.
Well, in Gmail's case, you can use POP3 and store a copy locally.
You can, but do you? How many people do this? And that's just gmail, which is just glorified webmail.
A lot of the stuff going on with 'cloud computing' isn't piggybacking on decades old standards, and has no real fallbacks.
How do you back up your facebook content?
Not really; it's either one or the other, or a split of both. You can't have legal currency stored under your mattress while still having it in the bank at the same time; if you could, you'd be able to just continually withdraw as much as you'd ever need.
Right, that's what makes your DATA different. With DATA you CAN have it in multiple places at once. You can have it under your mattress and in the cloud at the same time... in theory at least. In practice its rarely that easy.
I agree that without a backup there is a risk, but it's not the world-ending thing that RMS makes it out to be.
What good is the 'freedom' to do what you want with your software and your data if you subscribe to someone elses software, and give them control over your data?
Imagine a world with strong protections over real property rights, but everyone has been convinced to live in hotels where the property isn't yours so the rights don't apply, at least not to you.
Gmail, for example, has a terms of service and a privacy policy detailing exactly what they can and cannot do with your information. Most other companies do as well (by law?) and it's usually pretty easy to access.?
Its also a pretty user unfriendly document for the vast majority of these services, including google.
Ultimately you are giving your data to a third party, but I think it's paranoia to say that you should make sure your data never gets stored on the internet.
Agreed. But where is your backup, and how do you access it?
That's like keeping your money under your mattress instead of putting it in a bank -- the bank could, theoretically, take your money and disappear, but it's not at all likely.
Not quite, because with your data, it can (and should) be simultaneously under your mattress AND in a bank. With most web applications, its JUST in the bank, which is just as dumb as as having it just under your mattress.
And as the banks have shown us recently, they do fail.
The trouble with cloud apps isn't just that they host your data, but that they usually host it in proprietary ways, and make it inconvenient to back up yourself, and even if you can back it up, you find that you usually need their services to actually use it. e.g. the backup is really only useful to restore it back to their service; it doesn't do you much good if their service ceases to exist.
Why limit what consenting adults want to do in their free time?
Really? Did anyone consent to be cheated?
Hell, let's just ban the internet, since it's "virtually impossible" to keep it from being used to steal music and distribute kiddy porn.
False analogy and you know it.
This is false. It can take awhile to catch it (as is seen in the AP/UB story),...
So is it safe to play now? That's the question that needs answering. Or is there another scam going that hasn't been caught yet. You don't know.
but statistical analysis will always show if weird things are happening.
Eventually. But what good is that?
People who play seriously online use tools like Poker Tracker, Hold'em Manager, Poker Office, etc to keep track of their own play, wins/losses and whatnot.
Someone noticed something odd about the win rate of a few players. They mentioned it to someone else; who looked and found the same thing. It kept going until the evidence was so great that it couldn't be a statistical anomaly.
And 4 years later they got caught.
"A few players" should have retired their accounts, and spun up new ones every now and then.
Or after 3 years, should have just plain retired and taken their millions to another country. How sure are you this didn't happen too with other teams? Or isn't happening right now?
The real difficulty is in getting sites to admit when something shady has been going on. AP and UB denied that anything had happened for ages. Until the bad press started showing up and it became too much for them to ignore.
So not only does it take YEARS to unmask systematic cheating, but the online houses aren't cooperating to solve the issue faster. That doesn't exactly install confidence...
As I originally said, there is no way to reliably ensure cheating isn't taking place. Sure if it is taking place, one day, we'll know about it, maybe. But the smart criminals will have moved on before then... and meanwhile the new criminals will still be under the statistical radar.
So why should the poker business not exist?
Online poker for real money shouldn't exist because its virtually impossible to ensure systematic cheating isn't taking place.
Scientific experiments are usually one-sided: a positive result tells you something, a negative result tells you nothing.
That is soooooo wrong it hurts.
In round numbers, it's a trillion dollar bailout. That's about a 50% one year increase in the federal budget.
So far...
In ten years or so, it'll probably be recompensed, maybe at a loss, maybe at a profit. Let's say it'll be at a 50% loss, so we'll get 500 billion back.
In scale, that's similar to a typical US household, earning $60,000, getting a loan for $30,000, buying a expensive car, then selling it for $15,000 ten years from now.
A typical US household can't afford to do that. A whole country of them doing it all together doesn't somehow magically make the fact that they can't afford it go away.
It's a bitch and a half, but it's not the ruin of the economy.
Not by itself. But its part of a larger spiral. It devalues the dollar, making imports more expensive in a country that relies HEAVILY on imports. Meanwhile local and foreign investors pull their money out of the USA because they are losing money hand over fist and the risk of losing it all is climbing, which exacerbates the credit crunch by removing capital, raising unemployment, and further devaluing the dollar.
Still, the trillion dollar bailout MAY soften the landing, or let it turn around faster with less acute pain than otherwise. I'm not against public intervention on this scale, but the plan they've got on the table right now is utterly idiotic.
Hell, if we simply instituted a freeze in government growth, we would be running a surplus in about four years, and would probably have made back the trillion dollars within ten years.
If the economy spirals into a depression there will be no 'running a surplus in about four years', assuming they could actually freeze spending (which is pretty unlikely).
Don't let the panic on the TV reports spook you. That's what they want.
Agreed. TV reporters are thoughtless ass hats.
Also, buying videogames, and other such pastimes, are absolutely necessarily to keep the economy growing.
In other words: "Set aside whats good for you and put whats good for the economy, for the country, ahead of your own interests."
I believe that's called "communism", one of the dirtiest words one can say in the U-S-of-A.(*)
Advocating to just hang in there is UTTERLY futile. Its only going to work if everyone does it. However, the people that pull out, convert their money to gold, foreign assets, whatever, etc hedging against US currency devaluation, bank failures, further stock market declines, etc start doing better than their peers who stick with the US economy. And that just motivates more and more people to pull out.
Globally the best course of action is to ride it out together, you are right. But individually the best strategy is to get yours out while you can. In a society founded on capitalism and everyone for himself... well... working for the global otpimum is about as likely as a functioning communist system spontaneously happening.
Its ironic because the people calling out for this sort of 'sacrifice whats best for you for whats best for the economy, and it will work out..." includes the staunch free-market libertarians. Yet 'just keep spending and carrying on as normal' is fundamentally a communist and anti-free-market strategy.
(*) Communism as defined by members of society allocating resources for the greater good rather than for their own personal benefit, in the beleif that by serving the greater good. Specifically communism DOESN'T require a state-run-dictatorship allocating resources centrally. Many small communes, for example, are entirely democratic, and the 'sacrifices' are voluntary instead of coerced. It just doesn't work on a larger scale for a variety of reasons. And it won't work to save the US economy for those same reasons.
It is the PC version of 'like a chinaman on rice', therefore using this phrase makes you a revisionist racist arsehole and a politically correct twat all at the same time.
I'd never head that before, so I looked into it "like a chinaman on rice" has 5 hits on google. FIVE. For a racist slur it doesn't get much play. "like white on rice" on the other hand has about 6.5 million hits. Not that google hits mean much, but for an idiom to have 5 hits on google... well... that's not an idiom at all, that's something someone said once.
So I call bullshit.