Exactly like they did for Beautiful Katamari. It cost me full price (GBP 40) with only about half the levels available and I had to pay another GBP 15 or so (about 2000 points IIRC). They were on the disc, you just weren't allowed access to them until you'd paid the extra. It did convince me to never buy a full price game again.
The 360 is just as bad. I recently bought an Elite to replace my failed and just out of warranty original Premium unit and discovered that you couldn't re-download purchased Live Arcade games or game add-on content so I'm still having to use my old 20GB HD with it while the 120GB drive which came with the Elite sits gathering dust in a drawer.
The original author most certainly was not the beneficiary of that transaction. The way he was screwed over on royalties and merchandising rights for Watchmen is one of the reasons Alan Moore still refuses to have anything to do with DC. See his wikipedia page for more details.
They still do this through the Home Use Program which is so cheap it may as well be free. I got a legitimate copy of Office Enterprise 2007 under this for £17.99 including P&P.
And the premise behind a recent Grant Morrison arc (Batman 672-674). Gotham City PD train three cops to take over in case Batman is ever killed. Unfortunately (and predictably enough) they all went nuts.
Come off it, every channel "advertises" what programmes are coming up next/soon. The real difference with the BBC is that there are far fewer ads - e.g. absolutely none in the middle of programmes.
1. They don't need ads between the programmes. There are now BBC programmes which are basically nothing more than adverts (e.g. the Saturday evening reality shows which are nothing more than promotion for Andrew Lloyd-Webber's latest musical abomination).
2. BBC radio has adopted the format of 45-60 seconds of ads every two records. These are actually even more irritating than the ads on commercial radio as they repeat the same ones endlessly - which, if you're off work and have the radio on all day, slowly drives you insane (and these include ads for other BBC channels, not just the particular radio station). I understand that this has been done to make it easier for paid adverts to be dropped in for people listening on-line outside the UK, which is the eventual goal.
Can they actually do that in the US (genuine question - I'm not familiar with this aspect of US takeover regulations)? In the UK if a company walks away from a potential takeover it isn't allowed to try again for a year.
Cromulent is actually from to the Dr Johnson episode of Blackadder III. If the Simpsons have used it, it was in homage (or they stole it, if you prefer).
I think it might have more to do with the fact that, compared to illegal drugs, booze is incredibly cheap. For the price of an oz of weed (about GBP165 in London, or so I'm, er, told) I could get 5 and a half bottles of my favourite Whiskey (Laphroig Quarter Cask - GBP30 per bottle).
Not only is it "only" 720p, it's only 2 channel sound as I discovered (and was disgusted by) after downloading the Matrix to compare to the DVD version. The DVD version - played through a DVD player with HDMI and 1080p upscaler - also won on picture quality in my entirely unscientific and subjective opinion.
I think you may well be right. I know of more than a few people, like my mother and many of her friends, who have bought HDTVs because they're slim and look nice but have no idea what high definition means or what, apart from the the size and integrated Freeview tuner, makes the new TV different from their old CRT set. These people will not be buying an HD disc player.
I, on the other hand, am something of a movie buff, I got into DVD in a fairly big way and own 500+ movies (excluding porn and TV shows). There's no way I'm going to pay to replace these with Blu-Ray or any other HD format. A found a a £150 DVD player with HDMI and on-board scaler to be a much better investment. Maybe it's not quite as good looking as an HD disc would be (but who can really tell? I don't think more than a dozen of my movies are actually available in Blu-Ray or HD-DVD yet), but it certainly revitalised my disc collection.
It's not a tax break as such. It's transfer pricing, or a version of it. It's one of the oldest tax avoidance tricks in the book. Make your product in one jurisidiction, sell it to a subsidiary in a lower tax jurisdiction at cost (so booking zero profit) and have that subsidiary sell it on at the actual retail price, thus keeping your profits out of reach of the taxman in the higher tax jurisdiction.
Most jurisidictions' tax codes have rules which are designed to prevent this (most commonly by requiring goods to be sold between subsidiaries in different jurisdictions on arm's legnth terms and by assessing tax on the arm's legnth price if this was not charged). I'm surprised that Washington state doesn't have anything like this (or, possibly, it does and MS' tax counsel have figured out a way to avoid the rules applying to IP).
Is the Super Bowl pay per view (I'm in Europe and don't know what the TV arrangements are? If not what's being "stolen" from the NFL? Assuming no admission is being charged, how is having 100 people watch on one big screen any different from having 10 people watch on 10 smaller screen? They all see the ads and the sponsors.
Has coverage of "the children" become as schizophrenic in the US as it is in the UK these days?
Over here the press seems to alternate between stories about how the paedaphiles are coming for YOUR children and they're coming NOW (in fact, they're proably watching your child's school as you read this) and demanding that children be protected from the possibility of gaining the merest hint of the existence of sex, drugs or other "adult" topics lest it destroy their delicate little minds, on the one hand, and stories about how the streets are full of feral children who'll stab you for your mobile phone and iPod the second you leave the house, accompanied by demands for longer prison sentences for children and for them to be served in adult prisons (presumably to give the incarcerated paedaphiles something to keep them occupied) on the other.
If you consider having to get an emergency government loan of £24 billion in order to maintain solvency in the face of depositors withdrawing their money, together with a government guarantee worth £30 billion or so in order to allow you to access the wholesale money markets, trading normally then that's right. It's more accurate, I think, to say that Northern Rock's business model of borrowing short (by issuing short term paper secured on their mortgage portfolio) to lend long collapsed following the flight from mortgaged backed securities in August/September. There may be a legitimate debate to be had over whether or not Northern Rock's mortgage assets are really as valueless as the markets think - the UK government certainly seems to think not but I'm not sure that's a punt I want them taking with my taxes.
They were one of the production companies behind "Election" which is, IMHO, the cleverest and blackest comedy of the last 10 years or so. Given the quality of subsequent MTV movies though I suspect this was more luck than judgement.
...that the BBC download system won't work on Macs given that every BBC technical bod I know (and I know quite a few through my sister and her husband who both work in post-production there) is a complete Mac obsessive.
Hardly. But software companies make a big thing out of how they're selling us the data, and a license to use the data (which is not expressed to be a license to use the data until such time, if any, as the media on which that data is provided becomes unusable), rather than the media itself. Given that these companies also implement copy protection making it very difficult to make casual back-ups (which, I would argue, is the only way to really "take care of your stuff" in this context) I think, in all the circumstances, it's perfectly reasonable for them to provide a new disc at cost in the event that a customer's disc ceases to function.
I used MD (and HiMD) for my portable music needs about 9 years for the period between the death of cassette and me finally succumbing and buying an iPod last year out of sheer frustration with Sony's arrogance. While I liked the format and owned four portable players a micro system with built in MD player which I had at work and even a rack size stand alone recorder/player and I really don't agree that it was ahead of its time. The original players were conceived more as a direct replacement for cassette than anything else. They did not integrate with computers at all and you had to record directly from your CD player in real time meaning that making a compilation disc was as time consuming as making a mix tape used to be (and you couldn't adjust recording levels to equalise volume over the disc without introducing unpleasant digital distortion) and maximum play time was 74 minutes. Notwithstanding that I preferred them to portable CD players, which were the only alternative at the time.
Sony did not introduce NetMD with its PC integration until 2002, sometime after HDD and solid state mp3 players had started to become popular and (I always felt) as a grudging and half-arsed response to them. Looking back now I can't believe I stuck with NetMD as long as I did, I guess it must be true what they say about vendor lock-in - I had spent a lot of time recording MDs and I didn't want to start again on a new format. NetMD offered little over regular MD (a couple of long play modes of which only LP2 was seriously usuable for music and the fact your music was now also stored on your PC) Amongst the numerous problems the NetMD software (orginally called OpenMGJukebox, later SonicStage) had were:
1. The fact it would only let you export a track to a maximum of 3 MDs. This was a blaket prohibition and, perhaps, the earliest example of Sony's draconian approach to DRM. This limitation became a real problem for me when I had a bag with most of my MDs in it stolen.
2. If you had to do a system restore it would break the DRM and you would not have to access your music library at all. There was supposed to be a tool which fixed this. I could never make it work for me. It was when this happened for the second time (and Sony support claimed that this wasn't a bug but a feature) that I decided to buy an iPod.
3. The NetMD could only read ATRAC format files meaning that any MP3s etc had to be converted. This resulted in loss of quality and would not work at all with WMA files (I think this may have finally been fixed recently).
HiMD was actually a big advance I thought - 1GB discs, the ability to record PCM - but it was too little too late. When it was released it sold for the same price as as an iPod and just couldn't compete, especially given the awful software. I probably didn't help that spare 1GB discs weren't available until months after the players were launched)
Re:What's good for the goose...
on
Explosives Camp
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· Score: 1
I can't quite work out if you're being sarcastic or not. By your definition pretty much every government in the Middle East (save for Israel and, ironically, the Hamas lot elected in the West Bank) is criminal, including staunch US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt (I don't believe Iraq has a government in the true, legal, sense of the word since it does not appear to be in control of large swathes of its territory and most certainly does not have a monopoly on the use of force within its borders).
I also think it's misleading to talk about countries having "rights" to nukes, or anything else. If a country is doing something which other countries don't like then those countries have to consider what is an appropriate and proportionate use of their resources to stop that action (which can be anything from diplomatic notes to trade embargos to war). If these sanctions hurt the first country enough then it will stop. This is a pure application of power and the language of rights or morality is not relevant, it's just something we in the West like to say to make us feel righteous and justified in defending our interests as, for some reason, we seem to have become uncomfortable with admitting that we are rich and powerful and use that wealth and power to defend our wealth and power and acquire more. Unfortunately, we have started to believe our own rehtoric and this has trapped us in Iraq years after the mission we went there for (to depose Saddam and check for WMDs) has been completed as we (bizarrely) decided to try to turn Iraq into Belgium rather than just install another strong-man and letting him get on with repression of religious extremists and being a counterweight to Iran. This has left us with hundreds of thousands of troops with extremely exposed supply lines in an area of Iranian influence which stops us from making as vigorous a response to Iranian actions than we otherwise might.
I take the point. The problem is the tone of the book (especially the ending) makes that interpretation very difficult to sustain. Still it did its job, I guess, as, sucker that I am, I'm now buying World War Hulk to see if Richards and Stark finally get the kicking they so richly deserve.
I think that's the point. I don't read comics anything like as much as I used to, and hadn't read any "classic" universe Marvel for a few years, when I picked up the trade paperback of Civil War a couple of months ago. The whole thing seemed to be an allegory for current US politics with Captain America representing the liberal "we must not let the terrorists win by abrogating our freedoms" wing and with the killer android and concentration camp designing Reed Richards and Tony Stark representing the neocon "things have changed and the world is too dangerous for our old freedoms" wing. The point is the neocons do win. Captain America is shown to be out of touch and unrepresentative of (and in the final issue he is attacked by) the ordinary Americans he purports to represent, whereas Richards and Stark are hailed as true heroes. Sure, Sue gets a bit miffed with Reed about the whole killer android version of Thor thing, running off to join Caps rebels but she soons gets over her feminine mood swing and comes back - in an interesting parallel to recent Scooter Libby developments, Reed demands, and gets, a full pardon for Sue while his concentration camp is slowly filled with all the other post humans who refuse to co-operate with Reed and Stark.
And that's it. Reed and Stark turn into Henry Bendix types who kill and imprison people to help bring about their conception of a finer world with no comebacks (unless, as I fervently hope, at some point during World War Hulk, the Hulk removes Stark from his armour via the neck and then uses the emtpy shell as a latrine). The whole book seemed to be an endorsement of the idea of the competent, benign (unless you disagree with him - in which case its Prison 42 for you) dictator and, for me at least, left a bad taste. A shame as I've really liked Millar's work on The Ultimates.
And what's the basis for their position? They allow 18 certificate (i.e. adult only games) to be released in the UK/Europe so why aren't Americans allowed games which aren't suitable for children (beyond the obvious satiric answers)? Is it the same non-logic as is applied by US cinemas to X (or NC-17) rated titles i.e. pornography is always rated X, therefore anything rated X is pornography, we don't show pornography therefore we don't show anything rated X.
I find it particularly odd that Sony would ban games which aren't suitable for children given all their efforts to get consoles out of the "kids only" ghetto and the fact they're now trying to sell us a £425 "digital entertainment hub" which (realistically) can only be afforded by an adult with a reasonable amount of disposable income.
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Exactly like they did for Beautiful Katamari. It cost me full price (GBP 40) with only about half the levels available and I had to pay another GBP 15 or so (about 2000 points IIRC). They were on the disc, you just weren't allowed access to them until you'd paid the extra. It did convince me to never buy a full price game again.
Thanks.
The 360 is just as bad. I recently bought an Elite to replace my failed and just out of warranty original Premium unit and discovered that you couldn't re-download purchased Live Arcade games or game add-on content so I'm still having to use my old 20GB HD with it while the 120GB drive which came with the Elite sits gathering dust in a drawer.
The original author most certainly was not the beneficiary of that transaction. The way he was screwed over on royalties and merchandising rights for Watchmen is one of the reasons Alan Moore still refuses to have anything to do with DC. See his wikipedia page for more details.
They still do this through the Home Use Program which is so cheap it may as well be free. I got a legitimate copy of Office Enterprise 2007 under this for £17.99 including P&P.
And the premise behind a recent Grant Morrison arc (Batman 672-674). Gotham City PD train three cops to take over in case Batman is ever killed. Unfortunately (and predictably enough) they all went nuts.
1. They don't need ads between the programmes. There are now BBC programmes which are basically nothing more than adverts (e.g. the Saturday evening reality shows which are nothing more than promotion for Andrew Lloyd-Webber's latest musical abomination).
2. BBC radio has adopted the format of 45-60 seconds of ads every two records. These are actually even more irritating than the ads on commercial radio as they repeat the same ones endlessly - which, if you're off work and have the radio on all day, slowly drives you insane (and these include ads for other BBC channels, not just the particular radio station). I understand that this has been done to make it easier for paid adverts to be dropped in for people listening on-line outside the UK, which is the eventual goal.
Can they actually do that in the US (genuine question - I'm not familiar with this aspect of US takeover regulations)? In the UK if a company walks away from a potential takeover it isn't allowed to try again for a year.
Cromulent is actually from to the Dr Johnson episode of Blackadder III. If the Simpsons have used it, it was in homage (or they stole it, if you prefer).
The Milankovitch cycles?
I think it might have more to do with the fact that, compared to illegal drugs, booze is incredibly cheap. For the price of an oz of weed (about GBP165 in London, or so I'm, er, told) I could get 5 and a half bottles of my favourite Whiskey (Laphroig Quarter Cask - GBP30 per bottle).
Not only is it "only" 720p, it's only 2 channel sound as I discovered (and was disgusted by) after downloading the Matrix to compare to the DVD version. The DVD version - played through a DVD player with HDMI and 1080p upscaler - also won on picture quality in my entirely unscientific and subjective opinion.
I, on the other hand, am something of a movie buff, I got into DVD in a fairly big way and own 500+ movies (excluding porn and TV shows). There's no way I'm going to pay to replace these with Blu-Ray or any other HD format. A found a a £150 DVD player with HDMI and on-board scaler to be a much better investment. Maybe it's not quite as good looking as an HD disc would be (but who can really tell? I don't think more than a dozen of my movies are actually available in Blu-Ray or HD-DVD yet), but it certainly revitalised my disc collection.
Most jurisidictions' tax codes have rules which are designed to prevent this (most commonly by requiring goods to be sold between subsidiaries in different jurisdictions on arm's legnth terms and by assessing tax on the arm's legnth price if this was not charged). I'm surprised that Washington state doesn't have anything like this (or, possibly, it does and MS' tax counsel have figured out a way to avoid the rules applying to IP).
Is the Super Bowl pay per view (I'm in Europe and don't know what the TV arrangements are? If not what's being "stolen" from the NFL? Assuming no admission is being charged, how is having 100 people watch on one big screen any different from having 10 people watch on 10 smaller screen? They all see the ads and the sponsors.
Has coverage of "the children" become as schizophrenic in the US as it is in the UK these days? Over here the press seems to alternate between stories about how the paedaphiles are coming for YOUR children and they're coming NOW (in fact, they're proably watching your child's school as you read this) and demanding that children be protected from the possibility of gaining the merest hint of the existence of sex, drugs or other "adult" topics lest it destroy their delicate little minds, on the one hand, and stories about how the streets are full of feral children who'll stab you for your mobile phone and iPod the second you leave the house, accompanied by demands for longer prison sentences for children and for them to be served in adult prisons (presumably to give the incarcerated paedaphiles something to keep them occupied) on the other.
If you consider having to get an emergency government loan of £24 billion in order to maintain solvency in the face of depositors withdrawing their money, together with a government guarantee worth £30 billion or so in order to allow you to access the wholesale money markets, trading normally then that's right. It's more accurate, I think, to say that Northern Rock's business model of borrowing short (by issuing short term paper secured on their mortgage portfolio) to lend long collapsed following the flight from mortgaged backed securities in August/September. There may be a legitimate debate to be had over whether or not Northern Rock's mortgage assets are really as valueless as the markets think - the UK government certainly seems to think not but I'm not sure that's a punt I want them taking with my taxes.
They were one of the production companies behind "Election" which is, IMHO, the cleverest and blackest comedy of the last 10 years or so. Given the quality of subsequent MTV movies though I suspect this was more luck than judgement.
...that the BBC download system won't work on Macs given that every BBC technical bod I know (and I know quite a few through my sister and her husband who both work in post-production there) is a complete Mac obsessive.
Hardly. But software companies make a big thing out of how they're selling us the data, and a license to use the data (which is not expressed to be a license to use the data until such time, if any, as the media on which that data is provided becomes unusable), rather than the media itself. Given that these companies also implement copy protection making it very difficult to make casual back-ups (which, I would argue, is the only way to really "take care of your stuff" in this context) I think, in all the circumstances, it's perfectly reasonable for them to provide a new disc at cost in the event that a customer's disc ceases to function.
I used MD (and HiMD) for my portable music needs about 9 years for the period between the death of cassette and me finally succumbing and buying an iPod last year out of sheer frustration with Sony's arrogance. While I liked the format and owned four portable players a micro system with built in MD player which I had at work and even a rack size stand alone recorder/player and I really don't agree that it was ahead of its time. The original players were conceived more as a direct replacement for cassette than anything else. They did not integrate with computers at all and you had to record directly from your CD player in real time meaning that making a compilation disc was as time consuming as making a mix tape used to be (and you couldn't adjust recording levels to equalise volume over the disc without introducing unpleasant digital distortion) and maximum play time was 74 minutes. Notwithstanding that I preferred them to portable CD players, which were the only alternative at the time.
Sony did not introduce NetMD with its PC integration until 2002, sometime after HDD and solid state mp3 players had started to become popular and (I always felt) as a grudging and half-arsed response to them. Looking back now I can't believe I stuck with NetMD as long as I did, I guess it must be true what they say about vendor lock-in - I had spent a lot of time recording MDs and I didn't want to start again on a new format. NetMD offered little over regular MD (a couple of long play modes of which only LP2 was seriously usuable for music and the fact your music was now also stored on your PC) Amongst the numerous problems the NetMD software (orginally called OpenMGJukebox, later SonicStage) had were:
1. The fact it would only let you export a track to a maximum of 3 MDs. This was a blaket prohibition and, perhaps, the earliest example of Sony's draconian approach to DRM. This limitation became a real problem for me when I had a bag with most of my MDs in it stolen.
2. If you had to do a system restore it would break the DRM and you would not have to access your music library at all. There was supposed to be a tool which fixed this. I could never make it work for me. It was when this happened for the second time (and Sony support claimed that this wasn't a bug but a feature) that I decided to buy an iPod.
3. The NetMD could only read ATRAC format files meaning that any MP3s etc had to be converted. This resulted in loss of quality and would not work at all with WMA files (I think this may have finally been fixed recently).
HiMD was actually a big advance I thought - 1GB discs, the ability to record PCM - but it was too little too late. When it was released it sold for the same price as as an iPod and just couldn't compete, especially given the awful software. I probably didn't help that spare 1GB discs weren't available until months after the players were launched)
I also think it's misleading to talk about countries having "rights" to nukes, or anything else. If a country is doing something which other countries don't like then those countries have to consider what is an appropriate and proportionate use of their resources to stop that action (which can be anything from diplomatic notes to trade embargos to war). If these sanctions hurt the first country enough then it will stop. This is a pure application of power and the language of rights or morality is not relevant, it's just something we in the West like to say to make us feel righteous and justified in defending our interests as, for some reason, we seem to have become uncomfortable with admitting that we are rich and powerful and use that wealth and power to defend our wealth and power and acquire more. Unfortunately, we have started to believe our own rehtoric and this has trapped us in Iraq years after the mission we went there for (to depose Saddam and check for WMDs) has been completed as we (bizarrely) decided to try to turn Iraq into Belgium rather than just install another strong-man and letting him get on with repression of religious extremists and being a counterweight to Iran. This has left us with hundreds of thousands of troops with extremely exposed supply lines in an area of Iranian influence which stops us from making as vigorous a response to Iranian actions than we otherwise might.
I take the point. The problem is the tone of the book (especially the ending) makes that interpretation very difficult to sustain. Still it did its job, I guess, as, sucker that I am, I'm now buying World War Hulk to see if Richards and Stark finally get the kicking they so richly deserve.
And that's it. Reed and Stark turn into Henry Bendix types who kill and imprison people to help bring about their conception of a finer world with no comebacks (unless, as I fervently hope, at some point during World War Hulk, the Hulk removes Stark from his armour via the neck and then uses the emtpy shell as a latrine). The whole book seemed to be an endorsement of the idea of the competent, benign (unless you disagree with him - in which case its Prison 42 for you) dictator and, for me at least, left a bad taste. A shame as I've really liked Millar's work on The Ultimates.
I find it particularly odd that Sony would ban games which aren't suitable for children given all their efforts to get consoles out of the "kids only" ghetto and the fact they're now trying to sell us a £425 "digital entertainment hub" which (realistically) can only be afforded by an adult with a reasonable amount of disposable income.