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It's basically impossible for the common consumer to get a dvd player without region encoding in the states. However, it has been my understanding from previous slashdot articles that region free players are available for purchase in England.
Funny,
The Bethesda products that I have purchased have all had major bugs that should have been caught long ago. However, I'll agree with the fact that when they are developing code to fix the bugs that they make sure those fixes are bulletproof. Of course, you can't prove any problems with bugfixes that are never released. Bethesda does/did have some nice concepts, but they are not, repeat, not a company that releases quality code. I did like the concept of their games originally, but it's been what 10 years and they are still following the same patterns? Nothing new there and they didn't have networking when I purchased programs from them.
However, I would offer a couple of other companies that have excellent reputations for releasing good products:
Blizzard: Probably the formost company that could be considered, barring Duke Nukem 2000 ever coming out. They pushed release dates back several times on Diable and starcraft and other programs making sure that the games had very few problems. However, I haven't purchased any Blizzard product since they abused the DMCA and decided to attack my peer group for fixing their network issues.
id also has an excellent reputation and I still purchase every product that they release, though I haven't opened any of the packages once I saw Quake 3. I'm mainly just contributing to fund the release of the source code nowdays.
The last one I would recommend is an online game, atitd.com, ie A tale in the desert. I don't have time to play atm, but I continue to pay my subscription because it appears to me that the developer is more interested in providing a good product than to make a lot of money.
These comments represent my opinions, nothing more. I am not an avid gamer and since I don't have a windows box, though I doubt I am missing much. Game design has gone downhill as the cost of producing the games have gone up, also my opinion.
ps, Just a brief comment. Half-life, counter-strike(not the same), and Blizzard games are excellent examples of how quality products can overcome idiotic business strategies. Stream is a joke, making it blatently obvious that you don't "own" your game and blizzard's suing over enhancing player experience is just stupid in my opinion and so I refuse to having anything to do with those companies. However, a great many people are more than willing to put up with the bs to be allowed to play decent games.
I say leave the politics out of the game and just HAVE FUN!
The issue is that Blizzard is making this a political issue. Consider this... By allowing abusive language to continue and by suppressing positive expressions Blizzard is playing the politics game, although I am sure that this is not what they acturally intended, the issue is there.
Common Carrier status is used to protect companies against what someone might do using their equipment so that say if someone plans to rob a bank with their partner over the phone line, the telephone company has some protection against being responsible since they do not edit the content, merely provide a means of interaction. However, if a company monitors what information is taking place, they become liable for what happens on "their" property.
Thus, if Blizzard wants to suppress opinions either way, they then get to become liable for everything. For example: If I have a bar or nightclub and some of my patrons start doing coke or smoking illegal drugs, I become a party to the crime if I know that it is taking place. If Blizzard monitors the actions of it's patrons, to the point of listening to their conversations, then they also become a party to everything that does happen.
Using the "for the children" clause, this means that if/when a grown man engages with a 13 year old child and makes sexual suggestions, that Blizzard is also responsible since they did not stop these messages.
A far better means of fixing this problem is the system of setting ignore flags, meaning, give the users of the system the tools to decide for themselves what is offensive and to block it.
Now, however, WOW, is a virtual world so how does US law apply. Same as any other country, if you are a party to illegal activities the government has the ability to seize your assets, which is why Debeers does not have holdings in the US.
Therefore:
If Blizzard wishes to place a ban on what users talk about, then they must monitor all conversations because they are liable since they are assumed to be able to access any conversation.
Personally, it's up to them. If they want to discriminate, they need to clearly document that stance so that everyone understands that they are a "private" club which does not allow sexual orientation or shall we say, pro-gay statemnents. Which is their right, however, they are also liable for anything that their system is used for, be it child-pornography, someone planing murder/illegal activities on-line, etc.
In the software circles I am involved with, the definition of beta is:
Beta: Everything works, but need to request public feedback. So the apple release should have been labeled pre-beta or alpha since these releases are expected to have bugs in the system.
Hmmm,
I'm not sure how you would be able to manage this, but you must have some type of tax strategy at work. Considering that I consider Social Security as a "tax" that's a minimum of 7.5% up to what 90k now days? Can you point out some of the ways you are able to keep your tax burden so low?
Well, say what you will, I like having power steering and power breaks. I could do without the automatic transmission, but apparently many cars no longer come with "standard" transmissions.
The ability to slow down for traffic in front of the vehicle would be appreciated as well. I have been in two accidents where the driver of the vehicle following did not pay attention and slammed into someone that had stopped. A system that helped prevent this from happening would have saved time and effort on my part, especially since the insurance payments are never really enough to cover your expenses.
When driving I also worry about my blind spots quite often. I now drive a minivan and it's difficult to see small cars that are traveling in my blind spot... As a motorcyclist I often have people pull into my lane and have to keep a constant eye out to prevent injury.
So nebulus comments about how no one needs traction control outside of racetracks, attributing new driver skills to skills picked up in video games and talking about how if you took away modern technology like anti-lock breaks etc modern drivers would have more accidents... Well, I'm sorry wasn't that why the new systems were added in the first place? To make driving safer....
Also, I'm highly doubtful that locking the brakes on dry pavement will stop you faster than anti-locking brakes. From my own personal experience it takes longer to stop and you have less control so it appears to me that this is just FUD.
It's against the terms of service to run a webserver although apparently bittorrent does not violate my agreement... But my bt server is in my closet.. right beside the firewall system...
A point of interest... With the use of anti-depressives the period of time that a person first gains the energy to get up and moving is one of the most dangerous times, because while they may have wanted to kill themselves before, they didn't have the energy, when they have the energy it's a lot easier to kill oneself...
Thanks fir the correction, I'm obviously blind... Grin...
Sorry I didn't notice your comment... I do agree with the parent though that the "fair" tax shifts the tax burden onto those with less income... Unfortunately the system we have now is pretty bad as well because of all the loop-holes within the system... When companies can make billions and not pay anything in taxes, something is wrong. However the original poster is likely incorrect when he says that he will pay less while those who make less will pay more... The part of those making less will pay more is likely true, but he also is classified as middle income and will likely pay more as well... Currently middle income I believe is defined between $50K and $500K / annually... So he would end up paying more as well...
Changes need to be made, on this I can agree, and frankly any change is likely to be good as long as it leads to a more "fair" system of taxation, however with the corruption indicated by a large number of government representatives will any of the changes actually benefit the common man???
I don't know, and although I did chime in I really don't have the knowledge to adeqately get my opinions across on the matter. I would like to see some type of change, but I don't know how to go about effecting such change.
These issues of making pilots are the same as the ones that are encountered currently.... You do know that neilson(sp?) ratings are used to set advertising prices for shows currently? And that if your show is unknown, you are not going to get much income for ads during that show? That's why the networks advertise shows and create new shows in order to get a higher market share and charge more money... The new system is just the same, except that it's the end user that gets to decide how good a show is not a lot of marketing research.
There are hundreds of pilots made every year that do not show up on television because the marketing department do not think that they can make enough income off of the shows... ie, there are more profitable shows.... If we had a system that ensured that every time a show is viewed, there is a payment, then there will always be a profit any time a show is viewed and actually a lot more pilots will become available since the network does not have to worry what show is going to be the most popular. Ie the network will use more bandwidth, but it will also have a guarenteed return on any bandwidth it uses, so with minimal advertising there is no reason not to put their entire catalog online generating income versus having to pick and chose shows.
Wouldn't it be nice to have consumers making the choices about what shows they want? Btw, your $50 minimum with cable is unlikely to go down, this is one of the wonderful advantages of most municiples in the United States giving cable companies exclusive contracts, ie monopolies. The cable company wants it's cut for maintaining the cable line and you will still have to pay for the additional content on top of that, so this will not be a cheaper solution, merely a way of shifting the focus from attracting advertisers to attracting the interests of viewers... My free time is worth more than $2/hour and if I were able to guarentee that I could watch something interesting every time I sit in from of the TV, I'd be more inclinded to do so. Currently I have little desire to watch 99.99% of the shows, and it looks like you are in the same boat... Wouldn't it be nice to spend $70/month get all your options that you have now, note we don't have to get rid of the commercial channels just expand pay per view, and be confident that you could sit down and watch what you want to watch any time you want to watch it?
Hopefully that makes it a little clearer... It's not primarily an issue with cost, more an issue of convience and not having to view all the commercial crap online.
Social security taps out at $50K or somewhere near there, you don't pay social security on more... Also the majority of "rich" people do not make their money through labor, they get it through dividends and investments or inherit it..
Hey that's fine by me... If I could pay $15 for a subscription to the scifi channel or pay $30 for a season of a show that I can watch, abeit a little time for downloading to start or pay $3 an episode of a particular show I wouldn't mind. I would welcome it because I could keep things like firefly on the error, $15 bucks an episode might be a bit expensive, but I would rather pay $60/month for a show I wanted to see without commercials rather than $115/month, current rates in my area to get a few channels I would actually watch, granted if the basic cable cost were 65 I would be paying more, but I wouldn't have to waste my time watching commercials. I was 10 minutes for every 30 minutes on average with commercials, actuall I think 8 minutes might be closer but I don't watch than much.
Anyway my time and the ability to invest in a show that I wanted to watch rather than crap would be vary much appreciated. If you had commercial channels as well you could recoop you show cost there as well. Lots of people would watch commercial channels, but if I could help pay for the shows I watch I wouldn't mind...
Consider this, I think that firefly cost 1 million an episode to produce so let's double that to $2 million each show for a huge profit... I'm not sure how many fans are out there but 1 in 250 seems like it would be quite low... that gives us 1 million viewers for a specific show which is available at their convience I'm pretty sure that most of use would be willing to pay $2 a show. This is for an unpopular show, imagine what lost or 24 or Wrestling would make even charging say $.25 a show...
This model of distribution is possible right now and I would far prefer it to the current system.
PS, Someone mentioned burning cd's above, I don't won't mind this as a subscription service, but keep track of the shows I have paid for so that I can view them again or better yet charge me an additional fee for this service...
Hmmm,
I thought it was Falcon 4.0, but it's probably 3.0 wasn't it extended by the user community. AnywayF-117 Steath was interesting acknowledging of course that Falcon was the best for a very long time until the launch of the internet flight game, don't know what that one is called either.
As far as X-wing and Y-wing were and to my mind still are the only decent star wars games, I've played with some of the others, but I really liked the first one and might even buy a console or actually install windows... Actually I doubt I would install windows since it's probably going to require a new video card...
Blah, but even if the graphics were the same I would love to by able to play X-wing again or have a fully dynamic world created under a elite, the game, premise...
They may not have been as graphically intensive as the system we have now, but they would still be great games to play. Better graphics does not compensate for actual playability of the game. Quake 3 helped to establish this when they went to online play only with no single player game and their sales tanked.
I liked Halo, Fable and Second Sight on the X-box, but only purchased them after they were recommended several times by friends.... Because if I were to try and find decent games myself I would have to buy dozens of crap games to find the few gems and I frankly can't afford that.
Hmmm, you need to check your facts... Provisions in the DMCA effectively made ISP's common carriers, ie not responsible for the traffic that is going across their network and there have been several court cases that have upheld this provision...
Do a google search on DMCA "common carrier" ISP...
Ummm, what's your point? Grin, it wouldn't be the first time that extra goodies were added to the system that the consumer didn't know about. How about the serial number on Intel CPU's or how 386sx and dx chips differed. It's not that hard to imagine that parts of the CPU core would be reserved...
However, even given that, I don't know enought to discuss the subject knowledgably. I was just responding to someone who claimed that the 360 was better than any $2000 machine, which I can't really conceive of, MS wouldn't discount them than much if they were a better generic machine.
Eventually I will get to play with a 360, but that will probably be at least 5 years from now when the 720 hits the shelves...
Check the comment that I was responding to. It was asking why this was not the norm and I gave an explaination as to why this wasn't implemented for every entry. Yes I know that it is not being used for the whole site and frankly not even a small portion of it.
On the other hand, I do understand how my comment could be misinterpreted unless you carefully read the parent posts, so don't worry about it we all get confused occassionally.
Have you checked the http://www.dnalounge.com/ Jamie has had to deal with a lot of these issues and you might find some good advice there before your commit yourself to any one course of action.
The problem is that most experts are not going to edit a large number of articles and while they might make minor corrections to existing articles or filling in stubs are unlikely to spend hours working on the wiki and gaining authority on the system. I'll help you if it takes a little of my time, but when it becomes work for me to fix problems you are having you either need to compensate me for my work or get the education from someone else. The more work required by the expert the less likely he/she is to post. It's easier to correct malicious updated by watching what ip's are making changes than it is to get expert information without the experts...
One of the problems with this is that it discourages the "casual" updator. A large number of contributors, or so I assume, are people that are functional experts in their field and while they don't do a lot of edits, the 1 or 2 articles a year that are edited have information that would never be added if people had to jump through hoops in order to fix things. Adding a line there or correcting a minor mistake there takes a few minutes and it allows the person to feel that he/she is contributing. On the other hand if you have to register and jump through a bunch of hoops in order to correct an obvious mistakes the will probably be a lot less participation by the people who actually "know" the information.
Another thing to do is to consider slashdot's editing, I've had an account longer than most of the people on this system, and while I am not particulally witty or interesting because of the fact I have been around for such a long time I have excellent karma... Maybe 1 or 2 messages out of 50 gets modded up, ie I get maybe 10 karma points a year, but because I have been here for such a long time I get my +1 karma. Not too unreasonable if you figure that I actually think about what I say and that it isn't trolling, however what about the guy that posts 10 messages per story that comes up and goes from 0 karma to 50 karma, or excellect or whatever they use to track it now days, do you want that person to be able to overwrite the guy that is an expert and just drops in to correct a bit of information?
One of the people I correspond with occassionally has an article on wikipedia about him, I noticed that the article did not know what his age was and thus gave a range... Looking in the discussion I saw a lot of people bickering about what his birthday was, so I dropped a line and asked him to drop in and update the article for them... If he had to create a login and then get authorization or something like that to correct his own information what are the chances he would do so, unless he was very bored at the time he got my email? In another instance, I know John Carmack hasn't posted very many messages here, but when he does post about something id is doing, it's generally up to the moderators to notice his message and mod it up. The moderation system does have it's good points, but it also can hide the true experts because they are not part of the community.
Hopefully this message made sense, by allowing anyone to do edits wikipedia gets casual input from experts rather than having a staff of dedicated novices that don't know whether the information they put into the system is correct or not. They may have the best of intentions, but it will be far easier to correct entries from a few malicious users if you have the correct information available as well that it would be to get the correct information by people who don't know the subject.
So in order to get access to television shows you have to set up an XP server which you can then view with linux? I'm not against this, but I didn't see the information listed anywhere there and I don't have the patience to dig through their website looking for information... Can you post a url to the information, I'd love to be able to open a small window to watch some of my channels while I am away from home. I'm looking for this type of solution, but so far all I have found is Windows based programs/systems.
Nod,
I understand what you mean and I agree. But his contention was that the machine is better than a $2000 dollar machine. He made no specification in which way and my reply was/is intended to see if he will correct himself or not. Frankly, I don't care. I'm bored and just cruising through comments for a while... 10-15 posts in the last few days and before that it's probably been months between each post.... I just finished up a semester at school and I haven't kicked myself in the butt to get working yet so I'm wasting time.
So anyway, I agree with you, it just bugs me when people make blanket statements...
So what you are say is that you can't buy a $2000 dollar computer that can run 360 games? How does that make the 360 any better, what use have I for a system that just plays games and I can't do anything with. And if I remember correctly, only one of the cores is accessible. One is held in reserve and the other is tagged to run Microsoft DRM.... The equipment on this machine isn't better than a general purpose computer of $2000. If you only evaluate it within a certain set of perimeters, ie does it or does it not play 360 games you might as well compare it to a $300 million dollar supercomputer or to a B2 bomber for that matter....
Doom came out before windows 95 and we all remember or at least know how poorly that game did....
Seriously though, the home PC market for PC's was very large in 86 and 87 when I was working at VF associates in Maryland. We sold hundreds of systems each week, and it really started to get hectic with the 30 mB rll harddrives. The 286 was cool and we heard that there was something called the 386 we would be getting our hands on soon.... Don't make the mistake of thinking the PC market wasn't going hard... I remember a time when you put in the disk and booted the computer and games used ems?dos to run their own operating systems... Of course I had played with apples and Commodores were great, but the pc though ugly and difficult to use was used in business so we bought them for our homes. If you wanted a great system, you went with an amiga, but for the working class we bought PC's.
Slashdot Mirror
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It's basically impossible for the common consumer to get a dvd player without region encoding in the states. However, it has been my understanding from previous slashdot articles that region free players are available for purchase in England.
Funny,
The Bethesda products that I have purchased have all had major bugs that should have been caught long ago. However, I'll agree with the fact that when they are developing code to fix the bugs that they make sure those fixes are bulletproof. Of course, you can't prove any problems with bugfixes that are never released. Bethesda does/did have some nice concepts, but they are not, repeat, not a company that releases quality code. I did like the concept of their games originally, but it's been what 10 years and they are still following the same patterns? Nothing new there and they didn't have networking when I purchased programs from them.
However, I would offer a couple of other companies that have excellent reputations for releasing good products:
Blizzard: Probably the formost company that could be considered, barring Duke Nukem 2000 ever coming out. They pushed release dates back several times on Diable and starcraft and other programs making sure that the games had very few problems. However, I haven't purchased any Blizzard product since they abused the DMCA and decided to attack my peer group for fixing their network issues.
id also has an excellent reputation and I still purchase every product that they release, though I haven't opened any of the packages once I saw Quake 3. I'm mainly just contributing to fund the release of the source code nowdays.
The last one I would recommend is an online game, atitd.com, ie A tale in the desert. I don't have time to play atm, but I continue to pay my subscription because it appears to me that the developer is more interested in providing a good product than to make a lot of money.
These comments represent my opinions, nothing more. I am not an avid gamer and since I don't have a windows box, though I doubt I am missing much. Game design has gone downhill as the cost of producing the games have gone up, also my opinion.
ps, Just a brief comment. Half-life, counter-strike(not the same), and Blizzard games are excellent examples of how quality products can overcome idiotic business strategies. Stream is a joke, making it blatently obvious that you don't "own" your game and blizzard's suing over enhancing player experience is just stupid in my opinion and so I refuse to having anything to do with those companies. However, a great many people are more than willing to put up with the bs to be allowed to play decent games.
The issue is that Blizzard is making this a political issue. Consider this... By allowing abusive language to continue and by suppressing positive expressions Blizzard is playing the politics game, although I am sure that this is not what they acturally intended, the issue is there.
Common Carrier status is used to protect companies against what someone might do using their equipment so that say if someone plans to rob a bank with their partner over the phone line, the telephone company has some protection against being responsible since they do not edit the content, merely provide a means of interaction. However, if a company monitors what information is taking place, they become liable for what happens on "their" property.
Thus, if Blizzard wants to suppress opinions either way, they then get to become liable for everything. For example: If I have a bar or nightclub and some of my patrons start doing coke or smoking illegal drugs, I become a party to the crime if I know that it is taking place. If Blizzard monitors the actions of it's patrons, to the point of listening to their conversations, then they also become a party to everything that does happen.
Using the "for the children" clause, this means that if/when a grown man engages with a 13 year old child and makes sexual suggestions, that Blizzard is also responsible since they did not stop these messages.
A far better means of fixing this problem is the system of setting ignore flags, meaning, give the users of the system the tools to decide for themselves what is offensive and to block it.
Now, however, WOW, is a virtual world so how does US law apply. Same as any other country, if you are a party to illegal activities the government has the ability to seize your assets, which is why Debeers does not have holdings in the US.
Therefore:
If Blizzard wishes to place a ban on what users talk about, then they must monitor all conversations because they are liable since they are assumed to be able to access any conversation.
Personally, it's up to them. If they want to discriminate, they need to clearly document that stance so that everyone understands that they are a "private" club which does not allow sexual orientation or shall we say, pro-gay statemnents. Which is their right, however, they are also liable for anything that their system is used for, be it child-pornography, someone planing murder/illegal activities on-line, etc.
In the software circles I am involved with, the definition of beta is:
Beta: Everything works, but need to request public feedback.
So the apple release should have been labeled pre-beta or alpha since these releases are
expected to have bugs in the system.
Of course, that's only the definition I use.
lando
Hmmm,
I'm not sure how you would be able to manage this, but you must have some type of tax strategy at work. Considering that I consider Social Security as a "tax" that's a minimum of 7.5% up to what 90k now days? Can you point out some of the ways you are able to keep your tax burden so low?
Well, say what you will, I like having power steering and power breaks. I could do without the automatic transmission, but apparently many cars no longer come with "standard" transmissions.
The ability to slow down for traffic in front of the vehicle would be appreciated as well. I have been in two accidents where the driver of the vehicle following did not pay attention and slammed into someone that had stopped. A system that helped prevent this from happening would have saved time and effort on my part, especially since the insurance payments are never really enough to cover your expenses.
When driving I also worry about my blind spots quite often. I now drive a minivan and it's difficult to see small cars that are traveling in my blind spot... As a motorcyclist I often have people pull into my lane and have to keep a constant eye out to prevent injury.
So nebulus comments about how no one needs traction control outside of racetracks, attributing new driver skills to skills picked up in video games and talking about how if you took away modern technology like anti-lock breaks etc modern drivers would have more accidents... Well, I'm sorry wasn't that why the new systems were added in the first place? To make driving safer....
Also, I'm highly doubtful that locking the brakes on dry pavement will stop you faster than anti-locking brakes. From my own personal experience it takes longer to stop and you have less control so it appears to me that this is just FUD.
Hmmm,
Mandrake 2005 dvd, 2005 5 cds,
unbuntu, kunbuntu, & x86_64 editions
Fedora 3
Gentoo pkg and install cd's x86_64
The gutenburg project DVD, CD
Eclipse...
Other misc files....
It's against the terms of service to run a webserver although apparently bittorrent does not violate my agreement... But my bt server is in my closet.. right beside the firewall system...
A point of interest... With the use of anti-depressives the period of time that a person first gains the energy to get up and moving is one of the most dangerous times, because while they may have wanted to kill themselves before, they didn't have the energy, when they have the energy it's a lot easier to kill oneself...
Thanks fir the correction, I'm obviously blind... Grin...
Sorry I didn't notice your comment... I do agree with the parent though that the "fair" tax shifts the tax burden onto those with less income... Unfortunately the system we have now is pretty bad as well because of all the loop-holes within the system... When companies can make billions and not pay anything in taxes, something is wrong. However the original poster is likely incorrect when he says that he will pay less while those who make less will pay more... The part of those making less will pay more is likely true, but he also is classified as middle income and will likely pay more as well... Currently middle income I believe is defined between $50K and $500K / annually... So he would end up paying more as well...
Changes need to be made, on this I can agree, and frankly any change is likely to be good as long as it leads to a more "fair" system of taxation, however with the corruption indicated by a large number of government representatives will any of the changes actually benefit the common man???
I don't know, and although I did chime in I really don't have the knowledge to adeqately get my opinions across on the matter. I would like to see some type of change, but I don't know how to go about effecting such change.
These issues of making pilots are the same as the ones that are encountered currently.... You do know that neilson(sp?) ratings are used to set advertising prices for shows currently? And that if your show is unknown, you are not going to get much income for ads during that show? That's why the networks advertise shows and create new shows in order to get a higher market share and charge more money... The new system is just the same, except that it's the end user that gets to decide how good a show is not a lot of marketing research.
There are hundreds of pilots made every year that do not show up on television because the marketing department do not think that they can make enough income off of the shows... ie, there are more profitable shows.... If we had a system that ensured that every time a show is viewed, there is a payment, then there will always be a profit any time a show is viewed and actually a lot more pilots will become available since the network does not have to worry what show is going to be the most popular. Ie the network will use more bandwidth, but it will also have a guarenteed return on any bandwidth it uses, so with minimal advertising there is no reason not to put their entire catalog online generating income versus having to pick and chose shows.
Wouldn't it be nice to have consumers making the choices about what shows they want? Btw, your $50 minimum with cable is unlikely to go down, this is one of the wonderful advantages of most municiples in the United States giving cable companies exclusive contracts, ie monopolies. The cable company wants it's cut for maintaining the cable line and you will still have to pay for the additional content on top of that, so this will not be a cheaper solution, merely a way of shifting the focus from attracting advertisers to attracting the interests of viewers... My free time is worth more than $2/hour and if I were able to guarentee that I could watch something interesting every time I sit in from of the TV, I'd be more inclinded to do so. Currently I have little desire to watch 99.99% of the shows, and it looks like you are in the same boat... Wouldn't it be nice to spend $70/month get all your options that you have now, note we don't have to get rid of the commercial channels just expand pay per view, and be confident that you could sit down and watch what you want to watch any time you want to watch it?
Hopefully that makes it a little clearer... It's not primarily an issue with cost, more an issue of convience and not having to view all the commercial crap online.
Social security taps out at $50K or somewhere near there, you don't pay social security on more... Also the majority of "rich" people do not make their money through labor, they get it through dividends and investments or inherit it..
Hmmm, just a thought, but couldn't you throw out everything in normal mail and only keep the stuff that has the + in it?
Hey that's fine by me... If I could pay $15 for a subscription to the scifi channel or pay $30 for a season of a show that I can watch, abeit a little time for downloading to start or pay $3 an episode of a particular show I wouldn't mind. I would welcome it because I could keep things like firefly on the error, $15 bucks an episode might be a bit expensive, but I would rather pay $60/month for a show I wanted to see without commercials rather than $115/month, current rates in my area to get a few channels I would actually watch, granted if the basic cable cost were 65 I would be paying more, but I wouldn't have to waste my time watching commercials. I was 10 minutes for every 30 minutes on average with commercials, actuall I think 8 minutes might be closer but I don't watch than much.
Anyway my time and the ability to invest in a show that I wanted to watch rather than crap would be vary much appreciated. If you had commercial channels as well you could recoop you show cost there as well. Lots of people would watch commercial channels, but if I could help pay for the shows I watch I wouldn't mind...
Consider this, I think that firefly cost 1 million an episode to produce so let's double that to $2 million each show for a huge profit... I'm not sure how many fans are out there but 1 in 250 seems like it would be quite low... that gives us 1 million viewers for a specific show which is available at their convience I'm pretty sure that most of use would be willing to pay $2 a show. This is for an unpopular show, imagine what lost or 24 or Wrestling would make even charging say $.25 a show...
This model of distribution is possible right now and I would far prefer it to the current system.
PS, Someone mentioned burning cd's above, I don't won't mind this as a subscription service, but keep track of the shows I have paid for so that I can view them again or better yet charge me an additional fee for this service...
Hmmm,
I thought it was Falcon 4.0, but it's probably 3.0 wasn't it extended by the user community. AnywayF-117 Steath was interesting acknowledging of course that Falcon was the best for a very long time until the launch of the internet flight game, don't know what that one is called either.
As far as X-wing and Y-wing were and to my mind still are the only decent star wars games, I've played with some of the others, but I really liked the first one and might even buy a console or actually install windows... Actually I doubt I would install windows since it's probably going to require a new video card...
Blah, but even if the graphics were the same I would love to by able to play X-wing again or have a fully dynamic world created under a elite, the game, premise...
They may not have been as graphically intensive as the system we have now, but they would still be great games to play. Better graphics does not compensate for actual playability of the game. Quake 3 helped to establish this when they went to online play only with no single player game and their sales tanked.
I liked Halo, Fable and Second Sight on the X-box, but only purchased them after they were recommended several times by friends.... Because if I were to try and find decent games myself I would have to buy dozens of crap games to find the few gems and I frankly can't afford that.
Hmmm, you need to check your facts... Provisions in the DMCA effectively made ISP's common carriers, ie not responsible for the traffic that is going across their network and there have been several court cases that have upheld this provision...
Do a google search on DMCA "common carrier" ISP...
Here's a url to get you started http://www.cybertelecom.org/ip/dmca.htm
Ummm, what's your point? Grin, it wouldn't be the first time that extra goodies were added to the system that the consumer didn't know about. How about the serial number on Intel CPU's or how 386sx and dx chips differed. It's not that hard to imagine that parts of the CPU core would be reserved...
However, even given that, I don't know enought to discuss the subject knowledgably. I was just responding to someone who claimed that the 360 was better than any $2000 machine, which I can't really conceive of, MS wouldn't discount them than much if they were a better generic machine.
Eventually I will get to play with a 360, but that will probably be at least 5 years from now when the 720 hits the shelves...
Check the comment that I was responding to. It was asking why this was not the norm and I gave an explaination as to why this wasn't implemented for every entry. Yes I know that it is not being used for the whole site and frankly not even a small portion of it.
On the other hand, I do understand how my comment could be misinterpreted unless you carefully read the parent posts, so don't worry about it we all get confused occassionally.
Have you checked the http://www.dnalounge.com/ Jamie has had to deal with a lot of these issues and you might find some good advice there before your commit yourself to any one course of action.
The problem is that most experts are not going to edit a large number of articles and while they might make minor corrections to existing articles or filling in stubs are unlikely to spend hours working on the wiki and gaining authority on the system. I'll help you if it takes a little of my time, but when it becomes work for me to fix problems you are having you either need to compensate me for my work or get the education from someone else. The more work required by the expert the less likely he/she is to post. It's easier to correct malicious updated by watching what ip's are making changes than it is to get expert information without the experts...
One of the problems with this is that it discourages the "casual" updator. A large number of contributors, or so I assume, are people that are functional experts in their field and while they don't do a lot of edits, the 1 or 2 articles a year that are edited have information that would never be added if people had to jump through hoops in order to fix things. Adding a line there or correcting a minor mistake there takes a few minutes and it allows the person to feel that he/she is contributing. On the other hand if you have to register and jump through a bunch of hoops in order to correct an obvious mistakes the will probably be a lot less participation by the people who actually "know" the information.
Another thing to do is to consider slashdot's editing, I've had an account longer than most of the people on this system, and while I am not particulally witty or interesting because of the fact I have been around for such a long time I have excellent karma... Maybe 1 or 2 messages out of 50 gets modded up, ie I get maybe 10 karma points a year, but because I have been here for such a long time I get my +1 karma. Not too unreasonable if you figure that I actually think about what I say and that it isn't trolling, however what about the guy that posts 10 messages per story that comes up and goes from 0 karma to 50 karma, or excellect or whatever they use to track it now days, do you want that person to be able to overwrite the guy that is an expert and just drops in to correct a bit of information?
One of the people I correspond with occassionally has an article on wikipedia about him, I noticed that the article did not know what his age was and thus gave a range... Looking in the discussion I saw a lot of people bickering about what his birthday was, so I dropped a line and asked him to drop in and update the article for them... If he had to create a login and then get authorization or something like that to correct his own information what are the chances he would do so, unless he was very bored at the time he got my email? In another instance, I know John Carmack hasn't posted very many messages here, but when he does post about something id is doing, it's generally up to the moderators to notice his message and mod it up. The moderation system does have it's good points, but it also can hide the true experts because they are not part of the community.
Hopefully this message made sense, by allowing anyone to do edits wikipedia gets casual input from experts rather than having a staff of dedicated novices that don't know whether the information they put into the system is correct or not. They may have the best of intentions, but it will be far easier to correct entries from a few malicious users if you have the correct information available as well that it would be to get the correct information by people who don't know the subject.
So in order to get access to television shows you have to set up an XP server which you can then view with linux? I'm not against this, but I didn't see the information listed anywhere there and I don't have the patience to dig through their website looking for information... Can you post a url to the information, I'd love to be able to open a small window to watch some of my channels while I am away from home. I'm looking for this type of solution, but so far all I have found is Windows based programs/systems.
Nod,
I understand what you mean and I agree. But his contention was that the machine is better than a $2000 dollar machine. He made no specification in which way and my reply was/is intended to see if he will correct himself or not. Frankly, I don't care. I'm bored and just cruising through comments for a while... 10-15 posts in the last few days and before that it's probably been months between each post.... I just finished up a semester at school and I haven't kicked myself in the butt to get working yet so I'm wasting time.
So anyway, I agree with you, it just bugs me when people make blanket statements...
So what you are say is that you can't buy a $2000 dollar computer that can run 360 games? How does that make the 360 any better, what use have I for a system that just plays games and I can't do anything with. And if I remember correctly, only one of the cores is accessible. One is held in reserve and the other is tagged to run Microsoft DRM.... The equipment on this machine isn't better than a general purpose computer of $2000. If you only evaluate it within a certain set of perimeters, ie does it or does it not play 360 games you might as well compare it to a $300 million dollar supercomputer or to a B2 bomber for that matter....
Doom came out before windows 95 and we all remember or at least know how poorly that game did....
Seriously though, the home PC market for PC's was very large in 86 and 87 when I was working at VF associates in Maryland. We sold hundreds of systems each week, and it really started to get hectic with the 30 mB rll harddrives. The 286 was cool and we heard that there was something called the 386 we would be getting our hands on soon.... Don't make the mistake of thinking the PC market wasn't going hard... I remember a time when you put in the disk and booted the computer and games used ems?dos to run their own operating systems... Of course I had played with apples and Commodores were great, but the pc though ugly and difficult to use was used in business so we bought them for our homes. If you wanted a great system, you went with an amiga, but for the working class we bought PC's.