Well no, it's been quite clearly stated the official election results suggest that Ahmadinejad got 63% support even in the rich, well educated areas.
That's why it's pretty clear the election was a farce, because apparently even those that don't support Ahmadinejad er support Ahmadinejad according to the official results.
Let me guess, you also thought George Bush was an awesome president and Sarah Palin could've been even better had she ever made it to VP and then from VP to president?
To be fair the XBox 360 HD-DVD player count might not be that low.
When news came through HD-DVD was being ditched, they first started selling them off for £30, and then eventually £7 here in the UK.
That's so rediculously cheap I'd imagine they sold off the entire stockpile - how big that is, who knows, but it wont have been too small.
Still it's not really worth caring about, as no more discs will come out HD-DVD is dead in the water regardless.
As an aside some of the best internal Bluray drives for the PC also support HD-DVD - Of course this wouldn't change the balance as they include both but I found it interesting that they even bothered to include HD-DVD by that stage.
So in other words you're just a xenophobic fantacist?
As a society advances, todays high end jobs become tommorrows menial tasks that no one wants to do in an advanced country but that 3rd world countries are more than happy to take on as it's still better than what they were doing. Robot AI will always be a few steps behind again so would never be a solution to menial tasks, if robots could be created to do anything then we wouldn't need anyone to work at all, ever.
You also seem to miss the point that even in a single country like the US, without poor people there can be no rich people. A specific country can only have so much money, and there will always be those who want and gain more than others, there will always be impoverished sections of society.
Your idea has no grounding in reality, it is ignorant of basic science and economics. Effectively what you're talking about is some kind of communist utopia where robots do half the work - do you know how odd that sounds for today's world? Do you realise how much of a nutcase it makes you sound that you suggest the removal of free trade would suddenly turn the US into a society so advanced it was between about 2 and 5 decades ahead of every other country in the world?
It's not as if they probably only got the contract because American companies such as Cisco are forbidden from selling such equipment to Iran.
My point is that I do not believe there is a company in the world that would pass up this kind of contract. Do I disagree with it's use? Of course I do.
But I fail to see why Nokia and Siemens should be demonised anymore than any other company in the world - at the end of the day the only difference here between Nokia/Siemens and any other networking company is that those guys got the contract - it didn't mean others didn't bid and it doesn't mean others like Cisco wouldn't also bid if they had the opportunity to.
Rather than focus on chastising company x for the fact company x sold something to country y which was used in a bad way we should be chastising big corporations in general for this sort of behaviour. It's a problem that extends far far beyond just Nokia and Siemens and we can't expect Nokia and Siemens to change their ways if no one else will else it puts them at a major disadvantage and is like committing corporate suicide.
The problem is, people like the guy in TFA are suggesting you get more than the more expensive US offering for far less money out of them. This for the reasons you state is blatant bullshit.
Even if India is producing better graduates than the US (which let's face it, it's really not) then they're not working for this guy anyway because he's not paying for the top graduates, they'd eat into his profit margins too much, he's paying for the cheapest he can find and as you state, this means his company ends up producing crap because again, as you say, you get what you pay for.
You mean apart from make you clothes, farm you food and produce other goods at rates so cheap no American would be willing to do it?
If you cut off free trade with India and China expect a massive cost of living increase in the US to the point some of the poorer people in society wont even be able to afford clothes or feed their families. Expect massive toxic tips all across the US as you can no longer dump all your shit in other countries too.
I understand you'd be angry at the article, the guy is a fucking idiot and talking out his arse but his comments are rather irrelevant to free trade in general.
The same could be said for someone calling someone else a fanboy based on the arbitrary assumption they took offence, rather than simply that they dislike seeing people who are dishonest about said console without a care which one it is.
Sometimes it's worth considering your own advice before preaching it to others.
It also means the word needs to be spread on this so that everyone can challenge the RIAA in the same way forcing them to either accept complete defeat or allow it to be tried in court and er, end up being forced into accepting defeat.
I've always wondered why this sort of defence hasn't been tested before. Effectively all MedaSentry are providing is a screenshot and/or text files showing that their IP was being used for downloading copyright material. Of course, generating such a screenshot in photoshop that is impossible to tell apart from an authentic screenshot is trivial, similarly any old joe can knock together a text file that suggests such and such an IP was downloading some data at a certain time.
Hell you don't even have to do that, you could create an offline network setup to mimic the IPs involved in the first place.
This is the problem I have with computer crime cases in general, and in fact, even computer forensics. Even if you confiscate a PC and do DNA analysis on the keyboard to see if person x is the guy who use this computer to commit crime y can you ever reall prove someone didn't just plug a different keyboard in the computer to commit the crime?
There's a need to catch criminals who use computers for sure, but I'm concerned in computer crime cases the level of evidence required is so rediculously weak, and so easily rigged or faked compared to normal crimes that if it continues I wouldn't be suprised if we end up with a plethora of wrongful convictions coming to light over the next few decades. Of course, companies like MediaSentry are only degrading the level of "evidence" that is apparently acceptable too - if we can't really, truly prove people guilty in many computer crime cases from forensic analysis when you have access to the physical machine what kind of joke is it if you're going on an IP address and nothing more?
I hope eventually as judges and politicians become more IT literate this trend reverses, if it doesn't then it's going to be a sad future for justice as the level of evidence becomes ever weaker yet the use of electronic devices and hence the amount of electronic crimes increases. We're going to end up with a lot of innocent people in jail.
As much as I support her attempt at fighting the RIAA, the problem is that she lied in court, and she didn't challenge the real issues with the RIAAs claims (i.e. the fact their evidence is easily falsified and really proved nothing).
The reality is we shouldn't waste our time with Jammie, she's handing the RIAA victory on a plate and has done so twice now, which in the eyes of the average joe will make it look like the RIAA is in the right.
I feel for her, but on the same note, all the way through this she's been her own worst enemy and in the process has also been unhelpful to those who have been trying to support her cause by simply not taking advantage of the wealth of expert information available to her in defending herself.
Of course, more importantly, there's no way they could ever have known they'd get such a high judgement against her either. The very fact it's unconstitutionally high raises questions as there are many cases in other areas that are far more criminal but don't get handed down such high judgements.
I really think she's just been victim of her own incompetence coupled with a setence being handed down by a bunch of nutcases. The latter isn't a bad thing for the reasons you state, but I'm not convinced she's someone who can take that judgement and show it for the farce it is judging by her track record and the fact she's shot herself in the foot so many times before.
The problem with US intervention isn't that of harder crack down, you're mistaken in not understanding what the problem with it is.
The problem with US intervention is that even many of the protestors absolutely hate the US. There are hundreds of thousands of those protestors who would rather spite the US than spite the Ayatollah, whilst the US etc. stay out of it there is no "Iranian leadership vs. West" thing, it's a purely internal Iranian affair which all Iranians want to sort out. If the West gets involved and starts taking sides it turns into an "Iranian leadership vs. West" thing and many more will rally against the West because they hate us that much more.
Why do they hate us? Well, the very Iraq war you seem to think is empowering them to push for free elections is a damn good starting point.
Let the citizens of the West show their support because it's a good way for them to realise we're not all bad, get our leadership involved though and it becomes a Western attempt to control Iran. The last thing we want to do right now is split the protest movement - let it stay solid, let it stay together against the Ayatollah rather than be split against the West.
If the West is going to get involved it has to make sure one thing has happened - that the Iranian protestors now hate their leadership enough to side wholly with the West over their leadership, as yet we cannot be sure we're at that stage and again, we'd likely just split and hence weaken the movement. It's somewhat sad but I imagine a lot of protestors are going to have to die yet so that the protest movement becomes angry enough to think that maybe the West, the US in particular aren't that bad so that the US can lend their support.
When the other consoles were released the 360 was arguably the most expensive - it was outright more expensive than the Wii, and when you compared like for like it was more expensive than the PS3.
Yet it had a much higher attach rate, by far the highest of the three.
Since then it's dropped to offer the cheapest system out the lot yet still has the highest attach rate (http://kotaku.com/5222086/ps3-attach-rate-overtakes-wii-attach-rate).
That suggests that you're right, console price has nothing whatsoever to do with attach rate.
There has not been any period at all where the PS3 has had a higher attach rate than the 360 and it's only just very recently managed to overtake the Wii.
But it really doesn't make any sense, attach rate is number of games purchased per console, not number of units of certain cherry picked titles sold per console. I suppose if you're completely unobjective and a total Sony fanboy you might take away from that in your mind that Sony has a higher attach rate, but if you step back and be objective and look at the first link you'll notice that regardless of what Sony says and how they twist a few figures the cold hard truth is that they do have a lower attach rate even when adjusted for console lifetime on the market. Nintendo could play a similar game to Sony taking games that were really built for the Wii but ported to other consoles anyway and suggest they have a higher attach rate, but still, the reality is that they don't. Effectively what Sony is abusing is the fact they have a much lower selection of titles on their system, so the good titles get a higher ratio bought for their console than for the other consoles, but this makes no sense because attach rates aren't about specific individual titles. It also ignores the fact their system has sold much fewer of the titles they've cherry picked overall too which should be the real measure of per-game success on each platform. If they have sold less of a specific title because they have a smaller install base that doesn't mean anything in terms of how well they're doing, in fact, it only exagerates the problem of having a smaller install base. If you can make up for that smaller install base with greater profits from game sales (i.e. real attach rates) then you may be able to live with that, but the problem is Sony is struggling in terms of both install base AND attach rates. It looks like they're improving things on the attach rates front, but they're certainly nowhere near Microsoft and they're certainly even further from having a big enough lead on attach rates against Microsoft that they can make up the profit differences from a lower install base.
At the end of the day all a publisher like activision sees is the amount of profit gained per console they publish for, and the fact is, Sony's mangled statistics don't change that one bit, it's simply an attempt at improving PR.
Really, if you have any sources that show the PS3 really does have a higher attach rate than the other two consoles rather than a bunch of cherry picked mangled stats that actually have nothing to do with attach rate because attach rates are game neutral I'd love to see it, but I've yet to see anything that shows this and certainly nothing from independent and product neutral sources like NPD.
I don't expect you to change your mind and accept that Sony doesn't have the highest attach rate, because the fact you came out with that unsourced and clearly untrue comment in the first means you're probably not open to the idea that the PS3 isn't doing as well as it should be but it seems silly to leave such an incorrect comment uncorrected. Still, if you can somehow prove your comment then I'll step back and accept I stand corrected but mangled statistics that are effectively meaningless from the marketing department of the company you're referring to don't really count for obvious reasons, it needs to be objective 3rd party stats that really tell us something about profit from games sold per console.
It's a matter of consistency. Some articles and journalists aren't too bad to be fair.
But then you have people like Andrew Orlowski who make the entire site just look like a joke, he comes across as Sarah Palin with a blog rather than a professional IT journalist. He's neither professional, nor a journalist. I've noticed he is quite prone to mood swings - one week file sharers are the most evil people on earth and the next he's agreeing with them whilst referring to them as "freetards" still. Of course, disabling comments on nearly all his articles shows him up for what he is - someone not only entirely unobjective, but also completely unwilling to hear people tell him and explain why he's wrong.
I'm equally unimpressed by Lewis Page, whilst he's much better than Orlowski because his arguments are often at least coherent, they still miss extremely important facts and end up tending to be quite wrong. He seems to feel the fact he was a random low ranking sailor or whatever in the never this somehow qualifies him as an expert on defence and related geopolitical issues, but from the stuff he comes out with it often quite obviously doesn't.
Their heavily moderated comments system and the fact Sarah Bee sounds more suited to some teen MySpace gossip group or something doesn't help their case for being a professional IT news outlet either.
The Sun actually seems to accept that it caters to stupid people though.
The Register is more like the Daily Mail, self appointed moral defender of the internet that is more often wrong in it's opinion pieces than not but doesn't like to hear it and so heavily moderates or outright disables comments in response to stories that deep down even it knows are stupid.
That's not necessarily true, it depends entirely how it's been done with a computer.
If they used the PDF redaction tool then it probably can be undone. The problem is I'm not sure they have, I've had a fiddle around with the files and it seems they may have been images where they have put black boxes over in an unlayered manner meaning the process is totally destructive.
It needs more research for sure, but it's far from certain as to whether that data can be recovered in anyway. If they have indeed used a destructive technique for the redactions then even done on a computer it cannot be recovered.
Cheers, looks like they've already published some although a little dissapointing - they've still black out some data although they claim it's only address.
Frankly I don't buy the security argument for addresses and was hoping the Telegraph wouldn't either.
As MPs seem so intent on collecting all our data, they should have no problem with us having theirs. Anyone who is a security threat could find out where they live regardless.
Yeah, this is what amazes me, and this is the stuff they didn't censor. That's why I think we really need to know the stuff that was censored.
We already know they censored some pretty major stuff, so it suggests they actually think the stuff that isn't censored is all okay.
As you say there's a lot of stuff like the £250 petty cash, the £400 food allowances and so on, but there's also a lot of small staff that across all claims will instead add up. Using Ian Cawsey as an example again he paid £26 for a hanging basket and a watering service, £26 is little, but he could've paid £5 for the hanging basket and watered it himself, £21 saving isn't a lot, but that £21 that could've bought another text book at a school - across all expenses and MPs however many textbooks for schools can we not afford for even the small expenditures?
A major attitude change is indeed required and not just in government but right across public sector from schools to police to MPs (I use to work in public sector for just over 5 years FWIW) no thought whatsoever goes into how can I ensure I do this in a manner fair to tax payers. They just assume money grows on trees, because the government provides an endless supply of cash. When a department head says they don't have enough money the government just pays them more, the real answer should be to sack him and get someone that can do the job on budget.
I'm concerned that no media outlet has really made the connection yet - that maybe this isn't just a problem with MPs and the issue spreads right across public sector. Some council heads get paid £250,000 a year, far more than any MP and get expenses as well - we should be scrutinising that lot as well as MPs. We need a nationwide re-evaluation of how tax payer money is used. If any amount of fairness was injected into the system as a result I guarantee you we could shave a good few % off of everyone's tax and still have no detriment to public services whatsoever, hell, I saw literally millions thrown down the drain first hand when I worked in public sector, but good luck finding any manager who cares. It needs to come from the top down, starting with the MPs and absolutely not stopping at the MPs.
Anyone who has seen the expenses will know that the important stuff is all blanked out.
There are pages that are entirely black in there.
There are pages that say things like:
"Dear xx, here is your invoice of £2,500 for the following work:"...and then everything below it blanked out.
The BBC had a copy of Gordon Brown's uncensored expenses document and compared it to the official version. The uncensored version said "£99.00 Sky TV", the censored version just said "£99.00".
The whole thing is a farce, we need to get the uncensored version - there was suggestion yesterday the Telegraph who obtained the leaked uncensored versions would release them to the public today but I've heard nothing more since.
There are some gems in the official version, under MP Ian Cawsey's expenses I noticed he'd sponsored a local football team £300, and then charged the tax payer for that sponsorship via the expenses system, but I feel if we start this now we'll only need to start right over when we do finally get hold of the uncensored version.
I suppose there's an argument finding breaches in the official release will allow us to apply more pressure to get the uncensored version though maybe? I'd have thought people's time would be better spent actually pressuring for the release though of the uncensored versions overall and then do something like this.
Still, good work to the Guardian for working with what we have at least, you can't fault them for that.
I wont bother with the rest of it because we're going round in circles and you keep ignoring important points.
But regarding constituencies, it's also a bit of a silly argument in favour of FPTP.
What is the use having a local MP to represent you if the MP doesn't actually represent you because of major ideological differences, just as the relevant MPs don't represent the 19 million who threw their votes away in safe seat constituencies last election?
1 MP per 60,000 people is still a massive step up from 19 million people having no MP representing them as is the case under FPTP. The only people who get representation are those who voted for their safe seat party and even then only if their safe seat party is the winner because again for previously mentioned reasons only the winning party has any real power in parliament under FPTP. So we're back to square one then, in the current government, only 35% of people have a local MP to represent them in parliament.
Besides that though, 1 MP per 60,000 ignores the fact that each MP can hire upto 4 or 5 members of staff which easily dilutes the load in terms of contact they may have to deal with, in fact it brings us down to roughly the level of 10,000 we have under FPTP. The difference is, all people are actually represented because their constituency MP is one that actually cares what they think due to ideological similarities.
"You have best and worst confused: at worst, the House of Lords is a speedbump, at best at can convince the government ot scrap a bill. Someone in the middle is the possibility of suggested changes being accepted by the House of Commons."
It's a nice theory, but it hasn't actually managed to work like that on many issues.
"Canada doesn't help you for tow reasons: it's FPTP, not PR"
Yes, I pointed this out, but as I also stated, it's only because they're fortunate enough that the electoral boundaries have allowed them to be lucky enough for this to happen - the Quebec situation helps massively here. The key point is it was an example of a hung government and why hung governments aren't an issue. The problem with FPTP particularly in England is we never really get hung governments due to the layout of safe seats.
"I'm not aware of any mechanism which boots the government out once its approval rating drops below 50% which was the crucial issue at stake."
Luckily with PR that's not a problem, because the government never has effective 100% of the power anyway. Only in FPTP would you need to get rid of government with low approval ratings because then they have 100% of the power effectively.
"Democracy is about the people's choice. That requires the availability of options and the freedom to chose whichever option you want i.e. freedom for anyone within reason to put themselves up for election and freedom to vote for whoever you want combined with the most poplar choice winning. That is the case for both FPTP and PR, they just break things down differently - FPTP uses small constituencies with one representative; FPTP uses larger area with multiple representatives. There are arguments for and against both positions, but neither is a dictatorship."
No, democracy is about a government representive of the people, FPTP does not allow this in England because it's too disproportionately swung towards a specific minority.
"You seem to think that no-one should be able to govern without having the direct support of at least 50% of the population"
Again, you still seem to misunderstand the fundamental difference between FPTP and PR. I am not saying no one should be able to govern without having support of at least 50% of the population, I am saying people should only be able to govern with the proportion of power granted to them by the people.
If we have the following election result under PR:
Lib Dems: 20% Conservatives: 25% Labour: 30%
Then the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Labour should only get 20%, 25% and 30% of the seats in parliament respectively and hence when it comes to voting on an issue they should only get a 20%, 25% and 30% stake in the outcome of the vote. That is representation of the people's wishes in a manner that everyone's vote counts. Currently we have this situation as of last election:
Labour: 35% Conservatives: 32% Lib Dems: 22%
Yet, Labour get 55% of the seats meaning that if Labour decide to push something, i.e. ID cards then it doesn't matter that the 55% of people that voted Tory and Lib Dems did so because they didn't want ID cards, the minority 35% that voted Labour get their way under FPTP. Compare this to the PR system where with only 35% of the vote, Labour could not single handedly impose a law on the whole country that only 35% of the country supports because the 55% of people that didn't want it would simply have it voted against - effectively, they'd actually be represented in parliament.
I'm not sure how I can make it any more clear to you that FPTP does not represent the people, it allows a specific few controlling the leading party to impose their will as they wish and it means millions of voters votes effectively do not matter and hence might as well not even count.
You can continue to argue for FPTP all you want but the fact is, in the UK last election there were 19 million people whose vote achieved nothing and was worthless, there have been cases where a party, Labour, voted in with
What people seem to be missing is that so many games out there right now are full of American culture, to the point they perhaps don't even realise it.
A culturally British game may simply be a game like any other where you drive on the left hand side of the road and road signs are British, where accents are British, where things are spelt in a British way, where food is British (fish and chips!), where vehicles are those commonly driven in Britain, where you get chased by the met, SO19 or SOCA rather than the cops, SWAT or the FBI.
This would differ from many current games where vehicles are often American, accents are American, food is American, laws are American and so on.
People seem to be spinning this as some kind of racist point of view but quite the opposite, what they seem to be trying to do is bring more diversity to gaming and I don't think it's just the British that should do this. I actually like the idea of playing a game that's themed in a different way than the most common American style. In games where they have been themed in a different part of the world I have actually learnt something about those cultures in the process of playing through - even if it's just learning the name of a new type of food that's used as a health pickup in said game.
Adding a bit of cultural diversity might actually allow kids playing these games to learn that there are other cultures out there than just the ones defined by game developers as the FBI chasing, burger eating games we have now that are often used by game developers to portray the American setting we're commonly handed.
I can't help but think it might be quite fun to race round the streets of downtown bombay or whatever with a completely different style of everything from clothing to accents rather than driving round Manhattan etc. all the time. There is nothing wrong with your usual American stylised games, they in themselves are good - but a bit of a change wouldn't hurt now and again.
"Flamebait? This? No, this is response. The original is flamebait. One person's "cultural" is another's "racist". The "British" aspect just happens to make it very easy to flip that conceptual card."
Well no, not at all.
You're picking the worst possible bits of British history and claiming that's British culture.
Culture consists of more than just the things a country has done wrong over the years. It consists of the architectural style of certain cities, it consists of traditional foods, it consists of accents, it consists of folk stories and that sort of thing.
A game that's culturally British could just be one based on British legend like Robin Hood or King Arthur, or it could just be any other game like Grand Theft Auto where the accents are British, the architecture, styles, rules of the road (driving on the left) are British and where instead of eating burgers for health you eat fish and chips.
As it happens you ARE being racist because you're associating the culture of British people today with some of their most atrocious acts in the past. You're inferring that British people still view the world the same now as they did back then. You do realise that inferring British culture is all about colonialism and imperialistic tendancies is as ignorant as saying all Islamic culture is about terrorism right?
Culture isn't a static thing throughout history, cultures change. Tying a modern culture to it's related country's past is ignorant at best. Jokes about tea drinking and such are fair enough because the British do drink a lot of tea still, but tying it to slavery and so forth? Get a fucking grip, I doubt there's a person alive in Britain today that supports slavery and if there is you're talking about the odd fringe nutcases and certainly not mainstream British culture.
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Well no, it's been quite clearly stated the official election results suggest that Ahmadinejad got 63% support even in the rich, well educated areas.
That's why it's pretty clear the election was a farce, because apparently even those that don't support Ahmadinejad er support Ahmadinejad according to the official results.
Let me guess, you also thought George Bush was an awesome president and Sarah Palin could've been even better had she ever made it to VP and then from VP to president?
To be fair the XBox 360 HD-DVD player count might not be that low.
When news came through HD-DVD was being ditched, they first started selling them off for £30, and then eventually £7 here in the UK.
That's so rediculously cheap I'd imagine they sold off the entire stockpile - how big that is, who knows, but it wont have been too small.
Still it's not really worth caring about, as no more discs will come out HD-DVD is dead in the water regardless.
As an aside some of the best internal Bluray drives for the PC also support HD-DVD - Of course this wouldn't change the balance as they include both but I found it interesting that they even bothered to include HD-DVD by that stage.
I see.
So in other words you're just a xenophobic fantacist?
As a society advances, todays high end jobs become tommorrows menial tasks that no one wants to do in an advanced country but that 3rd world countries are more than happy to take on as it's still better than what they were doing. Robot AI will always be a few steps behind again so would never be a solution to menial tasks, if robots could be created to do anything then we wouldn't need anyone to work at all, ever.
You also seem to miss the point that even in a single country like the US, without poor people there can be no rich people. A specific country can only have so much money, and there will always be those who want and gain more than others, there will always be impoverished sections of society.
Your idea has no grounding in reality, it is ignorant of basic science and economics. Effectively what you're talking about is some kind of communist utopia where robots do half the work - do you know how odd that sounds for today's world? Do you realise how much of a nutcase it makes you sound that you suggest the removal of free trade would suddenly turn the US into a society so advanced it was between about 2 and 5 decades ahead of every other country in the world?
It's not as if they probably only got the contract because American companies such as Cisco are forbidden from selling such equipment to Iran.
My point is that I do not believe there is a company in the world that would pass up this kind of contract. Do I disagree with it's use? Of course I do.
But I fail to see why Nokia and Siemens should be demonised anymore than any other company in the world - at the end of the day the only difference here between Nokia/Siemens and any other networking company is that those guys got the contract - it didn't mean others didn't bid and it doesn't mean others like Cisco wouldn't also bid if they had the opportunity to.
Rather than focus on chastising company x for the fact company x sold something to country y which was used in a bad way we should be chastising big corporations in general for this sort of behaviour. It's a problem that extends far far beyond just Nokia and Siemens and we can't expect Nokia and Siemens to change their ways if no one else will else it puts them at a major disadvantage and is like committing corporate suicide.
I agree.
The problem is, people like the guy in TFA are suggesting you get more than the more expensive US offering for far less money out of them. This for the reasons you state is blatant bullshit.
Even if India is producing better graduates than the US (which let's face it, it's really not) then they're not working for this guy anyway because he's not paying for the top graduates, they'd eat into his profit margins too much, he's paying for the cheapest he can find and as you state, this means his company ends up producing crap because again, as you say, you get what you pay for.
You mean apart from make you clothes, farm you food and produce other goods at rates so cheap no American would be willing to do it?
If you cut off free trade with India and China expect a massive cost of living increase in the US to the point some of the poorer people in society wont even be able to afford clothes or feed their families. Expect massive toxic tips all across the US as you can no longer dump all your shit in other countries too.
I understand you'd be angry at the article, the guy is a fucking idiot and talking out his arse but his comments are rather irrelevant to free trade in general.
The same could be said for someone calling someone else a fanboy based on the arbitrary assumption they took offence, rather than simply that they dislike seeing people who are dishonest about said console without a care which one it is.
Sometimes it's worth considering your own advice before preaching it to others.
It also means the word needs to be spread on this so that everyone can challenge the RIAA in the same way forcing them to either accept complete defeat or allow it to be tried in court and er, end up being forced into accepting defeat.
I've always wondered why this sort of defence hasn't been tested before. Effectively all MedaSentry are providing is a screenshot and/or text files showing that their IP was being used for downloading copyright material. Of course, generating such a screenshot in photoshop that is impossible to tell apart from an authentic screenshot is trivial, similarly any old joe can knock together a text file that suggests such and such an IP was downloading some data at a certain time.
Hell you don't even have to do that, you could create an offline network setup to mimic the IPs involved in the first place.
This is the problem I have with computer crime cases in general, and in fact, even computer forensics. Even if you confiscate a PC and do DNA analysis on the keyboard to see if person x is the guy who use this computer to commit crime y can you ever reall prove someone didn't just plug a different keyboard in the computer to commit the crime?
There's a need to catch criminals who use computers for sure, but I'm concerned in computer crime cases the level of evidence required is so rediculously weak, and so easily rigged or faked compared to normal crimes that if it continues I wouldn't be suprised if we end up with a plethora of wrongful convictions coming to light over the next few decades. Of course, companies like MediaSentry are only degrading the level of "evidence" that is apparently acceptable too - if we can't really, truly prove people guilty in many computer crime cases from forensic analysis when you have access to the physical machine what kind of joke is it if you're going on an IP address and nothing more?
I hope eventually as judges and politicians become more IT literate this trend reverses, if it doesn't then it's going to be a sad future for justice as the level of evidence becomes ever weaker yet the use of electronic devices and hence the amount of electronic crimes increases. We're going to end up with a lot of innocent people in jail.
No, the sad fact is that Jammie is incompetent.
As much as I support her attempt at fighting the RIAA, the problem is that she lied in court, and she didn't challenge the real issues with the RIAAs claims (i.e. the fact their evidence is easily falsified and really proved nothing).
The reality is we shouldn't waste our time with Jammie, she's handing the RIAA victory on a plate and has done so twice now, which in the eyes of the average joe will make it look like the RIAA is in the right.
I feel for her, but on the same note, all the way through this she's been her own worst enemy and in the process has also been unhelpful to those who have been trying to support her cause by simply not taking advantage of the wealth of expert information available to her in defending herself.
Of course, more importantly, there's no way they could ever have known they'd get such a high judgement against her either. The very fact it's unconstitutionally high raises questions as there are many cases in other areas that are far more criminal but don't get handed down such high judgements.
I really think she's just been victim of her own incompetence coupled with a setence being handed down by a bunch of nutcases. The latter isn't a bad thing for the reasons you state, but I'm not convinced she's someone who can take that judgement and show it for the farce it is judging by her track record and the fact she's shot herself in the foot so many times before.
The problem with US intervention isn't that of harder crack down, you're mistaken in not understanding what the problem with it is.
The problem with US intervention is that even many of the protestors absolutely hate the US. There are hundreds of thousands of those protestors who would rather spite the US than spite the Ayatollah, whilst the US etc. stay out of it there is no "Iranian leadership vs. West" thing, it's a purely internal Iranian affair which all Iranians want to sort out. If the West gets involved and starts taking sides it turns into an "Iranian leadership vs. West" thing and many more will rally against the West because they hate us that much more.
Why do they hate us? Well, the very Iraq war you seem to think is empowering them to push for free elections is a damn good starting point.
Let the citizens of the West show their support because it's a good way for them to realise we're not all bad, get our leadership involved though and it becomes a Western attempt to control Iran. The last thing we want to do right now is split the protest movement - let it stay solid, let it stay together against the Ayatollah rather than be split against the West.
If the West is going to get involved it has to make sure one thing has happened - that the Iranian protestors now hate their leadership enough to side wholly with the West over their leadership, as yet we cannot be sure we're at that stage and again, we'd likely just split and hence weaken the movement. It's somewhat sad but I imagine a lot of protestors are going to have to die yet so that the protest movement becomes angry enough to think that maybe the West, the US in particular aren't that bad so that the US can lend their support.
"I've always personally used AMD systems, and have never found them lacking."
I'd be suprised if you did find them lacking if they're all you've used.
Only using one type of system doesn't really put you in the best of places to judge on what you may or may not be missing out on though.
To provide some evidence for your claim-
When the other consoles were released the 360 was arguably the most expensive - it was outright more expensive than the Wii, and when you compared like for like it was more expensive than the PS3.
Yet it had a much higher attach rate, by far the highest of the three.
Since then it's dropped to offer the cheapest system out the lot yet still has the highest attach rate (http://kotaku.com/5222086/ps3-attach-rate-overtakes-wii-attach-rate).
That suggests that you're right, console price has nothing whatsoever to do with attach rate.
Unfortunately reality seems to disagree with you.
http://kotaku.com/5222086/ps3-attach-rate-overtakes-wii-attach-rate
From a year ago:
http://playstation.joystiq.com/2008/04/25/npd-releases-home-console-attach-rate-ratios-ps3-not-so-hot/
There has not been any period at all where the PS3 has had a higher attach rate than the 360 and it's only just very recently managed to overtake the Wii.
The closest I could find to your claims was this:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23186
But it really doesn't make any sense, attach rate is number of games purchased per console, not number of units of certain cherry picked titles sold per console. I suppose if you're completely unobjective and a total Sony fanboy you might take away from that in your mind that Sony has a higher attach rate, but if you step back and be objective and look at the first link you'll notice that regardless of what Sony says and how they twist a few figures the cold hard truth is that they do have a lower attach rate even when adjusted for console lifetime on the market. Nintendo could play a similar game to Sony taking games that were really built for the Wii but ported to other consoles anyway and suggest they have a higher attach rate, but still, the reality is that they don't. Effectively what Sony is abusing is the fact they have a much lower selection of titles on their system, so the good titles get a higher ratio bought for their console than for the other consoles, but this makes no sense because attach rates aren't about specific individual titles. It also ignores the fact their system has sold much fewer of the titles they've cherry picked overall too which should be the real measure of per-game success on each platform. If they have sold less of a specific title because they have a smaller install base that doesn't mean anything in terms of how well they're doing, in fact, it only exagerates the problem of having a smaller install base. If you can make up for that smaller install base with greater profits from game sales (i.e. real attach rates) then you may be able to live with that, but the problem is Sony is struggling in terms of both install base AND attach rates. It looks like they're improving things on the attach rates front, but they're certainly nowhere near Microsoft and they're certainly even further from having a big enough lead on attach rates against Microsoft that they can make up the profit differences from a lower install base.
At the end of the day all a publisher like activision sees is the amount of profit gained per console they publish for, and the fact is, Sony's mangled statistics don't change that one bit, it's simply an attempt at improving PR.
Really, if you have any sources that show the PS3 really does have a higher attach rate than the other two consoles rather than a bunch of cherry picked mangled stats that actually have nothing to do with attach rate because attach rates are game neutral I'd love to see it, but I've yet to see anything that shows this and certainly nothing from independent and product neutral sources like NPD.
I don't expect you to change your mind and accept that Sony doesn't have the highest attach rate, because the fact you came out with that unsourced and clearly untrue comment in the first means you're probably not open to the idea that the PS3 isn't doing as well as it should be but it seems silly to leave such an incorrect comment uncorrected. Still, if you can somehow prove your comment then I'll step back and accept I stand corrected but mangled statistics that are effectively meaningless from the marketing department of the company you're referring to don't really count for obvious reasons, it needs to be objective 3rd party stats that really tell us something about profit from games sold per console.
It's a matter of consistency. Some articles and journalists aren't too bad to be fair.
But then you have people like Andrew Orlowski who make the entire site just look like a joke, he comes across as Sarah Palin with a blog rather than a professional IT journalist. He's neither professional, nor a journalist. I've noticed he is quite prone to mood swings - one week file sharers are the most evil people on earth and the next he's agreeing with them whilst referring to them as "freetards" still. Of course, disabling comments on nearly all his articles shows him up for what he is - someone not only entirely unobjective, but also completely unwilling to hear people tell him and explain why he's wrong.
I'm equally unimpressed by Lewis Page, whilst he's much better than Orlowski because his arguments are often at least coherent, they still miss extremely important facts and end up tending to be quite wrong. He seems to feel the fact he was a random low ranking sailor or whatever in the never this somehow qualifies him as an expert on defence and related geopolitical issues, but from the stuff he comes out with it often quite obviously doesn't.
Their heavily moderated comments system and the fact Sarah Bee sounds more suited to some teen MySpace gossip group or something doesn't help their case for being a professional IT news outlet either.
It's a fair point and I did wonder if they did it to cover themselves but I'd still rather have seen them make a stand!
It'd be nice if they did the right thing and leaked it anonymously as a torrent ;)
The Sun actually seems to accept that it caters to stupid people though.
The Register is more like the Daily Mail, self appointed moral defender of the internet that is more often wrong in it's opinion pieces than not but doesn't like to hear it and so heavily moderates or outright disables comments in response to stories that deep down even it knows are stupid.
I agree though, it's an atrociously bad site.
That's not necessarily true, it depends entirely how it's been done with a computer.
If they used the PDF redaction tool then it probably can be undone. The problem is I'm not sure they have, I've had a fiddle around with the files and it seems they may have been images where they have put black boxes over in an unlayered manner meaning the process is totally destructive.
It needs more research for sure, but it's far from certain as to whether that data can be recovered in anyway. If they have indeed used a destructive technique for the redactions then even done on a computer it cannot be recovered.
Cheers, looks like they've already published some although a little dissapointing - they've still black out some data although they claim it's only address.
Frankly I don't buy the security argument for addresses and was hoping the Telegraph wouldn't either.
As MPs seem so intent on collecting all our data, they should have no problem with us having theirs. Anyone who is a security threat could find out where they live regardless.
Yeah, this is what amazes me, and this is the stuff they didn't censor. That's why I think we really need to know the stuff that was censored.
We already know they censored some pretty major stuff, so it suggests they actually think the stuff that isn't censored is all okay.
As you say there's a lot of stuff like the £250 petty cash, the £400 food allowances and so on, but there's also a lot of small staff that across all claims will instead add up. Using Ian Cawsey as an example again he paid £26 for a hanging basket and a watering service, £26 is little, but he could've paid £5 for the hanging basket and watered it himself, £21 saving isn't a lot, but that £21 that could've bought another text book at a school - across all expenses and MPs however many textbooks for schools can we not afford for even the small expenditures?
A major attitude change is indeed required and not just in government but right across public sector from schools to police to MPs (I use to work in public sector for just over 5 years FWIW) no thought whatsoever goes into how can I ensure I do this in a manner fair to tax payers. They just assume money grows on trees, because the government provides an endless supply of cash. When a department head says they don't have enough money the government just pays them more, the real answer should be to sack him and get someone that can do the job on budget.
I'm concerned that no media outlet has really made the connection yet - that maybe this isn't just a problem with MPs and the issue spreads right across public sector. Some council heads get paid £250,000 a year, far more than any MP and get expenses as well - we should be scrutinising that lot as well as MPs. We need a nationwide re-evaluation of how tax payer money is used. If any amount of fairness was injected into the system as a result I guarantee you we could shave a good few % off of everyone's tax and still have no detriment to public services whatsoever, hell, I saw literally millions thrown down the drain first hand when I worked in public sector, but good luck finding any manager who cares. It needs to come from the top down, starting with the MPs and absolutely not stopping at the MPs.
Anyone who has seen the expenses will know that the important stuff is all blanked out.
There are pages that are entirely black in there.
There are pages that say things like:
"Dear xx, here is your invoice of £2,500 for the following work:" ...and then everything below it blanked out.
The BBC had a copy of Gordon Brown's uncensored expenses document and compared it to the official version. The uncensored version said "£99.00 Sky TV", the censored version just said "£99.00".
The whole thing is a farce, we need to get the uncensored version - there was suggestion yesterday the Telegraph who obtained the leaked uncensored versions would release them to the public today but I've heard nothing more since.
There are some gems in the official version, under MP Ian Cawsey's expenses I noticed he'd sponsored a local football team £300, and then charged the tax payer for that sponsorship via the expenses system, but I feel if we start this now we'll only need to start right over when we do finally get hold of the uncensored version.
I suppose there's an argument finding breaches in the official release will allow us to apply more pressure to get the uncensored version though maybe? I'd have thought people's time would be better spent actually pressuring for the release though of the uncensored versions overall and then do something like this.
Still, good work to the Guardian for working with what we have at least, you can't fault them for that.
I wont bother with the rest of it because we're going round in circles and you keep ignoring important points.
But regarding constituencies, it's also a bit of a silly argument in favour of FPTP.
What is the use having a local MP to represent you if the MP doesn't actually represent you because of major ideological differences, just as the relevant MPs don't represent the 19 million who threw their votes away in safe seat constituencies last election?
1 MP per 60,000 people is still a massive step up from 19 million people having no MP representing them as is the case under FPTP. The only people who get representation are those who voted for their safe seat party and even then only if their safe seat party is the winner because again for previously mentioned reasons only the winning party has any real power in parliament under FPTP. So we're back to square one then, in the current government, only 35% of people have a local MP to represent them in parliament.
Besides that though, 1 MP per 60,000 ignores the fact that each MP can hire upto 4 or 5 members of staff which easily dilutes the load in terms of contact they may have to deal with, in fact it brings us down to roughly the level of 10,000 we have under FPTP. The difference is, all people are actually represented because their constituency MP is one that actually cares what they think due to ideological similarities.
"You have best and worst confused: at worst, the House of Lords is a speedbump, at best at can convince the government ot scrap a bill. Someone in the middle is the possibility of suggested changes being accepted by the House of Commons."
It's a nice theory, but it hasn't actually managed to work like that on many issues.
"Canada doesn't help you for tow reasons: it's FPTP, not PR"
Yes, I pointed this out, but as I also stated, it's only because they're fortunate enough that the electoral boundaries have allowed them to be lucky enough for this to happen - the Quebec situation helps massively here. The key point is it was an example of a hung government and why hung governments aren't an issue. The problem with FPTP particularly in England is we never really get hung governments due to the layout of safe seats.
"I'm not aware of any mechanism which boots the government out once its approval rating drops below 50% which was the crucial issue at stake."
Luckily with PR that's not a problem, because the government never has effective 100% of the power anyway. Only in FPTP would you need to get rid of government with low approval ratings because then they have 100% of the power effectively.
"Democracy is about the people's choice. That requires the availability of options and the freedom to chose whichever option you want i.e. freedom for anyone within reason to put themselves up for election and freedom to vote for whoever you want combined with the most poplar choice winning. That is the case for both FPTP and PR, they just break things down differently - FPTP uses small constituencies with one representative; FPTP uses larger area with multiple representatives. There are arguments for and against both positions, but neither is a dictatorship."
No, democracy is about a government representive of the people, FPTP does not allow this in England because it's too disproportionately swung towards a specific minority.
"You seem to think that no-one should be able to govern without having the direct support of at least 50% of the population"
Again, you still seem to misunderstand the fundamental difference between FPTP and PR. I am not saying no one should be able to govern without having support of at least 50% of the population, I am saying people should only be able to govern with the proportion of power granted to them by the people.
If we have the following election result under PR:
Lib Dems: 20%
Conservatives: 25%
Labour: 30%
Then the Lib Dems, Conservatives and Labour should only get 20%, 25% and 30% of the seats in parliament respectively and hence when it comes to voting on an issue they should only get a 20%, 25% and 30% stake in the outcome of the vote. That is representation of the people's wishes in a manner that everyone's vote counts. Currently we have this situation as of last election:
Labour: 35%
Conservatives: 32%
Lib Dems: 22%
Yet, Labour get 55% of the seats meaning that if Labour decide to push something, i.e. ID cards then it doesn't matter that the 55% of people that voted Tory and Lib Dems did so because they didn't want ID cards, the minority 35% that voted Labour get their way under FPTP. Compare this to the PR system where with only 35% of the vote, Labour could not single handedly impose a law on the whole country that only 35% of the country supports because the 55% of people that didn't want it would simply have it voted against - effectively, they'd actually be represented in parliament.
I'm not sure how I can make it any more clear to you that FPTP does not represent the people, it allows a specific few controlling the leading party to impose their will as they wish and it means millions of voters votes effectively do not matter and hence might as well not even count.
You can continue to argue for FPTP all you want but the fact is, in the UK last election there were 19 million people whose vote achieved nothing and was worthless, there have been cases where a party, Labour, voted in with
I don't think that's far from the truth.
What people seem to be missing is that so many games out there right now are full of American culture, to the point they perhaps don't even realise it.
A culturally British game may simply be a game like any other where you drive on the left hand side of the road and road signs are British, where accents are British, where things are spelt in a British way, where food is British (fish and chips!), where vehicles are those commonly driven in Britain, where you get chased by the met, SO19 or SOCA rather than the cops, SWAT or the FBI.
This would differ from many current games where vehicles are often American, accents are American, food is American, laws are American and so on.
People seem to be spinning this as some kind of racist point of view but quite the opposite, what they seem to be trying to do is bring more diversity to gaming and I don't think it's just the British that should do this. I actually like the idea of playing a game that's themed in a different way than the most common American style. In games where they have been themed in a different part of the world I have actually learnt something about those cultures in the process of playing through - even if it's just learning the name of a new type of food that's used as a health pickup in said game.
Adding a bit of cultural diversity might actually allow kids playing these games to learn that there are other cultures out there than just the ones defined by game developers as the FBI chasing, burger eating games we have now that are often used by game developers to portray the American setting we're commonly handed.
I can't help but think it might be quite fun to race round the streets of downtown bombay or whatever with a completely different style of everything from clothing to accents rather than driving round Manhattan etc. all the time. There is nothing wrong with your usual American stylised games, they in themselves are good - but a bit of a change wouldn't hurt now and again.
"Flamebait? This? No, this is response. The original is flamebait. One person's "cultural" is another's "racist". The "British" aspect just happens to make it very easy to flip that conceptual card."
Well no, not at all.
You're picking the worst possible bits of British history and claiming that's British culture.
Culture consists of more than just the things a country has done wrong over the years. It consists of the architectural style of certain cities, it consists of traditional foods, it consists of accents, it consists of folk stories and that sort of thing.
A game that's culturally British could just be one based on British legend like Robin Hood or King Arthur, or it could just be any other game like Grand Theft Auto where the accents are British, the architecture, styles, rules of the road (driving on the left) are British and where instead of eating burgers for health you eat fish and chips.
As it happens you ARE being racist because you're associating the culture of British people today with some of their most atrocious acts in the past. You're inferring that British people still view the world the same now as they did back then. You do realise that inferring British culture is all about colonialism and imperialistic tendancies is as ignorant as saying all Islamic culture is about terrorism right?
Culture isn't a static thing throughout history, cultures change. Tying a modern culture to it's related country's past is ignorant at best. Jokes about tea drinking and such are fair enough because the British do drink a lot of tea still, but tying it to slavery and so forth? Get a fucking grip, I doubt there's a person alive in Britain today that supports slavery and if there is you're talking about the odd fringe nutcases and certainly not mainstream British culture.