I'm still not sure why they gave them a loan to begin with. Don't most "Tax incentive packages" involve a grace period of simply not paying local / state/ real estate taxes ? Since when do they flat out become the venture capitol ?
Do you have Amazon VOD available where you're at ? Every TV in the house has a Bluray player that streams Amazon VOD, and this is how we catch our non-Netflix shows.
We get Big Bang Theory, Castle and Criminal Minds by buying them as they come out (~$2 each and less when you buy the season) so assuming every show has a new episode each week we're only out $24 for the month + Netflix ($8) and with VOD we own it and can watch it unlimited times and from wherever we are (in the country is the 1 limitation).
Any HBO shows (which tend to be very serial in nature), I simply wait till they're on DVD / Bluray and spend a few weeks going through it at once.
Mainstream comics have been geared to an older audiance for quite a while now (there are some, but few), but If you walk into a Book store there's a bunch of "my first books" involoving various heros, such as
"My First Superman Book"
and a personal favorite of mine is "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" .
I know. I'd even be okay with buying episodes of shows as they air, not to coincide with some poorly done DVD release (hello, HBO) if they exist at all. In lieu of sane options, piracy is all that's left.
Not Quite.Hulu wasn't the only non-pirate site that offered this service. This is how I buy several shows using Amazon VOD. I buy a subscription (or season) and as new ones come available I get them in HD the next day. Your show many not be available that way (like HBO shows) but there are many that are.
I'll have to try that. I haven't had the issue you speak of, but I've never had an issue with my Steam games not working in a "fresh offline mode".
I shut down my active connection on my desktop before a trip, and when I boot my laptop on a plane (with no connection present) It askes to go into offline mode, I say yes, and every single one of my games that I have installed on the laptop plays fine. I have never had to (or even thought of) needing to set it to offline mode in advance. In my scenario "it just works".
However, the more likely scenario is just a repeat of what happened with PC games.
You can't really buy PC Games used anymore, so a large portion of the pc game traffic moved on and got consoles instead. When consoles suffer from the same thing, people are going to move on to mobile games on platforms like the iPad, Android, and soon windows 8 tablets.
Sure, you can't resell mobile apps, but it's a rarity when a mobile game costs more than $10. At that price, you can afford to buy 6 games for the same price as 1 console game. Who cares if you can't sell them back. And, for that matter, most mobile games are less than $5, and the majority are stuck squarely at $0.99.
This is why I support STEAM. Virtually Every purchase I ever make (for a single game) is under $5, and historically the MOST I've ever spent on a single game was $10. For this Steam is amazing. I understand I can't resell, loan or borrow under these terms but for these prices I'm ok with that... start insisting on $60 per and you'll see how fast my buying dries up.
I Disagree. If they are determined to take away my "right of first sale" and charge the same price for it then my issue is with Sony. It's their right to offer a lesser product for the same price, but it's guaranteed to lose sales.
The way I'm understanding it, Sony isn't taking anything away from YOU. You can still sell your game to anyone who wishes to purchase it, for whatever amount they wish to give you. They just have to understand that not only will they pay for the physical media, they will also have to pay to unlock game content as well.
So if used game stores offer you less money to sell your games, your problem is with the game stores, not Sony.
But they ARE taking something from me, they are taking resale value away from the item I purchased so I DO have an issue with them selling me a lesser product for full price.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Steam myself, I however have never paid more than $10 for a single title. Even THEN I knew if I waited longer I could get it for cheaper, but had free time that weekend and wanted to play it NOW. My per game average is below $5 per game and I consider that reasonable. I get that I can't sell it, loan it, etc... but I also don't have to buy any additional hardware, or accessories to be able to use it. I have a pre-existing computer and buy games that will play on that and the price I pay is almost always under $5 each title. I also will not buy any games that use DRM in addition to Steam. No 3rd party activiations, no computer install limits, no always online requirements. Under these conditions I find Steam to be a great system.
What I have issue with and thus would not consider is Paying several hundred dollars for a system + accessories to be locked into buying $60 games, that I can't loan and/ or re-sell. I've been a gamer since the Atari 2600 days, have all 3 current systems, a number of legacy systems and have more games already that I probably should, but there is no franchise on any system that will compel me to agree to the terms of what they are [rumored to be] proposing.
Completely different scenario. With games you are (and always have been) allowed to share between friends and even siblings, or to sell them or gift them used. Windows was never the case (legally).
I don't really have a problem with this. It's not like it's going to affect game prices that much, I can go to a local store and find $20 games that are "brand new". Of course, I may have to wait a year or two, but that doesn't mean I have to buy $60 games. Most of the stores where I live who sell recently released "used" games only take off $5 or MAYBE $10.
So, as someone who doesn't sell games, this doesn't bother me in the least.
Actually this doesn't bother me much either, since this is such a shitty anti-user business practice I'll save a ton of money by not buying their system, games or accessories next round. Seriously, if they implement this I don't care what comes out for the system, I'm not buying it.
If you do sell games, then your issue would be with the business who buys them from you, not Sony.
I Disagree. If they are determined to take away my "right of first sale" and charge the same price for it then my issue is with Sony. It's their right to offer a lesser product for the same price, but it's guaranteed to lose sales.
Please see subject, because you know it's true. As soon as people realize they can't trade-in games, everything is tied to one PSN account, and games still cost $60+ this game console will fly... right back to Japan.
Same thing with XBOX - if it comes locked down and games tied to a single account and no used game sales then it will be a very expensive paperweight. A dead albatross weighting them down.
Time for a new game company to step up and create something open or,rather, more open than the "next gen" consoles appear to be.
You conveniently forgot to mention the "Wii U" which to date is the only next generation console which hasn't been rumored to cripple used game sales.
Only if you assume the people making the dictionary attack are so monumentally stupid they won't try 0's in place of o's.
They wouldn't be " monumentally stupid they won't try 0's in place of o's", they would be monumentally stupid to think to try a dictionary attack at all.
The entire exercise is academic to begin with. How many systems allow for infinite retries of random passwords without locking the account and or sending an alert ? Where I work you get 3 tries and after that you lock the account systematically for 30 minutes (or an admin has to unlock you) so maximum you have 144 chances in a single day to guess the right password systematically (without anyone noticing).
Hell you can come up with more than 144 variations knowing the password is SUPPOSED TO BE "homer loves donuts"
Not only do you have to guess the word(s), the order, the context, any substitutions ( 0's instead of o's, 3's instead of E's) , camel casing, abnormal camel casing "( hOMERlOVESdONUTS )" If a person created a sufficiently complex password it could take a lifetime to try and brute force it.
You're much better off finding an exploit to retrieve it (or even simpler) using social engineering to coax or trick a person into giving it to you.
Getting joe public to use something other than "password" is hard, but its easier to persuade Joe to use a phrase like "HomerLovesDonuts" than some random string of letters - we all know the random string will just get written down.
Yes, but you CAN make them simple to remember and VASTLY more difficult to crack if you put different emphasis on specific characters.
HomerLOVESDonuts! - is a lot harder to crack as is encouraging them to swap out numbers for vowels even if it's just one.
H0merL0vesD0nuts! - is a lot better.
Phone companies: provide paper copies only to those customers that explicitly ask for one (opt-in), and charge for the printing / shipping costs.
I wish they did that here. Hell I get 3 phonebooks and end up getting rid of all of them. We Only use cell phones. We have internet on our phones, if we can't use them to get the number then we can't make a call so there's really no point in wasting the paper (at least on me).
I have a NES hooked up via composite to a projector and play it on a 97" screen. It seems that the people who have an issue with this generally are the types that wouldn't play it on a smaller screen anyway and it's their loss.
A server name needs to directly correspond to a server's function. I'm not saying you can't be creative but don't be stupid. When you grow beyond ~10 servers, cutesie names are going to cause you to work weekends trying to track down basic networking issues.
Not if there's a Built in mnemonic to the server name.
"Kirk" can be a Domain Controller
"Uhura" can be an email server.
"Gene" [Roddenberry] can be a payroll server...
If you have multiple sites break it down by shows.
Headquarters could be the "ToS" Enterprise(s), another building could be the Next Generation Enterprise(s), and if need be, just branch out into more shows, like Futurama, BSG, StarGate...
The only trick is to keep it Sci-Fi / Fantasy so the names are memorable and meaningful to the IT staff.
Not into the public domain, but they must release them.... (Disclaimer: I am an artist, not a lawyer. I look at things from an artist's point of view. Which is, of course, the right one.)
So the "Right one" is actually keeping these locked up and unreleased.
Michael very specifically recorded these tracks (about 100 all told) for his children to be released posthumously, so THEY would be taken care of. Back in 2009 when he was having financial problems, he was approached asking to release some and he refused.
Mr Halperin, author of Unmasked, The Michael Jackson Story said before his death: “He wants to leave them for his kids, a very personal legacy to them. I was told he will not let them come out now.”
It's fucking music tracks they were not releasing to cash in at a later point.
This was going to be available at some point in the future, and it's better for society that it's available now. Locked up in a vault they had zero value.
It has value to his kids. Michael specifically wrote / recorded music that was intended to be sold posthumously as a means of providing for his children when he was no longer around.
I have to question that statistic, however. Isn't 50% for ALL marriages? That doesn't apply to everyone. If you're in your first marriage, you don't care how many total marriages end in divorce, you only care how many first marriages end in divorce. I do remember reading that the failure rate for marriages goes up with the marriage number...
Yup, but that's how it goes 1 couple gets married once for life and they are counted once. Someone gets married / divorced 5 times and they get counted 5 times. I read somewhere that something like 52% (slightly more than half) of ALL marriages end up in divorce but 66% of FIRST marriages don't*. I don't have a link or anything to back that up on hand, but it sounds reasonable to me.
Note: "Doesn't end in divorce" =/= successful marriage, nor even "till death do you part". I have a neighbor in his 70's that is still married, but has been living apart and completely uninvolved in his wife's life for going on 25 years now. They went their separate ways, never looked back but neither "believed in divorce" so they never did it officially.
Combining EVERYTHING is a sure fire way to not only lose yourself, but also lose what that other person was attracted to. IMO life needs a careful balance of:
1) "Family time" - you + her + kids or extended family (parents, cousins, etc...)
2) "Couple time" - time when it's just you and her.
3) "Alone time" - when you both are completely separated and "do your own thing".
There are certain things that we each like that the other doesn't (or doesn't to the same degree). She HATES the cold and I love to ski... doesn't mean I have to give up skiing, I just don't take her with me when I go. Every so often one of us stays home with our son and the other goes out for a "guys night out / girls night out" and I honestly feel we are both the better for it. Being with someone means combining and sharing a multitude of things, but you don't have to lose yourself in the process.
Consuming content isn't playing a game. And many games are exactly about that --- show stuff, don't frustrate the player with any actual challenge, make sure the game can be completed easily if you only really want to. Who cares about the properties of games, like the ability to win or loose them... because hey, you hired 2000 artists, might as well show off their work, right?
I mean sure, if that's what people want, and other people are actually up for giving that to them, I don't care. It's like bad cinema, exactly like that. Formulaic, shallow, mediocre, and mentally as cheap as they are expensive in terms of money.
I agree, but apparently that's what the market WANTS. Look at the Metacritic score on "Bioshock" , not only was it commercially successful, it was critically hailed but it is a Pretty yet PAINFULLY shallow game that was broken in play balancing. On the hardest difficulty you can march forward mashing the R trigger until you won. Why? Because the developers felt that you NEEDED to be able to experience the whole narrative rather than playing a game. After beating it on hard I half expect the controls for "Easy" to look like a DVD remote. "Press Play to watch the cut-scenes and Win" .
Saddly, that appears to be what people want.:(
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I'm a little unclear on why so much.
I'm still not sure why they gave them a loan to begin with. Don't most "Tax incentive packages" involve a grace period of simply not paying local / state/ real estate taxes ? Since when do they flat out become the venture capitol ?
We get Big Bang Theory, Castle and Criminal Minds by buying them as they come out (~$2 each and less when you buy the season) so assuming every show has a new episode each week we're only out $24 for the month + Netflix ($8) and with VOD we own it and can watch it unlimited times and from wherever we are (in the country is the 1 limitation).
Any HBO shows (which tend to be very serial in nature), I simply wait till they're on DVD / Bluray and spend a few weeks going through it at once.
Mainstream comics have been geared to an older audiance for quite a while now (there are some, but few), but If you walk into a Book store there's a bunch of "my first books" involoving various heros, such as "My First Superman Book" and a personal favorite of mine is "The Complete Calvin and Hobbes" .
I know. I'd even be okay with buying episodes of shows as they air, not to coincide with some poorly done DVD release (hello, HBO) if they exist at all. In lieu of sane options, piracy is all that's left.
Not Quite.Hulu wasn't the only non-pirate site that offered this service. This is how I buy several shows using Amazon VOD. I buy a subscription (or season) and as new ones come available I get them in HD the next day. Your show many not be available that way (like HBO shows) but there are many that are.
I shut down my active connection on my desktop before a trip, and when I boot my laptop on a plane (with no connection present) It askes to go into offline mode, I say yes, and every single one of my games that I have installed on the laptop plays fine. I have never had to (or even thought of) needing to set it to offline mode in advance. In my scenario "it just works".
However, the more likely scenario is just a repeat of what happened with PC games.
You can't really buy PC Games used anymore, so a large portion of the pc game traffic moved on and got consoles instead. When consoles suffer from the same thing, people are going to move on to mobile games on platforms like the iPad, Android, and soon windows 8 tablets.
Sure, you can't resell mobile apps, but it's a rarity when a mobile game costs more than $10. At that price, you can afford to buy 6 games for the same price as 1 console game. Who cares if you can't sell them back. And, for that matter, most mobile games are less than $5, and the majority are stuck squarely at $0.99.
This is why I support STEAM. Virtually Every purchase I ever make (for a single game) is under $5, and historically the MOST I've ever spent on a single game was $10. For this Steam is amazing. I understand I can't resell, loan or borrow under these terms but for these prices I'm ok with that... start insisting on $60 per and you'll see how fast my buying dries up.
I Disagree. If they are determined to take away my "right of first sale" and charge the same price for it then my issue is with Sony. It's their right to offer a lesser product for the same price, but it's guaranteed to lose sales.
The way I'm understanding it, Sony isn't taking anything away from YOU. You can still sell your game to anyone who wishes to purchase it, for whatever amount they wish to give you. They just have to understand that not only will they pay for the physical media, they will also have to pay to unlock game content as well. So if used game stores offer you less money to sell your games, your problem is with the game stores, not Sony.
But they ARE taking something from me, they are taking resale value away from the item I purchased so I DO have an issue with them selling me a lesser product for full price.
What I have issue with and thus would not consider is Paying several hundred dollars for a system + accessories to be locked into buying $60 games, that I can't loan and/ or re-sell. I've been a gamer since the Atari 2600 days, have all 3 current systems, a number of legacy systems and have more games already that I probably should, but there is no franchise on any system that will compel me to agree to the terms of what they are [rumored to be] proposing.
Completely different scenario. With games you are (and always have been) allowed to share between friends and even siblings, or to sell them or gift them used. Windows was never the case (legally).
I don't really have a problem with this. It's not like it's going to affect game prices that much, I can go to a local store and find $20 games that are "brand new". Of course, I may have to wait a year or two, but that doesn't mean I have to buy $60 games. Most of the stores where I live who sell recently released "used" games only take off $5 or MAYBE $10. So, as someone who doesn't sell games, this doesn't bother me in the least.
Actually this doesn't bother me much either, since this is such a shitty anti-user business practice I'll save a ton of money by not buying their system, games or accessories next round. Seriously, if they implement this I don't care what comes out for the system, I'm not buying it.
If you do sell games, then your issue would be with the business who buys them from you, not Sony.
I Disagree. If they are determined to take away my "right of first sale" and charge the same price for it then my issue is with Sony. It's their right to offer a lesser product for the same price, but it's guaranteed to lose sales.
Please see subject, because you know it's true. As soon as people realize they can't trade-in games, everything is tied to one PSN account, and games still cost $60+ this game console will fly ... right back to Japan.
Same thing with XBOX - if it comes locked down and games tied to a single account and no used game sales then it will be a very expensive paperweight. A dead albatross weighting them down.
Time for a new game company to step up and create something open or ,rather, more open than the "next gen" consoles appear to be.
You conveniently forgot to mention the "Wii U" which to date is the only next generation console which hasn't been rumored to cripple used game sales.
Unfortunately a "moden re-imaging" of Pong would make it a cover based shooter, just like everything else these days.
Only if you assume the people making the dictionary attack are so monumentally stupid they won't try 0's in place of o's.
They wouldn't be " monumentally stupid they won't try 0's in place of o's", they would be monumentally stupid to think to try a dictionary attack at all.
The entire exercise is academic to begin with. How many systems allow for infinite retries of random passwords without locking the account and or sending an alert ? Where I work you get 3 tries and after that you lock the account systematically for 30 minutes (or an admin has to unlock you) so maximum you have 144 chances in a single day to guess the right password systematically (without anyone noticing).
Hell you can come up with more than 144 variations knowing the password is SUPPOSED TO BE "homer loves donuts"
Is it:
homerlovesdonuts
HOMERLOVESDONUTS
Homerlovesdonuts
Homerlovesdonuts.
Homerlovesdonuts!
HomerlovesDonuts
homerLOVESdonuts
HomerLovesDONUTS!
h0m3rL0v3sD0nuts!
etc...
How long do you think a dictionary attack takes to get a SINGLE dictionary word to work (considering there are 470,000 of them in the english language: http://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq/total_words.htm) ?
Not only do you have to guess the word(s), the order, the context, any substitutions ( 0's instead of o's, 3's instead of E's) , camel casing, abnormal camel casing "( hOMERlOVESdONUTS )" If a person created a sufficiently complex password it could take a lifetime to try and brute force it.
You're much better off finding an exploit to retrieve it (or even simpler) using social engineering to coax or trick a person into giving it to you.
Getting joe public to use something other than "password" is hard, but its easier to persuade Joe to use a phrase like "HomerLovesDonuts" than some random string of letters - we all know the random string will just get written down.
Yes, but you CAN make them simple to remember and VASTLY more difficult to crack if you put different emphasis on specific characters. HomerLOVESDonuts! - is a lot harder to crack as is encouraging them to swap out numbers for vowels even if it's just one. H0merL0vesD0nuts! - is a lot better.
Phone companies: provide paper copies only to those customers that explicitly ask for one (opt-in), and charge for the printing / shipping costs.
I wish they did that here. Hell I get 3 phonebooks and end up getting rid of all of them. We Only use cell phones. We have internet on our phones, if we can't use them to get the number then we can't make a call so there's really no point in wasting the paper (at least on me).
The # 1 Problem with Android is that it's nobody's "Lead platform" ... not even Google.
If my brain damage is severe enough that I can't at least hold a public office, then it's best to just let me go.
I have a NES hooked up via composite to a projector and play it on a 97" screen. It seems that the people who have an issue with this generally are the types that wouldn't play it on a smaller screen anyway and it's their loss.
A server name needs to directly correspond to a server's function. I'm not saying you can't be creative but don't be stupid. When you grow beyond ~10 servers, cutesie names are going to cause you to work weekends trying to track down basic networking issues.
Not if there's a Built in mnemonic to the server name. "Kirk" can be a Domain Controller "Uhura" can be an email server. "Gene" [Roddenberry] can be a payroll server... If you have multiple sites break it down by shows. Headquarters could be the "ToS" Enterprise(s), another building could be the Next Generation Enterprise(s), and if need be, just branch out into more shows, like Futurama, BSG, StarGate ...
The only trick is to keep it Sci-Fi / Fantasy so the names are memorable and meaningful to the IT staff.
Not into the public domain, but they must release them. ... (Disclaimer: I am an artist, not a lawyer. I look at things from an artist's point of view. Which is, of course, the right one.)
So the "Right one" is actually keeping these locked up and unreleased.
Michael very specifically recorded these tracks (about 100 all told) for his children to be released posthumously, so THEY would be taken care of. Back in 2009 when he was having financial problems, he was approached asking to release some and he refused.
Mr Halperin, author of Unmasked, The Michael Jackson Story said before his death: “He wants to leave them for his kids, a very personal legacy to them. I was told he will not let them come out now.”
It's fucking music tracks they were not releasing to cash in at a later point.
This was going to be available at some point in the future, and it's better for society that it's available now. Locked up in a vault they had zero value.
It has value to his kids. Michael specifically wrote / recorded music that was intended to be sold posthumously as a means of providing for his children when he was no longer around.
I have to question that statistic, however. Isn't 50% for ALL marriages? That doesn't apply to everyone. If you're in your first marriage, you don't care how many total marriages end in divorce, you only care how many first marriages end in divorce. I do remember reading that the failure rate for marriages goes up with the marriage number...
Yup, but that's how it goes 1 couple gets married once for life and they are counted once. Someone gets married / divorced 5 times and they get counted 5 times. I read somewhere that something like 52% (slightly more than half) of ALL marriages end up in divorce but 66% of FIRST marriages don't*. I don't have a link or anything to back that up on hand, but it sounds reasonable to me.
Note: "Doesn't end in divorce" =/= successful marriage, nor even "till death do you part". I have a neighbor in his 70's that is still married, but has been living apart and completely uninvolved in his wife's life for going on 25 years now. They went their separate ways, never looked back but neither "believed in divorce" so they never did it officially.
1) "Family time" - you + her + kids or extended family (parents, cousins, etc...)
2) "Couple time" - time when it's just you and her.
3) "Alone time" - when you both are completely separated and "do your own thing".
There are certain things that we each like that the other doesn't (or doesn't to the same degree). She HATES the cold and I love to ski... doesn't mean I have to give up skiing, I just don't take her with me when I go. Every so often one of us stays home with our son and the other goes out for a "guys night out / girls night out" and I honestly feel we are both the better for it. Being with someone means combining and sharing a multitude of things, but you don't have to lose yourself in the process.
Might wanna start that now. Seriously, if it's "mostly his games anyway", why not make a separate one for you ?
Consuming content isn't playing a game. And many games are exactly about that --- show stuff, don't frustrate the player with any actual challenge, make sure the game can be completed easily if you only really want to. Who cares about the properties of games, like the ability to win or loose them... because hey, you hired 2000 artists, might as well show off their work, right?
I mean sure, if that's what people want, and other people are actually up for giving that to them, I don't care. It's like bad cinema, exactly like that. Formulaic, shallow, mediocre, and mentally as cheap as they are expensive in terms of money.
I agree, but apparently that's what the market WANTS. Look at the Metacritic score on "Bioshock" , not only was it commercially successful, it was critically hailed but it is a Pretty yet PAINFULLY shallow game that was broken in play balancing. On the hardest difficulty you can march forward mashing the R trigger until you won. Why? Because the developers felt that you NEEDED to be able to experience the whole narrative rather than playing a game. After beating it on hard I half expect the controls for "Easy" to look like a DVD remote. "Press Play to watch the cut-scenes and Win" . Saddly, that appears to be what people want. :(