The thing is, this is more than trying to get first place in the console market - it's trying to get first place in the total home entertainment unit market. Taking a long-sighted approach, this is probably more important than anything else MS could be doing as it has the potential to be far more lucrative than even their OS market. Imagine if every home had one of your boxes in the living room and everyone in that home was paying to download content from your internet tubes, or paying for storage for remote content and applications. And as media centres and PC's move closer together, getting early dominance of this market becomes even more important.
Officers told the children they had been seen damaging the tree which is in a wooded area of public land near their homes
So, this isn't your personal property (and I agree that kids destroying a tree in my garden would offend me).
Of course, destroying public property is perfectly acceptable. Because we have such an abundance of nice places for people to go that haven't already been trashed by people with no respect for others.
As for "tearing down", I don't know if you've ever seen a tree, but they're fairly hardy buggers - we build houses out of them, and before steel came along they were quite popular for ocean-going ships.
I'd be fairly confident that an afternoon in the company of 3 twelve-year-olds wasn't going to significantly damage the tree. Perhaps a few broken twigs, and a little less foliage.
As has been noted elsewhere, the tree was only 20 foot, tearing off branches could certainly cause substantial damage. I didn't see the part of the article where they were (as you claim) breaking a few twigs. In fact, the only part of the article that mentions the extent of the damage is when the superintendent states they were breaking every branch from the tree. Of course, he might be lying to protect his officers, but that would be very easy to prove by showing some photographs of the tree and the amount of damage. Since you took the rest of the article verbatim, and since there was no refutation of the amount of damage they were doing, it seems fair that you accept this statement of the damage they did (and in fact, even one of the fathers referred to them damaging the tree) rather than making up your own.
Finally, as has also been noted, the Daily Mail have a long and colourful history of sensationalist journalism. They have a vested interested in stirring up public opinion, yet they declined to show the damage to the tree (which, if minimal, would have supported the whole story). You should ask yourself just why they would leave out this most incriminating indictment of the police's heavy-handed behaviour.
Just to re-iterate, I do think the police massively overreacted. However, to claim that the people who called the police are at fault is just stupid. The kids were causing criminal damage, the right thing to do is to notify the autorities and if the police see fit to give them a warning and let them go, so be it. Already people are scared to report crimes they see committed on a daily basis and your plan is to further reduce the number of people willing to stand up for society by threatening them with wasting police time doesn't seem like a way to fix that.
Why call the police and not just go to the tree and tell the kids to please stop? - It's not like these kids looked like hardline gang members (picture available in the article)...
Chances are if you tried this as a member of Joe Public, the least you could expect is a string of abuse, but it could be much worse. I know that, generally speaking, the vast majority of kids are good and not out to cause trouble, but the behaviour being exhibited wouldn't cause most people to think "Hmm, they seem like generally good kids".
I've known people try to approach kids causing trouble or damaging public (or private) property and try to reason with them in a civil manner. One guy I lived near tried just this when the (angelic-looking) kids on the street were playing football in the road, subsequent to people's flower-beds being crushed and car windows being smashed. He went out and asked them to move to the end of the road (where there is a small area for playing games) and got a load of verbal abuse in return, so he left them to it.
Two days later the police were at his door accusing him of assault when he hadn't laid a hand on any of them. They "let him off" with a caution (which stays on his record for, what, five years?). And then subjected him to a systematic campaign of harassment. He's had to fit cameras to the front and rear of his house to protect it and his car, and the police seem powerless to do anything.
Sure, if they're good kids they'll probably apologise for their behaviour and go do something more wholesome, but why the hell would anyone want to take the risk in today's society where the thugs and vandals seem to have the law on their side? If they turned on you with those sticks and you put up any kind of defence, you wouldn't be able to guarantee that you wouldn't be the one on the way to prison. Gangs of teens (and even younger kids) roam the streets smashing people's property, making people's lives a misery and the people are powerless to do anything - this is the society we're living in now, I honestly can't blame anyone for taking the safe route and calling the police to kids causing criminal damage to public property.
Was it unreasonable to do DNA testing and lock them up for hours? Most likely (although we only have the parents' word for it that they're little angels with no previous record of troublemaking - and they pretty much all say the same thing no matter how bad the kids are). Were the people in the park in the wrong for reporting their behaviour? No way. If only more people did this instead of turning a blind eye, the rogue kids probably wouldn't get away with so much in the first place.
When FF came out just installing it would make the world safe, because it was invulnerable and impervious.
I don't think anyone made this claim, simply that browsing the web would be very, very much safer. A claim I think many FF users would agree with. I agree that there should be some warning with regards to items dumped into the plugin folder, but having said that I think it's unfair to expect a web browser to make an entire operating system safe. The problems should be fixed at the operating system level, and then we wouldn't even need to run a secure browser.
You are right, and film makers know this trick too. Without the music, films wouldn't stir up nearly as much emotion. Sound has been an integral part of human story-telling for a very long time, and it seems game makers are realising this too.
I don't think I've ever had a 'blubber like a girl' moment in a game, but I've experienced the kind of terror you only get with a really great horror movie, which is just as hard to do as sad (if not harder). Actually, one thing sticks particularly in my mind - in Thief: Deadly Shadows, when you enter the abandoned asylum, the tension created in the first half of the level is unbelievable.
There are no enemies to fight, there's practically no sound, you're just walking around in this incredibly scary abandoned building where you just know bad shit has happened, and around every corner you expect something to jump out at you... it just never does. The tension keeps on mounting and, finally, after about half an hour of this you make your way up a creaky staircase and suddenly the attic door at the top bangs and if you can resist screaming like a schoolgirl, you're a better man than me! (I recommend not playing this level at 2am with all the lights out alone in the house like I did, by the way, not unless you can afford the therapy).
Seriously, if games can be so scary I don't doubt that, done right, they can make us cry too. I just think that this is something that's not really been explored to a great extent yet.
In other news, use of Bittorrent and eDonkey networks is up.
"We have won another battle in an ongoing war [...] We move forward with a spring in our step."
I have to hand it to these guys, they can sure convince themselves of what they want to believe in.
Haha. Yes, I imagine most people here stopped using the spyware infested rubbish that was Kazaa years ago. Just like we stopped using Napster years before they pulled that down, too. By the time they even begin to figure out how to approach the thorny bush of bittorrent, we'll already be using something better.
From where I'm standing it looks less like a spring in their step and more like a limp
Interestingly the BBC radio news broadcast a Q&A with some guy from the UK equivalent to the RIAA (which was practically a big advert for the music labels - Q&A as in some guy asked questions and then these were cherry picked by the label who then provided a soundbite response without any opportunity for the questioner to counter their arguments or delve deeper... and the BBC is meant to be a bastion of the media, hah!).
Anyway, what's interesting is that even though the interview was obviously heavily biased in the recording industry's favour, the guy still came off as self-contradictory and... well, slimy. When asked if downloads really hurt multi-million selling artists, his argument was that for every multi-million seller there are a hell of a lot of struggling artists who are being hurt by downloads. Fair enough, you might say. However, when asked why the record labels take such a huge cut of the profits, his response was that the artists get very well paid... how can they be both impoverished and well paid?
His only defence for the amount of money that the record labels award themselves was that they have high marketing costs. Well, it seems to me it's the artists at the top end of the scale that get all the expensive marketing, slots on TV and in magazines, etc. If there are many, many struggling artists for every top seller and the record labels are so concerned about this disparity, why aren't they heavily marketing the little guys and leaving the big fish to get on with it?
It was really quite sickening the way he was allowed to preach his lies for free on a supposedly unbiased national radio station (which we all know is a joke - these stations are in the record labels' pockets anyway, don't play nice with us and we'll make things very hard for you when it comes to exclusive plays of the newest hits, yadda yadda).
What was also interesting was that he admitted that not every single download equates to a lost sale. His response was that there is no real way of measuring how many actual lost sales result from illegal downloads. He didn't, however, explain why in the light of this view, the record labels still continue to spread the myth that every download is a lost sale (and nor was he pressed on the matter).
It's not hard to see why these people are able to ride roughshod over everyone when they've so obviously got the media in their pocket. They contradict themselves at every turn, they screw over both the music buyers and the musicians, governments turn a blind eye, p2p just seems to be a cash cow for them, the guy said they're already looking for their next target (I bet they didn't stand up in court and state that not every download on Kazaa amounted to a lost sale by a long margin)... ack, it makes my blood boil.
Just what I was thinking. And how are the stickers going to prevent waste? If the fruit looks bad, people won't buy it regardless of what a sticker tells them. All this is going to do is drive up prices...
Hey, grocers, here's a novel idea - if you're wasting tons (or bushels or litres, whatever) of fruit every year by throwing it away, instead of schemes to push cost up, why not reduce prices and see if you can't sell a bit more? And here's a more radical idea, why not give some of the food away, to the poor or homeless who don't care if it's a little overripe or bruised?
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, this is more than trying to get first place in the console market - it's trying to get first place in the total home entertainment unit market. Taking a long-sighted approach, this is probably more important than anything else MS could be doing as it has the potential to be far more lucrative than even their OS market. Imagine if every home had one of your boxes in the living room and everyone in that home was paying to download content from your internet tubes, or paying for storage for remote content and applications. And as media centres and PC's move closer together, getting early dominance of this market becomes even more important.
Of course, destroying public property is perfectly acceptable. Because we have such an abundance of nice places for people to go that haven't already been trashed by people with no respect for others.
As has been noted elsewhere, the tree was only 20 foot, tearing off branches could certainly cause substantial damage. I didn't see the part of the article where they were (as you claim) breaking a few twigs. In fact, the only part of the article that mentions the extent of the damage is when the superintendent states they were breaking every branch from the tree. Of course, he might be lying to protect his officers, but that would be very easy to prove by showing some photographs of the tree and the amount of damage. Since you took the rest of the article verbatim, and since there was no refutation of the amount of damage they were doing, it seems fair that you accept this statement of the damage they did (and in fact, even one of the fathers referred to them damaging the tree) rather than making up your own.
Finally, as has also been noted, the Daily Mail have a long and colourful history of sensationalist journalism. They have a vested interested in stirring up public opinion, yet they declined to show the damage to the tree (which, if minimal, would have supported the whole story). You should ask yourself just why they would leave out this most incriminating indictment of the police's heavy-handed behaviour.
Just to re-iterate, I do think the police massively overreacted. However, to claim that the people who called the police are at fault is just stupid. The kids were causing criminal damage, the right thing to do is to notify the autorities and if the police see fit to give them a warning and let them go, so be it. Already people are scared to report crimes they see committed on a daily basis and your plan is to further reduce the number of people willing to stand up for society by threatening them with wasting police time doesn't seem like a way to fix that.
Why call the police and not just go to the tree and tell the kids to please stop? - It's not like these kids looked like hardline gang members (picture available in the article)...
Chances are if you tried this as a member of Joe Public, the least you could expect is a string of abuse, but it could be much worse. I know that, generally speaking, the vast majority of kids are good and not out to cause trouble, but the behaviour being exhibited wouldn't cause most people to think "Hmm, they seem like generally good kids".
I've known people try to approach kids causing trouble or damaging public (or private) property and try to reason with them in a civil manner. One guy I lived near tried just this when the (angelic-looking) kids on the street were playing football in the road, subsequent to people's flower-beds being crushed and car windows being smashed. He went out and asked them to move to the end of the road (where there is a small area for playing games) and got a load of verbal abuse in return, so he left them to it.
Two days later the police were at his door accusing him of assault when he hadn't laid a hand on any of them. They "let him off" with a caution (which stays on his record for, what, five years?). And then subjected him to a systematic campaign of harassment. He's had to fit cameras to the front and rear of his house to protect it and his car, and the police seem powerless to do anything.
Sure, if they're good kids they'll probably apologise for their behaviour and go do something more wholesome, but why the hell would anyone want to take the risk in today's society where the thugs and vandals seem to have the law on their side? If they turned on you with those sticks and you put up any kind of defence, you wouldn't be able to guarantee that you wouldn't be the one on the way to prison. Gangs of teens (and even younger kids) roam the streets smashing people's property, making people's lives a misery and the people are powerless to do anything - this is the society we're living in now, I honestly can't blame anyone for taking the safe route and calling the police to kids causing criminal damage to public property.
Was it unreasonable to do DNA testing and lock them up for hours? Most likely (although we only have the parents' word for it that they're little angels with no previous record of troublemaking - and they pretty much all say the same thing no matter how bad the kids are). Were the people in the park in the wrong for reporting their behaviour? No way. If only more people did this instead of turning a blind eye, the rogue kids probably wouldn't get away with so much in the first place.
I don't think anyone made this claim, simply that browsing the web would be very, very much safer. A claim I think many FF users would agree with. I agree that there should be some warning with regards to items dumped into the plugin folder, but having said that I think it's unfair to expect a web browser to make an entire operating system safe. The problems should be fixed at the operating system level, and then we wouldn't even need to run a secure browser.
You are right, and film makers know this trick too. Without the music, films wouldn't stir up nearly as much emotion. Sound has been an integral part of human story-telling for a very long time, and it seems game makers are realising this too.
I don't think I've ever had a 'blubber like a girl' moment in a game, but I've experienced the kind of terror you only get with a really great horror movie, which is just as hard to do as sad (if not harder). Actually, one thing sticks particularly in my mind - in Thief: Deadly Shadows, when you enter the abandoned asylum, the tension created in the first half of the level is unbelievable.
There are no enemies to fight, there's practically no sound, you're just walking around in this incredibly scary abandoned building where you just know bad shit has happened, and around every corner you expect something to jump out at you... it just never does. The tension keeps on mounting and, finally, after about half an hour of this you make your way up a creaky staircase and suddenly the attic door at the top bangs and if you can resist screaming like a schoolgirl, you're a better man than me! (I recommend not playing this level at 2am with all the lights out alone in the house like I did, by the way, not unless you can afford the therapy).
Seriously, if games can be so scary I don't doubt that, done right, they can make us cry too. I just think that this is something that's not really been explored to a great extent yet.
Haha. Yes, I imagine most people here stopped using the spyware infested rubbish that was Kazaa years ago. Just like we stopped using Napster years before they pulled that down, too. By the time they even begin to figure out how to approach the thorny bush of bittorrent, we'll already be using something better.
From where I'm standing it looks less like a spring in their step and more like a limp
Interestingly the BBC radio news broadcast a Q&A with some guy from the UK equivalent to the RIAA (which was practically a big advert for the music labels - Q&A as in some guy asked questions and then these were cherry picked by the label who then provided a soundbite response without any opportunity for the questioner to counter their arguments or delve deeper... and the BBC is meant to be a bastion of the media, hah!).
Anyway, what's interesting is that even though the interview was obviously heavily biased in the recording industry's favour, the guy still came off as self-contradictory and... well, slimy. When asked if downloads really hurt multi-million selling artists, his argument was that for every multi-million seller there are a hell of a lot of struggling artists who are being hurt by downloads. Fair enough, you might say. However, when asked why the record labels take such a huge cut of the profits, his response was that the artists get very well paid... how can they be both impoverished and well paid?
His only defence for the amount of money that the record labels award themselves was that they have high marketing costs. Well, it seems to me it's the artists at the top end of the scale that get all the expensive marketing, slots on TV and in magazines, etc. If there are many, many struggling artists for every top seller and the record labels are so concerned about this disparity, why aren't they heavily marketing the little guys and leaving the big fish to get on with it?
It was really quite sickening the way he was allowed to preach his lies for free on a supposedly unbiased national radio station (which we all know is a joke - these stations are in the record labels' pockets anyway, don't play nice with us and we'll make things very hard for you when it comes to exclusive plays of the newest hits, yadda yadda).
What was also interesting was that he admitted that not every single download equates to a lost sale. His response was that there is no real way of measuring how many actual lost sales result from illegal downloads. He didn't, however, explain why in the light of this view, the record labels still continue to spread the myth that every download is a lost sale (and nor was he pressed on the matter).
It's not hard to see why these people are able to ride roughshod over everyone when they've so obviously got the media in their pocket. They contradict themselves at every turn, they screw over both the music buyers and the musicians, governments turn a blind eye, p2p just seems to be a cash cow for them, the guy said they're already looking for their next target (I bet they didn't stand up in court and state that not every download on Kazaa amounted to a lost sale by a long margin)... ack, it makes my blood boil.
Just what I was thinking. And how are the stickers going to prevent waste? If the fruit looks bad, people won't buy it regardless of what a sticker tells them. All this is going to do is drive up prices... Hey, grocers, here's a novel idea - if you're wasting tons (or bushels or litres, whatever) of fruit every year by throwing it away, instead of schemes to push cost up, why not reduce prices and see if you can't sell a bit more? And here's a more radical idea, why not give some of the food away, to the poor or homeless who don't care if it's a little overripe or bruised?