Add to that the difference in payloads. Launching a mining setup that weighs thousands of tons, successfully landing it on the moon, perhaps having it do some self assembly up there, have the ability for it to launch its own thounsands of tons payloads back towards the earth without nuking the planet in the process, none of that sounds remotely trivial, even after 50 years of R&D.
True, but at the same time if their best piece of evidence is that he could have done it because he had the know-how, then god help anyone who is a VoIP engineer, knows anything about computers, or has ever used Google. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the fact that he supposedly borrowed the router from work and then never returned it points to his guilt. If it was pre-meditated enough that he borrowed a router for the purpose, why the hell would he raise a huge flag by not returning it - why not buy a cheap router to do the job, or wipe the router's logs and take it back to work at the very least? Being caught out like that sounds more like the plot for an episode of Columbo (and the fact that they'd then take such flimsy evidence as enough to prosecute on, doubly so).
The game itself was pretty substandard, but it broke new ground in creating the awkward contraction "vidgame" to describe what was traditionally called a video game.
I only played the first Res (and a very little bit of Res 2, which I abandoned early on as it seemed they were going for all out zombie apocalypse instead of claustrophobic survival horror) but I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed the movie. Maybe it's because my expectations were so ridiculously low to begin with, but I thought they did a reasonable job of fitting the storyline of the movie around the storyline of the game without encroaching too much (or trying to do a straight retelling of the game story, or abandoning the story altogether). You got some familiar scenese from the game cropping up in the movie, the characters in the movie travel through the game world from the opposite direction (where you start the movie is where you ended the game and vice versa) and a little of the back story got filled in. For a standard fare zombie movie it did its job reasonably well, it was never going to win any awards but it wasn't offensive to me as someone who enjoyed the game, that's about the best I've come to hope for from movies based on games.
If we're ever going to see good movie games, we can't rely on existing directors who have no passion for, and often little knowledge of, the medium. However, now gaming has gone much more mainstream, we'll start to see more geeky directors who might actually be capable of making a movie of a game that doesn't suck (think along the lines of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright).
I could live with that, but when I tried to use my legitimately purchased ticket to get in, they didn't like some of the other tickets I happened to have in my wallet at the time and refused me entry.
I suspect his "secret" isn't really a secret, it's just how close his ties to the West were before the relationship soured. The reason he didn't talk about this prior to his death is that it was mutually embarassing. If he was captured, he'd have little to lose in reminding us that we're the ones who trained him and set him loose on the world, while it would still be potentially embarassing to our governments to have several days of that blazoned across every newspaper.
Yeah...but it means Justin Beiber takes over as the most hated man alive. Do you really want that...?
I dunno, does it mean the US will now spend trillions of dollars ensuring his demise? I'm kind of... yeah, I think I'm good with that. Not thrilled about the timescales if it means we have to put up with him for another decade, mind.
Thank god they didn't allow room for the same rumours about Bin Laden to spread and instead decided to prominently display his body to prove... what? They dumped it where?
The problem for the casual game producer is that the market is way, way more open. A major game studio knows exactly what it's going to be competing against when it releases in the pre Christmas rush. The casual game producer might find it's release window dominated by something a kid in his parents' basement threw together over the summer. How many failures, even cheap to produce failures, can a company sustain and remain viable?
Of course, upping the capabilities of the machine can help by making game production more complicated/expensive (better graphics, for instance, mean games need real graphic designers to stand out and stick-man efforts will struggle to get the recognition even with solid gameplay), but then you incur higher development costs, which means breaking certain cost barriers to try and recoup your investment (it also ups the risk factor if that basement hit still outsells you), and you only go so far down that road before you're competing against the traditional big game producers (and if you're showing them the market is lucrative even with high production costs, expect them to come eat your lunch imminently).
I'm one of those who have been boycotting Sony since the rootkit fiasco but I'm not going to get preachy about it. For me, it's not some kind of crusade to get them to mend their ways or die, it's actually rather pure self-interest - I just know that they can't screw me over. I do wish a few more people would take note and Sony would mend their ways as a reaction. They used to be a decent company, their hardware was always top notch and I loved the PS1, it's just a bit sad to see them go down this route of profit above all.
Indeed, if the EFF truly believe this, they should go first, use some of their funding to establish some free public WiFi points and let those be the legal test cases. I can understand their logic, if they could convince everyone to do this then the logic is "they can't sue everyone" (I'm sure they could try, mind), but they will never convince everyone until people know it's safe (and even then lots of people just won't want to share bandwidth).
Also worth noting that phone companies spend significantly more to attract and keep pay as you go customers than contract (because once you're locked in you aren't going anywhere). That's a cost saving per contract customer that's also used to subsidise the handset. If the phone companies really thought there was no lost value to them in you being able to change providers at the drop of a hat they wouldn't make such a big deal about you leaving/cancelling on one. It's also guaranteed income which allows them to more accurately plan investments, etc whereas with pay as you go they have no idea, from one month to the next, whether they'll be getting your money, that also feeds back into the system and makes it financially viable for them to subsidise the phone. There are a lot of non-obvious factors at play here that aren't immediately apparent from a direct price comparison of contract versus pay as you go rates.
Presumably because you're not locked into a contract and the "risk" of you leaving somehow coincidentally equates, in monetary value, to the same as someone getting a phone subsidy while locked in.
How is it domain squatting, or do you actually buy into the idea that Apple have automatic ownership of any word with an "i" stuck at the front, even though many prominent devices used this prior to Apple? It's not like they were sat on Apple.com or Iphone.org.
Clearly they are starting to "give a shit" about people not buying, or they wouldn't be putting out a press release that basically says "just bear with the device and eventually you'll agree it's great". Besides the DS has been around almost 7 years - his 6 year old might not be the target market for this device yet, but give it two or three years and he's likely to be asking for one for Christmas, and Nintendo want to make sure it's their device and not a competitor's that he's going to ask for.
Lots of people said exactly that about the Wiimote. The key difference in my mind is price - people were willing to take a punt on the Wii because it was so cheap, the 3DS weighs in at what, double the price of a standard DS? That's a hard sell when the key feature is something the user can't really experience until after the sale (they can test it out but you probably need to put in some serious time to know if it suits you), and lack of first party games at launch is not going to help their cause. Their best hope is to get some first party games out before third part developers get twitchy and abandon the platform.
But... but... you can turn the 3D effect off. Then it becomes just an expensive DS with abysmal battery instead of a headache-inducing expensive DS with abysmal battery:)
I wonder why they didn't say that in their official press release. Maybe because they know it's not worth a damn and was only ever intended to put people off suing over minor indiscretions - it's a bit harder to say "hey, we lost the details of 77 million people but they agreed we have zero responsibility so go whistle". Still, if anything good comes out of this we can only hope that it's the courts ruling that EULAs are worth less than used toilet paper in order to prevent a possible public backlash.
As far as I can see, unless they make you read and agree to the EULA before any money changes hands, there's no way such a clause added after the contract should be able to change the nature of the contract. It might be fairer if I were allowed to return the item if I don't agree with the EULA for a full refund, but since most places don't accept non-faulty returns on sonftware or consoles (and when they do it's only for store credit) I don't see how this could ever meet even the most rudimentary test of fairness required to form a contractual obligation.
Ugh, I hate that - besides I'm always dubious when special characters aren't allowed in passwords. If they're hashing it, it shouldn't matter to them what characters I use, so it always makes me wonder why they'd have such a policy unless they're storing it plain text and don't want to worry about sanitising little Bobby Tables. I hope your password was along the lines of: y0urCr4ppyP4ssw0rdSyst3mThr34t3n5MyS3cur1ty
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Add to that the difference in payloads. Launching a mining setup that weighs thousands of tons, successfully landing it on the moon, perhaps having it do some self assembly up there, have the ability for it to launch its own thounsands of tons payloads back towards the earth without nuking the planet in the process, none of that sounds remotely trivial, even after 50 years of R&D.
True, but at the same time if their best piece of evidence is that he could have done it because he had the know-how, then god help anyone who is a VoIP engineer, knows anything about computers, or has ever used Google. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the fact that he supposedly borrowed the router from work and then never returned it points to his guilt. If it was pre-meditated enough that he borrowed a router for the purpose, why the hell would he raise a huge flag by not returning it - why not buy a cheap router to do the job, or wipe the router's logs and take it back to work at the very least? Being caught out like that sounds more like the plot for an episode of Columbo (and the fact that they'd then take such flimsy evidence as enough to prosecute on, doubly so).
Let's speak MS at it...
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
The game itself was pretty substandard, but it broke new ground in creating the awkward contraction "vidgame" to describe what was traditionally called a video game.
I only played the first Res (and a very little bit of Res 2, which I abandoned early on as it seemed they were going for all out zombie apocalypse instead of claustrophobic survival horror) but I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed the movie. Maybe it's because my expectations were so ridiculously low to begin with, but I thought they did a reasonable job of fitting the storyline of the movie around the storyline of the game without encroaching too much (or trying to do a straight retelling of the game story, or abandoning the story altogether). You got some familiar scenese from the game cropping up in the movie, the characters in the movie travel through the game world from the opposite direction (where you start the movie is where you ended the game and vice versa) and a little of the back story got filled in. For a standard fare zombie movie it did its job reasonably well, it was never going to win any awards but it wasn't offensive to me as someone who enjoyed the game, that's about the best I've come to hope for from movies based on games.
If we're ever going to see good movie games, we can't rely on existing directors who have no passion for, and often little knowledge of, the medium. However, now gaming has gone much more mainstream, we'll start to see more geeky directors who might actually be capable of making a movie of a game that doesn't suck (think along the lines of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright).
I could live with that, but when I tried to use my legitimately purchased ticket to get in, they didn't like some of the other tickets I happened to have in my wallet at the time and refused me entry.
I suspect his "secret" isn't really a secret, it's just how close his ties to the West were before the relationship soured. The reason he didn't talk about this prior to his death is that it was mutually embarassing. If he was captured, he'd have little to lose in reminding us that we're the ones who trained him and set him loose on the world, while it would still be potentially embarassing to our governments to have several days of that blazoned across every newspaper.
You'll get Monday's old data in Wednesday's dupe story. You must be new here.
Yeah...but it means Justin Beiber takes over as the most hated man alive. Do you really want that...?
I dunno, does it mean the US will now spend trillions of dollars ensuring his demise? I'm kind of... yeah, I think I'm good with that. Not thrilled about the timescales if it means we have to put up with him for another decade, mind.
Thank god they didn't allow room for the same rumours about Bin Laden to spread and instead decided to prominently display his body to prove... what? They dumped it where?
You think you're out of touch? I didn't even realise Hitler was still in the running for "Evilest Guy Alive".
The problem for the casual game producer is that the market is way, way more open. A major game studio knows exactly what it's going to be competing against when it releases in the pre Christmas rush. The casual game producer might find it's release window dominated by something a kid in his parents' basement threw together over the summer. How many failures, even cheap to produce failures, can a company sustain and remain viable?
Of course, upping the capabilities of the machine can help by making game production more complicated/expensive (better graphics, for instance, mean games need real graphic designers to stand out and stick-man efforts will struggle to get the recognition even with solid gameplay), but then you incur higher development costs, which means breaking certain cost barriers to try and recoup your investment (it also ups the risk factor if that basement hit still outsells you), and you only go so far down that road before you're competing against the traditional big game producers (and if you're showing them the market is lucrative even with high production costs, expect them to come eat your lunch imminently).
I'm one of those who have been boycotting Sony since the rootkit fiasco but I'm not going to get preachy about it. For me, it's not some kind of crusade to get them to mend their ways or die, it's actually rather pure self-interest - I just know that they can't screw me over. I do wish a few more people would take note and Sony would mend their ways as a reaction. They used to be a decent company, their hardware was always top notch and I loved the PS1, it's just a bit sad to see them go down this route of profit above all.
Indeed, if the EFF truly believe this, they should go first, use some of their funding to establish some free public WiFi points and let those be the legal test cases. I can understand their logic, if they could convince everyone to do this then the logic is "they can't sue everyone" (I'm sure they could try, mind), but they will never convince everyone until people know it's safe (and even then lots of people just won't want to share bandwidth).
Also worth noting that phone companies spend significantly more to attract and keep pay as you go customers than contract (because once you're locked in you aren't going anywhere). That's a cost saving per contract customer that's also used to subsidise the handset. If the phone companies really thought there was no lost value to them in you being able to change providers at the drop of a hat they wouldn't make such a big deal about you leaving/cancelling on one. It's also guaranteed income which allows them to more accurately plan investments, etc whereas with pay as you go they have no idea, from one month to the next, whether they'll be getting your money, that also feeds back into the system and makes it financially viable for them to subsidise the phone. There are a lot of non-obvious factors at play here that aren't immediately apparent from a direct price comparison of contract versus pay as you go rates.
Presumably because you're not locked into a contract and the "risk" of you leaving somehow coincidentally equates, in monetary value, to the same as someone getting a phone subsidy while locked in.
How is it domain squatting, or do you actually buy into the idea that Apple have automatic ownership of any word with an "i" stuck at the front, even though many prominent devices used this prior to Apple? It's not like they were sat on Apple.com or Iphone.org.
Clearly they are starting to "give a shit" about people not buying, or they wouldn't be putting out a press release that basically says "just bear with the device and eventually you'll agree it's great". Besides the DS has been around almost 7 years - his 6 year old might not be the target market for this device yet, but give it two or three years and he's likely to be asking for one for Christmas, and Nintendo want to make sure it's their device and not a competitor's that he's going to ask for.
Lots of people said exactly that about the Wiimote. The key difference in my mind is price - people were willing to take a punt on the Wii because it was so cheap, the 3DS weighs in at what, double the price of a standard DS? That's a hard sell when the key feature is something the user can't really experience until after the sale (they can test it out but you probably need to put in some serious time to know if it suits you), and lack of first party games at launch is not going to help their cause. Their best hope is to get some first party games out before third part developers get twitchy and abandon the platform.
But... but... you can turn the 3D effect off. Then it becomes just an expensive DS with abysmal battery instead of a headache-inducing expensive DS with abysmal battery :)
I wonder why they didn't say that in their official press release. Maybe because they know it's not worth a damn and was only ever intended to put people off suing over minor indiscretions - it's a bit harder to say "hey, we lost the details of 77 million people but they agreed we have zero responsibility so go whistle". Still, if anything good comes out of this we can only hope that it's the courts ruling that EULAs are worth less than used toilet paper in order to prevent a possible public backlash.
More likely if there is a danger of people cancelling they'll throw them some free gear.
As far as I can see, unless they make you read and agree to the EULA before any money changes hands, there's no way such a clause added after the contract should be able to change the nature of the contract. It might be fairer if I were allowed to return the item if I don't agree with the EULA for a full refund, but since most places don't accept non-faulty returns on sonftware or consoles (and when they do it's only for store credit) I don't see how this could ever meet even the most rudimentary test of fairness required to form a contractual obligation.
Ugh, I hate that - besides I'm always dubious when special characters aren't allowed in passwords. If they're hashing it, it shouldn't matter to them what characters I use, so it always makes me wonder why they'd have such a policy unless they're storing it plain text and don't want to worry about sanitising little Bobby Tables. I hope your password was along the lines of: y0urCr4ppyP4ssw0rdSyst3mThr34t3n5MyS3cur1ty