Backup my legally bought and paid for games so I'm not out £40 if my XBOX decides to eat them (as it has to 2 in the past)
Remove the disk check for the games I have installed to the hard drive (i.e. games I have legally installed using MS's functionality) so I don't have to continually switch disks to play different games or when I go between my two systems
I really want an updated version of XBMC - the single most useful app on my old XBOX - so that one box can be my entire gaming and media system
None of these uses costs MS anything, the first two ensure I buy more games, the third that I never have to switch off my XBOX for my other entertainment needs. None of them are about getting games for free, I don't have the time or patience to find free games when I only play maybe one or two a month and I can easily afford that. I'm tired of getting a substandard experience as a paying customer, MS should be doing this stuff anyway, I'd never buy another system if they did. In the meantime I won't be modding my XBOX because I like the online features, but it's hardly filling me with brand loyalty.
That's all well and good, but maybe Amazon should have thought about that two days ago when they first agreed to host the site, after the cables were already being published, the site was already sufering DDoS attacks (the whole reason for the move to Amazon in the first place) and the outcry had already started. This is not a case of Amazon unknowingly getting their fingers burnt, this is more akin to them watching someone stick their hand in a fire and scream that it hurts, then doing the same themselves and expecting sympathy. They knew what they were getting into, agreeing to host the site then immediately dropping it just makes them look like idiots.
I guess "received via email" isn't nearly so sensationalist. You're right, this whole furore exists precisely as a ruse to hide embarassment over the fact that such huge gaping potential for leaks exists in the first place, and if that means blurring the lines between someone being sent information and someone somehow illegally obtaining it through means of a seizure, I guess that's what they'll resort to (hell, there's probably a cable to that effect flying around).
Surely the real issue here is that this information got out at all. Instead of demonising Wikileaks, governments should be addressing the very fact that this kind of confidential or, at the very least, highly embarassing information came to be in public hands. The whole Wikileaks witch hunt, to me, looks like a big smokescreen to hide the incompetence of the so called confidential communication process. Would they be happier if all this information was going to an enemy nation who wasn't revealing the fact and was potentially using the information for their own agenda? At least with a leak into the open everyone knows what's in the documents and it can no longer be used as leverage (and it highlights weaknesses that can then be addressed).
There's nothing wrong with thinking things up for a living. The problem is when the system is so broken that patents can be submitted for ideas that already have prior art, or can be so vague or so broad that they allow someone to squat on a whole raft of potential innovation, or persist for so long (particularly in the field of modern electronic devices) that they're pretty much superceded years before they expire, or that they give a massively unfair advantage to the super rich or to huge corporations who can afford to register hundreds of these things with no intention of ever creating anything, or can afford the armies of lawyers to defend or attack based on them. The basic idea isn't necessarily bad, but the implementation is absolutely awful.
How annoyed would you have been if they'd made you sit through ads in order to watch ads? In fact, what if the ads they forced you to sit through were the ones you went there to see in the first place. My head hurts.
Well it's not really free in the UK, we already pay a kind of television tax. The BBC doesn't have an issue with charging people overseas for its content, so the logical answer would be to allow it in Live as an already paid for service in the UK and charge anyone a subscription fee outside of the UK, but this has already been ruled out in the past (well, I don't know if the additional subscription model came up, but providing it at no cost in the UK was already shot down).
You're right, I haven't spent a great deal of time reading up on this because it has little bearing on me. To clarify, I wasn't trying to be disparaging, I just know that often when people here talk about consumer protections that we take for granted in much of Europe, many people from the US comment there are no equivalent rights or greatly diminished equivalents over there (hence "I'm given to understand" as opposed to "I know for a fact").
Agreed - loss leaders in themselves are not a distortion of the free market. What would be a distortion is the producer being able to use the law to prevent people buying the razor and then using their own cheap blades (or in B&N's case, someone buying the Nook and not using it to buy books if it is indeed an example of a loss leader). A free market should allow you to come up with whatever promotional ideas you want to make money, but similarly it should allow your customers to ignore your ideas and do their own thing. The second those ideas have some element that is enforced by law (i.e. you can ONLY use product X with service Y and tampering with X to allow Z is illegal) it is no longer free.
This seems to be more of MS just not "getting it". They didn't seem to get that XBMC turned an alright games console into an amazing games console (I would have been all over licensing and/or bundling that thing if I was MS), and now they don't get that, if they want to be the media centre in people's homes, they can't approach that by offering less than the other consoles. I know their argument is probably that it will detract people fromt the paid for content, but realistically it already does that, since every license payer in the UK gets it at no extra cost anyway and most people have access to either freeview or a PC or one of the other consoles or a video enabled phone or... you get the picture. Is it really good for MS's business model that, every time I want to watch iPlayer, I turn off the XBOX and turn on the Wii?
Even worse, here in the UK we can't even get BBC IPlayer (a service that should be available to me as a license fee payer, and that is already Wii and PS3, as well as PC, I believe), apparently because MS refuse to give it away free to silver users and the BBC's charter won't let it be included in the paid gold package.
He probably only has to prove that he's the person named on the credit card. I'm sure they don't really care if one person wants to pay on behalf of another person, so long as they get the agreement of the person with the money. Aside from verifying the payer is who he says, I'm not sure they'd be too bothered about proving who the beneficiary is, unless there is some condition of the service that says these must be the same person (I know I've paid for things on behalf of family and friends using my CC before and in every case my identity was the only one the vendor cared about verifying).
The way this works in reality, people send friend requests to complete strangers all the time. Say you've trawled through hundreds of idiots in various online games and you finally meet someone who matches your play style and seems like they'd be fun to play with again. You can either send them a friend request while not really knowing the first thing about them, or you can hope that, over the course of hundreds more games, you will meet them multiple times until you eventually consider them a real friend. Most people go with the former, you wouldn't necessarily want to send that person your name.
Blizzard tried to introduce this feature to an already existing community of anonymous people. Apple introduced the Game Center and Ping services as a way to interact with your family and friends. It was never intended to be a free-for-all, anonymous community and lots of people accept this.
Never intended? Maybe some should tell Apple that, they seem to think otherwise:
Game Center lets friends — and soon-to-be-friends — in on the action. Invite someone to join, then get a game going. Or go up against people you don’t know, from anywhere in the world, in a multiplayer game.
Those terms and conditions are meaningless if they attempt to override any of your legal rights. At least that's how it works in our country. Sure they can cancel but they can't force you to pay for a service you no longer have.
We're talking about the US, where I'm given to understand the cust^H^H^Honsumer pretty much has no rights.
Maybe he has no intention of modifying his phone in such a way that it would ever be an issue - that doesn't stop him thinking it's a poor deal for the purchaser, but likewise it doesn't necessarily preclude him buying the phone. I hardly think a handful of people refusing to buy the phone will stop them including these clauses. More likely the backlash from existing customers with jailbroken phones if they ever try to enforce them would be a bigger concern.
Depending on your jurisdiction, it's still not necessarily binding. Plenty of countries have laws or legal precedent to the effect that, to be legally binding, a contract must be equitable to both parties and cannot be unfairly one-sided, meaning any clause in said contract in said jurisdiction would be open to challenge in court (that's not necessarily saying this particular clause would be thrown out, but it's at least not so black and white as many people believe).
Does "someone who doesn't want publicity, fame or attention" really sounds like an accurate description of Steve Jobs to you? I can understand he's annoyed they're using his image, but I can't say that someone who puts themselves so much in the limelight can really complain (even though I think they probably have a valid case for the figure's base and the fact he's holding an iPhone, the caricature aside).
I know she's your mother, but around 3-400,000 people are born every day, so if you're calling a single birth something of significant interest, you're setting the bar pretty low. What do you call the moon landing? You'd need a whole new scale. On top of that, even if your mother grew to be the most amazing person who ever lived, nobody would know that at the time of her birth (unless the birth itself was a remarkable circumstance, like ensuring a line of succession or the first test tube baby or something). It would be of interest to her family and their friends, but outside of that, a blip in the grand scheme. It would only be when she got older and actually did something of interest that it would register.
I'd be surprised if half the total population of the world wore shoes that day. I think the point is that they likely measured this by seeing what the most interesting things were that filtered to the top and affected the lives of the greatest number of people. I'm sure on an individual basis literally millions of interesting things were happening, but really the only way to measure this is to take things that impact more than individuals. You might consider a day where only one interesting thing happens to be largely boring. If the same happens for every person in the world, then that's a day where 6 billion interesting things happened, yet if you ask anyone about it they'd say it was boring, so it has to be based on events that effect a large number of people - and they tend to be easier to find out about.
The world is already heading towards a population crisis, immortality or no, so why can we only develop the latter after reducing fertility? You might as well say that untreated flu kills a lot of people, so in order to get a flu shot you have to agree to sterilisation. Same for any of the common treatments we have these days for illnesses that used to kill thousands. Note, the people who are trying to solve one problem are not (necessarily) the same people who are responsible for solving the other.
This would have zero bearing on evolution. Since most humans already get their breeding out of the way in the first half of their lives, there's no inherent selection advantage to an unusually long lifespan/immortatlity, and so long as this is a treatment (i.e. not something your children can inherit genetically) it wouldn't affect those who come after. There might be more chance of people "sowing their oats" if they're super wealthy, but the immortality would be a perk of that, not the main driving factor. Meanwhile, evidence suggests poor people procreate at least as much as the rich.
Slashdot Mirror
If it was the case then they should be prosecuting him for piracy, not for modding.
Indeed. Here's what I would like to do:
None of these uses costs MS anything, the first two ensure I buy more games, the third that I never have to switch off my XBOX for my other entertainment needs. None of them are about getting games for free, I don't have the time or patience to find free games when I only play maybe one or two a month and I can easily afford that. I'm tired of getting a substandard experience as a paying customer, MS should be doing this stuff anyway, I'd never buy another system if they did. In the meantime I won't be modding my XBOX because I like the online features, but it's hardly filling me with brand loyalty.
That's all well and good, but maybe Amazon should have thought about that two days ago when they first agreed to host the site, after the cables were already being published, the site was already sufering DDoS attacks (the whole reason for the move to Amazon in the first place) and the outcry had already started. This is not a case of Amazon unknowingly getting their fingers burnt, this is more akin to them watching someone stick their hand in a fire and scream that it hurts, then doing the same themselves and expecting sympathy. They knew what they were getting into, agreeing to host the site then immediately dropping it just makes them look like idiots.
I guess "received via email" isn't nearly so sensationalist. You're right, this whole furore exists precisely as a ruse to hide embarassment over the fact that such huge gaping potential for leaks exists in the first place, and if that means blurring the lines between someone being sent information and someone somehow illegally obtaining it through means of a seizure, I guess that's what they'll resort to (hell, there's probably a cable to that effect flying around).
Surely the real issue here is that this information got out at all. Instead of demonising Wikileaks, governments should be addressing the very fact that this kind of confidential or, at the very least, highly embarassing information came to be in public hands. The whole Wikileaks witch hunt, to me, looks like a big smokescreen to hide the incompetence of the so called confidential communication process. Would they be happier if all this information was going to an enemy nation who wasn't revealing the fact and was potentially using the information for their own agenda? At least with a leak into the open everyone knows what's in the documents and it can no longer be used as leverage (and it highlights weaknesses that can then be addressed).
There's nothing wrong with thinking things up for a living. The problem is when the system is so broken that patents can be submitted for ideas that already have prior art, or can be so vague or so broad that they allow someone to squat on a whole raft of potential innovation, or persist for so long (particularly in the field of modern electronic devices) that they're pretty much superceded years before they expire, or that they give a massively unfair advantage to the super rich or to huge corporations who can afford to register hundreds of these things with no intention of ever creating anything, or can afford the armies of lawyers to defend or attack based on them. The basic idea isn't necessarily bad, but the implementation is absolutely awful.
How annoyed would you have been if they'd made you sit through ads in order to watch ads? In fact, what if the ads they forced you to sit through were the ones you went there to see in the first place. My head hurts.
Well it's not really free in the UK, we already pay a kind of television tax. The BBC doesn't have an issue with charging people overseas for its content, so the logical answer would be to allow it in Live as an already paid for service in the UK and charge anyone a subscription fee outside of the UK, but this has already been ruled out in the past (well, I don't know if the additional subscription model came up, but providing it at no cost in the UK was already shot down).
You're right, I haven't spent a great deal of time reading up on this because it has little bearing on me. To clarify, I wasn't trying to be disparaging, I just know that often when people here talk about consumer protections that we take for granted in much of Europe, many people from the US comment there are no equivalent rights or greatly diminished equivalents over there (hence "I'm given to understand" as opposed to "I know for a fact").
Agreed - loss leaders in themselves are not a distortion of the free market. What would be a distortion is the producer being able to use the law to prevent people buying the razor and then using their own cheap blades (or in B&N's case, someone buying the Nook and not using it to buy books if it is indeed an example of a loss leader). A free market should allow you to come up with whatever promotional ideas you want to make money, but similarly it should allow your customers to ignore your ideas and do their own thing. The second those ideas have some element that is enforced by law (i.e. you can ONLY use product X with service Y and tampering with X to allow Z is illegal) it is no longer free.
This seems to be more of MS just not "getting it". They didn't seem to get that XBMC turned an alright games console into an amazing games console (I would have been all over licensing and/or bundling that thing if I was MS), and now they don't get that, if they want to be the media centre in people's homes, they can't approach that by offering less than the other consoles. I know their argument is probably that it will detract people fromt the paid for content, but realistically it already does that, since every license payer in the UK gets it at no extra cost anyway and most people have access to either freeview or a PC or one of the other consoles or a video enabled phone or... you get the picture. Is it really good for MS's business model that, every time I want to watch iPlayer, I turn off the XBOX and turn on the Wii?
Even worse, here in the UK we can't even get BBC IPlayer (a service that should be available to me as a license fee payer, and that is already Wii and PS3, as well as PC, I believe), apparently because MS refuse to give it away free to silver users and the BBC's charter won't let it be included in the paid gold package.
He probably only has to prove that he's the person named on the credit card. I'm sure they don't really care if one person wants to pay on behalf of another person, so long as they get the agreement of the person with the money. Aside from verifying the payer is who he says, I'm not sure they'd be too bothered about proving who the beneficiary is, unless there is some condition of the service that says these must be the same person (I know I've paid for things on behalf of family and friends using my CC before and in every case my identity was the only one the vendor cared about verifying).
The way this works in reality, people send friend requests to complete strangers all the time. Say you've trawled through hundreds of idiots in various online games and you finally meet someone who matches your play style and seems like they'd be fun to play with again. You can either send them a friend request while not really knowing the first thing about them, or you can hope that, over the course of hundreds more games, you will meet them multiple times until you eventually consider them a real friend. Most people go with the former, you wouldn't necessarily want to send that person your name.
Blizzard tried to introduce this feature to an already existing community of anonymous people. Apple introduced the Game Center and Ping services as a way to interact with your family and friends. It was never intended to be a free-for-all, anonymous community and lots of people accept this.
Never intended? Maybe some should tell Apple that, they seem to think otherwise:
Game Center lets friends — and soon-to-be-friends — in on the action. Invite someone to join, then get a game going. Or go up against people you don’t know, from anywhere in the world, in a multiplayer game.
Emphasis mine, wording very much Apple's.
Those terms and conditions are meaningless if they attempt to override any of your legal rights. At least that's how it works in our country. Sure they can cancel but they can't force you to pay for a service you no longer have.
We're talking about the US, where I'm given to understand the cust^H^H^Honsumer pretty much has no rights.
Maybe he has no intention of modifying his phone in such a way that it would ever be an issue - that doesn't stop him thinking it's a poor deal for the purchaser, but likewise it doesn't necessarily preclude him buying the phone. I hardly think a handful of people refusing to buy the phone will stop them including these clauses. More likely the backlash from existing customers with jailbroken phones if they ever try to enforce them would be a bigger concern.
Depending on your jurisdiction, it's still not necessarily binding. Plenty of countries have laws or legal precedent to the effect that, to be legally binding, a contract must be equitable to both parties and cannot be unfairly one-sided, meaning any clause in said contract in said jurisdiction would be open to challenge in court (that's not necessarily saying this particular clause would be thrown out, but it's at least not so black and white as many people believe).
Does "someone who doesn't want publicity, fame or attention" really sounds like an accurate description of Steve Jobs to you? I can understand he's annoyed they're using his image, but I can't say that someone who puts themselves so much in the limelight can really complain (even though I think they probably have a valid case for the figure's base and the fact he's holding an iPhone, the caricature aside).
Or maybe they just object to the huge Apple logo the figurine is standing on.
I know she's your mother, but around 3-400,000 people are born every day, so if you're calling a single birth something of significant interest, you're setting the bar pretty low. What do you call the moon landing? You'd need a whole new scale. On top of that, even if your mother grew to be the most amazing person who ever lived, nobody would know that at the time of her birth (unless the birth itself was a remarkable circumstance, like ensuring a line of succession or the first test tube baby or something). It would be of interest to her family and their friends, but outside of that, a blip in the grand scheme. It would only be when she got older and actually did something of interest that it would register.
I'd be surprised if half the total population of the world wore shoes that day. I think the point is that they likely measured this by seeing what the most interesting things were that filtered to the top and affected the lives of the greatest number of people. I'm sure on an individual basis literally millions of interesting things were happening, but really the only way to measure this is to take things that impact more than individuals. You might consider a day where only one interesting thing happens to be largely boring. If the same happens for every person in the world, then that's a day where 6 billion interesting things happened, yet if you ask anyone about it they'd say it was boring, so it has to be based on events that effect a large number of people - and they tend to be easier to find out about.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'. [552]
The world is already heading towards a population crisis, immortality or no, so why can we only develop the latter after reducing fertility? You might as well say that untreated flu kills a lot of people, so in order to get a flu shot you have to agree to sterilisation. Same for any of the common treatments we have these days for illnesses that used to kill thousands. Note, the people who are trying to solve one problem are not (necessarily) the same people who are responsible for solving the other.
This would have zero bearing on evolution. Since most humans already get their breeding out of the way in the first half of their lives, there's no inherent selection advantage to an unusually long lifespan/immortatlity, and so long as this is a treatment (i.e. not something your children can inherit genetically) it wouldn't affect those who come after. There might be more chance of people "sowing their oats" if they're super wealthy, but the immortality would be a perk of that, not the main driving factor. Meanwhile, evidence suggests poor people procreate at least as much as the rich.