Posts by Andrew Tyler 78 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2007
Since it doesn't offer 'alternative pleasures,' rather than censoring out the nasty parts to get it approved couldn't they simply add a feature whereby you could instead offer flowers to the enemy characters who would then join you, arm in arm, to go skipping around through the rest of the game spreading peace, love and flower power to the other chainsaw-wielding maniacs?
This is the same JD Power that I always see in advertisements on TV (here in the States) giving awards to Chrysler for "highest quality."
Have you ever driven a Chrysler?
I don't really know anything about JD Power, but I've seen enough car commercials (not only for Chrysler) to know their awards don't amount to much.
I seem to remember every video-game since, well a long time ago- at least the mid nineties- having a big black-box epilepsy warning on the first page of the manual.
I wouldn't mind seeing something like a scale of how likely a game is to induce seizures (who decides though, a doctor?) though. I didn't know a lot of games used the strobe effect anymore, that was pretty much a way to make something look "bright" when all you could do was flip the palette around. We have fancier effects these days.
Still, this is the sort of thing that tends to pass right through without any actual thought going into it. Video games hurting kids is all politicians need to hear- even if it's only has an effect on one in a thousand kids (according to the Epilepsy Foundation, in the US).
I'm not against it, but I hope they give it serious consideration.
John Andersen... let's get out the old phonebook: 35 John Andersons.
Edward Allen... only three for that one. There are 12 E Allens though.
No Javaid Iqbals, though there is a Zafar Iqbal. Maybe he's a terrorist. Can't be too careful, better add him to the list.
I feel so safe it's scary.
Taking advantage of people's good-intentions and kindheartedness as a marketing scheme is going too far. If Western Digital really cared, they would just donate the money themselves or give a portion of EVERY purchase to a breast cancer charity.
If consumers care, as indeed they should, they ought to donate money themselves. I didn't feel so strongly about this until I met a group of breast-cancer survivors (just a couple of weeks ago) who are outraged and disgusted by this sort of practice- enough to organize against it. They feel as though these corporations are capitalizing on their suffering simply as a way to advertise and sell more products.
They aren't opposed to it in theory, because any donation helps, but the way in which it is presented. It more or less comes down to a "buy this car or we'll club a baby seal" mentality. If it were simply a normal part of their advertising campaign stating a portion of every sale goes to a charity, that would be okay. However, having a separate, temporary 'pink' line of products is insulting. It implies consumers ought to buy EXTRA stuff they might not otherwise to support breast cancer charities.
Rather than buying your girlfriend a pink hard-drive, why don't you donate $100 in her name to a breast cancer charity and buy her a normal hard-drive. Or, better yet, something she actually wants.
Seriously, that Einstein video is terrifying. I know you warned me, and I really shouldn't have looked, but I couldn't help myself. I think I'm deeply, deeply scarred.
Anyways, whomever is the first to dub a voice over the video in the parts where Al's mouth is moving is going to reap all kinds of horrible Web 2.0 fame. Probably something with a lot of screaming and pitiful "What have you done to my body?!" crying would do...
Just put some clown makeup on that sucker and I'll never sleep again.
Seriously? Really?! There's got to be more to it.
Trying to pass off counterfeit money at a bank is like sticking up a police station with a toy gun. I don't even know where to start with the amount... well, it's like sticking up a police station with a toy gun and demanding twenty-seven billion pounds actually. Nobody who's smart enough to actually do it is dumb enough to try it.
There's must be more to this than meets the eye. I'm thinking it's a government conspiracy to get out of paying the 27 billion pounds they just realized they actually owed someone. How convenient for them that the notes turned out to be such obvious forgeries.
I'm going to be forced to have chip implanted some day for the same reason I'm forced to use a Texas Instruments calculator today. Get 'em while they're young and don't know any better and you've got a customer for life. Then just let the need for compatibility weed out anyone who dares think for themselves.
All your reverse polish is belong to us.
I haven't used newsgroups for quite some time (probably ten years or so), but I don't recall there actually being a difference between the binary groups and the rest of the newsgroups aside from the title. From what I recall, everything was ASCII anyways and had to be decoded (uuencode, or something) from a pile of messages. It wasn't a particularly straightforward process, but I suppose that may well have changed since then. Is there a technical difference?
At any rate, this seems likely to be protected under the DMCA. It will be interesting to see how they go about attacking this one.
If I were going shopping for a music player, and I could pay $80 for a player and another $90 for easy, fast access to all the music I want legally so long as I own the player, that would be okay with me. It is obviously just sort of hiding the subscription fee and forcing it upon us though. What if I just want an MP3 player for my CD collection and no subscription? I have a big collection. I don't want to pay for it again.
Also, the real kicker is which music do I have access to? For this to work, it really has to be all music- even the local indie bands. It has to be fair and it has to be open to everyone and every label. That seems almost impossible to implement, but if it only applies to Universal, BMG, etc., it's just going to confuse consumers ("this player gives you access to these labels, that one to those..."). I don't even know which labels most of my favorite bands are on, and they're certainly not all on the same one.
I'm happy to see that they're starting to have at least a little bit of sense about it though. As far as I can tell, the only short-term practical downside to pirating music is that it is a pain in the ass to find anything and the sources are generally shady. Since it seems most people can't be bothered with morals, they need to leverage that sort of thing. I'm sure it's rough competing with 'free,' but there are ways. Saving people time and effort is a good start.
I understand you used to be able make old water-meters under-report your usage by knocking a few teeth off the gear driving the mechanism, and you could flip old electricity-meters around, reversing the polarity, to make them run backward.
It will be interesting to see what folks come up with to screw with these ones.
She broke the law, that's true. It's silly to claim she doesn't have some sort of restitution to make, but the scale is disturbing. I don't care for punishments designed to 'set an example.' I don't care for the lawyers comments. We should settle? What? We shouldn't share music, yes. I believe the amount of the verdict is ridiculous.
Clearly the record industry is one of the most threatened by the availability of cheap, generic information transfer. They no longer solely control the flow of information. They took advantage of their position by making control of distribution their greatest strength. They're losing, or have already lost, that.
Rather than clinging desperately to their former model, they need to accept change and find a way to make themselves useful again. This is what angers me. It's not just them, either. Everywhere I look I see everything that made the internet great threatened by artificial, heavy-handed capitalist legal manipulation.
If we're to truly believe in the free-market, we need to accept that technology will lower the cost of certain services. The music industry wants us to pay the same price for a few megabytes of data transmission as we paid to have something manufactured and shipped to us. I wish I could believe the cost of a CD was justified by all of the discovery, marketing and creation of music or to support the artists but I just don't buy it.
The creators of the music should negotiate deals for the terms they want with the record companies, not the other way around. If they feel they need a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, that's fine but let it be reflected in the cost of that album alone. Let the people who need their music chosen for them pay for that service.
This could easily happen now. After all, with the transfer of the music itself becoming such a marginal cost, marketing is all the record companies really do. I don't want most of the money I pay for some smaller band's album going to the marketing campaign for Britney Spear's latest single.
I don't necessarily have anything against the RIAA, they have a right to defend their IP, but they really should be finding a way to make themselves useful again, at least for the sake of all the people who depend upon them for their livelihood. I'm surely no expert, but the entire situation seems to have gone terribly wrong. In the end though, it's up to us. Support your local bands, go see concerts. Find and buy good music from independent artists. Don't steal, use your money to make the free market work for us.
That's just how I feel. Sorry for the long post, I didn't even bother taking my coat off in the first place. ;)
I have nothing really to add, but I want to register my belief that this is a horrible, disgusting, nasty, unrighteous, heinous, evil, foul, grotesque, sickening, atrocious, offensive, depraved, nefarious, repugnant, loathsome, villainous, wicked, sinful, vile, repulsive, egregious, abominable, dreadful, scuzzy, sleazy, no good, dirty, low down, filthy, rotten, putrid, mean, spoiled, god-awful, diseased ruling.
It sucks too.
To whom do I write letters nasty letters, and where is my thesaurus?
I still think it's ridiculous, but the $1m could make sense if she bought a lot of them with the intention to resell. I don't know anything about these 'pricing laws' but I don't have much sympathy for her. It's the same reason it's hard to find a local screwdriver shop that sells higher-end video cards, if the price drops 50% before they sell them all, they're pretty screwed. (Haha- get it? Screwed... yeah, the coat thing.) Clearly, she was hoping to sell them for above MSRP on e-bay. She should have known what she was getting into- it's risky business even without the price-drop. Them's the breaks.
Back when I originally learned Apple was switching to x86, I was pretty excited. With Vista turning out the way it did, they had a golden opportunity to become a major player for home operating systems. If they had released OSX for generic hardware, I think they really could have taken a big bite. It was an amazing convergence of Apple's newfound popularity, Microsoft fumbling, and the potential for everyone to just buy OSX instead of Vista without having to buy a new computer.
Of course it's never so simple, and forced to suddenly support generic hardware, OSX probably would have turned out as bad as Vista. With a lot of effort though, I think Apple could have probably pulled it off reasonably well. To be honest, I'm a little disappointed in them. Real competition would have been great. My only serious objection to Macs is the hardware restriction. Despite the strengths to that approach, I would hate to find myself subject to a monopoly on operating systems AND hardware should Apple find themselves in a Microsoft-like position where they don't even really have to try.
I'm pretty happy with XP. It's not great, but it works. The future seems uncertain as of now. Unfortunately, I highly doubt any good will come of it.
What a bunch of scum. If you live in the US and you voted for Bush, I hope you're proud of yourself.
I'm taking a sociology class and we had a speaker come in, some local FBI agent of the JTTF, and the definition of 'terrorism' he gave more or less included anybody who broke the law with an apparent political motivation. It didn't even have to be violent. For instance, vandalizing SUVs is apparently an act of 'terrorism.'
Clearly, an FBI agent is going to use any means at his disposal to pursue his case and he gets access to many powerful means if his target is a 'terrorist.' So... well, I hope you're bright enough to see where that's going to lead.
I also noted that he claimed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to be an act of 'terrorism' which I can't help but notice sort of makes the US a worse terrorist seeing as how many more civilians were killed when we invaded Iraq. Oh... don't forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the bright side, he thought a national DNA database of innocent citizens was a terrible invasion of privacy. So, it looks like we've all got some work to do in our respective countries. Of course in mine, eventually that will makes me a terrorist as I imagine simply disagreeing with the government or not being an Evangelical Christian will be enough before long.
It seems pretty obvious to me that what they really want is more terrorists. It's not enough to just make them up in some press-release, they actually want more real terrorists. They're doing a bang-up job so far.
Which brings us to another point...
Since for a lot of thieving people all software is free anyways, you have to look at it from a their perspective. To invoke the popular car analogy: if your average person is going to be stealing a car anyways, wouldn't they steal the most expensive one they can get away with?
The dependable, efficient, highly functional cheap car (say, a Toyota) or the ridiculously expensive, impractical exotic car that's all flash and with no door-locks (say, a Lamborghini)?
Oooh.. that'll piss some people off. I'll let you decide which is which.
I've always wanted Lawyer-Thugs. Find a bunch of ex-navy seal/green-beret types and send them to the best law-schools or possibly, nay likely, the other way around.
They would accompany me everywhere! Nothing they can't handle.
Yeah that, and zeppelins too- lead zeppelins -just for the shear hell and challenge of it.
They don't sell music anymore, they sell pop musicians. Disney in particular is a veritable pop-star-puppy-mill. Of course, when I say 'anymore' I mean since the birth of the recording industry.
I don't know if there is necessarily anything wrong with that though. Why doesn't a Bob Dylan cover have the same impact as the original even when it's sung by someone with a better voice?
What people want is character. I don't think it has anything to do with the 'American Dream' though that might sometimes be a part of a singer's character. The trouble is that sometimes people take it too seriously, they want the character to be real.
Knowing this, the music industry goes to great lengths to paint them as the genuine article. Vanilla Ice was from the ghetto, Milli Vanilli could sing and Puff Daddy spends his free time shooting it out with thugs. Now, Marie Digby is just another nobody like you on the net.
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" - You know who.
Yes... but 2 months later? I find it absolutely impossible to believe they've somehow refined their manufacturing process that much in two months. I doubt it's changed at all, actually.
They may well have been unsure about the market's reaction to the phone and set the the initial price based upon conservative projected sales figures to help cover development. A couple of months later though, it turns out people like it so Apple expects to sell more and can therefore lower the price.
Now the early adopters are not only beta testers, but they're also financing the risk Apple took in developing the phone. That's pretty slimy. Clearly one of the biggest objections to the iPhone was the price, so it's not unreasonable for them to lower it. Unless they offer to refund the difference to current owners however, they're slime.
Of course, I have little sympathy for anyone who is a 'fan' of some huge corporation. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads to. The customers are just figures in a ledger. To be honest though, I expect Apple will offer some sort of compensation. I just hope it's not something silly like iTunes credit- which it probably will be.
I've seen that on TV. It consists entirely of half-naked, sweaty men rolling around on the ground in vaguely erotic positions occasionally slapping at one another. It's quite a display of skill.
What percentage of computer nerds do you think own some sort of samurai sword or nunchucks? It's some sort of a trend I think.
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