and 9/10 times, it's the pirates and the modders that end up fixing the bloody thing, when the studio can't even be bothered to patch it's bullshit.
And 9/10 times that the publisher/developer comes back and threatens to sue the modders and the patchers for making their game playable.
98% of the games I now buy and play come from GoG and other companies like GoG, mainly because they publish tons of information including unofficial patches and mods, and seem to have a much better handle on the community than the studios. The other 2% either come from Steam (not that I am very happy with Steam but their DRM is the least difficult to work with and they put a lot of effort in it working properly, no matter how you install it, since I don't do Windows and everything here is virtualized) or from the indies that get it.
No money goes directly to the studios (obviously they get some kickbacks from GoG/Steam) and I will never buy a shrink-wrapped video game ever again.
And so far, I have really enjoyed applying patches and mods to games on GoG to make the games I used to get really frustrated with to play properly as the developers intended.
Re: Re: Never cancel by phone... just show up at their door
I'm fairly certain that this is the first time in history that someone has used the DMV as an example of BETTER customer service than something else.
I've never seen bullet-resistant glass at the DMV, and for the most part my experience walking in to the DMV has been a much better experience than dealing with my cable company (either online, on the phone, or in person.) Plus, my DMV offers appointments, which allows me to walk in and skip the line (which means I am in and out in a few minutes.)
I've had the occasional Cable-Company CSR reject experience at the DMV, but usually after a couple complaints, the DMV removes them or at least moves them so they don't have to deal with the public. And while my DMV recently got hacked, I suspect they get hacked far less than the cable company, but I can't know for sure since the cable company never tells me if they are hacked.
That was my first thought as well, but the article says that the city wouldn't agree to put up the monument unless they had a guarantee that there wouldn't be any copyright issues. :(
WTF DC, there is a huge monument/statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois. I've been there...I've got the damn pictures to prove it. It isn't like they've never allowed this before.
I'd just make the picture of the kid the statue and then they have absolutely no copyright/trademark issues to stand on.
I am not sure on the original numbers either. Wholesale paper and ink and mass runs will bring the cost of printing down, but $2 does sound low.
However, for e-book distribution, $2 sounds really high, depending on the number of sales of a book. Storage is constant and very, very small (average size of my .anz files is about a MB each.) Distribution occurs only a couple times (maybe more if you go through devices like I do.) We are talking a couple pennies at most.
Or use a plugin like NoScript which can, by default, block all JavaScript except from White-Listed sites (techdirt is on my white-list, because they have proven not to abuse my browser with such stupidity in the past.)
That way you still get some of the benefits of JavaScript (such as jQuery and AJAX) on certain websites without letting in all the crazies.
Seems to me that one nice big earthquake that produce some very beautiful beach property in Arizona would correct the complete problem.
You'd be better off waiting for legal/political fixes for this problem than mother nature. No earthquake will ever create Pacific Ocean-based beach property in Arizona in the near geological future. The best bet will be the Gulf of California moving Northward, and you already have prime beachfront property in Arizona on the Colorado River.
It would be much more likely that California is split into six states, but even then, that fix wouldn't likely fix your issues.
Pretty soon...someone will discover how to translate and endcode and store to a .txt file. then, another app will come along and read and decode the .txt file...
And sadly, the MAFIAA owned politicians will come along and say that none of this is innovation and that they should instead spend their time and money doing something new and creative instead.
I kinda wish there was a better evolutionary environmental pressures for politicians and gatekeepers. So that we could weed them out of the food chain and move on.
As far as I can figure, the only reason you'd want to do so would be for personal enjoyment. That is, unless you work for the Department of Defense.
Lasers and Rockets on drones only fall into two categories, personal enjoyment or the first Nobel Peace Prize winner with kill-lists. Professional hitmen wouldn't use a drone with lasers and rockets...since sniper rifles, pistols with silencers, and uranium pellets in specialized umbrella launchers are cheaper and easier to dispose of, and don't tend to attract unwanted attention.
My mom was a teen in the 50s in the US. It was common for parents back then to blame polio on rock & roll concerts and hanging out at the beach.
Theoretically they were right. Since polio is an communicable disease, spread by poor bathroom hygiene, if someone at the concert or at the beach had polio, it is possible, though extremely remote, that you could have gotten it too.
Though it would be far easier to get polio from someone with bad bathroom hygiene working at a restaurant than from a rock concert or at the beach.
Those legal offerings that keep getting cited tend to be awful to the point of uselessness.
The DRM alone kills most of them. I don't want to purchase something I cannot watch whenever I want, wherever I want, and on whatever I want.
Nevermind the fact that they have fractured everything to the point you need to search to find what you want from a number of sites only to find that none of the sites have what you are looking for.
Netflix works because it is a single place to go, and for the most part, it works on all my devices. I even managed to get Netflix working on my Linux devices, but it is kludgy. If they could release a Linux client, I'd be peachy.
T-Mobile still offers truly unlimited data plans. You have to ask for it specifically (and be vary specific), but they do offer it.
Also, note, that they *do not* offer it for data devices, such as USB modems or MIFI devices. And if you "tether" a smartphone to a computer, you don't even get the bandwidth cap of your phone (but instead are limited to 512MB.) However, this isn't a problem for rooted phones, cause they can't tell.
But another thing to note is that T-Mobile just limits 4G speeds at your cap, you can still access the internet after you exceeded your cap...just at a much slower speed (the Ars Technica article says 128kb, but I know I've been able to access youtube after going over my cap with no problems on the lowest streaming settings.)
There is a big difference between streaming music @ 160kbps (typical Spotify) and video streaming at 1.5Mbps or more. Your claim is silly on it's face.
I think the problem is more a definition of bandwidth vs bandwidth caps (which really shouldn't be called bandwidth cap, but instead called usage cap.) What you are describing is bandwidth, i.e. how many bits you can theoretically push through the wire at one time. What my ISP charges me for is for a bandwidth cap of 4GB per month. My ISP charges me whether I eat it all in 20 seconds or spread it out over time. Bandwidth is limited, total bandwidth usage over the month isn't so much.
There is no technical reason why AT&T/T-Mobile/etc., can't up their bandwidth caps while still limiting continuous bandwidth. If there are periods of the day where usage is high, than they can limit the bandwidth used by each user during that time (though, in reality, the protocol and cell availability will do that for them anyway.) The cell isn't 100% utilized the entire day, and there are plenty of times where a user can get an extremely high throughput. Bandwidth caps are, technically and in practice, a way of screwing the customer by forcing them to pay multiple times for the connection they already paid for.
I don't know, but it sure does sound like a handy bit of small print if your system fails and people get robbed as a result... I somehow doubt they have it spelled out anywhere else.
It's been a while, but I remember the contract I signed (with two different security companies) said that the maintenance of the equipment (since the equipment was mine) was my responsibility. It also said I should test my system regularly to assure that it works.
There are quite a few companies that now monitor through alarm.com, so it is pretty easy to determine whether or not your system is working properly through their website. They also send notifications through email if the alarm is offline or is not responding and even if the power fails.
do not watch Last Week Tonight, The Daily Show, or The Colbert Report, because they are not news shows, they are comedy shows.
I disagree. They are very much news shows in that they inform their views of current issues and events. They are also comedy shows, and anyone who uses them solely for their news value is missing a lot. However, they are the only news shows you'll watch where you know the exact bias (or the case of Colbert, the anti-bias) of the presenter. They are trying to make you laugh at stuff you really should be shaking your head or crying about. You aren't going to get that from 60-minutes (or, as better known, the state shill hour,) or the local news (unless you happen to have a ghetto news service.)
I consider them to be what Wikipedia is to research, a starting point to which you spend further investigating, but not the one-stop destination for everything you need to know.
Endermen are kind of like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall, if you are wearing a pumpkin they don't get all pissed off and teleport at you.
Yeah... I forgot about that. My biggest problem is them teleporting into my house and stealing my sh*t while I am not looking (worse than the underpants gnomes.) But then again, you look funny wearing a pumpkin on your head during social events.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
True, but it could indicate that the reason for excessive use of firearms isn't the shift to semi-autos, but a shift to having many officers shooting simultaneously.
Exactly. Certainly, the police shouldn't be shooting just because everyone else is shooting. They should be shooting to end a threat. If the threat has been eliminated, there is no need to stand on the hood of the car emptying two and a half clips into the car (or stand over the body committing a coup-de-grace.)
Four police officers, seeing a person pointing a gun at them, respond by firing three shots each is far more justifiable than one police officer firing 12 shots.
Either that, or she'll become a blubbering wreck due to the exploding bush monsters that rampage around outside every night.
Cats tend to scare away creepers, so as long as you have cats, you should be ok. That is what I use to keep away the exploding bush monsters that rampage around outside every night.
I haven't figured out a defense against endermen, however.
On the post: Skullgirls Creator Combats Piracy With Humor And By Being Awesome
Re: Re: Re:
And 9/10 times that the publisher/developer comes back and threatens to sue the modders and the patchers for making their game playable.
98% of the games I now buy and play come from GoG and other companies like GoG, mainly because they publish tons of information including unofficial patches and mods, and seem to have a much better handle on the community than the studios. The other 2% either come from Steam (not that I am very happy with Steam but their DRM is the least difficult to work with and they put a lot of effort in it working properly, no matter how you install it, since I don't do Windows and everything here is virtualized) or from the indies that get it.
No money goes directly to the studios (obviously they get some kickbacks from GoG/Steam) and I will never buy a shrink-wrapped video game ever again.
And so far, I have really enjoyed applying patches and mods to games on GoG to make the games I used to get really frustrated with to play properly as the developers intended.
On the post: Comcast 'Cares' About Not Listening To Customers, Being Obnoxious And Refusing To Cancel Service
Re: Re: Never cancel by phone... just show up at their door
I've never seen bullet-resistant glass at the DMV, and for the most part my experience walking in to the DMV has been a much better experience than dealing with my cable company (either online, on the phone, or in person.) Plus, my DMV offers appointments, which allows me to walk in and skip the line (which means I am in and out in a few minutes.)
I've had the occasional Cable-Company CSR reject experience at the DMV, but usually after a couple complaints, the DMV removes them or at least moves them so they don't have to deal with the public. And while my DMV recently got hacked, I suspect they get hacked far less than the cable company, but I can't know for sure since the cable company never tells me if they are hacked.
On the post: DC Comics Refuses To Let Superman Logo Adorn The Headstone Of A Young Child Who Was Starved To Death [Updated]
Re: Re: Re: Do it!
Heh, I guess I should have read the article...that is exactly what they did. Good thing DC relented.
On the post: DC Comics Refuses To Let Superman Logo Adorn The Headstone Of A Young Child Who Was Starved To Death [Updated]
Re: Re: Do it!
WTF DC, there is a huge monument/statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois. I've been there...I've got the damn pictures to prove it. It isn't like they've never allowed this before.
I'd just make the picture of the kid the statue and then they have absolutely no copyright/trademark issues to stand on.
On the post: Amazon Offers Authors 100% Of Ebook Sales To Get Them To Recognize Its Fight With Hachette Isn't About Screwing Authors
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I am not sure on the original numbers either. Wholesale paper and ink and mass runs will bring the cost of printing down, but $2 does sound low.
However, for e-book distribution, $2 sounds really high, depending on the number of sales of a book. Storage is constant and very, very small (average size of my .anz files is about a MB each.) Distribution occurs only a couple times (maybe more if you go through devices like I do.) We are talking a couple pennies at most.
On the post: Amazon Offers Authors 100% Of Ebook Sales To Get Them To Recognize Its Fight With Hachette Isn't About Screwing Authors
Re: Re: Re:
Storage and distribution costs that Amazon alone provides, not the publishers. My B/S flag has been thrown.
What Hatchette wants is Amazon to pay all the costs and Hatchette to get all the money (since they only pay a pittance to the Authors.)
On the post: The Trials Of Being A Techdirt Writer Volume 1: Stupid Copyright Popups When Pressing CTRL-C
Re: Re:
Or use a plugin like NoScript which can, by default, block all JavaScript except from White-Listed sites (techdirt is on my white-list, because they have proven not to abuse my browser with such stupidity in the past.)
That way you still get some of the benefits of JavaScript (such as jQuery and AJAX) on certain websites without letting in all the crazies.
On the post: Hollywood Studios Tried To Add File Sharing Sites To New Zealand's Child Porn Blacklist
Re:
You'd be better off waiting for legal/political fixes for this problem than mother nature. No earthquake will ever create Pacific Ocean-based beach property in Arizona in the near geological future. The best bet will be the Gulf of California moving Northward, and you already have prime beachfront property in Arizona on the Colorado River.
It would be much more likely that California is split into six states, but even then, that fix wouldn't likely fix your issues.
On the post: Hollywood Goes After Korean Fans Subtitling Soap Operas, Pressing Criminal Charges
Re:
And sadly, the MAFIAA owned politicians will come along and say that none of this is innovation and that they should instead spend their time and money doing something new and creative instead.
I kinda wish there was a better evolutionary environmental pressures for politicians and gatekeepers. So that we could weed them out of the food chain and move on.
On the post: FAA Says Drones May Be Used For Fun... But Not For Profit
Re: Re: A new legal way
As far as I can figure, the only reason you'd want to do so would be for personal enjoyment. That is, unless you work for the Department of Defense.
Lasers and Rockets on drones only fall into two categories, personal enjoyment or the first Nobel Peace Prize winner with kill-lists. Professional hitmen wouldn't use a drone with lasers and rockets...since sniper rifles, pistols with silencers, and uranium pellets in specialized umbrella launchers are cheaper and easier to dispose of, and don't tend to attract unwanted attention.
On the post: That Time When People Thought Playing Chess Would Make You Violent
Re:
Theoretically they were right. Since polio is an communicable disease, spread by poor bathroom hygiene, if someone at the concert or at the beach had polio, it is possible, though extremely remote, that you could have gotten it too.
Though it would be far easier to get polio from someone with bad bathroom hygiene working at a restaurant than from a rock concert or at the beach.
On the post: Australian Media Company CEO Accuses iiNet ISP Of Piracy 'Lies', Says Illegal Filesharing Is Theft
Re: It bears repeating
The DRM alone kills most of them. I don't want to purchase something I cannot watch whenever I want, wherever I want, and on whatever I want.
Nevermind the fact that they have fractured everything to the point you need to search to find what you want from a number of sites only to find that none of the sites have what you are looking for.
Netflix works because it is a single place to go, and for the most part, it works on all my devices. I even managed to get Netflix working on my Linux devices, but it is kludgy. If they could release a Linux client, I'd be peachy.
On the post: Music Freedom Or Holding Consumers Hostage? Letting ISPs Pick Winners And Losers Is A Problem
Re: Re: Re:
Also, note, that they *do not* offer it for data devices, such as USB modems or MIFI devices. And if you "tether" a smartphone to a computer, you don't even get the bandwidth cap of your phone (but instead are limited to 512MB.) However, this isn't a problem for rooted phones, cause they can't tell.
But another thing to note is that T-Mobile just limits 4G speeds at your cap, you can still access the internet after you exceeded your cap...just at a much slower speed (the Ars Technica article says 128kb, but I know I've been able to access youtube after going over my cap with no problems on the lowest streaming settings.)
On the post: Music Freedom Or Holding Consumers Hostage? Letting ISPs Pick Winners And Losers Is A Problem
Re: Re: Re:
I think the problem is more a definition of bandwidth vs bandwidth caps (which really shouldn't be called bandwidth cap, but instead called usage cap.) What you are describing is bandwidth, i.e. how many bits you can theoretically push through the wire at one time. What my ISP charges me for is for a bandwidth cap of 4GB per month. My ISP charges me whether I eat it all in 20 seconds or spread it out over time. Bandwidth is limited, total bandwidth usage over the month isn't so much.
There is no technical reason why AT&T/T-Mobile/etc., can't up their bandwidth caps while still limiting continuous bandwidth. If there are periods of the day where usage is high, than they can limit the bandwidth used by each user during that time (though, in reality, the protocol and cell availability will do that for them anyway.) The cell isn't 100% utilized the entire day, and there are plenty of times where a user can get an extremely high throughput. Bandwidth caps are, technically and in practice, a way of screwing the customer by forcing them to pay multiple times for the connection they already paid for.
On the post: Comcast Collects A Combined 20 Years Worth Of Fees From Two Customers Who Never Received What They Were Paying For
Re: Re:
It's been a while, but I remember the contract I signed (with two different security companies) said that the maintenance of the equipment (since the equipment was mine) was my responsibility. It also said I should test my system regularly to assure that it works.
There are quite a few companies that now monitor through alarm.com, so it is pretty easy to determine whether or not your system is working properly through their website. They also send notifications through email if the alarm is offline or is not responding and even if the power fails.
On the post: Tom Wheeler: 'I'm Not A Dingo.' John Oliver: 'Prove It!'
Re: Re: Re: Re: credibility
I disagree. They are very much news shows in that they inform their views of current issues and events. They are also comedy shows, and anyone who uses them solely for their news value is missing a lot. However, they are the only news shows you'll watch where you know the exact bias (or the case of Colbert, the anti-bias) of the presenter. They are trying to make you laugh at stuff you really should be shaking your head or crying about. You aren't going to get that from 60-minutes (or, as better known, the state shill hour,) or the local news (unless you happen to have a ghetto news service.)
I consider them to be what Wikipedia is to research, a starting point to which you spend further investigating, but not the one-stop destination for everything you need to know.
On the post: Oops: Xbox Advertisement Results In Aaron Paul Turning On Your Console
Re:
"My ... voice ... is my ... password, ... verify ... me."
On the post: The Real Blame For The 'Slender Man' Killings Is The Media Blaming Slender Man For The Killings
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yeah... I forgot about that. My biggest problem is them teleporting into my house and stealing my sh*t while I am not looking (worse than the underpants gnomes.) But then again, you look funny wearing a pumpkin on your head during social events.
+10000 exp for the HHGTG reference.
On the post: Six Officers Charged In Police Pursuit That Ended With 137 Shots Being Fired At Suspects In A Little Over 20 Seconds
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to: That One Guy on Jun 11th, 2014 @ 4:37am
Exactly. Certainly, the police shouldn't be shooting just because everyone else is shooting. They should be shooting to end a threat. If the threat has been eliminated, there is no need to stand on the hood of the car emptying two and a half clips into the car (or stand over the body committing a coup-de-grace.)
Four police officers, seeing a person pointing a gun at them, respond by firing three shots each is far more justifiable than one police officer firing 12 shots.
On the post: The Real Blame For The 'Slender Man' Killings Is The Media Blaming Slender Man For The Killings
Re: Re:
Cats tend to scare away creepers, so as long as you have cats, you should be ok. That is what I use to keep away the exploding bush monsters that rampage around outside every night.
I haven't figured out a defense against endermen, however.
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