She's confusing loneliness for narcissism - that is, people say they feel lonely when, really, what they feel is self-doubt; the doubt goes away when a 'friend' reaffirms their chosen identity ("the band's going to make it" "you'll be a great mom someday" "your parent/boss/art teacher is just jealous of your talent"), and becomes an addictive replacement for self-actualization.
So people spend all day staring at a computer or a smartphone like it was the Magic Mirror from Sleeping Beauty. If they got out of their echo-chamber and dealt with strangers and real life - or, in a Buddhist-meditation sense, made themselves alone and just sat - they might detox a little.
Proximity1, your entire thread is condescending and unhelpful. If my grandfather were still alive, he would throw one of his home-grown tomatoes at you.
"And why should just the corporations be able to change the contract? Why shouldn't I, the other party to the contract, just be able to post new terms of service to a website and say that Sony must now abide by them? "
Why don't you? Write up a counter-agreement, send it certified mail (forcing someone at SONY's HQ to sign for it), include a clause saying that signing for the package implies agreement of your new terms unless you hear from them in writing within 15 days, wait 15 days, then file a copy of your agreement with your local county clerk.
Mike's always been a free-market guy. This comes as a surprise to you now, but only because America hasn't had a true free market since probably the aftermath of the Civil War, when corporate spokesmen and lobbyists started misusing the 14th Amendment to grab rights for businesses and set the stage for corporate personhood.
Use the console? Sort of. You can use it to play games* and play movies on disc, but SONY advertises features that require the online connection.
Can you return the devalued device? No, probably not - certainly not to SONY and typically not to the retailer if it's been more than 30 days.
*Some games require an online connection - most for multiplayer, but some for DRM. You may actually not be able to play all your games - especially games you purchased through the PSN store.
Also: I'm not sure if SONY uses Micro-Transaction Currency, but with XBox Live and MS Points: MS will not refund or transfer points in numerous situations, meaning you may have bought 4000 MSP for $50, spent 1600 of those points, then, after declining a new TOS, be locked out of spending or retrieving your remaining $30.
MTC should probably be considered a contract, legally, and partially-consumed MTC should be considered a partially-fulfilled contract; if the company excludes you from access to that MTC for any reason it should be considered a breach of contract resulting in penalties.
Except you claim job loss numbers higher than government recorded employment in your industry ever.
I'm late to the party on this, but wouldn't it be better to say something more like "You claim more jobs lost than you've ever paid payroll taxes on?" I mean, they *could* have hired millions of undocumented illegals.
Aaaaand, because of prosecutorial overreach, the 1984 (hoo boy, the universe really does run on irony) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act says circumventing TOS is a federal felony.
And I hope the government sees it as a way to get its own surveillance agenda greenlit and encourages it.
Because you can't stop the future, state actors are going to droneswarm the privacy out of lives in time, so we might as well have cameras pointed both ways.
And, if the militarization of police in the USA is any indication, we'll need to have a huge publicly-available commercial drones market that can be modified to counteract the inevitable militarization of state surveillance drones.
"On the surface, this may seem contridictory to comments Capps made earlier in the year about how $1 games are destroying the games industry. Hopefully, Capps is just seeing the folly of that view point and instead feels as he is expressing now, that console manufacturers need too allow more price flexibility. While they probably don't need to let prices drop to $1, having more available pricing options will only help some games."
Well, it seems that way on the surface, but I agree with him, not you: there are lots of games out there that I'd buy for $30 or $40, but not $60 or $70, and I end up buying a lot of games for PC because they're $10-15 cheaper at launch. I'd rather see the console market be able to support more studios like Goldhawk, who took $30 pre-orders to fund development, and never would have been able to do it if they'd needed $60 a pop, and I'd love to see the world generate fewer companies like Zynga, who - by their founder's own admission - used whatever dirty tricks they needed to get a big enough install base to fund development at $.99 a pop.
In the end, you have a big company like Apple who pushes the $.99 mark and a different big company like Microsoft who pushes a different pricepoint for its library, and, in the end, it's probably the creators and customers who suffer for it.
"These publishers didn't want to dedicate time and resources to preparing these games to run on modern computers. They figured it was a losing strategy."
Hell, most companies didn't want to take the time to release patches to make sure Win98 games would run correctly on WinXP. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, for example, was released in September 1999, and has a set of BINK Video drivers that won't work on an NT kernel. Meaning, a game released in 1999 doesn't work on Windows 2000 - and the publisher never really bothered to fix it.
Came here to say this. There's no interception if the company is initiating and receiving the disgusting, amoral, privacy-invading electronic communication. Which, of course, is the amazing part of the law - attempts to intercept an illegal communication are, themselves, illegal, like how the DMCA's ant-circumvention clause means that even if a company's doing something that flies in the face of established law, your attempt to circumvent that makes you a criminal.
But, of course, if you complain about this or argue against the law, the title alone makes it sound like you're defending child pornography. How nice.
It's all in the phrasing.
"Congressional Rep.s Lamar Smith, Bill Flores, Randy Forbes, Dutch Ruppersberger and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are using Child Pornography to put your personal and financial data into the hands of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec."
Funny, because every time someone uses that "Wild West" metaphor, I picture them being thrown out of the saloon.
Come on, it's such a useless metaphor. "Wild West?" The Wild West was a land populated by a variety of (more) indigenous peoples, whom we dispossessed and/or slaughtered in order to settle, cultivate, and mine precious resources. The initial settlers had a bad reputation because they might be mauled by bears or raided by indians at any time. I've never been mauled by a bear on the internet.
The West was "tamed" as more and more people moved out into the territories, invested time, money and effort, and demanded equal representation and protection under the law.
The MPAA and RIAA aren't doing that; they're trying to double-charge (services and customers) for the same content pushed over other people's pipes and demanding unequal protection far out of proportion to their population or economic stature (remember, if Google's founders could liquidate their assets without losses, they're worth more than the member corporations of the RIAA put together), and not at the expense of the "wild men" who built it, but the modern settlers.
You're talking about an industry using regulatory capture and government lobbying to criminalize the unwanted behaviors of its own customers, that doesn't fit anything I've ever heard or read about the Wild West. It's a lot more like British Colonial Mercantilism, altho' I suppose you'd rather be Wyatt Earp than Robert Clive.
(untitled comment)
She's confusing happiness for contentment.
She's confusing loneliness for narcissism - that is, people say they feel lonely when, really, what they feel is self-doubt; the doubt goes away when a 'friend' reaffirms their chosen identity ("the band's going to make it" "you'll be a great mom someday" "your parent/boss/art teacher is just jealous of your talent"), and becomes an addictive replacement for self-actualization.
So people spend all day staring at a computer or a smartphone like it was the Magic Mirror from Sleeping Beauty. If they got out of their echo-chamber and dealt with strangers and real life - or, in a Buddhist-meditation sense, made themselves alone and just sat - they might detox a little.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Are you kidding me?
Proximity1, your entire thread is condescending and unhelpful. If my grandfather were still alive, he would throw one of his home-grown tomatoes at you.
50 DKP minus.
Re:
I noticed you declined to elucidate
Re: Hmm...Is mike going the way of John Stossel?
"And why should just the corporations be able to change the contract? Why shouldn't I, the other party to the contract, just be able to post new terms of service to a website and say that Sony must now abide by them? "
Why don't you? Write up a counter-agreement, send it certified mail (forcing someone at SONY's HQ to sign for it), include a clause saying that signing for the package implies agreement of your new terms unless you hear from them in writing within 15 days, wait 15 days, then file a copy of your agreement with your local county clerk.
Re:
Show us on the doll where the bad company touched you.
Re: Hmm...Is mike going the way of John Stossel?
Mike's always been a free-market guy. This comes as a surprise to you now, but only because America hasn't had a true free market since probably the aftermath of the Civil War, when corporate spokesmen and lobbyists started misusing the 14th Amendment to grab rights for businesses and set the stage for corporate personhood.
Re:
Use the console? Sort of. You can use it to play games* and play movies on disc, but SONY advertises features that require the online connection.
Can you return the devalued device? No, probably not - certainly not to SONY and typically not to the retailer if it's been more than 30 days.
*Some games require an online connection - most for multiplayer, but some for DRM. You may actually not be able to play all your games - especially games you purchased through the PSN store.
Also: I'm not sure if SONY uses Micro-Transaction Currency, but with XBox Live and MS Points: MS will not refund or transfer points in numerous situations, meaning you may have bought 4000 MSP for $50, spent 1600 of those points, then, after declining a new TOS, be locked out of spending or retrieving your remaining $30.
MTC should probably be considered a contract, legally, and partially-consumed MTC should be considered a partially-fulfilled contract; if the company excludes you from access to that MTC for any reason it should be considered a breach of contract resulting in penalties.
(untitled comment)
I'm late to the party on this, but wouldn't it be better to say something more like "You claim more jobs lost than you've ever paid payroll taxes on?" I mean, they *could* have hired millions of undocumented illegals.
Re: Already against Facebook's TOS to do this..
Aaaaand, because of prosecutorial overreach, the 1984 (hoo boy, the universe really does run on irony) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act says circumventing TOS is a federal felony.
(untitled comment)
I think he's right.
I'm OK with that.
And I hope the government sees it as a way to get its own surveillance agenda greenlit and encourages it.
Because you can't stop the future, state actors are going to droneswarm the privacy out of lives in time, so we might as well have cameras pointed both ways.
And, if the militarization of police in the USA is any indication, we'll need to have a huge publicly-available commercial drones market that can be modified to counteract the inevitable militarization of state surveillance drones.
(untitled comment)
"And first, do no harm."
What oath are you talking about? I'm just waiting for my check.
Re: This sounds familiar....
Exactly! Piracy *was* under control, it's obviously in its last throes, but our duty is clear: we must stay the course, by committing to a surge.
(untitled comment)
"On the surface, this may seem contridictory to comments Capps made earlier in the year about how $1 games are destroying the games industry. Hopefully, Capps is just seeing the folly of that view point and instead feels as he is expressing now, that console manufacturers need too allow more price flexibility. While they probably don't need to let prices drop to $1, having more available pricing options will only help some games."
Well, it seems that way on the surface, but I agree with him, not you: there are lots of games out there that I'd buy for $30 or $40, but not $60 or $70, and I end up buying a lot of games for PC because they're $10-15 cheaper at launch. I'd rather see the console market be able to support more studios like Goldhawk, who took $30 pre-orders to fund development, and never would have been able to do it if they'd needed $60 a pop, and I'd love to see the world generate fewer companies like Zynga, who - by their founder's own admission - used whatever dirty tricks they needed to get a big enough install base to fund development at $.99 a pop.
In the end, you have a big company like Apple who pushes the $.99 mark and a different big company like Microsoft who pushes a different pricepoint for its library, and, in the end, it's probably the creators and customers who suffer for it.
(untitled comment)
"These publishers didn't want to dedicate time and resources to preparing these games to run on modern computers. They figured it was a losing strategy."
Hell, most companies didn't want to take the time to release patches to make sure Win98 games would run correctly on WinXP. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, for example, was released in September 1999, and has a set of BINK Video drivers that won't work on an NT kernel. Meaning, a game released in 1999 doesn't work on Windows 2000 - and the publisher never really bothered to fix it.
(untitled comment)
Our glorious corporate masters have harvested all the easy money from capitalism, it's time to revert to mercantilism.
Re: Interception
Came here to say this. There's no interception if the company is initiating and receiving the disgusting, amoral, privacy-invading electronic communication. Which, of course, is the amazing part of the law - attempts to intercept an illegal communication are, themselves, illegal, like how the DMCA's ant-circumvention clause means that even if a company's doing something that flies in the face of established law, your attempt to circumvent that makes you a criminal.
(untitled comment)
Google should have charged them a $35 per article fee to contest the automatic delisting.
(untitled comment)
It's all in the phrasing.
"Congressional Rep.s Lamar Smith, Bill Flores, Randy Forbes, Dutch Ruppersberger and Debbie Wasserman Schultz are using Child Pornography to put your personal and financial data into the hands of groups like Anonymous and LulzSec."
(untitled comment)
I think it's time for the record labels to understand that the Wild West of industry accounting is being tamed more and more every day.
Re:
Funny, because every time someone uses that "Wild West" metaphor, I picture them being thrown out of the saloon.
Come on, it's such a useless metaphor. "Wild West?" The Wild West was a land populated by a variety of (more) indigenous peoples, whom we dispossessed and/or slaughtered in order to settle, cultivate, and mine precious resources. The initial settlers had a bad reputation because they might be mauled by bears or raided by indians at any time. I've never been mauled by a bear on the internet.
The West was "tamed" as more and more people moved out into the territories, invested time, money and effort, and demanded equal representation and protection under the law.
The MPAA and RIAA aren't doing that; they're trying to double-charge (services and customers) for the same content pushed over other people's pipes and demanding unequal protection far out of proportion to their population or economic stature (remember, if Google's founders could liquidate their assets without losses, they're worth more than the member corporations of the RIAA put together), and not at the expense of the "wild men" who built it, but the modern settlers.
You're talking about an industry using regulatory capture and government lobbying to criminalize the unwanted behaviors of its own customers, that doesn't fit anything I've ever heard or read about the Wild West. It's a lot more like British Colonial Mercantilism, altho' I suppose you'd rather be Wyatt Earp than Robert Clive.