It's not actually about money but control of distribution. If retailers have a separate income from games, they're more independent of the game industry. Compare game distribution to the movie industry, because that's the model they're pursuing. You don't have so much a market for used movies as you have a video/dvd market, which suits the MPAA because they still get a cut (ask a video store owner how their distribution works, it'll open your eyes).

The games industry wants similar control. They can't legally stop resale of games due to the various forms of first sale doctrine around the world. But they can make it less remunerative to retailers by lessening the value of a used game. This is a direct challenge to the EBs. Ultimately they want to cut out the resellers altogether by digital distribution/DLC. I have a copy of ME2 I intend to resell. I made certain NOT to use the code or the cerberus network, but it will be interesting to see whether my local EB will give me a good trade-in price.

you cannot hope to defeat the Reality Distortion Field!

I can see where you're going with this. But money is still the barrier to media entry. If they can, they'll invent a way to keep control of the culture. I always use DAT as my example. We could have had this superior technology go mainstream years ago, but the content controllers smelt danger, and only recording studios could afford them. Now of course anyone can produce high quality media, but the fences being erected now are different. We have copyright, DMCA, Trusted Computing, HDMI, and good old money to prove that the old guard still got it bitches. Most of the media we're using for community content are money bitbuckets, in the red and unlikely to change. It's becoming much more the individual success story until the media landscape hardens again and we get a new oligarchy of mindshare. That's just the way we white niggers are.

Check the tables at the end of this Comes exhibit, its Linux/OO (when it was still StarOffice) in every region. Because the target is future developers and government contracts, obviously.

Half of my twitter followers are either commercial (I have an airline following me ffs) or data-mining spammers. Most of them know better than to tweet me and get blocked. I used to block them initially but they just find a different nick and rejoin. I call it twittercrud.

And no one knows if they were wrong in the past in a similar way; that is the danger of chasing correlations without a firm grasp of the physical mechanisms (which provide model structure and make extrapolation beyond the calibration region somewhat safe).

Yes, because it's exactly the same as regular computing.

It is also fairly likely that it is in this section:

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/

Oh man, you have no idea what is in that list do you. I haven't read over everything there, not by a long shot, but I can say that it contains completely non-skeptical papers, such as Khilyuk and Chillanger.

There are a few other signs that the list is not legit -- for a starters, some of these papers will have rebutals. In any case, 450 papers really is not that many.

But we can test this with evidence. Pick 10 papers at random from this list, and lets see how many are actually skeptic papers that have not been debunk by merit of argument.

You must understand, that the whole skeptic argument rests on the principle that nobody would actually bother to look at the sources they reference. And the evidence for that can be found in reading the references.

Thats why I said Alleged. But it could have been anything along the pornographic or embarassing material lines - something that doesn't suggest any kind of Skill. Using it to his advantage might NOT be an option.

First off, to everyone who knows me: This wasn't my story submission

OK, now that's out of the way, I suffer from a related, but not quite so bad situation: I'm pretty much the only Erik Trimble on the Internet (that's not true, but close enough). Google me, and 90% of the first 100 returns point to me, in some way or not (FYI - the MySpace page for "leathercladdemon" isn't me. Really.) There's nothing bad there, it's just that my life has evolved, and having absolutely all of it retained and searchable over the past 20 years allows people to draw incorrect assumptions about me.

This is all the privacy problems that the current young generations seem to be completely oblivious to, and that pundits like to ignore. People's perceptions of you matter, as much as we'd like to think otherwise. That doesn't mean it has to rule your life, but to think that such perceptions don't matter is foolish. The problem with retaining all this data out in the open is that it seriously harms the ability of people to change. And we want people to change. Lots of Very Bad Things happen to society if we forbid people (either legally, or de facto) from changing their paths in life. For just a minor example, look at what being convicted of anything does to one's entire life. It's not good to have complete personal transparency.

I don't have a solution. At least not a simple one. But it needs to understood by everyone that it IS a problem.

-Erik

Mr. Woods didn't use a condom with his extra-marital partners.

Ouch, now THAT is stupid.

Betraying trust is horrible aweful bad, but I really don't care. The image being sold is him as a sport idol, and no matter what he does at night, he is good at playing sports. I don't care who sleeps with, so why should I care who sleeps with?

But not using a condom? Oh wow. With how much money he has, WTF. AIDS sucks. He was having sex with women who are obviously willing to sleep with passing celebrities w/o using a condom, in other words, not the safest of sex partners. Yeesh.

Samsung is one of the largest cellphone manufacturers, second only to Nokia and significantly ahead of rest of the pack.

Whatever Samsung wants to be popular, will be popular.

On the flip side, when your friend goes to the store and has to put up with someones kids who are running around yelling, screaming, and crying, he should remember that the world isn't censored.

Maybe if the Americans stopped breaking International Law - the Iranians could be left in peace - there'd be no need for wave after wave of propaganda to set public opinion before the clearly-approaching action against Iran.

Iran has every right to pursue its interests - it's signed the non-proliferation treaty (unlike Israel which has masses of US nuclear weapons on its soil, again, against International Law).

Stop 'buying into' this shit as you guys say.

kthx.

America is sowing the seeds of terrorism in every country around the world - clearly this includes non-muslim/-arab states - where would you be if even 1% of the horrors you've committed/sponsored against the rest of the world came back to you? hint: horrors beyond your imagining; hundreds/thousands of times worse than 911, again and again. For fuck's sake - stop reading your government-controlled propaganda - New York Times etc and start controlling your 'leaders'.