Damn. /. gave me no indication that the post had been accepted; i refreshed the thread, it wasn't there. i waited a couple of minutes, still not there.

Sorry.

Just for a moment, lets postulate that time travel is possible.
The people who keep a eye on such things, to prevent discovery before it's time, notice that someone has posted on the internet that they have discovered an anachronism.

Thinking quickly, the agency in question pops back to circa 1926, and creates a hearing aid that makes the best possible use of 1926 technology, and packages it in an appropriate casing. it costs the equivalent of 6 new cars, and is so fragile that the thought of it functioning for more than a few hours is ridiculous, but it's possible. they contact a hearing aid manufacturer, get them to use the device in a couple of advertisements, and Voila! temporal anachronism explained away.

But it leaves one question; someone had to have been instructed to dig through the brittle yellowing remains of 1920's advertisements to locate this "reasonable explanation"; is that someone actually in the agencies employ, or did they just receive a anonymous tip?

I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked.
1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing.
She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...

Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.

Their denial is sort of humorous.

Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.

my apologies if this is a dupe.

I've also got family share, with 5 lines; I just logged in to Verizon, and all my lines except 1, the one I have "unlimited data" on, have data charges. and those 4 other lines have data blocked.
1 of those lines is my mom's emergency phone, which has never had a text sent or received on it, at least not in the last 13 months; she doesn't do that sort of thing.
She also is being billed for 3 "premium" SMS messages this month...

Not counting the premium SMS thing, every month I get data charges on those blocked phones, even on phones that never made it out of the glovebox for long, long periods.

Their denial is sort of humorous.

Unfortunately for me, they have the only towers in my area.

I'm pretty sure Virtual PC supplies Voodoo support.

The only problem I had with the Wii netflix was that, about 1/2 the time, my connection just goes flaky as hell, and the buffering system is simply stupid.
I'm not sure what you are saying, but I think the problem here is their attempting to make everything workable by the most idiotic customers; we need advanced setting for those of us with non-standard and/or non-functioning connections.

...Which is why Sim City, Civilization, X-COM, Master of Magic, Mass effect, and nearly any RPG have been such total flops.

I've been Computer Gaming since the 80's. The only games I've ever played multi-player are MOO2, Age of Empires, Earth and Beyond and Empire Earth.

As TFA points out, the problem is that very few studios are making adequate effort to make quality single player games these days.

You really did write up exactly what I was thinking but was too lazy to go into detail about.

one thing: while you are almost certainly right that the GPU manufacturers would make a new standard every year, even if consumers did not upgrade them, the Video Cards would still retain their ability to act as video cards for standard PC based games, and would add power to applications able to make use of GPU's for processing; people are going to be able to continue to use last years Gaming GPU for PC stuff.

I could see Nvidia essentially continuing the way they currently are, but they could add to the various cards as they come out "compliant with integrated console platform 2012A" with the economy cards only being compliant with "ICP 2011", for instance.

I think it would be an extremely elegant solution; I hate DRM, but as long as they keep to a hardware based DRM inside the thing (and unable to be modified by software), game developers could enjoy the same level of copy protection they currently get on consoles.

Manufacturing costs would be considerably lower, obviously, since you don't have to worry about storage interface, controller ports, power, networking, etc.

Something tells me I should have patented this.

You wrote that up MUCH better than I did.

Sounds to me that they would do better by talking to video card manufactures; if everything was based on a video card, it wouldn't really matter what sort of PC you had; add TV out hardware (if you can find a video card without the hardware already there) and use the GPU for the games.

Nooo...

How about Cyberpunk City, in Murray, KY? (my best friends BBS)? or The Grove in Clarksville, TN? (mine), The Midnight Hour or The Red Dragon in Cali?

running a BBS was much more fun than running a website.

it's not very dangerous. and if you know how to make a match shooter, lots of fun.

making a electrolysis rig to make your own hydrogen balloons is pretty darned easy; salt water, DC current, a few graphite rods and a couple of empty 2-liter soda bottles (well, if you want to capture the oxygen also you need two).

You know what? never mind.

Actually, on a couple my dad WAS the sound engineer... but that is not the point. they didn't create it, and their contract didn't specify that they would get royalties, so that's a pretty odd argument. what percentage of the entire work would you attribute to the sound engineer? i would have problems putting it above 5%, at best (in pre-autotune days, at least).

I don't quite understand where your attack is coming from, I disagree with the new law.

and as there is no way, possible to formulate "At what point is 90% of the money made from 90% of the works?", we need fixed time periods. I don't think they should ever extend past the life of the artist, though.

Interesting point.

My OPINION is that if someone sets up a website, or flea market stand, specifically for the purpose of selling music or art that they have no rights to, that does border on the criminal.

But...sharing it? not selling it? Giving it away? Civil, at worst, fandom at best.

Bernie purposefully defrauded people, lied to people to get their money. not the same anyway, really.