Re: Am I missing something?

It's because of time served (if I read the article correctly). He's already been locked up for a while so when it comes down to it they take that into account rather than adding it on to the end so he doesn't serve X months for the hacking and Y months for the child abuse images

Re: Opinion, don't stone me

Hurting the used game market will actually damage game companies, not put more money in their pocket.

Joe Average wants the latest CoD, he only has £10, he runs off to the store with his £10 and a couple of used games, he trades in the used games and the £10 for the latest CoD. Net effect, the publisher/dev's get the profit from the sale of CoD.

Remove the ability to trade in, Joe now cannot afford CoD so he doesn't buy it. Net effect, no money for the publisher.

Joe NotSoAverage only buys used games, he does that buy trading in games and paying a little. Publisher already have their money (from the original sale) so are losing nothing. Remove the used games market and Joe NotSoAverage switches to a system where they can buy used games. Net effect, no money for the publisher after the original sale.

Joe Rich buys just new games, he buys two a month at £50 a game. After a year he decides he wants to sell his console with 24 games so sticks the console + games on Ebay. Who would then buy the console if, after you buy it on Ebay, you have to spend £35 per game to register the 24 games? £840 to register the games, on top of the price of game + console from Ebay.

Personally I'm waiting for the lawsuit, MS are trying to enforce EULA on to 2nd users which goes against the first sale doctrine and other such laws which prevent people from applying rules after a product is sold.

Re: I fail to understand

The person was not a topless female. Had the person in the video been a topless female then FB would have removed it.

Jack Nicolson said it best, in the US movie industry if you chop off a females breast with a knife it's rated PG, show that females breast and it's 18. It's sick, it's wrong, FB should have removed the videos as any right thinking country would have laws that would make watching such stuff illegal and most of us really don't want to break the law (and if that video appeared on my FB the person who watched it would very quickly be removed from my FB friends)

I'd guess it uses GPS to just trace out a route of where you are to where you are going and as you move it'll update the map every now and then to show where you are compared to where you're going. Of course, if you're totally lost on a really long road with no points of reference you may end up going the wrong way, in which case you use the hour hand and the 12 o'clock position on your watch to deduce North and, err, that may not work if you have a digital watch... so find a tree and look for some moss, the moss only grows on one side of the tree and that side is north, or south, maybe east, could even be west... umm.... how did people cope with normal maps before GPS?!

Re: Broken

I can do a quick review of SC5 for you. The AI is stupid, the path finding is stupid, the online DRM is stupid, the city sizes are stupidly small, the water/electric/sewer system using roads is a stupid idea. With SC4 you could spend days working on one city, with SC5 you'll spend a few hours, run out of space and have to start another city, assuming of course that the internet isn't slow as if it is it takes stupid time to load up an empty zone.

Re: One question

I have an app on my Lumia (called Contacts Transfer) that does what it's called, via bluetooth, I think the reason you can't do it like you normally would (select contact, click "send") is because the contacts are from your social networks and email contact lists rather than how they would previously be stored as a vcard on the phone. Does make backing up your contacts pretty easy however........

Simply put. You work for Apple and earn $40,000 per year. Palm comes along and says "hey, we have a job that we want you for, we'll pay you $60,000 per year!". Apple then have to either let their talent go (and they are talented, they were head hunted) or match (or beat) $60,000.

To get around this, Apple, Google etc. enter a pact "we won't poach your staff, don't poach ours" so Google won't go to an Apple employee and offer them $60,000 a year which means the employee is out of pocket to the tune of $20,000, the wages are kept artificially low "yeah, the people doing your job earn $40k so that's what we're offering you"..

All in all, quite sleazy.

".....and start to drive themselves...." So you'll only be walking until they start driving themselves then?

As I pointed out, I don't drive cars, nor do I shoot people, or own a gun, but I have no desire to actually get my car licence (I'm happy with my motorbike licence). Your argument was that more people die in car accidents in the US and that over 100 years more people would have died from car accidents than from shooting accidents. My counterpoint was that in 2 years more people in the US will die from gun related incidents than from car related incidents.

Your entire argument about cars is a moot point, cars are getting safer and safer all the time, hopefully within 100 years the annual fatalities from motor vehicles will be in the triple or even double digits in the US whilst the gun related fatalities will still be in the six digits per year. Or in other words, the argument about cars killing more people doesn't hold any water and is about as logical as blaming videogames for violence.

@Matt Bryant - fuck no, I'm a motorbikerist, walking is for car owners. Anyhow, I figured I'd look at some figures.

In 2011 a massive 32,367 people in the US died due to automotive accidents. By 2015 it's estimated that deaths by firearm will top 33,000 (cars get safer, guns get more deadly) so over the next 100 years as cars get safer (and start to drive themselves improving safety again) the number of people dying will steadily drop so over 100 years.... far less people will die from car accidents than will die from firearm related incidents, including but not limited to, using a gun as a hammer.

Re: He's justifying his lack of effort...

Nope, he is arguing that whenever we find something new on the internet we go WHEEEEEEE and our brain produced crack cocaine or something (may have misread that part) but also, when the constant reminders "Your trial ran out 7,521 days ago" - "EMAIL BRIAN, YESTERDAY, IMPORTANT!" we get annoyed and irritated and microwave unicorns to relieve the stress. Of course, I may have totally missed the point of the article, which if I has, is annoying, where's that frikken unicorn gone?

There are lots of reasons for getting slow broadband, but without the basic details you can't start to figure out why it's so slow. If he's 5km away by copper then he's at the very far reaches of DSL but the "up to 3Mb" quoted is important, the BT estimate for ADSL is conservative so he should be looking at maybe 4-5Mb which seems to suggest there is an issue somewhere along the line.

The only way to be sure of that is to know the attenuation and the SNR margin, it's basic troubleshooting stuff and is usually the first question asked when you're having speed problems. Then you need to go through a checklist.

First (obviously) place the modem into the test socket (behind the master socket) and check speeds, if speeds increase it's a problem on your side, if speeds don't increase, try a different filter, check speeds, try a different modem, check speeds. If the speeds don't change after that then the issue is with BT.

Do a quiet line test, dial 17070 and then press Option 2, if you hear anything on the line (snap, crackle or pop) then there is a line fault which is causing slow downs.

Or you can phone up BT who will just reset your line and hope for the best.

Re: Pass

The Swiss railway company?

Re: That yacht looks terrible

Not only does it look terrible, it's bloody tiny, Paul Allen's little boat (Octopus) looks a hell of a lot better and is twice as big? I mean, if you want a boat to show off your wealth you don't really go for an ugly cheap thing, especially if you're Apple, maybe Job's didn't want to get sued by putting round corners on the boat?

Re: The basic fallacy

That sounds like a false economy to me, buy from company A which is cheap but pays no corp-tax rather than B which does pay corp-tax so is a little more expensive, okay, maybe more than a little as it's a tax on profit. Because you bought from A the taxman is getting less tax into the public purse so has to find revenue from somewhere else, which means the customer ends up forking out more in tax elsewhere to make up the tax not being paid by company B. So it looks like the choice is we (the consumer) pay more tax or the company pays more tax, which is more palatable to you, higher prices or higher tax?

It may not seem like much, £15m here, £20m there, but if enough of the top performing companies perform this tax avoidance then it'll quickly add up to billions in lost taxation which means everyone is paying more tax because the treasury is a few billion short of where it could be.

Re: Microsoft the Patent troll

I'm not even sure Eadon understands the article, let alone the case. MS are not suing, MS *want* to licence the technologies in question, Motorola hold the patents (not Microsoft) but MS want the terms to be fair. Motorola want a percentage on the sale price.

To put it in simpler terms, if there was a chip in an MS product that required the licence and the chip cost $1, Motorola is asking for a licence fee for that chip of $10, MS would rather pay a percentage of the cost of the chip, now you may think that's unfair to Motorola, why should they only get a percentage of the chip rather than the whole product, but consider how many licences MS require to make the Xbox 360, it probably runs in to the hundreds, if each patent holder wanted 2.5%.........

Re: Agreed

Sad as it sounds it looks like he could have said "hell yeah, I had an axe to grind against Samsung and got a $1b axe, FOAD Samsung!" and Samsung couldn't do a thing about it, as stated in the post:

Judge Koh said that legally, Hogan's comments after the trial couldn't be used as evidence in a new trial

Re: @ Jim in Hayward

@AC - I think that joke may have gone over a lot of peoples head, so bloody well done for such a funny and obscure reference!

Re: Optional.

But then the publishers can say "no chance" and refuse to stock Amazon, people who then go to Amazon to find the latest vampire porn book featuring dead Pharaoh will have to look elsewhere (B&N?) who also stock the other books they want so they continue to shop at B&N (or another book store) and Amazon run the risk of losing the customer from their entire system.

Amazon will sell books at a loss because it brings people to their site where they may purchase things which give Amazon a small profit, with enough people doing that they will make small profits due to the number of people who buy stuff on their site, if the people are going elsewhere, they are not buying the stuff that make Amazon a profit so I don't think Amazon would want to risk publishers walking away and taking their custom to their competitors.

Re: Wii U doesn't feel next generation

The PSV should take off in 2013 if Capcom release Monster Hunter Vita, it's pretty much a guaranteed sale of 2.4 billion Vita's. Maybe the PS4 will have lots of connectivity options with the Vita, maybe allowing it to be used as a controller in the style of the Wii U controller for certain games?

If I were in charge at Sony, I would do the one thing that would improve PS Vita sales instantly, I would drop the price of the memory cards from £2/gb to £0.50/gb (or less). Lets face it, you buy a phone with a micro SD slot and shove in a 32Gb card for a tenner, then you look at the PS Vita and figure "well, I got a 32Gb for my phone, I should require at least that for my console.... what the fuck? £60 just for a memory card? No way am I paying that much and the console without it is useless so I'm not getting the console either!"

I'm a PS+ member, downloading Uncharted pretty much filled my card up, the price of getting a larger card is dissuading me from getting a larger card, and next month I'll be faced with the choice of deleting Uncharted to stick another game on or getting a bigger card (or downloading it on my PS3 and doing some fiddling around). I don't want to fiddle around, I want to buy a bigger card but when a 32Gb card is more expensive than a 120Gb SSD you really don't feel like it.

Re: Governments aren't serious about combatting tax avoidance

It is tricky isn't it? We have companies which have huge revenues but still make a loss, so if we were to tax revenue and not profit a company which made a loss of £1b that year on revenue of £38b would find themselves in a not very nice tax position. The issue is with companies that make a profit of £1b off revenue of £38b yet use creative accounting to set that profit as a loss negating their tax on profits.

Of course, this does (in the long run) hurt the tax dodgers, they end up with huge stockpiles of cash which they can't bring into the US or the UK without that stockpile of cash being smashed by the taxman. You might think it's nice to have £100b in an off-shore bank account, but if you need that money in the US then you can't really access it, so you end up spending it on buying back stock or buying other companies, anything to use the money up. Buying other companies could introduce two problems, the first is that it's a loss-making company so you're throwing away billions on the purchase and then hundreds of millions on the annual loss that you incur (although that'll lower your tax burden...) the other problem is that the company is a profit making company so you end up shifting the profits over-seas again which puts you back where you start.

Hrm?

I'm pretty sure I didn't mention perpetual motion, more along the lines of a see-saw, at the moment it's half a see-saw with the one side dropping and staying down, but with a see-saw you put force into one side (that'd be the start with the human bit) and it doesn't just stop, it keeps going until the other forces catch up with it and stop it extending the uptime of the light past 30 minutes. That is what I was asking about possibility, not the possibility of keeping the light going for eternity which would be a pretty silly thing for a light to have to do in a persons home, or shack.

Though in fairness I did invent what I think is a perpetual motion engine about 5 years ago, but I'm still running tests on it before I can actually conclude it is a perpetual motion engine, once it stops I'll be able to give the definitive answer........

Your title is too long!

The problem isn't getting Steam to work on Linux, that part is pretty easy (and done). The problem is getting the gaming companies to produce versions that run on Windows, OSX and Linux. Windows is a no-brainer, the market share for Windows is so high that not producing a game for it is a bit daft, OSX has a lower marketshare (single digits or is it now in double?) so maybe popular games that will sell, maybe indy titles but not really a huge amount of games. Linux, the marketshare is pretty low so it'll take companies dedicated to getting their games to run on Linux to make it financially viable, as well as Linux users buying the games.

So no, just getting Steam running on Linux doesn't mean you can dump Windows, you'll still need Windows to run the vast majority of games that are on Steam. Case in point, Skyrim.

Not a patent, a trademark™

Obviously by looking at the image provided the first thing you think of is Apple.... okay, it isn't, does the apple even have a leaf? So no, it's an abuse of the trademark system and most likely will be thrown out.

Re: Suppliers

Your problem is that you went into a Vodafone shop, they can't get the deals that 3rd party shops (phones4u and cpwh get). Okay, so cpwh is evil but they do some good deals on upgrades, You can get the 820 for £25/month whilst the voda website still only lists the 7.5 mobiles.

Re: Still seems shifty

If you were only turning over small amounts of goods than a 2.2p off sales of £1m then it would be pretty rubbish (£22,000 per year). When you're turning over billions though them 2.2p's rack up and you end up with millions in profit.