Posts by Adrian Jackson 132 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Mar 2007
The idea that because there are murderers, rapists and what have you out there, no less serious crime should be investigated by anyone (a line normally used by people who've been caught speeding and want to try to justify it to themselves) is every bit as pathetic and inaccurate as the idea that each unlicensed download has a direct cost to the music industry.
It annoys me. We have a number of people (or maybe a single very insistent individual) who don't have the guts to reveal who they are, crying that we should all ignore our legal rights and allow Sony to set anti-consumer precedents. They're also relying on feeble ad hominem arguments.
To these people I say this:
Screw you. You have no right to make assumptions about me and my use of or interest in Other OS. You have no right to tell me that I shouldn't be worried about the erosion of consumer rights. You ignore the legal aspects of this case (hell, we're discussing it in an article where people who *are* lawyers are expressing the opinion that the retailers are on the hook for this illegal activity and you're still coming out with the same tired bad analogies and excuses) and try to put the blame for Sony's actions in places where it doesn't belong - Sony are the ones changing the product that I've bought in a way that reduces functionality. Not GeoHot. Not Microsoft. Sony.
They're hoping the problem will go away. If it does go away, then as consumers we're accepting that manufacturers get to change the functionality of the devices they sell us without any good reason and without any form of compensation. It's that simple.
Let's put the "but it was optional!" lie to bed, shall we? Sony removed functionality from the PS3. Either it was the ability to run other operating systems, or it was the ability to connect to the PSN, play your purchased media, download game updates and play future games that require firmware > 3.2.1. That they give you the choice of how they cripple your console is entirely irrelevant to the fact that they're doing it.
Because I distinctly remember paying £425 for my PS3, and I distinctly remember Sony getting plenty of other money from me since for PSN purchases and games. Sony gave me the video download servcice for free? Seriously? Because from where I'm sitting, not only is it the most expensive video download service out there (do some quick price comparisons to iTunes, Microsoft's offerings and buying the videos on DVD) it's also something they won't let me use if I want to run Linux on my PS3.
Unsurprising to see the Sony shills posting anonymously and throwing around preemptive personal insults, I suppose. I've kind of got used to it recently.
No date confirmed yet, but Sony have announced that there will be an upgrade.
As for whether it's a better bet than a Desire, I'd say it comes down to whether you like the whizzy social networking integration and superior camera of the X10 more than the slightly more vanilla look of the Desire.
China is an oppressive regime that dictates every last detail of what its citizens can do, while a huge government-owned PR machine tries to tell us all that it's for their own good and everyone is happy with the way things are. They want control over every bit of technology used in their country, and to be able to mandate exactly how everything works and what it does with your data.
It's not that Apple's morally opposed to that - they just don't want the competition. ;)
All we need to do to fix them is get them to read the BBC 'Have Your Say' page for a couple of days. Pretty soon they'll be as violently against the 'wisdom of the masses' as the rest of us.
I mean, I thought I was *joking* when I said I was looking at it to see how many posts it took for someone to try and blame Gordon Brown for the snow (it was two, as it happens...)
"What it doesn't have is a Last.fm style radio where you enter an artist name, or a tag, and get new songs from bands you may never have heard before."
Go to the Artist page, select Artist Radio. Not quite as prolific as the Last.fm radio, but I've found some interesting stuff that way. :)
I suppose none of the people claiming that anyone daring to move a CD is mentally challenged ever heard of such a thing as a CD walkman? Plenty of spinning disc devices can cope with being tilted while in use, including most games consoles, and some of them can cope with relatively violent movement.
That said, when my launch-day PS2 got knocked over while playing Tekken, dislodging and scratching the disc, I did the sensible thing. Shrugged and resolved to put it somewhere safer next time, that is, not sued Sony. Never had that problem with the 360, as it's neatly stacked under the TV at all times.
Not entirely convinced I'd have had it there at all, to be honest. Because for all its neat features, it's just not that great at playing MP3s, and I have this irrational preference for devices that are good at their core functionality. Substance over style sort of thing. I'm currently a very happy owner of a Sansa Fuze with a nice (cheap) hefty memory card to flesh out the storage capacity. Meets all my music-playing needs, and with the addition of a decent set of headphones does it at very high quality - and at a quarter of the price of the equivalently-sized Apple product...
Not sure you can count this one as a neologism, since it predates not only Web 2.0, but also the WWW in general - goes back to 1987 at least.
And I *would* distinguish between automatically and automagically - the latter requires the operation to be in some way technically complex and mysterious - as should be obvious from the roots of the portmanteau word - 'automatic' and 'magic'. Plenty of operations can be carried out automatically but have no 'magic' behind them. Yes, you can always replace uses of 'automagically' with 'automatically', just as you can always replace uses of 'crimson' with 'red'. Doesn't mean it doesn't add more description.
Of course, if it makes you feel better, and if you're up to pronouncing it, you could go with 'autosufficientlyadvancedtechnologyally' instead.
It's probably the load of everyone trying it out at once, but from the brief play I had with it yesterday, I found a lot of content painfully slow or failing to load altogether. Found the navigation slightly unintuitive as well, though I suspect that's at least partly a question of getting used to it.
Installing games to HD seems to work well, though. Nice not to have to put up with the constant sound of the drive while playing, and to reduce the risk of the 360 deciding to scratch the disc. Should boost the life expectancy of the hardware quite considerably.
Oh, and creating a Mi^H^H^Hn avatar was, as expected, quite fun. And almost entirely worthless. :D
Well, they're all going to be popular choices, aren't they? The only two I could possibly vote for are fucknuggets and asshat, though, with a slight preference for the latter.
As far as more internetty words go, I like 'blogosphere'. Using it in polite conversation is the perfect way for someone to indicate to me that they are desirous of being punched in the face.
Sorry you've missed out on the great games for the DS. There have been plenty of them, as my increasing collection and shrinking bank balance will testify. Advance Wars DS, a selection of Castlevania titles, Mario Kart, the Phoenix Wright/Ace Attorney series, and a whole slew of platformers, RPGs, card games, adventures. Not to mention the whole back catalogue of GBA titles.
That's not to say the PSP doesn't have a great selection of titles either. It's had its dry patches, but it's got a whole host of classics too, as well as some quirky titles. Currently getting my handheld gaming fix from R-Type Command...
You seem to forget - we have *time machines*. Allowing us to freely go back in time to the revolutionary war and engage in whatever activities we desire with alternate timeline versions of our selves.
It's a wonder they managed to get any fighting done at all, frankly, with all the time-hopping onanists lying around the place.
screw you for using your comments to talk shit about trolls, I would rather have a muslim moderator than a woman-- any day of the week. Why don't your stick your attitude problem back in a time machine and go back to read the fotw and kill off some more brain sells.
Or something like that.
His concession speech hit the tone he should have gone for throughout the campaign. Respectful, patriotic, and of course "Palin stood beside him, but did not speak". If he'd managed those throughout the campaign things might have been a lot closer.
@h4rmony: "US$40 budgeted to "win Florida""
Damn. If I'd known it was so cheap, I'd have run for president myself!
@Anonymous Coward: "Apart from, that is, the millions of babies killed for being inconvenient."
Nice to see the single-issue fundamentalists are still trying to change the English language for their cause and pull made-up and unsupportable statistics out of their rear ends. Proof that *some* things won't change with an Obama victory.
@ChrisG: "@ 1# AC Bye Bye have a nice day, now you wont be reading El Reg you can concentrate on Genesis."
Now did you read the news today? They say the danger's gone away - but I can see the fire's still alight, burning into the night. Too many men, too many people making too many problems and there's not much love to go round.
Hold out, just keep on hoping against hope it's gonna get better. Don't worry, there's no hurry for you, for me everything's gonna come around. Shout out, someone will listen to you, to me, someone's gonna see.
I think it's a great idea. Now people can have a phone with a Crazy Frog ringtone, wallpaper of amusingly subtitled cat pictures, and their whole UI lovingly rendered in Postcrypt or Revue. It's a perfect indicator of who to avoid like the plague.
The next step, of course, will be to offer translation of all labels/documentation into txtspk, lolcats, and other such languages of the modern world. Then the idiotificationism of mobile phones will finally be complete.
And I'm perfectly happy with the screen so far. It's not a hideous artifacted mess, nor is it a massive improvement over the launch models. It *is* perfectly serviceable and displays the games nicely, including a variety of 2D and 3D titles.
But by all means let's carry on judging it from screen shots. That's a fine tradition in the world of gaming, after all.
Maybe *you* would be a better person if you learned to read, rather than jumping to incorrect conclusions. As I've said before in this thread, I'm an agnostic and an atheist and I think everyone else should be too.
Your comment is irrelevant anyway. Whether people *could* be better or not, the assertion being made was a generalisation that "Religious people are *nasty*". And as anyone who bases their opinions on actual observation and has met any typical religious people would know, this is clearly not a valid generalisation. I know some very nice people who are religious (across a range of religions). I know some very nice people who are atheists. All the violent murderous thugs I've known have been atheists, but the sample size is quite small (I try not to associate with violent murderous thugs) and I'm convinced by the evidence that there are violent murderous thugs who are religious as well (choosing to take a liberal interpretation of 'thou shalt not kill' or the equivalent in their particular faith).
The stunning level of self-righteous hypocrisy from a lot of people in the atheist camp is why I find discussions like this so aggravating. It's bad for religious people to be judgemental and hold irrational beliefs about non-believers, but at the same time it's fine to spew this sort of garbage claiming that being religious makes you a '*nasty*' person? When atheists do bad things then there are other underlying reasons, but when nominally religious people do bad things then it's the evils of religion to blame? And this from the people who claim that rationality is on their side? <sigh> That's why I so often find myself playing devil's advocate.
And yes, it's fine to have a strong belief that invisible pink unicorns don't live in your house. It's fine and, in my opinion eminently sensible, to live your life on the basis that this is indeed the case. But don't tell me that it is definitively the case that they don't and you can prove it, because you can't. Don't tell me that the probability that they exist is vanishingly small without showing workings of how you reached that probability. In particular, don't do these things and accuse *other* people making similar leaps of being irrational because of it. It's only fair. And don't confuse the adjective 'strong' applying to belief with the phrase 'strong atheism' - in that case it's not a sliding scale, it's a binary distinction between whether you actively assert the definitive non-existence of god or not. And I don't have a problem with people *being* strong atheists - some of my best friends are strong atheists. The problem comes with being unable to acknowledge the leap of faith that you have to make above and beyond what you can prove in order to hold that position.
Thanks for calling various of my friends and members of my family '*nasty*' from your position of arrogant ignorance. It only helps to make the point that anyone who takes an insular viewpoint and condemns other people based solely on the fact that they belong to some wide-ranging group quickly becomes an obnoxious bigot, whether they're religious or atheist.
If your occasional blog entries are as filled with such weak trolling as your post here, then you can hardly be surprised that some of the more extreme religious idiots write in to have a go at you. Would you be shocked to learn that people who write blogs that occasionally criticise atheism also receive hateful bile-filled emails from... you guessed it, *atheists*?
Some people are asshats. This is hardly news. Some religious people are asshats, some non-religious people are asshats. Trying to assert that there's a direct correlation between being a credulous god-botherer and being an asshat or a godless heathen and being an asshat just puts you firmly in the asshat category in my book, whatever your belief system.
<sigh> I guess the research was right - people really *do* lose their capacity for rational thought when it comes to religion and politics.
@Michael: The thing is, some of the views held by people are based on faith. Some of them are not.
A definitive belief in God is based on faith. Strong atheism (God does not exist) is based on faith. Weak atheism and agnosticism *are not faith based* because they don't make definitive statements that go beyond the actual evidence available to us and what we actually observe. Which is why they're (in my opinion) the only sensible position for a rational person or one who claims to respect logic and the scientific method.
Also @Dan Cooke: Can we *please* stop misrepresenting agnosticism? No it isn't a case of just saying "I dunno", and it isn't weaker than or incompatible with the more rational forms of atheism. You might want to take a look at the Wikipedia page on the subject, particularly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism#Types_of_agnosticism and if you're genuinely interested follow up some of the sources. It just annoys the hell out of me (pun possibly intended) that people who claim to be representing the rational (SCIENCE LOL!!1) against the irrational (RELIGION LOL!!1) have a worrying tendency to not only be painfully wrong with the basic definitions of the things they're discussing, but also to exhibit a wilful disregard for the fundamental rules of logic. Makes me ashamed to be an atheist at times, just as many reasonable religious people are ashamed by the behaviour of the fundamentalist nutcases who make up the majority of the anecdotal evidence in discussions like this.
What a horrible analogy. No, it's like claiming that being anti-Nazi is a *political* belief, even if you don't espouse any particular political cause yourself.
And I don't see that most people would argue with *that* definition.
Now, if I'd claimed that a stated lack of belief in the Abrahamic God was a *Christian* belief, your point might hold water. But that would be silly.
> If it were an agnostic slogan, it would read "THERE'S POSSIBLY NO GOD..."
If it were truly an agnostic slogan, it would read "I DON'T KNOW WHETHER THERE'S A GOD, AND NOR DO YOU."
If it were a weak atheist slogan, it would read "I DON'T BELIEVE THERE'S A GOD."
If it were a strong atheist slogan, it would read "THERE IS NO GOD."
If it were a deist slogan, it would read "GOD IS."
If it were a theist slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD!"
If it were a baptist slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD, AND HE LOVES YOU!"
If it were a Russian Orthodox slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD, AND HE HATES YOU!"
If it were a Catholic slogan, it would read "THERE IS A GOD, AND HE HATES US ALL." followed by an elaborate sad Virgin Mary smiley.
If it were a C of E slogan it would read "I JUST GO FOR THE HYMNS. ANYONE FOR A NICE CUP OF TEA?"
If it were a Muslim slogan, it would have been defaced by a barely-literate Daily Mail reader.
I'd get my coat, but I can't be sure whether it exists.
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