Berial.org

Assumptions:

MP3 players holds roughly 100-250 songs per GB.
The MPAA wants songs to cost minimum around $.99 per song.
‘Smart phones’ have from 8-64 GB of space.
People don’t use ALL the space on their phones for music.

If the above assumptions are true:

The average cost of the music on 1GB of space is roughly $99-$247.50.

That means the cost of music is MORE than the cost of the device it is on. This may not be surprising but it also means:

The cost of the music on a 64GB Phone, with lets say around roughly 32GB of music, would cost $3,168-$7,920 JUST FOR THE MUSIC.
If the Phone held the max lets say 60GB the music would have cost around $5,940-14,850.

I don’t know about you but my first CAR cost less than that, and I SURELY never spent that much on music.

If the MPAA had it’s way, and we were forced to re-buy our music every time we shift it from one format to another, replacing your Smart Phone would cost you roughtly the replacement cost of a used car EVERY TIME! They better have given this older idea up completely, otherwise EVERYONE will end up being a pirate.

Also with digital space(hard drive, optical, whatever) getting smaller while holding MORE all the time, the music industry better hope their consumers find something else to put on their devices, or there WILL be a lot more priacy in the future than now. Even though $.99 sounds completely reasonable, when people have simple devices that will hold 6,400-16,000+ songs there is simply no way the average consumer is paying that price for all of the songs.

I just wanted to share. I was struck by some arguments in a forum and decided to do some math, which I had never really bothered doing before.

Seems like that whole ‘enjoy firing his life insurance’ thing is becoming Romney’s ‘Dean Moment’, as in Howard Dean’s campaign yell. It seems really similar to me, because like Dean’s ‘moment’ nobody thought anything of it at the time, but once the media got ahold of it, it got changed and seems to be everywhere. Everyone seems to be taken aback by it or the way they look at the man has changed or something. Just look at this take on it by Krugman: Uncompassionate Conservatism. And before you think I’m going too far left (it is Krugman), this was just the latest example of the ‘moment’ I’d found. People are really reacting negatively to this statement by Romney.

I still don’t think Romney will lose the nomination the way Dean did. If there was an actual “NotRomney” generic Republican on the ballot he would be in trouble. That “NotRomney” guy gets more support than Romney. Lucky for the former Governor there is no such guy on the ballots, just a bunch of other actual candidates that the Republican base seems to like even less.

It just doesn’t seem like the Republicans are going to be all that enthused this year. Even with the economy as bad as it is, I’d say Obama could actually get a better percentage of the vote than he did the first time and you wouldn’t think that would be possible.

But I could be reading the Republicans completely wrong, and they will be out and eager to vote come November. Have to wait and see.

Has anyone else noticed that the number 27 comes up quite often in American politics when talking about percentages? It seems that 27% is the ‘crazefacation’ number(I just made that name up!). No matter what gets asked to be voted on there seems to be around 27% crazy enough to vote for it.

This isn’t all that scientific, but I just ask you kind reader, to keep an eye out for that 27% result showing up all over the place. Has anyone else noticed?

Well, the season had a lot of ups and downs, and I’m really not all that happy with some of it, but overall a fun season of football. This season had some of the most exciting, even, and most importantly ‘close scoring’ bowl games in memory (not including the BCS championship). I really had a lot of fun watching a LOT of the bowls this year. Most years I don’t even bother to watch half the bowls, because you know going in that they are going to be blowouts(Las Vegas bowl I’m looking at you).

I’m sure the Ole Miss fans out there are probably just glad this season is over. That’s understandable, we MSU fans weren’t all that enthused about our various down seasons either. Just remember, “There’s always next year.”

MSU ended up 7-6 so we had a winning record still that’s not where I was hoping to end up. The bulldogs really underperformed, and honestly I think a lot of the problem was the calls on the field for our offense need improvement and our linemen in general(we need more and better of them). I have no idea what to expect from next year, but I’ll be hoping for that 14 win season! (Good lord how many heart attacks would that cause?)

I didn’t like the all Southeastern Conference BCS Championship game. I cannot fault the teams for it happening; I really have no doubt that LSU and Alabama were the two best teams in college football this season. The other teams that wanted in, dropped the ball at some point during the season. I just feel cheated, that LSU and Alabama weren’t allowed to play out of conference teams, to show their real strength. Oklahoma State(Iowa State? really?) fans will forever more, be talking about “what if’s”. I beg the BCS to at least move to the +1 playoff. Let #1 and #4 and #2 and #3 play, then the winners go to the BCS Bowl. I think we would have still had the same game as we got, but at least #s 3 and 4 would KNOW they didn’t deserve to be there. Also it has to look weird that Alabama even got to the game, when they not only didn’t win their conference, but didn’t win their HALF of their conference.

I’ll end the college football season with this: Sorry LSU you choked when it mattered most. Congrats Alabama you stepped up and showed your opponent who’s boss. Now I go back to hating you BOTH!

To the guys that only read me during the football season [Hey I admit I got nothing much interesting to say most of the rest of the year]: See y’all next year!

BEER: Sadly none for this game. Was to lazy to run up to the store.

PS: I must admit my ability to pick winners in bowl games was abysmal this year. I came in 15th out of 19. YIKES! I did win the general college football pick’em this year though and that should count for something!

The following block quote is from an e-mail I received at work. Notice that the attachment was removed, for which, I am thankful, because you just KNOW it contained all sorts of nastyness and that someone in my agency would have opened it anyway. Now, I’m not sure what ‘account’ this is supposed to be, but I give the assholes responsible for this credit, at least they made up a nice unusual looking number to entice the gullible. Also they have at least a passing knowledge of banks because the confidentiality notice looks like the real thing from a real bank. The assholes responsible also lose a lot of points for one, being virus spreading, thieving assholes; and two, including around 8 other people in a CC as if a financial e-mail like this would include ANYONE else.

Also I think an honorable mention for assholeness should go out to my work e-mail system (lotus notes) for delivering this e-mail to me instead of just putting it in the spam/junk filter and MOST IMPORTANTLY because the damn thing was set to an email that IS NOT MINE! Apparently if it just gets the first couple of letters right lotus notes just tosses e-mail to the closest match. ASSHOLES!

[Suspect attachment quarantined by PureMessage]
An Account Activity Notification you created has detected that the
following transaction has posted as of 12/19/11.  The detail information
associated with the transaction is as follows:

Account: XXXXXX4429

Transaction Description:       Incoming Wire Transfer
Amount:                              $986,157.09
Type:                          Credit
Reference Info:                        8028214154IE
Availability:                  Immediate

PLEASE REFER TO ATTACHED FORM FOR MORE DETAILS

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This electronic mail transmission may contain
legally privileged, confidential information belonging to the sender. The
information is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named
above. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that
any disclosure, copying, distribution or taking any action based on the
contents of this electronic mail is strictly prohibited. If you have
received this electronic mail in error, please contact sender and delete
all copies.

I think the title sums it up nicely and that’s pretty much all I have to say.

Star Wars has been released into the wilds and the wilds are proving once again, just how stupid they can be. I can understand some peoples frustration and complaints. Especially legitimate complaints like ‘the game lags out and crashes even though I have a powerful computer’.  But the complaints in the SWTOR forums are enough to have Mother Teresa want to strangle the posters through the internet.

A bit of advice to people trying to play Star Wars The Old Republic.

‘Heavy’ and ‘Full’ servers are about to have queues. Unless you have friends on a specific server DO NOT play on a full or heavy server.  Queues are not much fun.

If you have friends that are on a queued server they don’t have much fun waiting either. Try to convince them to start over on another server. It’s not like you lose much of anything but frustration by doing this. They could ‘lose’ at most a weeks worth of play and are they playing to have fun or is this some sort of work that they are getting college credit for? You don’t really ever ‘lose’ anything.

If your friends insist on playing on a full server and you can’t get on without waiting for 30+ minutes. I’d suggest you just not play with your friends for another couple of weeks. Yes it sucks, but the queues for a new game go away for most servers after a couple of weeks or the first month. Once the queues are gone you can start on that server then. The game is a MMO, not a race to 50, you aren’t missing anything but frustration looking at a queue bar slowly count to 0.

Do NOT go to the SWTOR to complain about how you are going back to WoW because this is the worst game ever, and WoW never sucked this bad. You’ll just get laughed at because WoW DID suck this bad from time to time when it launched and it’s not like the community is going to miss you. Just go back to WoW and enjoy playing a game you actually enjoy playing. SWTOR will be around for a while. You can always come back if the problems at a launch of a game bothers you that much.

And this last bit of advice is for me and people like me. DO.NOT.READ.THE.GENERAL DISCUSSION.FORUMS.OF.SWTOR.THE.FIRST.MONTH. Maybe not ever. The scum and villainy of Mos Eisley has nothing on the scum and idiocy of the forums of a MMO or a political blog.

I was able to get in the head start on the 15th, so if you pre-ordered and registered your pre-order by October 31, you are in the game. Even if you waited till the last day I expect you’ll get around 3 days early access so if you are interested go get it! I really enjoyed my two days of beta, but I didn’t get to really feel out all the characters, so I set up all my characters yesterday on the ‘Corellian Run’ server. I really enjoyed seeing all the beginnings for all the different character classes. Must give a waring out to people unfamiliar with SWTOR, if you don’t like cut-scenes you won’t like SWTOR, it’s full of ‘em. Personally I really enjoy all of them, but you will need to occasionally tell anybody you are on voice chat with to “Shut up! I’m in a scene!”

So far as I said I really enjoyed the brief ‘intro’ stories for all the different characters, but I gotta say some characters are much more interesting than others and I personally feel a LOT of people are going to go ‘empire’ just because those stories are a hell of a lot more interesting. I mean, you have the option of role-playing the story of a emotionless celibate monk always pushing peace treaties, or a Roman senator able to give into whatever passions you want and do whatever you want to WHOMEVER you can get away with doing it to. Which do YOU think would be more interesting?

The Jedi are by far the least interesting starter stories in the game in my opinion. The Trooper and Smuggler were much more interesting. I personally was planning on playing a Jedi Consular to start the game, but decided a better plan was to play all the characters to level 10, to get a feel for them, before picking one to be my main. So far, I think the trooper (my second choice pre-gameplay) has the better shot of being the main. I DIDN’T want to play the Smuggler at all before playing the game, but I gotta admit it’s growing on me. I loved the personality (“If I die, bury me with my ship!” LOL)

I do have some pet peeves with the game. They don’t let you create your own default setup for the game. I have a lot of keybindings that I always use game to game, and SWTOR makes you set up each character separately. There is probably a config file somewhere that I could edit or copy, but I haven’t found it yet.  As an example, by default autorun is bound to your mouse4 button which is nice I guess, but I use the extra mouse buttons on my device for combat maneuvers(it’s a PvP thing), so that has to go(and I have to do it over and over on every character. Annoying!)

Overall I’m really enjoying the game and look forward to playing out all 8 story lines. Even if I just played the game as a single player game I’m going to get many many hours out of the game just playing it out 8 different times. It’s really a great move on BioWare’s part. You basically get 8 games in one because none of the character classes share quests or storyline. However, that decision can come back to bite them later for expansions because they’ll basically have to create 8 expansion stories every time.

Oh, and just for the record, I pronounce SWTOR (“swoe-tor” [and sometimes "swoe-tar" thanks to a southern accent]). Just putting that out there.

Hope everyone is having a good Christmas this year and if I don’t see ya at the house I hope to see ya in game!

I got this message in my work e-mail:

Subject: Re:Re: your-Direct Deposit payment-ID- a2b0405252bb4db3

The_details-regarding_this-matter-are-available_in our_secure-section:àNo.3CJSDIJYUKUNïï! (http link goes here)

I put the stuff in parenthesis to protect the innocent (or maybe stupid).

I mean, that’s it. This guy isn’t even TRYING. I’ve nearly been fooled before but this shouldn’t fool a 5 year old.

By this time next week I hope to be leveling a Jedi Consular Sage in Star Wars the Old Republic. I pre-ordered back in October so I should be in the ‘head start’ sometime on the 14th. I have some friends that will be forming a guild on the “Corellian Run” server so that’s where you’ll find me if you are interested.

Played a lot of Portal 2 for the first time this weekend. I’ve had the game since it came out, but I never took the time to play it. I was playing Co-Op with a friend of mine who had never played either. We had a blast, but I must say, some of those puzzles were fucking hard! I KNOW we spent at least an hour on one level. I had gotten to the exit but we just couldn’t figure out how I’d done it. (Literately, I stepped through a portal and just let the game bounce me around, while my buddy watched and we STILL couldn’t replicate it afterwards.) If you have never played portal get the original and then give portal 2 a go. It’s a really fun puzzler/FPS mix.

Oh, and if you do play co-op try to play it the first time through with someone who hasn’t played the co-op game either. If you are both ‘newbies’ you’ll have a lot more fun then having someone run you through it.

It SUX to be USM. No respect!

Who is Southern Miss? Well I think the following applies,

If you are Southern Miss then:

Mississippi State and Ole Miss steal all the football headlines, even when they are having down years and you are having an awesome one.
Everyone says the reason they don’t wanna play you is because “you can’t even fill up your own stadium during a winning year”.
Neither school will play you because there is NOTHING good that can come of the game for them, and you are eternally left out of the ‘best team in the state’ conversation.

And even worse when you win your conference:

You don’t get congratulations you get told ‘you cost us 13 Million in bowl money!’
Another conference threatens to take all the ‘best’ of your conference but excludes you.
Your bowl (Liberty) takes someone else.
The bowl you go to actually LOSES MONEY FOR THE SCHOOL!
Your coach gets hired away from you for a ‘better job’.

No respect I tell ya!

(PS: I think they deserve better treatment than this.)