Microsoft, PRISM and that show-trial in Florida...
Much has been said about Microsoft's new XBOX ONE console seeming like something out of George Orwell's 1984... And, in fairness, they did drop most of those nonsensical policies after enormous public demand. However, it looks like Microsoft may have figured out that they need to do more to cover their ass.
In a strongly worded letter to the Attorney General (who's probably quite busy looking for more ways the Feds can f*** with George Zimmerman since Florida acquitted him), M$ asked Eric Holder to release more info about the PRISM program that the NSA has been using to mine customer Metadata from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, et al. They even used the phrase 'the Constitution itself is suffering' in the first paragraph. That's pretty strong language.
One can tell that this letter was written by a lawyer, though. The grammar is atrocious. I haven't seen this many run-on sentences in a letter to someone in a long time. Also, the last few sentences made me groan, both for a glaring grammatical error involving prepositions and it's obvious ass-kissing nature:
"I feel very fortunate that we have both an Attorney General and a President with such longstanding knowledge of and appreciation for our Constitution. Put simply, we need you to step in to ensure that common sense and our Constitutional safeguards prevail."
Yeah... Note to Bradford L. Smith (or whoever wrote this letter for him), The President and Attorney General don't actually care about the Constitution. If they did, this PRISM program would have been shut down the moment they learned of its existence... Not to mention keeping their nose out of some self-defense shooting/local controversy in Sanford, Florida.
The moment the President says something like 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon' that shows potential bias on the part of the Federal government. How could Mr. Zimmerman get a fair trail when the highest levels of government in this country are against him? In my non-expert legal opinion, his 5th Amendment rights were violated and he should have never been put on trial. That whole farce was a waste of time and the tax dollars of Floridians.
Nintendo...
In happier news, Nintendo FINALLY gives fans what they have asked for... No, BEGGED for over the last several years and re-releases Earthbound on the eShop for the WiiU console. They even went so far as to re-optimize the game guide for the Super NES original and make that available on the official Earthbound website. I'm not a fan of RPG's but, I am wondering why they took so long to re-release this title. It's a guaranteed money-maker.
Also, the release of Pikmin 3 in Japan has done quite well, selling 102,000 of the initial 193,400 copies shipped to market in only 2 days. I played the first Pikmin title on the GameCube years ago. I found it to be confusing since I had never played a Real-Time Strategy game before and didn't get into that particular Nintendo franchise. Even Shiggy can't score a proverbial home run all the time.
Anyway, I wish Nintendo all the luck and success they can get with this title. It will boost console sales, which have suffered a lot since WiiU launched in late 2012. I blame the bad economy and consumers waiting to see what the PS4 and XBOX ONE have in store for them. I can't really blame them, even if I just can't stand the new XBOX and think that $400 is too much for a console.
And since we're talking about costs of new consoles...
At the risk of sounding old...
When I was a kid, you could get a system with 2 controllers and at least 1 pack-in game (and probably a light gun too) for $250 at most. Now, new consoles are costing up to $400 and may not even have a pack-in game?! What the f***?! That just ain't right.
Also, as much as I like my WiiU, I think $350 for the black one with 32GB internal memory and a copy of Nintendoland was a bit much. I miss the days when $250 at most was all you'd be expected to pay. And those days were not so long ago. That was what the Wii cost at launch in 2006. Inflation could not have possibly rose the costs that much in only 6 or 7 years. I know that to be true since I used the inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find the difference between 2006 and 2013. The difference was a mere $39.56.
- Lord Publius
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