Depending on how recent this snapshot of wealth is, Bill Gates waffles back and forth between number 1 and number 2 in relation to the price of his Microsoft stock holdings. Recently he went back up to #1 but may have fallen again after the new Xbox was announced.

should change the title from Louis to Lewis....
When I see "Comedian Louis" I automatically think of Louis C.K.

Kinect for 360 can't detect facial features, but it's still great for robots.

I will re-coin the classic:
"Every time you masturbate, Microsoft kills a kitten on God's behalf."

*quality, only that videosifters need to know (if they don't already) the evil of what has become Microsoft and what is the Xbox One. It's not a laughing matter.

Its not really consoles fault that PCs are harder to develop for and suffer much higher piracy rates. It frustrates me when a console port is lazy on the fairly basic shit, like graphics, control and hud options but I don't really hate on developers for focusing their huge investment on the platform that'll give them the most return either. Some might see games like Skyrim as compromising their PC heritage for the console market, but I think you could also argue that the console market allowed a PC game to be mucher larger in scope than it would have been otherwise.

Personally I think PC gaming is in a pretty good place. My hope is that it won't be long before you can easily hook up the TV in your living room to the PC sitting in your study or bedroom or w/e and the PC can really compete against consoles on their territory. Valve has clearly set their sights on it, I think Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo should be worried.

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I'm not sure what Microsoft has going for it at this point. The hardware is so similar between this and the PS4 that making an exclusive publishing deal seems like throwing away money opportunities for a publisher. Its not like how it was with the PS3 and 360 where the PS3 decided to take a radically different approach hardware wise. Microsoft is betting on all the other features stacked into it. They've been trying for over a decade to make a "unified household media center" and this might be their next attempt.

EA recently put an end to their "Online Pass" scheme, even removing the requirement from all existing games. And they're the only console publisher I know of that was trying to implement a game reselling fee on disk-based games. It's striking that Microsoft is moving in a direction that proved too dickish even for EA.

viacom in bed with Microsoft apparently.

The X1 allows you to transfer the license once (borrow or sell the title) to a friend that's on your friends list for 30 days.

Select partners (Gamestop obviously) will be able to resell used games, I'm sure they have some huge massive contract with MS for this.

The big kicker is the online requirement, the system will check authentication once every 24 hours or once per hour if you're on your account but not on your machine. If you fail the check (internet goes down etc) you're unable to play any games, although the Bluray and media center functions remain unchanged.

Overall Microsofts policy and lackluster handling of the situation and info has been terrible overall. For the first time in years (since ps1 gen 1) I'll be getting a Sony system to pair up with my PC for games/entertainment.

The current XBox allows you to borrow, rent games. You can buy and sell used games without any issues as well. The upcoming XBox One however allows a title to be resold only once through a very specific process that they haven't revealed yet. You can't borrow a friends copy of a game, and I'd presume you can't take your game to their house to play there unless the game is tied to your account not just your XBox One... Either way...

As Jinx noted, this was likely done to appease the publishers. They've been wanting to get rid of the used game industry for some time (an industry I don't get anyhow, you'll give me less than half the used price of a game, then sell it for $5 less than a new copy... why buy used if it is only $5 less?).

The question becomes, as noted before, if the publishers make it worth Microsoft's time and losses due to that policy then it will work out, but if they support Sony just as well, or even after a short delay, then Microsoft gambled wrong. They are going to lose sales over the policy. That, the fact the system needs to connect every 24 hours or it will lock down even single player use until it connects again...

To play games online with XBox Live you need a paid Gold account. You can play games on the PS3 without a PS Plus account, but there are rumors that the PS4 will require a paid PS Plus account to play multiplayer. That will just be leveling the playing field, and if you still don't need a paid account to access Netflix (you need a paid Gold account on XBox to get Netflix or Amazon videos... and I think to access your YouTube account fully) on the PS4 then they'll still have an edge on the multimedia front.

Another of Sony's big upsets was pricing the PS4 $100 under the XBox One price... now I'm going to hazard a guess they had a couple prices ready to roll based on the XBox's price and decided to undercut, it could have been the planed price from the start, but I'd guess they wanted to scare Microsoft. I'm also guessing Microsoft will announce "new cost saving measures" right before the holidays and adjust theirs down, they are already behind the 8 ball with the used and borrowing game limits, I can't see them letting Sony getting a huge boost from price as well... if they reverse course on borrowing/used games they might be able to keep the price up "we've heard the complaints from our users and have decided not to implement that feature at this time" sort of thing, but I'm guessing they are too far into that to reverse that and will just price match.

EDIT: I should note that I'm mostly a PC Gamer, followed by XBox games then PS3... well iOS games are probably after PC Games but before console games... I like XBox better as a gaming platform, but my PS3 has better networking for Netflix and Blu-ray support (XBox One gains Blu-ray support) so it is my multimedia machine of choice. I don't think I'll upgrade either system at this time though...

Presumably Microsoft made their decision as a result from pressure from publishers. I'm sure in time those same publishers will scratch Microsoft's back in return. If XboxOne nets a decent catalogue of exclusive titles then I'd wager that most will simply forget this.

Since I mostly purchase games through steam I did away with used games yonks ago, and I don't miss it. In Steams case I think the benefits outweigh or at least equal the cons of not being able to sell my games on. If Microsoft manage it too then most people won't miss used games either.

We'll see anyway.

*quality

it is sad it has come to this, that we celebrate a feature that has existed for decades. still a massive sigh of relief, and a hilarious video. the first thing I thought when the E3 attendance started screaming in applause at the announcement of no drm and used games sales still exist etc, I felt sad and happy at the same time. Sad it has come to this, happy Sony and Nintendo didn't follow.

Fuck you Microsoft.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

But the big difference is that *everyone* here in Australia relies on things like Gmail, Microsoft cloud tech, Amazon etc. It's not like we have our own local systems to fall back on.

We didn't see Google and Apple and Amazon as arms of the US government - and I guess that's naive - but now we will.

Expect to see more pushes for decentralising the Internet. Look for Australia, the EU and Asian countries to take control of their own Internet infrastructure.

Microsoft is going to have a tougher time selling things like Office 365 to overseas governments and multi-national groups. Likewise for Google Docs, Dropbox, Apple iCloud etc.

This whole thing is very, very bad for American IT companies.

As an owner of each console but a loyalist to Xbox...I've gotta hand it to Sony. We got owned this year. Looks like Microsoft is pulling a PS3.

"Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin with news that the National Security Agency has obtained access to the central servers of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo! and Facebook. The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the top secret program on Thursday, codenamed PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. But an Apple spokesperson said it had "never heard" of PRISM and added, quote, "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," they said. Other companies had similar responses.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, columnist, attorney, and blogger for The Guardian, where he broke his story in—that was headlined "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal." This comes after he revealed Wednesday in another exclusive story that the "NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers." According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, the scope of the NSA phone monitoring includes customers of all three major phone networks—Verizon, AT&T and Sprint—as well as records from Internet service providers and purchase information from credit card providers. Glenn Greenwald is also author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. He’s joining us now via Democracy—video stream.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! Lay out this latest exclusive that you have just reported in The Guardian.

GLENN GREENWALD: There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, "Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check." And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, there is a chart prepared by the NSA in the top-secret document you obtained that shows the breadth of the data it’s able to obtain—email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, Skype chats, file transfers, social networking details. Talk about what this chart reveals.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, as you reported, the PRISM program—not to be confused with prison, the PRISM program—is run with the assistance of the companies that participate, including Facebook and Apple, but all of those who responded to a Guardian request for comment denied knowledge of any of the program. This is what Google said, quote: "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege [that] we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, first of all, after our story was published, and The Washington Post published more or less simultaneously a similar story, several news outlets, including NBC News, confirmed with government officials that they in fact have exactly the access to the data that we describe. The director of national intelligence confirmed to The New York Times, by name, that the program we identify and the capabilities that we described actually exist. So, you have a situation where somebody seems to be lying. The NSA claims that these companies voluntarily allow them the access; the companies say that they never did.

This is exactly the kind of debate that we ought to have out in the open. What exactly is the government doing in how it spies on us and how it reads our emails and how it intercepts our chats? Let’s have that discussion out in the open. To the extent that these companies and the NSA have a conflict and can’t get their story straight, let them have that conflict resolved in front of us. And then we, as citizens, instead of having this massive surveillance apparatus built completely secretly and in the dark without us knowing anything that’s going on, we can then be informed about what kinds of surveillance the government is engaged in and have a reasoned debate about whether that’s the kind of world in which we want to live.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business record section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Senator Dianne Feinstein. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.

But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."

When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong. The idea of the PATRIOT Act was that when the government suspects somebody of being involved in terrorism or serious crimes, the standard of proof is lowered for them to be able to get these documents. But the idea that the PATRIOT Act enables bulk collection, mass collection of the records of hundreds of millions of Americans, so that the government can store that and know what it is that we’re doing at all times, even when there’s no reason to believe that we’ve done anything wrong, that is ludicrous, and Democratic senators are the ones saying that it has nothing to do with that law.

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon in March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the questioning of the head of the national intelligence, James Clapper, by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.

We are going to do a story, coming up very shortly, about the scope of the NSA’s spying activities domestically, and I think it’s going to shock a lot of people, because the NSA likes to portray itself as interested only in foreign intelligence gathering and only in targeting people who they believe are guilty of terrorism, and yet the opposite is true. It is a massive surveillance state of exactly the kind that the Church Committee warned was being constructed 35 years ago. And we intend to make all those facts available so people can see just how vast it is and how false those kind of statements are.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein. Speaking on MSNBC, she said the leak should be investigated and that the U.S. has a, quote, "culture of leaks."

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.

ANDREA MITCHELL: Should it be—should the leak be investigated?

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think so. I mean, I think we have become a culture of leaks now.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, being questioned by MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Glenn Greenwald, your final response to this? And sum up your findings. They’re talking about you, Glenn.

GLENN GREENWALD: I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States. Virtually everything that government does, of any significance, is conducted behind an extreme wall of secrecy. The very few leaks that we’ve had over the last decade are basically the only ways that we’ve had to learn what our government is doing.

But look, what she’s doing is simply channeling the way that Washington likes to threaten the people over whom they exercise power, which is, if you expose what it is that we’re doing, if you inform your fellow citizens about all the things that we’re doing in the dark, we will destroy you. This is what their spate of prosecutions of whistleblowers have been about. It’s what trying to threaten journalists, to criminalize what they do, is about. It’s to create a climate of fear so that nobody will bring accountability to them.

It’s not going to work. I think it’s starting to backfire, because it shows their true character and exactly why they can’t be trusted to operate with power in secret. And we’re certainly not going to be deterred by it in any way. The people who are going to be investigated are not the people reporting on this, but are people like Dianne Feinstein and her friends in the National Security Agency, who need investigation and transparency for all the things that they’ve been doing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we want to thank you for being with us. Is this threat of you being investigated going to deter you in any way, as you continue to do these exclusives, these exposés?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, it’s actually going to embolden me to pursue these stories even more aggressively.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper. We’ll link to your exposés on our website, "NSA Taps in to Internet Giants’ Systems to Mine User Data, Secret Files Reveal", as well as "NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily"." - Democracy Now!