That's now. It still pales in comparison to the forests that have already been cleared in the US for frarmland. Most of the midwest used to be covered by forest.
Additionally, it sounds like they're cutting out the DVD functionality to save the royalty costs, AND that they plan to pass those savings on to customers. Whether that will actually be the case in reality remains to be seen. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but if that is what they end up doing, I have to give them kudos for that.
For myself, I won't miss DVD playback. My home PCs don't even have optical drives installed. I have a USB DVD drive, which I've used probably less than 5 times in the past year, and only once or twice for DVDs.
But besides all that, as you pointed out, there's plenty of free software players out there now. I prefer VLC over Media Center anyway.
The problem isn't so much that they decided to make everything accessible to casual players, it's the way they did it, and the way their endgame in general was structured. But given the structure of their endgame, yes, some of the content should not have been accessible to casual players.
The real problem with it was the major disconnect between what looked like well designed content and the idiocy of what seemed to be pre-teen player base, lingerie wearing magic users, hordes of non combat pets, and all the other cutesy stuff.
You're definitely exaggerating, but I guess I can see your point. It wasn't really an issue for me though. The reason I quit GW had nothing to do with the game itself, and everything to do with the complete lack of account security at the time.
I wish modern MMOs took a page from the GW playbook and used storyline for progression instead of gear. To keep players replaying the same content, you use cool items and/or fluff items as incentives. It's amazing what players will do to get that awesome sword just because it looks awesome, even if it isn't a damn bit better than the plain-jane one they've had for the last 5 months.
The Warcraft brand was a lot more niche before WoW than TES is now. It's a lot more about the game than the existing fanbase. The vast majority of WoW players past and present never played another Warcraft game. If the game itself hits the right notes, the players will come.
I'm pretty sure ArenaNet also has no expectations of it killing WoW. And the irony is, that might be exactly what makes it a WoW-killer. Blizzard, for example, didn't set out to make WoW an EQ-killer. They just looked at what was out there, found ways to improve (by their standards) everything, and made a fun game that they wanted to play. Not surprisingly, lots of other people also wanted to play it and it became much more successful much more quickly than they ever imagined.
I think the lesson here is not to try to compete with what's out there, but to make your game, make it fun, and make it accessible.
Guild Wars may not be a true MMO, but it's close enough and it handily disproves all of that. Have to wait and see how GW2 will do, but I'm betting it'll be highly successful as well. Without long periods of grinding.
I know it's only anecdotal, but most of the people I used to play WoW with have quit for the same reasons I did (because it got irredeemably bland, repetitive, and unimaginative).
It may be only anecdotal but that doesn't make it irrelevant. I quit WoW more or less for the same reasons, but for me it was even more extreme than for most players. I'm one of those who still says WoW should have kept the level cap at 60 and expanded sideways rather than upwards with the expansions. It worked well for Guild Wars, I believe it would have worked for WoW. But that's just my $.02. However I'm not one of the 1.5 million who quit since May '11, I quit January of '11.
A few things that would still be relevant and meaningful in WoW if the level cap were at 60:
- All the fun engineering stuff from vanilla - All the original vanilla dungeons - Legendary weapons
Every new expansion just seems a little more bland and watered down than the previous one.
All that aside, I was a bit excited about this announcement, but it's too early to really get hyped up about it. It probably won't release for at least another couple years.
I don't like spreadsheets and I enjoy playing Eve. Spreadsheets are only necessary if you're heavily into the industry side of things, or if you're extremely concerned about maximizing your profits from everything. If you'd rather just play and have fun, you can always just run missions or mine for money, and sell stuff for the immediate value at Jita. Sure, it may not be as much money but it works.
Books with poor editing, proofreading and layouts still cost as much as ones much better in all those categories. Meanwhile, books physically constructed in a higher-quailty manner sell for a good bit more. And the poorly-edited variety usually don't sell too well either. You'd think that if the cost of the actual publishing were that cheap (and they clearly cut corners on the rest of it) the per-copy price would be next to nothing. And yet they still don't drop the price to a point where it actually sells. So why exactly is all that?
Sure, it's that cheap if you go with the cheapest option you can possibly find. Good quality hard-backs and paperbacks aren't cheap to physically print. (This is why it's not possible for some random individual who wrote a book on his own to just go and get it published on his own, when he's first starting out. It requires significant capital outlay to get the printing done because it's not cheap. Getting your ebook version on Amazon, on the other hand, is a trivial amount of money in comparison.) Of course, that's not nearly all the extra costs associated with a physical copy vs. a digital copy. Physical copies also have to be stored somewhere, in the right conditions. That means, at the very least, warehouses with all the ususal utilities to keep the temperature at the proper range for books, as well as staff at the warehouse, as well as equipment at the warehouse, etc. etc. And on top of all that, you've still got almost all the same digital resources required as for the digital copy. You still have to run the website, you still need the IT staff for it, and all of that. The only overhead the digital copy has that the physical copy doesn't is the storage space for the digital copy and the extra bandwdith to upload it. That's a pittance compared to all the extra overhead the physical copy requires, probably less than 1% as much.
Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.
But see, that's the whole problem right there. That's the real crux of it all, and the rest of your post all just reflects back and magnifies that. If the tree-pulp version that actually requires time and resources to manufacture and distribute costs $13, the bits and bytes version should probably cost about $3-5. And at that price, it wouldn't matter so much if you couldn't resell or share it.
And yet somehow I've never had a problem with infections on my home PCs (with Windows), despite having them online 24/7 for the past 8+ years, the majority of the time without any active antimalware protection. But then, I also don't download cutesy apps or online greeting cards, I know what to watch for in emails, and I recognize drive-by infections on websites and kill the browser before it actually downloads.
But less knowledgable people still know the risks are out there, and they proceed anyway - at their own risk. Still doesn't excuse them from liability.
Exactly. I'm not sure how people are failing to see this. It's not so much a matter of "well he was just stupid, he deserved what happened" as it is that you cannot hold banks (or other instituions) liable for mistakes their clients make through ignorance or stupidity. It just doesn't work that way. It wasn't a breach in security. It was an individual participating in an activity by his own choice, and falling for a scam. It's the job of law enforcement to go after scammers, not the business.
It sucks, but it's life. Bad people do bad things, and the ignorant pay for it.
That law however does have an exception that would cover him, provided he has the means to fight it in court.
for the private use of the importer or exporter and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time,
As long as he purchased only one copy and used it before reselling, he's not breaking this law.
Copyright law doesn't give anyone the right to monetize anything. It gives content creators exclusive distribution rights, which in turn makes attempts at monetization more likely to be successful.
But let me make it even more simple:
No one has the RIGHT to MONETIZE anything. You may have the right to ATTEMPT to monetize something, but that's not the same thing at all.
The point stands however, that we have no trouble distinguishing between the two.
No, the point is irrelevant. Copyright is about copying, not plagiarism, especially not in the context you gave.
And anyone doing research will tell you its fine to cite and paraphrase from another work, but to go through another work, and paraphrase it paragraph by paragraph, image by image, diagram by diagram from cover to cover isn't even remotely approaching anything that might be considered fine.
That may or may not be the case, but that isn't what happened here so it's irrelevant.
paraphrase [par-uh-freyz] Show IPA noun, verb, paraphrased, paraphrasing. noun 1. a restatement of a text or passage giving the meaning in another form, as for clearness; rewording. 2. the act or process of restating or rewording.
That's not at all what Boundless did. They didn't reword or restate anything. They took articles and images provided freely by other individuals and used those.
No, the definition of equation or variable or alebra might be paraphrased; but the examples they use to illustrate things, the images they use to add humor or insight, the sidebars... its not copied whole cloth from anything else.
And neither is the Boundless project.
And to create a new work, you need to accumulate knowledge from several sources, while adding your own insights.
What Boundless did wasn't a new work. It was simply a compilation of existing, open works freely available for anyone to use.
You don't just take an existing book, and paraphrase it cover to cover. To say that's the same thing is idiotic.
Fortunately, that's not what happened here. What happened was someone took existing, freely available information and compiled and organized it the same way as an existing textbook.
The justice system may side with the prosecution here, but that doesn't make them right. No matter how you slice this, it's BS, and if they win the suit it just goes to show how fucked up our copyright system is and how badly it needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.
When you were assigned tests and homework in school, and the format of what you turned in was pretty rigid, and you were all answering the same questions... but we had no trouble then understanding that writing our own answers and handing them in was acceptable while taking someone elses answers and then just rearranging them a bit, and pushing it through a thesaurus was dishonest, or that automating the process was even more dishonest.
That has absolutely fuck all to do with copyright or honesty. It has everything to do with properly testing your knowledge of the material.
CLEARLY, taking a work, and mechanically transforming it into a new equivalent work is by definition a derivative work.
And the original textbook is simply a derivative of the work of other scientists or authors, whose work is also a derivative of someone else, etc. etc. Take any given page in the textbook and go find the source, and you'll find that the textbook is just a paraphrase of the source. That's how science and academics works. It's all based on knowledge built up over centuries, by the efforts of millions.
Not necessarily. The point of mapping to the existing textbook is so you can be sure your open material meets the criteria for the course you're taking. This doesn't mean that Boundless couldn't still just as easily assemble online textbooks based on open material if they just had a list of specific topics covered in the course.
Slashdot Mirror
That's now. It still pales in comparison to the forests that have already been cleared in the US for frarmland. Most of the midwest used to be covered by forest.
The biggest cause of forests being killed is people clearing them for farmland. That's by far humanity's biggest impact on the environment.
Additionally, it sounds like they're cutting out the DVD functionality to save the royalty costs, AND that they plan to pass those savings on to customers. Whether that will actually be the case in reality remains to be seen. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but if that is what they end up doing, I have to give them kudos for that.
For myself, I won't miss DVD playback. My home PCs don't even have optical drives installed. I have a USB DVD drive, which I've used probably less than 5 times in the past year, and only once or twice for DVDs.
But besides all that, as you pointed out, there's plenty of free software players out there now. I prefer VLC over Media Center anyway.
The problem isn't so much that they decided to make everything accessible to casual players, it's the way they did it, and the way their endgame in general was structured. But given the structure of their endgame, yes, some of the content should not have been accessible to casual players.
The real problem with it was the major disconnect between what looked like well designed content and the idiocy of what seemed to be pre-teen player base, lingerie wearing magic users, hordes of non combat pets, and all the other cutesy stuff.
You're definitely exaggerating, but I guess I can see your point. It wasn't really an issue for me though. The reason I quit GW had nothing to do with the game itself, and everything to do with the complete lack of account security at the time.
I wish modern MMOs took a page from the GW playbook and used storyline for progression instead of gear. To keep players replaying the same content, you use cool items and/or fluff items as incentives. It's amazing what players will do to get that awesome sword just because it looks awesome, even if it isn't a damn bit better than the plain-jane one they've had for the last 5 months.
You grabbed one sentence of my post, took it completely out of context, and harped on it.
I would still enjoy playing vanilla WoW. Modern WoW, not at all. I don't miss WoW because the game I enjoyed no longer exists.
The Warcraft brand was a lot more niche before WoW than TES is now. It's a lot more about the game than the existing fanbase. The vast majority of WoW players past and present never played another Warcraft game. If the game itself hits the right notes, the players will come.
I'm pretty sure ArenaNet also has no expectations of it killing WoW. And the irony is, that might be exactly what makes it a WoW-killer. Blizzard, for example, didn't set out to make WoW an EQ-killer. They just looked at what was out there, found ways to improve (by their standards) everything, and made a fun game that they wanted to play. Not surprisingly, lots of other people also wanted to play it and it became much more successful much more quickly than they ever imagined.
I think the lesson here is not to try to compete with what's out there, but to make your game, make it fun, and make it accessible.
Because MMO developers/publishers never work on other stuff, right? Good to know StarcraftII and DiabloIII are just figments of my imagination.
Guild Wars may not be a true MMO, but it's close enough and it handily disproves all of that. Have to wait and see how GW2 will do, but I'm betting it'll be highly successful as well. Without long periods of grinding.
I know it's only anecdotal, but most of the people I used to play WoW with have quit for the same reasons I did (because it got irredeemably bland, repetitive, and unimaginative).
It may be only anecdotal but that doesn't make it irrelevant. I quit WoW more or less for the same reasons, but for me it was even more extreme than for most players. I'm one of those who still says WoW should have kept the level cap at 60 and expanded sideways rather than upwards with the expansions. It worked well for Guild Wars, I believe it would have worked for WoW. But that's just my $.02. However I'm not one of the 1.5 million who quit since May '11, I quit January of '11.
A few things that would still be relevant and meaningful in WoW if the level cap were at 60:
- All the fun engineering stuff from vanilla
- All the original vanilla dungeons
- Legendary weapons
Every new expansion just seems a little more bland and watered down than the previous one.
All that aside, I was a bit excited about this announcement, but it's too early to really get hyped up about it. It probably won't release for at least another couple years.
I don't like spreadsheets and I enjoy playing Eve. Spreadsheets are only necessary if you're heavily into the industry side of things, or if you're extremely concerned about maximizing your profits from everything. If you'd rather just play and have fun, you can always just run missions or mine for money, and sell stuff for the immediate value at Jita. Sure, it may not be as much money but it works.
You think organic beef don't live "shoulder to shoulder" with each other?
I actually find that pretty funny, as I've worked on farms before.
[citation needed]
Books with poor editing, proofreading and layouts still cost as much as ones much better in all those categories. Meanwhile, books physically constructed in a higher-quailty manner sell for a good bit more. And the poorly-edited variety usually don't sell too well either. You'd think that if the cost of the actual publishing were that cheap (and they clearly cut corners on the rest of it) the per-copy price would be next to nothing. And yet they still don't drop the price to a point where it actually sells. So why exactly is all that?
Sure, it's that cheap if you go with the cheapest option you can possibly find. Good quality hard-backs and paperbacks aren't cheap to physically print. (This is why it's not possible for some random individual who wrote a book on his own to just go and get it published on his own, when he's first starting out. It requires significant capital outlay to get the printing done because it's not cheap. Getting your ebook version on Amazon, on the other hand, is a trivial amount of money in comparison.) Of course, that's not nearly all the extra costs associated with a physical copy vs. a digital copy. Physical copies also have to be stored somewhere, in the right conditions. That means, at the very least, warehouses with all the ususal utilities to keep the temperature at the proper range for books, as well as staff at the warehouse, as well as equipment at the warehouse, etc. etc. And on top of all that, you've still got almost all the same digital resources required as for the digital copy. You still have to run the website, you still need the IT staff for it, and all of that. The only overhead the digital copy has that the physical copy doesn't is the storage space for the digital copy and the extra bandwdith to upload it. That's a pittance compared to all the extra overhead the physical copy requires, probably less than 1% as much.
Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.
But see, that's the whole problem right there. That's the real crux of it all, and the rest of your post all just reflects back and magnifies that. If the tree-pulp version that actually requires time and resources to manufacture and distribute costs $13, the bits and bytes version should probably cost about $3-5. And at that price, it wouldn't matter so much if you couldn't resell or share it.
And yet somehow I've never had a problem with infections on my home PCs (with Windows), despite having them online 24/7 for the past 8+ years, the majority of the time without any active antimalware protection. But then, I also don't download cutesy apps or online greeting cards, I know what to watch for in emails, and I recognize drive-by infections on websites and kill the browser before it actually downloads.
But less knowledgable people still know the risks are out there, and they proceed anyway - at their own risk. Still doesn't excuse them from liability.
Exactly. I'm not sure how people are failing to see this. It's not so much a matter of "well he was just stupid, he deserved what happened" as it is that you cannot hold banks (or other instituions) liable for mistakes their clients make through ignorance or stupidity. It just doesn't work that way. It wasn't a breach in security. It was an individual participating in an activity by his own choice, and falling for a scam. It's the job of law enforcement to go after scammers, not the business.
It sucks, but it's life. Bad people do bad things, and the ignorant pay for it.
I think the better question is how quickly will someone learn to game the system, and come up with a program to generate unique "top quality" essays.
I suggest reading TFA. I did, and his stance makes a lot more sense.
One of his reasons, in a nutshell, is so he's not faced with the possibility of lawsuits due to overly broad and vague NDAs.
That law however does have an exception that would cover him, provided he has the means to fight it in court.
for the private use of the importer or exporter and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time,
As long as he purchased only one copy and used it before reselling, he's not breaking this law.
Copyright law doesn't give anyone the right to monetize anything. It gives content creators exclusive distribution rights, which in turn makes attempts at monetization more likely to be successful.
But let me make it even more simple:
No one has the RIGHT to MONETIZE anything. You may have the right to ATTEMPT to monetize something, but that's not the same thing at all.
The point stands however, that we have no trouble distinguishing between the two.
No, the point is irrelevant. Copyright is about copying, not plagiarism, especially not in the context you gave.
And anyone doing research will tell you its fine to cite and paraphrase from another work, but to go through another work, and paraphrase it paragraph by paragraph, image by image, diagram by diagram from cover to cover isn't even remotely approaching anything that might be considered fine.
That may or may not be the case, but that isn't what happened here so it's irrelevant.
paraphrase [par-uh-freyz] Show IPA noun, verb, paraphrased, paraphrasing.
noun
1.
a restatement of a text or passage giving the meaning in another form, as for clearness; rewording.
2.
the act or process of restating or rewording.
That's not at all what Boundless did. They didn't reword or restate anything. They took articles and images provided freely by other individuals and used those.
No, the definition of equation or variable or alebra might be paraphrased; but the examples they use to illustrate things, the images they use to add humor or insight, the sidebars ... its not copied whole cloth from anything else.
And neither is the Boundless project.
And to create a new work, you need to accumulate knowledge from several sources, while adding your own insights.
What Boundless did wasn't a new work. It was simply a compilation of existing, open works freely available for anyone to use.
You don't just take an existing book, and paraphrase it cover to cover. To say that's the same thing is idiotic.
Fortunately, that's not what happened here. What happened was someone took existing, freely available information and compiled and organized it the same way as an existing textbook.
The justice system may side with the prosecution here, but that doesn't make them right. No matter how you slice this, it's BS, and if they win the suit it just goes to show how fucked up our copyright system is and how badly it needs to be scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.
When you were assigned tests and homework in school, and the format of what you turned in was pretty rigid, and you were all answering the same questions... but we had no trouble then understanding that writing our own answers and handing them in was acceptable while taking someone elses answers and then just rearranging them a bit, and pushing it through a thesaurus was dishonest, or that automating the process was even more dishonest.
That has absolutely fuck all to do with copyright or honesty. It has everything to do with properly testing your knowledge of the material.
CLEARLY, taking a work, and mechanically transforming it into a new equivalent work is by definition a derivative work.
And the original textbook is simply a derivative of the work of other scientists or authors, whose work is also a derivative of someone else, etc. etc. Take any given page in the textbook and go find the source, and you'll find that the textbook is just a paraphrase of the source. That's how science and academics works. It's all based on knowledge built up over centuries, by the efforts of millions.
Not necessarily. The point of mapping to the existing textbook is so you can be sure your open material meets the criteria for the course you're taking. This doesn't mean that Boundless couldn't still just as easily assemble online textbooks based on open material if they just had a list of specific topics covered in the course.