However, with the free trade agreement that was recently made, Australia agreed to implement a DMCA-style law, although from what I understand, they are still negotiating as to exactly what parts of it to implement.
I hope you send a message to your MP about this, I did.
I don't buy R2 DVDs, basically because I couldn't be bothered chipping my DVD player, or finding a patch for my DVD software on my computer
Do you have a PS2? Buy DVD Region X or the entire Action Replay pack. This means that an Australian PS2 is Region 4 by default, but if you need to play another region's disc just boot DVD Region X, select the region and put the DVD in -- it will stay that region until you turn it off (or hit the reset button). No hardware modification and since it's only ever one region at a time it doesn't get tricked by those discs with dead ends on every region other than the one it is.
If your job requires you to regularly be away from your desk phone in order to, say, fix a computer, spend more time away from your desk doing work. Don't return to it between jobs -- go direct from one if the other. If that fails, schedule meetings -- lots of them. Ideally you should be able to spend a few 2-hour or more blocks away from your standard lines of communication each day. After a few weeks of your boss being unable to contact you when he's forgotten how scroll bars work he'll soon beg you to get a mobile. Just make sure the work you do away from the desk is real work and you do it well.
Or if the company is just being nasty because they think that not having a mobile will mean that you do more work for them try to impress upon them how much extra stuff you do outside your job description. If they don't get it, work to rule while you look for another job. If they wise-up before you take another position, great, if not it's much easier to find a job while you have a job -- you might even manage to find something that pays better. For those people that think moving to another job is over-reacting, petty rules like this are a huge moral killer which will only result in a less pleasant working environment: Competent, hard working people will leave because they know they can find a better place, leaving only the incompetent to become bitter.
That said, if you work at a military contractor, goverment security division or a place with sensitive equipment (such that there's a real reason for this ban), suck it up and get on with life.
If you're going to break a law no matter what you do, why not just grab the fansubs for free?
Did you hear that MPAA? By making it impossible to legally enjoy a bit of harmless entertainment, you're encouraging people to learn how to be a pirate.
Here in Australia, bypassing region coding is legal. Thus I actually have a legal way to enjoy Anime only released on DVDs coded to Japan's region. In the US, fans don't even have that. Explain how this benefits anyone.
Is there a program you can use to play a DVD on a PC while adding subtitles from a nominated file? Then you could buy the Japanese discs and only have to download a little zipped text file.
Just setup a VPN server on your home PC on Port 80. At the very least setup a web server on your home PC that you can use for file transfer and determining if it's alive.
Now if only I could show people why its a stupid idea to zip a large file before torrenting it.
The stuff I want goes in the other direction. Since I'm not particularly interested in videos, many of the torrents I download benefit significantly from decent compression. For example, I've downloaded a torrent that would have been one third the size if it had been 7-zipped. Many torrents are very sloppy.
Get a slower hard drive. 5400rpm drives are nearly silent, draw less power and are much cooler (thus you can turn down other fans). If you're concerned that this will affect your system's performance, you can compensate to some extent with lots of RAM.
We have a clean room nearby that's called ACE (advanced clean environment, or similar). I'm trying to come up with a recursive acronym "CLEAN", but I keep stalling on the N, Eg: Clean Lab Environment And ____. Anyone got any suggestions?
A local resturant only hired family as waiters. This seriously turned up the suck on their service. While the food is great, I stopped going because of this service. You're probably setting yourself up to have to choose between customers and friends/family.
I'm saying that our laws now appear to be designed specifically to help companies make money where they used to be to make people's lives better. And that you've been completely brainwashed like ever other good consumer.
Your position undervalues the work of people that create the copy. Intellectual Property isn't real, it's an artificial construct that's supposed to be designed to encourage the creation of new actual objects. (In this instance lets say that software or a ROM image is a real object -- it's more real than the idea of a design.) Now, I'm not going to say that a lot of work doesn't go into ideas, but a lot of work also goes into making copies -- proportionally less that it used to be, but work none the less. Are you saying that there aren't people in the community that value a GBA emulator for the Zodiac? Are you saying that no work went into making it? Are you saying that it takes no time or money to rip a ROM, post it to the net, download it or store it?
Would the existing GBA developers be discouraged from creating if they only sold 1 copy for every 100,000 that were played? You bet. But look at all the freeware GBA software that's out there. A good example is the Rogue port. It's great fun. I'd be pretty happy about the money I spent on a GBAsp and a Flash cart even if that was the only thing on offer. It's a freely available port of a program made first made available even before the games industry existed. There may not be a games industry without these draconian laws, but since there are already people releasing free games I'm sure that making money and copyright are not high on their list of priorities.
(Cynical aside: Nintendo aren't protecting their developers, they're protecting their marketing budget. It's these obscene marketing budgets that reduce the profitability of modern games, not piracy.)
Of course the Sims isn't educational. I assume you're not letting them anywhere near the on-line service either; Google for Sims and Prostitution. I also think your definition of "simulation" looks a little narrow. Flight Simulator is more what I think of when you say simulation than The Sims, but I'm "old skool". It could even be considered educational. However, it is incredibly boring. Most of the other simulators, using the classic definition, focus either on racing (eg; Accolade's Test Drive series) or shooting things (eg; A10 Tank Killer -- anyone remember that?)
The more modern definition of "sim" that you seem to be using typically doesn't include anything of any redeming educational value. Most of the rules of the world are so simplified that behaviour within the sim is borderline random or very easy to effect by doing something seriously unrealistic. You'd get about as much educational value out of Monopoly as you would out of Railroad Tycoon. You could try looking at word and puzzle games. There's a "Wheel of Fortune game for the Mac, but I would imagine that a room full of kids would go through the library of puzzles pretty quickly.
My final suggestion might be a little out of your scope: Robocode or Corewars -- Kids develop their own little programs that battle it out in a virtual arena. The second is a little more abstract than the first. At the very least it will teach them how to program.
That's two really crap stories in a row. I did a quick scan of my front page and CowboyNeal doesn't have anything else cool on there. I've just added him to my JonKatz list. I'll still see stuff via search.pl, but I think I can do without such needlessly bitter writeups on the main page for a little while at least.
I know it's a Swiss Army *knife*, but...
on
USB Swiss Army Knife
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...the blade mades it impossble to take on a plane. As someone that's about to travel with only 128MB of flash RAM (no laptop, no iPod), I'd think it would be handier if it looked to the Cybertool for a whole bunch of blunt(ish) stuff like the screwdrivers, pen or pliers.
Overclocking an; Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Gameboy, GBA, C64 (or any system with a disk drive option) or even a PSX/PS2 is really cool because you can get homebrew code onto real hardware with some sort of RAM or flash cart, or writable media. Enthusiasts can subsequently write new programs that use the extra clock cycles. However, I don't know of any way to get ROMs onto a Genesis/Mega Drive -- is there one?
Meanwhile, anyone in the Perth area that wants a Mega Drive to try this on, you can have one of mine if you'll convert a second for me.
Most of them are timed based on the video signal. Depending on how well they were coded, they may will run at normal speed, just with fewer dropped frames when the sprites pile up.
Apart from the occasional note-to-self and the odd form (which is typically more illogical than my handwriting is bad), who hand writes stuff so much anymore that it matters? I don't even use cursive, I only print in small caps.
Slashdot Mirror
Or if the company is just being nasty because they think that not having a mobile will mean that you do more work for them try to impress upon them how much extra stuff you do outside your job description. If they don't get it, work to rule while you look for another job. If they wise-up before you take another position, great, if not it's much easier to find a job while you have a job -- you might even manage to find something that pays better. For those people that think moving to another job is over-reacting, petty rules like this are a huge moral killer which will only result in a less pleasant working environment: Competent, hard working people will leave because they know they can find a better place, leaving only the incompetent to become bitter.
That said, if you work at a military contractor, goverment security division or a place with sensitive equipment (such that there's a real reason for this ban), suck it up and get on with life.
See second part of suggestion.
Here in Australia, bypassing region coding is legal. Thus I actually have a legal way to enjoy Anime only released on DVDs coded to Japan's region. In the US, fans don't even have that. Explain how this benefits anyone.
Isn't this how Hathor was awakened? We think you should let sleeping Goa'uld lie.
Is there a program you can use to play a DVD on a PC while adding subtitles from a nominated file? Then you could buy the Japanese discs and only have to download a little zipped text file.
Just setup a VPN server on your home PC on Port 80. At the very least setup a web server on your home PC that you can use for file transfer and determining if it's alive.
Mostly, student villages are full of open shares. All the machines are on the same LAN. Internal BT is redundant.
Your shift key obviously works, try using it at the beginning of a sentence.
Get a slower hard drive. 5400rpm drives are nearly silent, draw less power and are much cooler (thus you can turn down other fans). If you're concerned that this will affect your system's performance, you can compensate to some extent with lots of RAM.
We have a clean room nearby that's called ACE (advanced clean environment, or similar). I'm trying to come up with a recursive acronym "CLEAN", but I keep stalling on the N, Eg: Clean Lab Environment And ____. Anyone got any suggestions?
A local resturant only hired family as waiters. This seriously turned up the suck on their service. While the food is great, I stopped going because of this service. You're probably setting yourself up to have to choose between customers and friends/family.
I'm saying that our laws now appear to be designed specifically to help companies make money where they used to be to make people's lives better. And that you've been completely brainwashed like ever other good consumer.
Would the existing GBA developers be discouraged from creating if they only sold 1 copy for every 100,000 that were played? You bet. But look at all the freeware GBA software that's out there. A good example is the Rogue port. It's great fun. I'd be pretty happy about the money I spent on a GBAsp and a Flash cart even if that was the only thing on offer. It's a freely available port of a program made first made available even before the games industry existed. There may not be a games industry without these draconian laws, but since there are already people releasing free games I'm sure that making money and copyright are not high on their list of priorities.
(Cynical aside: Nintendo aren't protecting their developers, they're protecting their marketing budget. It's these obscene marketing budgets that reduce the profitability of modern games, not piracy.)
The more modern definition of "sim" that you seem to be using typically doesn't include anything of any redeming educational value. Most of the rules of the world are so simplified that behaviour within the sim is borderline random or very easy to effect by doing something seriously unrealistic. You'd get about as much educational value out of Monopoly as you would out of Railroad Tycoon. You could try looking at word and puzzle games. There's a "Wheel of Fortune game for the Mac, but I would imagine that a room full of kids would go through the library of puzzles pretty quickly.
My final suggestion might be a little out of your scope: Robocode or Corewars -- Kids develop their own little programs that battle it out in a virtual arena. The second is a little more abstract than the first. At the very least it will teach them how to program.
We're only up to the "Lorne's Sleep" episode here in Australia. Does it get any better?
That's two really crap stories in a row. I did a quick scan of my front page and CowboyNeal doesn't have anything else cool on there. I've just added him to my JonKatz list. I'll still see stuff via search.pl, but I think I can do without such needlessly bitter writeups on the main page for a little while at least.
...the blade mades it impossble to take on a plane. As someone that's about to travel with only 128MB of flash RAM (no laptop, no iPod), I'd think it would be handier if it looked to the Cybertool for a whole bunch of blunt(ish) stuff like the screwdrivers, pen or pliers.
Cool! Now, how to know if someone writes a Mega Drive game/demo only for overclocked decks..?
Meanwhile, anyone in the Perth area that wants a Mega Drive to try this on, you can have one of mine if you'll convert a second for me.
Most of them are timed based on the video signal. Depending on how well they were coded, they may will run at normal speed, just with fewer dropped frames when the sprites pile up.
Apart from the occasional note-to-self and the odd form (which is typically more illogical than my handwriting is bad), who hand writes stuff so much anymore that it matters? I don't even use cursive, I only print in small caps.
Given that I'm currently connected at 49.2, I'd buy a new modem if a product was released that my ISP supported.