Maybe I'm wrong and all other industries suffer from the same level of management problems - it's just that the technology industry is the one I'm most familiar with.
You are. This sort of shortsighted next-quarter-stock-prices chasing happens in all industry.
It's a fairly obvious flaw of how a stock market distorts the free market....stockholders are the bosses, and at some point it because easier to make money by bumping up the stock price for two months and selling their stock to new unsuspecting people, than to actually get paid any dividends from the profits of the company.
In other words, the American economy operates by trading intangible assets from one person to another and hoping that they make worse guesses than you in selecting what and when to buy, instead of actually paying people to take $X worth of goods, put in $Y worth of labor, and selling to customers for $X+$Y+profit.
Only in America do we have a political party that thinks that healthcare is not a need that the government should provide at least the basics of, and only in America do we have a political party that thinks women who get pregnant should be forced to give birth.
I don't think you actually read what I said. I pointed out the same text was used to condemn masturbation.
And I also pointed out that there is a very clear message in the story of Onan. The entire thing is only three sentences long!
Sins in the bible have actual places they are forbidden. It says 'Don't do this'. Sometimes people argue over exactly what that means, or what exactly it's talking about, or if that's relevant anymore...but there is an actual place where it says 'God says not to do this'. All actual sins have this place, where it says 'Doing this is bad' or 'Doing this is an abomination' or 'You should not do this'.
Yet the entire foundation of anti-birth control is someone apparently doing it once, and God 'being displeased'. Not banning it, not even talking about it. He got displeased once, apparently.
There is absolutely no hint it's any sort of global rule, nor is there any sort of hint exactly what displeased God...considering the explicit mention of 'fulfilling his duty', uh, an entirely sane assumption that that is what God is pissed at, failure to do his actual duty.
The Catholic church has done an impossible level of harm by misinterpreting this verse.
Ah, yes, the old 'I'm sure there must be people out there willing to pay for it. Just google it!' bullshit.
There is one organization, called Planned Parenthood, which is pretty good at providing prenatal care on a sliding scale. Of course, we all know how the pro-forced-birth movement loves Planned Parenthood.
However, they do not do delivery which is, uh, about 80% of the cost that I was talking about.
And there's Medicaid, if you're making under $20,000 a year.
Of course, anyone making $25,000, before taxes, can surely give up $10,000 of that to have a child. I mean, that's only about half their entire year's income. What sort of whiny bitch wouldn't be willing to pay that money?
Yes, because the Catholic church, ages ago, misunderstood the story of Onan.
Basically, this guy Onan had his brother die, and his brother had no children. In those day God's law required Onan to marry his brother's wife, and have a kid with her and pretend it was his brother's kid. (Pretty stupid, eh?)
So he did so, but during sex, he, uh, pulled out, and, as the bible says, 'spilled his seed on the ground'. So...uh...he wouldn't waste his seed. (Yeah, I find it an odd thing to avoid. This kid was going to legally be his brother's and legally live off his brother's money, so it's not even a child support thing. And Onan gets to claim all the rest of the kids he has with her.)
The Catholic church has interpreted this as banning all birth control, ever. The Protestants, jealous because they didn't have a fucking stupid belief from that story, come up with one of their own, and decided that that story condemns masturbation.
Of course, what the story actually condemns is just pretending to do what God says, instead of actually doing it. God told Onan to have a kid with her, he decided to screw around instead. In fact, he would have been condemned if he hadn't had sex with her. (The Catholics, OTOH, somehow think not having sex with your wife is an acceptable form of birth control, despite the fact it clearly would not have been allowed in the story they use to ban birth control...in fact, Onan tries that first.)
Claiming this story condemns 'spilling seed on the ground' and thus any sexual practice that 'wastes seed' is a sin, is like claiming that it's a sin to not be currently traveling towards Nineveh. (After all, that's why Jonah got swallowed by a whale.) This is the church pretending that a specific order from God to a specific person in a specific circumstance are general worldwide orders. (Wait, wouldn't that actually mean we have to marry our sister-in-laws if our brother dies childless? That was the actual disobeyed order.)
The Bible, at no point, condemns birth control. The Bible, at no point, condemns masturbation.
In fact, the Bible, at no point, condemns any sort of sexual practice at all, except certain types of sex outside of marriage (Not all of it, and not in the way people think. Men, if you deflower a virgin, be prepared to cough up some cash to her father. Then it's all okay. And non-virgins, fuck them to your heart's content.), and male homosexuality in the old testament. (No, the stuff in the new testament is a fairly modern mistranslation, and is probably supposed to mean 'male temple prostitutes'.)
But apparently churches can just pretend it says things, and no one bothers to check.
Noah, his wife, and the wives of their three sons. People always miscount that group as two, six, or eight, but it's five genetically unique individuals.
All genetic material in humans supposedly comes from one of those five people. People who are paying attention will notice there is one Y chromosome in that entire group.
(We shall charitably assume that all the wives are utterly unrelated, although it wasn't incredibly uncommon to marry relatives of your sibling's spouse, especially in small communities, where the families unrelated to you were often somewhat limited.)
Registry cleaners are not entirely pointless. There are a few thing that should not be in the registry, like paths to programs and dlls that no longer exist.
However, CCleaner does a good enough job removing those, for free. And everyone should use that program regularly anyway. Just flip over to the Registry tab every month or so and run that.
I like the fact you think all contracts have to 'require' people to do things.
You do know that plenty of contract, including most contracts with license agreements, require fuck-all from the party getting the license? They're along the lines of 'You can put this song of mine in the movie you're making(Which is the license part), and if you do, you have to pay me X (Which makes it a contract)'.
If one party doesn't put the song in, they just don't pay the money. A lot of licensing contracts work that way.
You can distribute the binary with the source or with an offer to provide source later - but THIS IS AN OPTION, you ARE NOT REQUIRED TO DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING.
So let's see if I've gotten this right. A license, which apparently you have to 'agree' to (This is not correct, but let's pretend), says that I can make copies, which would otherwise be a violation of copyright law. I can make these copies if I also copy the source, or provide a note saying I will give them a copy of the source later.
I choose the latter.
Later, someone comes along wanting a copy of the source. I, because I have no contractual obligation at all, decide at this point I'm going to 'stop' agreeing to the license.
After all, I only needed the license to make copies. Standing around not making copies isn't a violation of copyright law, even if people have notes promising I will do that.
So at that point, what exactly am I doing illegal? I can't break copyright by not making copies. The other post tried to suggest my original copying was retroactively illegal, which is quite literally insane and utterly unsupported by law. You cannot retroactively lose permission to do things you did.
Now, if I had some sort of contract I had agreed to which had given me the license to make copies in exchange for me doing things in the future, that would be another thing entirely. I'd be in breech of contract. But apparently I just had a license, which cannot create any obligations on me at all...if I make copies in the form it describes, I'm fine, no matter what the hell it tries to imply I have to do later.
Seriously, you can't stand around asserting that something that can create future obligations isn't a 'contract', you utter nimrod. It doesn't matter if that's just an 'option' or not. It's an option whether or not filmmakers pay for a song in their movie, too. They can either choose to include it, or not. If they choose to include it, they have to pay for it in the future. If someone chooses to distribute binaries with a note, they have to provide the source in the future.
A license can say 'You can do X with certain constrains on X', aka, it can say 'You can copy this copyrighted work only if you keep the entire work intact and do not modify it.'. Licenses do not have to allow you to do anything you want.
But If it is of the form 'If you do X, then you have to do Y', it's a fucking contract. The GPL says 'If you provide the binary and note to provide the source later, then you have to provide the source later'. Hey, look, a contractual obligation.
Substitute "accept" for "agree to," which is what the license itself says anyway.
The really tiresome part is that you apparently think you can 'accept' a license.
You cannot accept, or reject, or agree to, or whatever the hell words you want to say, a license. A license is just a statement that you can do something.
It matters whether or not you say 'Okay' or 'No!'. You still have a license to do that thing.
Here, watch, a license: I give people permission to quote this comment in replies to this comment.
Now the entire world, like it or not, has permission to quote this in replies to me. (Not that they needed it.) They cannot accept or reject this, it just is.
OTOH, I should probably mention this again, random licenses can be revoked for any reason at all. (In a contract, of course, trying to do so would be breech of contract.) That is an interesting position for someone to take about the GPL.
If you don't abide by the terms of the license, you have no distribution rights. Ergo your binary-only distribution is illegal.
What, it's retroactively illegal? That's a neat trick.
You did not address my actual situation, which is doing what the license said while you needed a license, aka, providing a note promising the source while you were making copies.
Which would then be followed up by a failure to meet that obligation, which cannot possibly be a violation of copyright. (Because you are not currently making any damn copies.)
Licenses do not bound people to things. Licenses are not accepted or agreed to or anything like that. A license is a statement saying 'This specific thing is allowed'.
Anything where people are 'accepting' that they have to do future stuff...that's a contract.
Yes, you must agree to the license before you can distribute.
Uh, no. You cannot 'agree' to just a license. This, I think, the entire point of confusion.
The only way to 'agree' to something is if it is a contract.
A license is a grant. It says 'You can do Y.". In the GPL's case, (under your theory that it's not a contract), it is a very complicated license, something like "You can punch me in the face while hopping on one leg and doing a bunch of other complicated stuff.". A license can, indeed, say that, I will not dispute that.
But if it is just 'a license', then there is no reciprocal thing you must do, so there is nothing you can agree to. You don't 'agree' you will hop on one leg. You just have a grant to do punch me in the face while you hop on one leg. If you do it any other time, well, you didn't have any right to do that and I'll charge you with a crime.
If, for a saner example, I put up a sign saying 'People can eat a picnic in my gated backyard from 11-4 while wearing a hat', no one has a contract with me, nor have they 'agreed' to anything. They just have been given a license to do something that would otherwise be trespassing, with some restrictions.
A license is just a note saying 'You can do X.'. It can say 'subject to this other stuff', but it's not something you agree with or disagree with by itself...it's just a statement of permission of certain activities. (Which is why it is usually contained in a contract.)
The problem is, with the GPL, there are things you have to agree to. Like providing the source later.
There are no required future commitments in GPL. It grants exceptions for people who choose to make such commitments. As for restricting the work to certain configurations, a copyright holder can license the distribution, in whole or in part, of the original work plus derivative works, and that's what GPL does.
I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to think about it hard:
If I distribute binaries with a note that I will distribute the source on request, and then I don't....what exactly have I done?
Remember, there's no such thing as breaching 'a license', because there's no such thing as agreeing with one in the first place. You can violate copyright law by exceeding a license, or you can breach a contract.
As you say there's no contract, you must assert I violated copyright law.
But...um...how? You gave me permission to distribute the stuff. I even included the note I was supposed to. The copies I handed out appear to be exactly what you specified.
...then yes, I stopped following your rules, but I only needed to do that while I needed the licenses, aka, doing the act of making the copy.
Now, if I'd agreed to a contract that had granted me a license to make copies, it would be an entirely different matter. I'd have to abide by that even after I was done making copies.
However, luckily, it was apparently just a license that made me jump through weird hoops and make strange promises while producing copies. Luckily, once I stop making copies, I can stop doing whatever it said I had to do while making copies.
Kiwis are not animals. They are often confused with them, but the kiwi is a fruit.
It grows on a bush, and eventually becomes large enough that it grows a beak-like stem and legs and falls off, running around as if it is an animal. It is at this stage that it spreads kiki seeds, often confused with eggs.
It is a common mistake, like thinking a sponge is a plant or that a duck-billed platypus is real.
At least they won't pay attention until so many jobs have left America that people are so poor they can't find a job and can no longer afford their iPhone/Droid/Etc anymore. Not to mention not being able to afford to buy a car, or pay your mortgage/rent, etc.
To quote Douglas Adams: There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Specifically, it happened about 10 years ago. But luckily, the banks were willing to give us mortgages we couldn't pay. (Due to complete and utter insanity on their part.) If people needed more money, heck, they could just get a second or third mortgage and get money from there.
Tada. Problem solved forever.
This will of course cause everyone to ignore the fact the economy is actually getting worse and worse, because they personally can continue to survive. They're falling deeper and deeper in debt, but surely that's just them and not some sort of nationwide statistical truth. (What if we held a slow-motion economic collapse and no one notices?)
As long as the banks don't figured out that the mortgages they've been issuing are shit, and just because they put them in complicated financials Shit-Holding Instruments doesn't mean they still aren't shit. As long as that doesn't happen, the 'economy' is great...sure, the actual 'producing things' sector is gutted, but people can borrow from the banks and work min wage jobs selling Chinese stuff to each other. Actual economies can't work like that, but as long as the banks keep ignoring that and loaning to us, we'll be fine.
Let's hope no one ever, Wile E. Coyote-style, looks down and realizes they're standing in mid-air.
If it's just a two story building, it's probably easy to do the cable runs. As a poster above suggested: Use the roof.
Or the courtyards.
I.e, if it's a hassle to run wiring inside, simply do not do that. Run the wiring outside, and either punch into a storage room at the very end, or simply attach the AP to the outside of the building. (You can get ones that work outside, but you can also easily find weather-proof boxes designed exactly to hold stuff like that at Home depot.)
Yes, and it's not like it needs to be a complicated password.
Just make it five letters or something and change it every day around at checkout time. Have them calculated in the future so you can give out the next few days to guests. You can print out a form with blanks that say 'Here are the next three days of passwords', and have the desk people fill them in as needed, or you can print it on some paperwork you give guests anyway.
You could probably even get away with changing it just once a week.
No one's trying to absolutely stop all non-guests from possibly accessing anything...the point is to stop the problem where people go 'I can get free wifi in the parking lot of the hotel down the street'. Pretty much any barrier to that will send people somewhere else.
And having a password also gives you legal grounds to have people arrested who don't belong on the network. It doesn't matter how simple or poorly guarded a password is, just like it doesn't matter how flimsy a lock on a door is to make it breaking and entering. Once they start using a password they're not entitled to (Because it clearly says at the top of the paper, 'for hotel guests only'), they're toast.
If it were a contract, you would offer something in return (the "bargain") - i.e. you would pledge to distribute something. You don't have any such obligation under GPL.
I don't understand why you have said this. You _do_ have an obligation. If you distribute the binaries, you must distribute the source.
However, more to the point, there's another obligation you have: You must grant the people the rights to your modifications you distributed to the same license as the original.
You can use some sort of weird logical jujitsu to argue that copyright holders can license, without a contract, only certain configurations of distribution, and you're right in theory. Although I will still argue that requiring future commitments would make it 'a contract'.
But regardless of that, a unilateral license can't possibly require that you license your changes under their licenses.
A license without a contract could only control what you did with their work, period. It could stop from from editing their work and distribute it without changes (This often happens, in fact. The text of the GPL is subject to this, in fact.), so it could stop you from adding stuff that is copyrighted by you. Or it could allow you to make changes. But something that is just 'a license' can't go around requiring to you make said modifications that are copyrighted by you available under a specific license. (How would a license magically cover the modifications that aren't yet licensed under it?)
But the GPL is a contract. So you gained the license to make modifications to the original work, and distribute the modified version, in exchange for the requirement that you license those modifications in a specific way. That's a contract.
Also, you have to show them a copy of the GPL. Again, that's not something a 'license' can make you do.
And it gets even sillier than that with the GPL3. Under that, you also 'waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.'
Yeah...once something tells you that you're disclaiming intentions to forbid third parties to do things...it's a contract.
If there's any contractual agreement to be found here, it's between you and the aforementioned third parties, not between you and the author.
Like I said, 'consideration' does not even vaguely have to benefit you for the contract to be valid. It is entirely possible to write a contract saying you will donate $1000 to the Red Cross if I donate $1000 to them.
Likewise, it's entirely possible to write one that says I will donate $1000 to them if you mow my lawn. Or I will donate $1000 to them if you let me make copies of your software. Or I will let others have my modifications of your software if you let me make copies of your software.
If it were a contract, you would have to sign and get approval from the author before you could even download a copy of the software.
No you don't. It's entirely possible for an entity to agree to contracts that anyone else can walk up and agree to the other half of. (I'm a little confused as to how you think a EULA is a contract if you don't think this.)
A EULA is more like a contract, in that you have to agree to the terms before you get the license.
Uh, no. EULAs aren't even valid most of the time, as they give the end user no rights the end user does not already have. EULAs are contracts that give 'pretend licenses' to do things that people can already do because they own a copy of the program.
With GPL, you get the license automatically upon using or copying the software.
Let's not forget Ctrl+= and Ctrl+-, which apparently no one knows resize the pages in every web browser and mail client. (And probably other applications, too.) I showed that to my mother the other day, she was amazed...and my mother is not some computer illiterate.
It's really amazing how people don't know simple things that can save them a bunch of time. It's like they own a car and don't realize they can back it up, so end up parking in utterly convoluted ways.
I get looks every time I'm asked to look at someone's computer and the first key I press is Windows+E to get explorer. Now, I'm aware that that is a pretty silly shortcut, I don't use it half the time on my computer because I have Windows Explorer pinned on the Start Menu, but on other people's computers I can't be bothered to track down where MS put Explorer on this version of Windows. (Four menus deep? Really?) And I won't pretend I actually know all the Windows key shortcuts.
However, a good portion of people seem completely unaware that applications shortcuts exist, and everyone seems unaware they can add more. Likewise, everyone seems unaware you can hit the Windows key and then just start typing to search your applications in Vista and 7.
Teach people the basic shortcuts, sure. But more importantly, teach them the idea of shortcuts, and how to learn what they are, and to actively seek out ones that would be useful.
I don't think you know what 'for scale' means. Scale is union wages.
It's the minimum union payment level, and it's an entirely appropriate amount to pay someone without any professional acting experience. That is what 'scale' is for, for actors with no recognition that they can use to negotiate higher wages.
Not to be confused with 'extras', who are not paid...but to be an extra, you must not have any individual lines, so obviously that makes no sense in a video game.
That said, I have no idea if any of the actor's guilds have any specifics covering games anyway.
Also, actors at a community theatre probably would not belong to the right union, which would be AFTRA or possibly SAG. They might belong to AEA, but that specifically doesn't cover creating recorded stuff...that's only live theatre, and other live acts. It's possible they belong to AFTRA, but in reality, almost no community theaters are union at all.
However, there are plenty of out of work actors who do have such memberships, and would be more than willing to work scale, if such a scale actually exists for video games. A community theatre is probably not the place to find them, though.
I've paid full price only on a few games. Fallout New Vegas (Paid half price on the DLCs, though), and Civ 5, and I think that was it. I have to laugh at all these people who apparently pay full price for games. Just the other day, I bought Prototype for $10 on Steam. I don't even have any plans to play it, and I'm in the middle of several other games, but, hey, I like the look of it ages ago when it came out, and I'll get around to it eventually.
But I agree, trying to figure out the proportional cost of entertainment is silly. However, if we're looking strictly at time, computer games (Especially year-old ones) are right up there with paperback books as some of the cheapest.
Of course, there's a problem there: You have to buy an entire game at once.
It would be like if to see a movie, you had to buy a ticket that let you watch every episodes of five seasons of a TV show. (For the purpose of this analogy, people watch TV shows in movie theaters.)
That's about 75 hours. And you pay, oh, $60.
That's actually a really good deal, money-wise.
But what if that TV show is Star Trek Voyager? And you hate it?
No matter how cheap a video game is, you're buying it, sight unseen, in bulk. It's a 75 hour game or whatever...and you're buying all 75 hours at once.
If you get 75 hours of enjoyment from that, it's great. If you don't, well...
The problem arises when probably 50% of the work developing a game is spent on stuff that doesn't scale linearly with the length of the game.
The game engine is a huge part of development, and it doesn't matter whether you have a huge sprawling universe, or three rooms, the engine is still the same. You have gravity, you have combat, you have whatever. Someone had to write it.
So if the current games are $60, and are vast 100 hour adventures, and they decide, instead, to have a 33 hour game...well, they only spent $30 on that part to start with, so they only save $20, so now the game is a third the length...and two thirds the price.
Sometimes this can be spared by reuse of the engine. That's how all the serial Telltale games work...they develop the engine at the start of the series, and then it's small modifications.
And DLCs are somewhat a way to do this, also. (Which is why the prices on them are way too high. They often want to charge 1/3rd the price of the game for something that's 1/5th as long...and that's exactly backwards. DLCs should cost less, proportionally, because they have less upfront static costs of building the damn game.)
And obviously game companies don't always start over on a new engine. But there's usually the perception that newer engines are better, or that all existing engines don't do what they need, or cost too much to license, or whatever.
I sorta wish there were commercial game engines. Like, actual companies that did nothing but produce and debug those. And companies could purchase them off the shelf.
Or even, hell, maybe end users could buy them. Either with the game, or separately, and then buy games that run on those engines for much cheaper.
I'm not entirely sure how that would work, though, it always seems game companies want to modify third-party engines.
'Hey, you don't live here.' 'Sure I do, the bank wrote up a contract that said I owned this house.' 'Uh, yeah, but you didn't sign it.' 'Well, no, I didn't agree to it, I didn't want to pay them all that money. But they still wrote I owned this house, so I do.'
...anymore than there should be laws prohibiting companies from making exclusive agreements with unions.
I'll go along with 'no laws about unions' if that includes 'no such thing as right to work states'.
You'll notice 'Everyone should have the right to agree to whatever they want' almost instantly goes out the door when it's a union saying 'If you want our members to agree to work for this company, you have to agree that you will only hire union members'.
For some mysterious, inexplicably reason, a contract like that isn't allowed. It's perfectly okay to stamp on 'corporate rights' for that one specific form of contract. (Because the rich don't like that contract.)
Likewise, none of the 'must have 51% of the workforce' bullshit. If a union consisting of 10% of the workforce invents itself, whatever. They can go on strike or whatever they want. (Granted, 10% is so low that they could easily be replaced, but whatever.)
Oh, and then there are laws forbidding sympathetic striking. How exactly does that work?
I think that some people, and it's possibly you're not one of them, but some people don't realize there are just as many laws restricting unions as there are protecting them.
The only law I'd like to see about unions is requiring that people can work to organize a union on their (legally required) break periods or while not at work, and companies can't fire them for that. That's it. (And that's really a speech issue...and, yes, I know the first amendment doesn't apply to corporations, but it's not like there's some anti-first amendment saying 'Congress shall make no laws disallowing private corporations from punishing people however they want for speech.'.)
I get a job from corporations, who hire exactly as many people as they need to meet the demand. This demand, in case you're wondering, is provided by people of all walks of life who wish to purchase goods or services.
Considering that most people have a set amount of minimum needs, and the rich already have enough to buy everything they need and want, whereas the the poor, by definition, do not have enough to buy all they want, and probably not even all they need...
....logically, giving money to the poor will increase demand more instead of giving to the rich. Which will in turn require corporations to hire more people to meet that demand.
Or we can move to your universe how we're all apparently employed by 'the rich' personally, and everything we do is for them. We'd be their servants or something, I assume.
Or maybe they take their money and 'invest' in companies. I'm sure if the rich give them more money, corporations will start hiring people they don't need to do work that doesn't need to be done because there's no demand for it, like you apparently think will happen.
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Maybe I'm wrong and all other industries suffer from the same level of management problems - it's just that the technology industry is the one I'm most familiar with.
You are. This sort of shortsighted next-quarter-stock-prices chasing happens in all industry. It's a fairly obvious flaw of how a stock market distorts the free market....stockholders are the bosses, and at some point it because easier to make money by bumping up the stock price for two months and selling their stock to new unsuspecting people, than to actually get paid any dividends from the profits of the company.
In other words, the American economy operates by trading intangible assets from one person to another and hoping that they make worse guesses than you in selecting what and when to buy, instead of actually paying people to take $X worth of goods, put in $Y worth of labor, and selling to customers for $X+$Y+profit.
Only in America do we have a political party that thinks that healthcare is not a need that the government should provide at least the basics of, and only in America do we have a political party that thinks women who get pregnant should be forced to give birth.
And only in America are they the same party.
I like how in your universe, no one has to pay for emergency medical care after they get it.
I don't think you actually read what I said. I pointed out the same text was used to condemn masturbation.
And I also pointed out that there is a very clear message in the story of Onan. The entire thing is only three sentences long!
Sins in the bible have actual places they are forbidden. It says 'Don't do this'. Sometimes people argue over exactly what that means, or what exactly it's talking about, or if that's relevant anymore...but there is an actual place where it says 'God says not to do this'. All actual sins have this place, where it says 'Doing this is bad' or 'Doing this is an abomination' or 'You should not do this'.
Yet the entire foundation of anti-birth control is someone apparently doing it once, and God 'being displeased'. Not banning it, not even talking about it. He got displeased once, apparently.
There is absolutely no hint it's any sort of global rule, nor is there any sort of hint exactly what displeased God...considering the explicit mention of 'fulfilling his duty', uh, an entirely sane assumption that that is what God is pissed at, failure to do his actual duty.
The Catholic church has done an impossible level of harm by misinterpreting this verse.
Ah, yes, the old 'I'm sure there must be people out there willing to pay for it. Just google it!' bullshit.
There is one organization, called Planned Parenthood, which is pretty good at providing prenatal care on a sliding scale. Of course, we all know how the pro-forced-birth movement loves Planned Parenthood.
However, they do not do delivery which is, uh, about 80% of the cost that I was talking about.
And there's Medicaid, if you're making under $20,000 a year.
Of course, anyone making $25,000, before taxes, can surely give up $10,000 of that to have a child. I mean, that's only about half their entire year's income. What sort of whiny bitch wouldn't be willing to pay that money?
Yes, because the Catholic church, ages ago, misunderstood the story of Onan.
Basically, this guy Onan had his brother die, and his brother had no children. In those day God's law required Onan to marry his brother's wife, and have a kid with her and pretend it was his brother's kid. (Pretty stupid, eh?)
So he did so, but during sex, he, uh, pulled out, and, as the bible says, 'spilled his seed on the ground'. So...uh...he wouldn't waste his seed. (Yeah, I find it an odd thing to avoid. This kid was going to legally be his brother's and legally live off his brother's money, so it's not even a child support thing. And Onan gets to claim all the rest of the kids he has with her.)
The Catholic church has interpreted this as banning all birth control, ever. The Protestants, jealous because they didn't have a fucking stupid belief from that story, come up with one of their own, and decided that that story condemns masturbation.
Of course, what the story actually condemns is just pretending to do what God says, instead of actually doing it. God told Onan to have a kid with her, he decided to screw around instead. In fact, he would have been condemned if he hadn't had sex with her. (The Catholics, OTOH, somehow think not having sex with your wife is an acceptable form of birth control, despite the fact it clearly would not have been allowed in the story they use to ban birth control...in fact, Onan tries that first.)
Claiming this story condemns 'spilling seed on the ground' and thus any sexual practice that 'wastes seed' is a sin, is like claiming that it's a sin to not be currently traveling towards Nineveh. (After all, that's why Jonah got swallowed by a whale.) This is the church pretending that a specific order from God to a specific person in a specific circumstance are general worldwide orders. (Wait, wouldn't that actually mean we have to marry our sister-in-laws if our brother dies childless? That was the actual disobeyed order.)
The Bible, at no point, condemns birth control. The Bible, at no point, condemns masturbation.
In fact, the Bible, at no point, condemns any sort of sexual practice at all, except certain types of sex outside of marriage (Not all of it, and not in the way people think. Men, if you deflower a virgin, be prepared to cough up some cash to her father. Then it's all okay. And non-virgins, fuck them to your heart's content.), and male homosexuality in the old testament. (No, the stuff in the new testament is a fairly modern mistranslation, and is probably supposed to mean 'male temple prostitutes'.)
But apparently churches can just pretend it says things, and no one bothers to check.
Sleeping around is a sin, and wearing a condom is a sin. I'll not wear a condom, because then I'll only piss god off half as much.
That's probably not what people are normally thinking. They're thinking 'I want to have sex with this person, so I will.'
And the society they were brought up in didn't bother to introduce them to the concept of safe sex.
In the US, despite decades of abstinence-only idiots trying to get rid of it, safe sex is still a consideration. In parts of Africa, it's not.
Yes, remember folks, there's always ten thousand dollars worth of medical expenses and then adoption.
That's a bottleneck of five people.
Noah, his wife, and the wives of their three sons. People always miscount that group as two, six, or eight, but it's five genetically unique individuals.
All genetic material in humans supposedly comes from one of those five people. People who are paying attention will notice there is one Y chromosome in that entire group.
(We shall charitably assume that all the wives are utterly unrelated, although it wasn't incredibly uncommon to marry relatives of your sibling's spouse, especially in small communities, where the families unrelated to you were often somewhat limited.)
Registry cleaners are not entirely pointless. There are a few thing that should not be in the registry, like paths to programs and dlls that no longer exist.
However, CCleaner does a good enough job removing those, for free. And everyone should use that program regularly anyway. Just flip over to the Registry tab every month or so and run that.
I like the fact you think all contracts have to 'require' people to do things.
You do know that plenty of contract, including most contracts with license agreements, require fuck-all from the party getting the license? They're along the lines of 'You can put this song of mine in the movie you're making(Which is the license part), and if you do, you have to pay me X (Which makes it a contract)'.
If one party doesn't put the song in, they just don't pay the money. A lot of licensing contracts work that way.
You can distribute the binary with the source or with an offer to provide source later - but THIS IS AN OPTION, you ARE NOT REQUIRED TO DISTRIBUTE ANYTHING.
So let's see if I've gotten this right. A license, which apparently you have to 'agree' to (This is not correct, but let's pretend), says that I can make copies, which would otherwise be a violation of copyright law. I can make these copies if I also copy the source, or provide a note saying I will give them a copy of the source later.
I choose the latter.
Later, someone comes along wanting a copy of the source. I, because I have no contractual obligation at all, decide at this point I'm going to 'stop' agreeing to the license.
After all, I only needed the license to make copies. Standing around not making copies isn't a violation of copyright law, even if people have notes promising I will do that.
So at that point, what exactly am I doing illegal? I can't break copyright by not making copies. The other post tried to suggest my original copying was retroactively illegal, which is quite literally insane and utterly unsupported by law. You cannot retroactively lose permission to do things you did.
Now, if I had some sort of contract I had agreed to which had given me the license to make copies in exchange for me doing things in the future, that would be another thing entirely. I'd be in breech of contract. But apparently I just had a license, which cannot create any obligations on me at all...if I make copies in the form it describes, I'm fine, no matter what the hell it tries to imply I have to do later.
Seriously, you can't stand around asserting that something that can create future obligations isn't a 'contract', you utter nimrod. It doesn't matter if that's just an 'option' or not. It's an option whether or not filmmakers pay for a song in their movie, too. They can either choose to include it, or not. If they choose to include it, they have to pay for it in the future. If someone chooses to distribute binaries with a note, they have to provide the source in the future.
A license can say 'You can do X with certain constrains on X', aka, it can say 'You can copy this copyrighted work only if you keep the entire work intact and do not modify it.'. Licenses do not have to allow you to do anything you want.
But If it is of the form 'If you do X, then you have to do Y', it's a fucking contract. The GPL says 'If you provide the binary and note to provide the source later, then you have to provide the source later'. Hey, look, a contractual obligation.
Substitute "accept" for "agree to," which is what the license itself says anyway.
The really tiresome part is that you apparently think you can 'accept' a license.
You cannot accept, or reject, or agree to, or whatever the hell words you want to say, a license. A license is just a statement that you can do something.
It matters whether or not you say 'Okay' or 'No!'. You still have a license to do that thing.
Here, watch, a license: I give people permission to quote this comment in replies to this comment.
Now the entire world, like it or not, has permission to quote this in replies to me. (Not that they needed it.) They cannot accept or reject this, it just is.
OTOH, I should probably mention this again, random licenses can be revoked for any reason at all. (In a contract, of course, trying to do so would be breech of contract.) That is an interesting position for someone to take about the GPL.
If you don't abide by the terms of the license, you have no distribution rights. Ergo your binary-only distribution is illegal.
What, it's retroactively illegal? That's a neat trick.
You did not address my actual situation, which is doing what the license said while you needed a license, aka, providing a note promising the source while you were making copies.
Which would then be followed up by a failure to meet that obligation, which cannot possibly be a violation of copyright. (Because you are not currently making any damn copies.)
Licenses do not bound people to things. Licenses are not accepted or agreed to or anything like that. A license is a statement saying 'This specific thing is allowed'.
Anything where people are 'accepting' that they have to do future stuff...that's a contract.
Yes, you must agree to the license before you can distribute.
Uh, no. You cannot 'agree' to just a license. This, I think, the entire point of confusion.
The only way to 'agree' to something is if it is a contract.
A license is a grant. It says 'You can do Y.". In the GPL's case, (under your theory that it's not a contract), it is a very complicated license, something like "You can punch me in the face while hopping on one leg and doing a bunch of other complicated stuff.". A license can, indeed, say that, I will not dispute that.
But if it is just 'a license', then there is no reciprocal thing you must do, so there is nothing you can agree to. You don't 'agree' you will hop on one leg. You just have a grant to do punch me in the face while you hop on one leg. If you do it any other time, well, you didn't have any right to do that and I'll charge you with a crime.
If, for a saner example, I put up a sign saying 'People can eat a picnic in my gated backyard from 11-4 while wearing a hat', no one has a contract with me, nor have they 'agreed' to anything. They just have been given a license to do something that would otherwise be trespassing, with some restrictions.
A license is just a note saying 'You can do X.'. It can say 'subject to this other stuff', but it's not something you agree with or disagree with by itself...it's just a statement of permission of certain activities. (Which is why it is usually contained in a contract.)
The problem is, with the GPL, there are things you have to agree to. Like providing the source later.
There are no required future commitments in GPL. It grants exceptions for people who choose to make such commitments. As for restricting the work to certain configurations, a copyright holder can license the distribution, in whole or in part, of the original work plus derivative works, and that's what GPL does.
I'm going to ask you a question, and I want you to think about it hard:
If I distribute binaries with a note that I will distribute the source on request, and then I don't....what exactly have I done?
Remember, there's no such thing as breaching 'a license', because there's no such thing as agreeing with one in the first place. You can violate copyright law by exceeding a license, or you can breach a contract.
As you say there's no contract, you must assert I violated copyright law.
But...um...how? You gave me permission to distribute the stuff. I even included the note I was supposed to. The copies I handed out appear to be exactly what you specified.
Now, if I'd agreed to a contract that had granted me a license to make copies, it would be an entirely different matter. I'd have to abide by that even after I was done making copies.
However, luckily, it was apparently just a license that made me jump through weird hoops and make strange promises while producing copies. Luckily, once I stop making copies, I can stop doing whatever it said I had to do while making copies.
Kiwis are not animals. They are often confused with them, but the kiwi is a fruit.
It grows on a bush, and eventually becomes large enough that it grows a beak-like stem and legs and falls off, running around as if it is an animal. It is at this stage that it spreads kiki seeds, often confused with eggs.
It is a common mistake, like thinking a sponge is a plant or that a duck-billed platypus is real.
To quote Douglas Adams: There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Specifically, it happened about 10 years ago. But luckily, the banks were willing to give us mortgages we couldn't pay. (Due to complete and utter insanity on their part.) If people needed more money, heck, they could just get a second or third mortgage and get money from there.
Tada. Problem solved forever.
This will of course cause everyone to ignore the fact the economy is actually getting worse and worse, because they personally can continue to survive. They're falling deeper and deeper in debt, but surely that's just them and not some sort of nationwide statistical truth. (What if we held a slow-motion economic collapse and no one notices?)
As long as the banks don't figured out that the mortgages they've been issuing are shit, and just because they put them in complicated financials Shit-Holding Instruments doesn't mean they still aren't shit. As long as that doesn't happen, the 'economy' is great...sure, the actual 'producing things' sector is gutted, but people can borrow from the banks and work min wage jobs selling Chinese stuff to each other. Actual economies can't work like that, but as long as the banks keep ignoring that and loaning to us, we'll be fine.
Let's hope no one ever, Wile E. Coyote-style, looks down and realizes they're standing in mid-air.
*checks the news*
If it's just a two story building, it's probably easy to do the cable runs. As a poster above suggested: Use the roof.
Or the courtyards.
I.e, if it's a hassle to run wiring inside, simply do not do that. Run the wiring outside, and either punch into a storage room at the very end, or simply attach the AP to the outside of the building. (You can get ones that work outside, but you can also easily find weather-proof boxes designed exactly to hold stuff like that at Home depot.)
Yes, and it's not like it needs to be a complicated password.
Just make it five letters or something and change it every day around at checkout time. Have them calculated in the future so you can give out the next few days to guests. You can print out a form with blanks that say 'Here are the next three days of passwords', and have the desk people fill them in as needed, or you can print it on some paperwork you give guests anyway.
You could probably even get away with changing it just once a week.
No one's trying to absolutely stop all non-guests from possibly accessing anything...the point is to stop the problem where people go 'I can get free wifi in the parking lot of the hotel down the street'. Pretty much any barrier to that will send people somewhere else.
And having a password also gives you legal grounds to have people arrested who don't belong on the network. It doesn't matter how simple or poorly guarded a password is, just like it doesn't matter how flimsy a lock on a door is to make it breaking and entering. Once they start using a password they're not entitled to (Because it clearly says at the top of the paper, 'for hotel guests only'), they're toast.
If it were a contract, you would offer something in return (the "bargain") - i.e. you would pledge to distribute something. You don't have any such obligation under GPL.
I don't understand why you have said this. You _do_ have an obligation. If you distribute the binaries, you must distribute the source.
However, more to the point, there's another obligation you have: You must grant the people the rights to your modifications you distributed to the same license as the original.
You can use some sort of weird logical jujitsu to argue that copyright holders can license, without a contract, only certain configurations of distribution, and you're right in theory. Although I will still argue that requiring future commitments would make it 'a contract'.
But regardless of that, a unilateral license can't possibly require that you license your changes under their licenses.
A license without a contract could only control what you did with their work, period. It could stop from from editing their work and distribute it without changes (This often happens, in fact. The text of the GPL is subject to this, in fact.), so it could stop you from adding stuff that is copyrighted by you. Or it could allow you to make changes. But something that is just 'a license' can't go around requiring to you make said modifications that are copyrighted by you available under a specific license. (How would a license magically cover the modifications that aren't yet licensed under it?)
But the GPL is a contract. So you gained the license to make modifications to the original work, and distribute the modified version, in exchange for the requirement that you license those modifications in a specific way. That's a contract.
Also, you have to show them a copy of the GPL. Again, that's not something a 'license' can make you do.
And it gets even sillier than that with the GPL3. Under that, you also 'waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.'
Yeah...once something tells you that you're disclaiming intentions to forbid third parties to do things...it's a contract.
If there's any contractual agreement to be found here, it's between you and the aforementioned third parties, not between you and the author.
Like I said, 'consideration' does not even vaguely have to benefit you for the contract to be valid. It is entirely possible to write a contract saying you will donate $1000 to the Red Cross if I donate $1000 to them.
Likewise, it's entirely possible to write one that says I will donate $1000 to them if you mow my lawn. Or I will donate $1000 to them if you let me make copies of your software. Or I will let others have my modifications of your software if you let me make copies of your software.
If it were a contract, you would have to sign and get approval from the author before you could even download a copy of the software.
No you don't. It's entirely possible for an entity to agree to contracts that anyone else can walk up and agree to the other half of. (I'm a little confused as to how you think a EULA is a contract if you don't think this.)
A EULA is more like a contract, in that you have to agree to the terms before you get the license.
Uh, no. EULAs aren't even valid most of the time, as they give the end user no rights the end user does not already have. EULAs are contracts that give 'pretend licenses' to do things that people can already do because they own a copy of the program.
With GPL, you get the license automatically upon using or copying the software.
Firstly, you don't 'get' anything by using the
Let's not forget Ctrl+= and Ctrl+-, which apparently no one knows resize the pages in every web browser and mail client. (And probably other applications, too.) I showed that to my mother the other day, she was amazed...and my mother is not some computer illiterate.
It's really amazing how people don't know simple things that can save them a bunch of time. It's like they own a car and don't realize they can back it up, so end up parking in utterly convoluted ways.
I get looks every time I'm asked to look at someone's computer and the first key I press is Windows+E to get explorer. Now, I'm aware that that is a pretty silly shortcut, I don't use it half the time on my computer because I have Windows Explorer pinned on the Start Menu, but on other people's computers I can't be bothered to track down where MS put Explorer on this version of Windows. (Four menus deep? Really?) And I won't pretend I actually know all the Windows key shortcuts.
However, a good portion of people seem completely unaware that applications shortcuts exist, and everyone seems unaware they can add more. Likewise, everyone seems unaware you can hit the Windows key and then just start typing to search your applications in Vista and 7.
Teach people the basic shortcuts, sure. But more importantly, teach them the idea of shortcuts, and how to learn what they are, and to actively seek out ones that would be useful.
I don't think you know what 'for scale' means. Scale is union wages.
It's the minimum union payment level, and it's an entirely appropriate amount to pay someone without any professional acting experience. That is what 'scale' is for, for actors with no recognition that they can use to negotiate higher wages.
Not to be confused with 'extras', who are not paid...but to be an extra, you must not have any individual lines, so obviously that makes no sense in a video game.
That said, I have no idea if any of the actor's guilds have any specifics covering games anyway.
Also, actors at a community theatre probably would not belong to the right union, which would be AFTRA or possibly SAG. They might belong to AEA, but that specifically doesn't cover creating recorded stuff...that's only live theatre, and other live acts. It's possible they belong to AFTRA, but in reality, almost no community theaters are union at all.
However, there are plenty of out of work actors who do have such memberships, and would be more than willing to work scale, if such a scale actually exists for video games. A community theatre is probably not the place to find them, though.
I've paid full price only on a few games. Fallout New Vegas (Paid half price on the DLCs, though), and Civ 5, and I think that was it. I have to laugh at all these people who apparently pay full price for games. Just the other day, I bought Prototype for $10 on Steam. I don't even have any plans to play it, and I'm in the middle of several other games, but, hey, I like the look of it ages ago when it came out, and I'll get around to it eventually.
But I agree, trying to figure out the proportional cost of entertainment is silly. However, if we're looking strictly at time, computer games (Especially year-old ones) are right up there with paperback books as some of the cheapest.
Of course, there's a problem there: You have to buy an entire game at once.
It would be like if to see a movie, you had to buy a ticket that let you watch every episodes of five seasons of a TV show. (For the purpose of this analogy, people watch TV shows in movie theaters.)
That's about 75 hours. And you pay, oh, $60.
That's actually a really good deal, money-wise.
But what if that TV show is Star Trek Voyager? And you hate it?
No matter how cheap a video game is, you're buying it, sight unseen, in bulk. It's a 75 hour game or whatever...and you're buying all 75 hours at once.
If you get 75 hours of enjoyment from that, it's great. If you don't, well...
The problem arises when probably 50% of the work developing a game is spent on stuff that doesn't scale linearly with the length of the game.
The game engine is a huge part of development, and it doesn't matter whether you have a huge sprawling universe, or three rooms, the engine is still the same. You have gravity, you have combat, you have whatever. Someone had to write it.
So if the current games are $60, and are vast 100 hour adventures, and they decide, instead, to have a 33 hour game...well, they only spent $30 on that part to start with, so they only save $20, so now the game is a third the length...and two thirds the price.
Sometimes this can be spared by reuse of the engine. That's how all the serial Telltale games work...they develop the engine at the start of the series, and then it's small modifications.
And DLCs are somewhat a way to do this, also. (Which is why the prices on them are way too high. They often want to charge 1/3rd the price of the game for something that's 1/5th as long...and that's exactly backwards. DLCs should cost less, proportionally, because they have less upfront static costs of building the damn game.)
And obviously game companies don't always start over on a new engine. But there's usually the perception that newer engines are better, or that all existing engines don't do what they need, or cost too much to license, or whatever.
I sorta wish there were commercial game engines. Like, actual companies that did nothing but produce and debug those. And companies could purchase them off the shelf.
Or even, hell, maybe end users could buy them. Either with the game, or separately, and then buy games that run on those engines for much cheaper.
I'm not entirely sure how that would work, though, it always seems game companies want to modify third-party engines.
'Hey, you don't live here.'
'Sure I do, the bank wrote up a contract that said I owned this house.'
'Uh, yeah, but you didn't sign it.'
'Well, no, I didn't agree to it, I didn't want to pay them all that money. But they still wrote I owned this house, so I do.'
...anymore than there should be laws prohibiting companies from making exclusive agreements with unions.
I'll go along with 'no laws about unions' if that includes 'no such thing as right to work states'.
You'll notice 'Everyone should have the right to agree to whatever they want' almost instantly goes out the door when it's a union saying 'If you want our members to agree to work for this company, you have to agree that you will only hire union members'.
For some mysterious, inexplicably reason, a contract like that isn't allowed. It's perfectly okay to stamp on 'corporate rights' for that one specific form of contract. (Because the rich don't like that contract.)
Likewise, none of the 'must have 51% of the workforce' bullshit. If a union consisting of 10% of the workforce invents itself, whatever. They can go on strike or whatever they want. (Granted, 10% is so low that they could easily be replaced, but whatever.)
Oh, and then there are laws forbidding sympathetic striking. How exactly does that work?
I think that some people, and it's possibly you're not one of them, but some people don't realize there are just as many laws restricting unions as there are protecting them.
The only law I'd like to see about unions is requiring that people can work to organize a union on their (legally required) break periods or while not at work, and companies can't fire them for that. That's it. (And that's really a speech issue...and, yes, I know the first amendment doesn't apply to corporations, but it's not like there's some anti-first amendment saying 'Congress shall make no laws disallowing private corporations from punishing people however they want for speech.'.)
I get a job from corporations, who hire exactly as many people as they need to meet the demand. This demand, in case you're wondering, is provided by people of all walks of life who wish to purchase goods or services.
Considering that most people have a set amount of minimum needs, and the rich already have enough to buy everything they need and want, whereas the the poor, by definition, do not have enough to buy all they want, and probably not even all they need...
Or we can move to your universe how we're all apparently employed by 'the rich' personally, and everything we do is for them. We'd be their servants or something, I assume.
Or maybe they take their money and 'invest' in companies. I'm sure if the rich give them more money, corporations will start hiring people they don't need to do work that doesn't need to be done because there's no demand for it, like you apparently think will happen.