When an undercover cop buys drugs, it proves the previous owner had possession, which is the crime.
It is not, however, a crime to -possess- copyrighted material. (Otherwise we'd all be in jail for the legal CDs we bought in 1997 and stuck in a closet somewhere, before the RIAA went crazy and we all stopped buying CDs.)
The crime (well, civil infringement) is unauthorized duplication. If the RIAA is doing the duplicating, it is the copyright holder duplicating his own material, and therefore, it is authorized.
Well, that's the thing about ashes. You've got more than one gram of them.
My friend John (motorcycle accident, 24 years old, very tragic) had 1mg of him launched into space with Doohan's first set of ashes, the rest were scattered in a more terrestrial manner.
My house is on the top of a hill, and my workplace is in the middle of a valley, so that 1.4 miles is a long way when you factor in elevation and all the twists and turns. It would almost be easier to swim across the river and ascend the cliff...
A bike would be perfect for me. I'm only 1.4 miles from work. Well... if it wasn't for the fact that A) The only way to get to work is via a highway., and B) It's a 10% grade to get back from work.
Indeed - I didn't know about this back in November/December when I traveled to New Zealand with a brand new Apple MacBook Pro that I strictly couldn't afford but felt I needed so that I could do some rudimentary video editing and capturing while I was in NZ.
If that had been confiscated, I would... well, I don't know what I'd do. But I can tell you this, it's cheaper to buy a used laptop in NZ, and abandon it, and use network storage. I'll wait to see the raw footage until I get home.
I was going to point out the endearing nature of retro arcade classics, but I thought about it - Ms. Pac Man still has damn good graphics because it illustrated the main points clearly and decently.
Yes, it was terribly abstract, but not a pixel out of place. You knew the ghosts were ghosts, the maze walls were well defined, and a cherry, despite the low pixel count in a sprite, looked like a cherry.
There was quite a lot of thought put into Ms. Pac Man's graphics, and it shows.
So, theoretically, he can get elected president, arrest the telecoms, and then when said that the immunity had been granted retroactively, argue that the retroactive immunity he voted for is unconstitutional?
That would be brilliant - if this were "Survivor: Gabon."
I often feel that when people say: "The kids are the best thing to ever happen to me," they're doing so out of a combination of "post-purchase rationalization" and the desire to make sure that the kids never know that they would have been happier without them.
God, I know my parents would have been happier without me and my sister...
Oompa Loompa Doopity Do.
I've got a Slashdot Posting for You.
Oompa Loompa Doopity Dee.
If you are wise, you'll listen to me.
What do you get when you try to make jokes
About what you don't know, unlike many folks?
Confusing pop culture isn't so bad
But here it can make you seem so sad.
Why Don't You Just Google It?
Oompa Loompa Doopity Do.
I've got a Slashdot Posting for You.
Oompa Loompa Doopity Dee.
If you are wise, you'll listen to me.
Well, personally, I don't think Evil Steve sees a lot of hope for GURPS as a line and think that taking the time to invest in forwarding it might be refurbishing a sinking ship. I think he'd rather focus on the next Munchkin or Chez Geek/Greek/Punk/Goth. Maybe relaunch Car Wars. Again.
Back in the 3e salad days, there was a new GURPS suppliment released each month (leading some to remark, not entirely inaccurately that GURPS was less a game and more a gaming magazine.) 4th edition saw that brought down to a suppliment a quarter. (And a few PDF suppliments. Not that they don't count, but... they don't count.)
There has not yet been a print release for any new GURPS 4th edition product in the entire year of 2008 so far. The next product in the queue is GURPS Thaumaturgy.
Munchkin is on it's 6th expansion of the -core- rules which does not include all if it's spinoffs (Star Munchkin, Munchkin Bites, Munchkin Cthulu, Munchkin Fu, Super Munchkin, Munchkin Impossible, The Good, The Bad, and the Munchkin, etc.)
I'm not saying that GURPS will be unsupported, but it is Munchkin, not GURPS that pays the bills - GURPS is the labour of love.
Hmm... you know, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you on this.
When GURPS 4e came out, it was published in 2004 as two books. The complete set cost $75, and was designed to replace GURPS 3e's Basic Set, Compendium I and Compendium II.
This was in 2004. Crude oil was trading at $30/barrel, and gas was around $2.25/2.50 gallon, depending on where you lived. You can peg things to the consumer price index, but that's a bit of a lie - the best way to determine how much things actually costs is to peg it in terms of gas. In 2004, GURPS 4e cost about 2 tanks of gas for a mid-sized sedan.
At $105, and a $4/gallon gas price, D&D 4e costs about 2 tanks of gas for a mid sized sedan.
So, they're roughly the same. But let's start talking about things beyond the pure price point.
Utility: It is simply harder to find and get a group together to play a game of GURPS. There are Dungeons and Dragons players everywhere, but GURPS players are few and far between. Furthermore, almost all GURPS players have played D&D, very few D&D players have played GURPS.
Percieved Value: GURPS 3e players are (were?) a stingy bunch. While the $75 price tag for GURPS 4e was comparable to the cover price of $70 for GURPS Basic Set, CI and CII, the Basic Set and CI and CII came out at different points, allowing for a staggered payment of $30, then $20, and $20. Additionally, most gamers really had little use for CII and stuck with GURPS BS and CI, knocking it down to $50.
Getting even further into it, GURPS was at that time one of the few holdouts into lower prices - a GURPS supplement at $22 (later $25) was much cheaper than the $35-40 that most games charged. GURPS got a reputation for "cheaper games with more meat and less fluff." Moving to the "all color, all hardback" 4e alienated that audience. Thus the complaining about 4e's prices.
On the other hand, D&D was never known for "cheap" - and 4e costs the same as 3.5e. And indeed, most people who play D&D aren't interested in running, so they'd just pick up the player's handbook at $35.
Around the time that GURPS 4th edition came out I discovered the HERO 5th system (starting with Sidekick.) One huge book. $50. Not cheap, but I knew by that time that the HERO system (unlike GURPS) really could cover the entire genre spectrum WITHOUT tons of supplements. (Sure, there are tons of supplements for HERO but most of them have little crunch and lots of fluff - setting information and GM advice mostly.) There are roughly the same amount of HERO players as there are GURPS players, so that seems to be my go-to game of choice. If I don't have a specific reason for choosing a particular system, I'm choosing HERO.
I don't know if the kids are dumbing down, but there was a time when I was in high school that I used to be able to answer all of these questions.
I can't. I've forgotten.
Not that it worries me too much, I mean, I never had to take a math class again after my sophomore year and I'm doing okay. And the real-life applications of trig have been few and far between. I did once use the Pythagorean theorem to find out if a corner desk would fit into my apartment. That's about the extent of my higher mathmatics applications.
But still - this is something that I wonder if I'm missing out on.
Maybe we should get together "adult math clubs" to refresh ourselves on algebra, geometry and calculus.
For this, I am using lowercase "b" to represent "bits" and uppercase "B" to represent "Bytes." There are 8 bits to a byte, 1024KB to 1MB, and 1024MB to 1GB
On plan 1, you have 15.1 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential, before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 3 hours, 2 minutes.)
On plan 2, you have 6.07 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 9 minutes, 6 seconds.)
I do not think this plan would be suitable for my Internet needs.
I'm paying $50 per month instead of $30 per month to get increased throughput.
A switch to per-gigabyte pricing is means that that $20 extra just hits the data cap faster.
I can think of no reason this actually helps anything except to charge people for data - an unlimited resource - instead of bandwidth - a limited resource. Or both.
If there is a competitor who offers uncapped broadband in the area, I'd cancel my service and replace it. If the cable company has a monopoly or all the bandwidth providers cap the data, I'd move.
Slashdot Mirror
When an undercover cop buys drugs, it proves the previous owner had possession, which is the crime.
It is not, however, a crime to -possess- copyrighted material. (Otherwise we'd all be in jail for the legal CDs we bought in 1997 and stuck in a closet somewhere, before the RIAA went crazy and we all stopped buying CDs.)
The crime (well, civil infringement) is unauthorized duplication. If the RIAA is doing the duplicating, it is the copyright holder duplicating his own material, and therefore, it is authorized.
Dude, my friend died.
Well, that's the thing about ashes. You've got more than one gram of them.
My friend John (motorcycle accident, 24 years old, very tragic) had 1mg of him launched into space with Doohan's first set of ashes, the rest were scattered in a more terrestrial manner.
My house is on the top of a hill, and my workplace is in the middle of a valley, so that 1.4 miles is a long way when you factor in elevation and all the twists and turns. It would almost be easier to swim across the river and ascend the cliff...
A bike would be perfect for me. I'm only 1.4 miles from work. Well... if it wasn't for the fact that A) The only way to get to work is via a highway., and B) It's a 10% grade to get back from work.
Indeed - I didn't know about this back in November/December when I traveled to New Zealand with a brand new Apple MacBook Pro that I strictly couldn't afford but felt I needed so that I could do some rudimentary video editing and capturing while I was in NZ.
If that had been confiscated, I would... well, I don't know what I'd do. But I can tell you this, it's cheaper to buy a used laptop in NZ, and abandon it, and use network storage. I'll wait to see the raw footage until I get home.
I -liked- the Arch Deluxe.
Then again, I was a really fat kid.
I was going to point out the endearing nature of retro arcade classics, but I thought about it - Ms. Pac Man still has damn good graphics because it illustrated the main points clearly and decently.
Yes, it was terribly abstract, but not a pixel out of place. You knew the ghosts were ghosts, the maze walls were well defined, and a cherry, despite the low pixel count in a sprite, looked like a cherry.
There was quite a lot of thought put into Ms. Pac Man's graphics, and it shows.
So, theoretically, he can get elected president, arrest the telecoms, and then when said that the immunity had been granted retroactively, argue that the retroactive immunity he voted for is unconstitutional?
That would be brilliant - if this were "Survivor: Gabon."
Unfortunately the guy is running for President.
I didn't know you could turn "verb" into a verb, or, to verb a noun, verb verb.
If your biological imperatives told you to jump off a bridge in order to impress potential mates, would you do it?
I often feel that when people say: "The kids are the best thing to ever happen to me," they're doing so out of a combination of "post-purchase rationalization" and the desire to make sure that the kids never know that they would have been happier without them.
God, I know my parents would have been happier without me and my sister...
Why is it that everyone complains about mortgages and kids, and then goes out and gets both? Me? No kids. Ever.
The country doesn't need to be unified. The country needs to be fixed. I'd rather have a cantankerous, belligeren
Oompa Loompas are Orange.
Oompa Loompa Doopity Do.
I've got a Slashdot Posting for You.
Oompa Loompa Doopity Dee.
If you are wise, you'll listen to me.
What do you get when you try to make jokes
About what you don't know, unlike many folks?
Confusing pop culture isn't so bad
But here it can make you seem so sad.
Why Don't You Just Google It?
Oompa Loompa Doopity Do.
I've got a Slashdot Posting for You.
Oompa Loompa Doopity Dee.
If you are wise, you'll listen to me.
Hmm...
You know, I'm thinking about building myself a Tuktuk.
Knowing that gas is going up 150% in two years is not the same as having the capital to take advantage of that knowledge.
Well, personally, I don't think Evil Steve sees a lot of hope for GURPS as a line and think that taking the time to invest in forwarding it might be refurbishing a sinking ship. I think he'd rather focus on the next Munchkin or Chez Geek/Greek/Punk/Goth. Maybe relaunch Car Wars. Again.
Back in the 3e salad days, there was a new GURPS suppliment released each month (leading some to remark, not entirely inaccurately that GURPS was less a game and more a gaming magazine.) 4th edition saw that brought down to a suppliment a quarter. (And a few PDF suppliments. Not that they don't count, but... they don't count.)
There has not yet been a print release for any new GURPS 4th edition product in the entire year of 2008 so far. The next product in the queue is GURPS Thaumaturgy.
Munchkin is on it's 6th expansion of the -core- rules which does not include all if it's spinoffs (Star Munchkin, Munchkin Bites, Munchkin Cthulu, Munchkin Fu, Super Munchkin, Munchkin Impossible, The Good, The Bad, and the Munchkin, etc.)
I'm not saying that GURPS will be unsupported, but it is Munchkin, not GURPS that pays the bills - GURPS is the labour of love.
Hmm... you know, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you on this.
When GURPS 4e came out, it was published in 2004 as two books. The complete set cost $75, and was designed to replace GURPS 3e's Basic Set, Compendium I and Compendium II.
This was in 2004. Crude oil was trading at $30/barrel, and gas was around $2.25/2.50 gallon, depending on where you lived. You can peg things to the consumer price index, but that's a bit of a lie - the best way to determine how much things actually costs is to peg it in terms of gas. In 2004, GURPS 4e cost about 2 tanks of gas for a mid-sized sedan.
At $105, and a $4/gallon gas price, D&D 4e costs about 2 tanks of gas for a mid sized sedan.
So, they're roughly the same. But let's start talking about things beyond the pure price point.
Utility: It is simply harder to find and get a group together to play a game of GURPS. There are Dungeons and Dragons players everywhere, but GURPS players are few and far between. Furthermore, almost all GURPS players have played D&D, very few D&D players have played GURPS.
Percieved Value: GURPS 3e players are (were?) a stingy bunch. While the $75 price tag for GURPS 4e was comparable to the cover price of $70 for GURPS Basic Set, CI and CII, the Basic Set and CI and CII came out at different points, allowing for a staggered payment of $30, then $20, and $20. Additionally, most gamers really had little use for CII and stuck with GURPS BS and CI, knocking it down to $50.
Getting even further into it, GURPS was at that time one of the few holdouts into lower prices - a GURPS supplement at $22 (later $25) was much cheaper than the $35-40 that most games charged. GURPS got a reputation for "cheaper games with more meat and less fluff." Moving to the "all color, all hardback" 4e alienated that audience. Thus the complaining about 4e's prices.
On the other hand, D&D was never known for "cheap" - and 4e costs the same as 3.5e. And indeed, most people who play D&D aren't interested in running, so they'd just pick up the player's handbook at $35.
Around the time that GURPS 4th edition came out I discovered the HERO 5th system (starting with Sidekick.) One huge book. $50. Not cheap, but I knew by that time that the HERO system (unlike GURPS) really could cover the entire genre spectrum WITHOUT tons of supplements. (Sure, there are tons of supplements for HERO but most of them have little crunch and lots of fluff - setting information and GM advice mostly.) There are roughly the same amount of HERO players as there are GURPS players, so that seems to be my go-to game of choice. If I don't have a specific reason for choosing a particular system, I'm choosing HERO.
I don't know if the kids are dumbing down, but there was a time when I was in high school that I used to be able to answer all of these questions.
I can't. I've forgotten.
Not that it worries me too much, I mean, I never had to take a math class again after my sophomore year and I'm doing okay. And the real-life applications of trig have been few and far between. I did once use the Pythagorean theorem to find out if a corner desk would fit into my apartment. That's about the extent of my higher mathmatics applications.
But still - this is something that I wonder if I'm missing out on.
Maybe we should get together "adult math clubs" to refresh ourselves on algebra, geometry and calculus.
What's wrong with being anti-religion?
Time for the math!
For this, I am using lowercase "b" to represent "bits" and uppercase "B" to represent "Bytes." There are 8 bits to a byte, 1024KB to 1MB, and 1024MB to 1GB
Plan 1:
$29.95/mo at 768kb/s and 5GB monthly cap.
For Plan 1:
768kb/s = 96kB/s
96kB/s = 0.09375MB/s
0.09375MB/s = 0.000091552734375 GB/s
5GB / (0.000091552734375 GB/s)=
54613.33(repeating) seconds. =
910.22(repeating) minutes =
15.1703703(repeating) hours.
On plan 1, you have 15.1 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential, before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 3 hours, 2 minutes.)
Plan 2:
$54.90/mo at 15Mb/s and 40GB monthly cap.
15Mb/s = 1.875MB/s
1.874MB/s = 0.0018310546875 GB/s
40GB / (0.0018310546875 GB/s) =
21845.33(repeating) seconds
364.088(repeating) minutes
6.06814814 (repeating) hours.
On plan 2, you have 6.07 hours of using your Internet connection to it's fullest potential before you hit the cap. (And you incur an additional dollar of bandwidth cost every additional 9 minutes, 6 seconds.)
I do not think this plan would be suitable for my Internet needs.
I'm paying $50 per month instead of $30 per month to get increased throughput.
A switch to per-gigabyte pricing is means that that $20 extra just hits the data cap faster.
I can think of no reason this actually helps anything except to charge people for data - an unlimited resource - instead of bandwidth - a limited resource. Or both.
If there is a competitor who offers uncapped broadband in the area, I'd cancel my service and replace it. If the cable company has a monopoly or all the bandwidth providers cap the data, I'd move.
I'm very glad I don't live in Beaumont.
As a smart guy...
That's just because McCain is old.
But Good News Everyone! Barack Obama actually IS a professor! Of Law! You should listen to him when he says, "Lava! Fire! Hot!"