I have yet to have more fun gaming than playing Deus Ex (although a few games have come close).
To me that makes it an important game:)
I second that emotion. Deus Ex was probably the most engrossing game I've ever played. The only others to come close are probably the Baldur's Gate games, and maybe Oblivion once I got the right mix of patches/mods to fix the gameplay.
but dune 2 isn't fun to play, i think westwood figured that part out in their c&c series. i understand the importance of giving credit to the firsts (and why choose dune 2?) but it usually takes a while for a genre to start producing gems as long as the genre does not become tiresome.
Neither is Warcraft anymore. But both were fun in their day. I spent a lot of hours with Dune II. It was fun.
How many because it really sucked, and how many because, well, they already played the game (and most likely beat it)?
If they played Doom 3 all the way to the end, then they've already been punished enough.
I remember very distinctly that Doom 3, while not the revolutionary end-all of shooters, was well-received when it was first released. It wasn't until later that people complained about the cheap jump-at-you gameplay and darkness. On IRC at the time it was constantly full of "ZOMG check out Doom 3" exclamations.
Frankly, I don't remember a very long delay between the release and the realization that the gameplay was crap. In fact, the prerelease pirating probably sped that up. So yeah, in a way, piracy killed Doom 3. But not because people pirated it, played through it, and didn't buy. It's because they pirated it, realized it was crap, told everyone else it was crap, and then went on to play something else.
As for QuakeWars, surely without an online key the game is worthless, you'll always get cracks etc of course, but in that realm, those people are more demo'ing the game rather than wanting to spend serious time with it. If your spending 5-10hrs plus with a multi-player, net based game you'd have bought it.
That depends on whether their are cracked servers out there to play on. If the server doesn't require validation, then you don't need a real serial to play.
You have to feel for the poor mobile telcos.. They have to work so hard supporting a number of operating systems on phones so that they can hobble them and make sure that their customers are wrung of every penny they can be.
QFT. I mean, where would they be if they couldn't charge me 10 bucks a month for an extra feature that costs them essentially nothing? What we really need is for cell companies to get the hell out of the phone business.
It will be a long, painful process, and I think people generally just want to live their lives without having to babysit the likes of Dubya and his neo-con cronies. This doesn't make it right, but I think it does explain it a little.
I think you're right. I think that things have to get pretty bad and start having a pretty direct and significant impact on people's lives before they will resign themselves to giving up their normal lives and possibly their jobs, freedom, and even their lives in order to fight back against the government. It takes a real commitment to make a real difference.
We are talking about social networking sites in the US, not some political organization in China. Anonymity in this case is not about free speech, but about the "right" to not take responsibility for what we say. Personally, I find anonymity more of a problem as it is a major cause of pollution.
What's the difference really between a social networking site, and any other site where people communicate, be it about politics, religion, health issues, etc? Who says which ones can be anonymous and which can't, and why should we trust them?
It's much more expensive to wire Iowa for broadband for three million people than it is to wire Orange County, California to reach about the same number of people. Think of the cost of fiber, and of the signal attenuation on copper wire for sections that aren't optical. Part of every phone bill in the US has traditionally been to subsidize dialup in areas that make no economic sense to service on their own.
That's why the government gave them billions in tax breaks to fund infrastructure buildouts, which they never bothered to do and just pocketed the money instead.
i get what you meant, though. but given that there is a maximum to the amount of rice a given field can produce, even with optimal conditions, this is not an optimal analogy. i understand rice paddy farming has a pretty good yield per acre, reasonably close to a mean conditions maximum, while we are nowhere near the limit on broadband speed.
Actually, the way I read it, he wasn't using rice paddies as an analogy, he was simply saying that the words "net neutrality" in the sentence were irrelevant because it was the competition providing all the benefits. So, replacing those words with basically anything else totally unrelated would serve just as well.
Seeing as they would be risking prison by colluding illegally. As the federal government is a customer anybody could sue them and take home 10% of the recovery as a reward.
Actually, they'd probably just get a slap on the wrist, as happens in most price-fixing cases. The fines never even come close to compensating people. The lawyers are the only ones that ever get much of anything out of it. What we need is municipally owned last-mile networks that any provider can provide services over. That's the only way to get real competition in this market.
With the current outcry against BeelzeBush teh neo-Hitler Chimp, it seems that the left, had they hair #1 in a useful location, would be arguing to curb Federal power, starting with taxation.
You're joking right? Members of the federal government arguing to curb federal power? Especially when they're just now getting back into a position to start funneling that money to their own interests? Seriously?
I am fully aware of the abuse potential of allowing law-enforcement to hack computers as part of an investigation but I also deeply doubt that the vast majority of the law enforcement community is out to use such investigative tools as a stepping stone in their diabolical efforts to use Orwell's 1984 as a roadmap for creating a totalitarian surveillance state.
There are plenty of people in law enforcement who would love to throw out a lot of the rules. It's much easier to get things done when you can just go house to house and kick down doors to hunt for evidence. I don't particularly want to live in that world though. Privacy is essential to allowing us to be who we are without having to share every aspect of our lives with everybody else. Giving police the right to invade the privacy of anybody they want, anytime they want, without the evidence needed to get a warrant, would destroy privacy completely. Even if it doesn't get "abused" as you say, the simple act of allowing it at all is an abuse.
The people we truly have to worry might rob us of our liberty will use hacking to further their cause regardless of whether the law allows it or not.
At least then they could be prosecuted for it. If they are powerful enough to be above the law, then that's an entirely different problem, and one that would probably have to be solved outside the law.
Re:If you do not have rule by majority....
on
From Bess to Worse
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then what do you have? Dictatorship? Facism? Elitism?
I don't think he's advocating those. I think the point is that people in general will often support things that are just wrong, either because they aren't really affected by those things, or because they've only heard one side of the story, or because they are just not interested in rocking the boat, or for other similar reasons. Sometimes it takes someone or some group of people to stand up and tell people that they're wrong and that things have to change to wake people up and make them think about the things that they didn't care about or didn't want to think about. We saw that with slavery. We saw it with the women's rights and civil rights movements. It's gotten harder and harder to do over the years as things have become even more polarized (ok, not civil war polarized yet, but it's gotten pretty bad).
Now each side has its own news sources and pundits and there's very few common information or opinion sources. So both sides live in their own world's where people tell them how bad and horrible the other side is and give them the latest spin on what the other side has been doing. So each side sees the other as a bunch of corrupt, evil assholes out to screw everything up. While that may be true in some cases, it's certainly not limited to one side or the other. I see it every day where I work. You've got the guys that sit there listening to Rush Limbaugh and the like all day long, and are always talking about how the democrats are out to destroy the country and how Hillary Clinton is the anti-Christ. Then there's the ones that are listening to Air America or other similar outlets and believe that GWB is either a retarded chimp or a criminal mastermind, or both.
Unless we, as a country, get some perspective on things, and hopefully fix our election systems so that we don't continue with this two-party garbage, things will probably continue to get worse. I really don't want to see that happen.
It's not provable in the mathematical sense, but given that the artists preferred not to use the non-copyright method that was available to them, and did require significant financial investment, it is unreasonable to think otherwise.
Of course, they're given a choice between two extremes there. The extreme of no protection, or the extreme of copyright law as it exists today. That doesn't really prove much of anything. What if copyrights lasted only 30 years? Would artists still create? History tells us that they would. Would companies be able to own these works forever and prohibit anyone from creating anything new based on those works? No. But I fail to see how that is a bad thing.
It is a way to protect ISPs from being sued for the content they host.
What makes one content host protected and another one not protected? Seems clear to me that they are talking about web hosting providers, which YouTube is, just as much as Yahoo! or AOL.
After doing some similar research, I came to the conclusion it is either a clever marketing ploy by blog author, or more likely some hidden prototype site their web development team was using and as it was never linked from main page, it was never found by any spiders (yet referrers to authors site showed up in his logs, which is exactly how he found out about it), Turns out the latter is the case
Yeah, well they had it set up on a public-facing web server, accessible by anyone. You don't test software on a public server. Given that the MPAA is not exactly known for being a forgiving bunch, I don't think their excuses amount to much. If they had some public goodwill, I could see giving them a pass on it, but they seem to feel so strongly about copyright infringement that it just wouldn't seem right to let them off on this. I'm sure they would agree, right? If copyright infringement is so terrible, surely they should be facing a really hefty fine here, right? Maybe some jail time? If they're going to insist on strict enforcement, then they had better get their own affairs and people under some seriously tight control too.
Making statements about something as vague as 'culture' is pretty meaningless without a better definition of what you mean by 'culture'.
I think he's distinguishing between law and culture here. This makes sense, as we've seen many many instances throughout history where the law ends up being out of step with the current culture. Sometimes it's due to the law being out of date, and sometimes its due to certain powerful interests passing laws that conflict with the current culture. In this case, it's both really.
If you are going to stick with windows wouldn't you want the most secure windows? Regarless of if my machines could have all the gimicks or not I'd still want security.
At this point, we don't even know if Vista is much more secure for most uses than XP. Some of us have been using XP just fine for at least a few years without having our boxes pwned and added to some dweeb's zombie army, or succumbing to any number of viruses that have gone around in that time. Vista hasn't been out long enough for it to be proven secure yet. Some of its security features are so annoying to users that they will likely disable them as well, negating at least some of the benefits of using it in the first place. I'm simply saying that the smartest move for most people is to at least wait for a year or so until sometime after the first service pack before deciding whether to make the move to Vista. An added benefit is that hardware capable of running it well will be cheaper too.
Sure, there are some video cards that are a year old that can't run Aero but not running Aero is a vastly different thing than not running Vista.
Aero is the feature that most regular users associate with Vista. If they don't get that, then why do they even want Vista now? It's not like there are a whole lot of compelling reasons to switch to it at this point. And there are definitely a number of drawbacks. So if their PC can't run Aero, most people probably couldn't care less about getting Vista.
Global Warming is a celebrity field right now, and it will keep alot of us employed for a very long time. You can understand why we are a little protective of our sacred consensus, right?
Umm... you are aware that the oil industry and others are practically begging to fund scientists in an effort to disprove current global warming theories, aren't you?
File sharing is probably hurting radio more than it is artists, as it becomes increasingly difficult to cater to the growing diverse tastes of what used to be their audience.
And what's more, they don't even try. For the most part, they simply play what the recording industry pays them to play. This is to further the industry's continuing goal of promoting the hell out of a few artists to create a few bajillion-selling albums instead of getting a wider variety of music out there and making less from each artist. I assume it has to do with retail space concerns, which is just another reason we need to get away from traditional retail models for music. File-sharing has opened up a much larger world of music to many people. I know I've downloaded music from bands I've never heard of many times. Sometimes it's crap, but sometimes it's great. I can't even stand to listen to radio most of the time anymore. It's endlessly repetitive, boring, and annoying.
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I second that emotion. Deus Ex was probably the most engrossing game I've ever played. The only others to come close are probably the Baldur's Gate games, and maybe Oblivion once I got the right mix of patches/mods to fix the gameplay.
Neither is Warcraft anymore. But both were fun in their day. I spent a lot of hours with Dune II. It was fun.
If they played Doom 3 all the way to the end, then they've already been punished enough.
Frankly, I don't remember a very long delay between the release and the realization that the gameplay was crap. In fact, the prerelease pirating probably sped that up. So yeah, in a way, piracy killed Doom 3. But not because people pirated it, played through it, and didn't buy. It's because they pirated it, realized it was crap, told everyone else it was crap, and then went on to play something else.
That depends on whether their are cracked servers out there to play on. If the server doesn't require validation, then you don't need a real serial to play.
QFT. I mean, where would they be if they couldn't charge me 10 bucks a month for an extra feature that costs them essentially nothing? What we really need is for cell companies to get the hell out of the phone business.
Nothing wrong with that unless IBM is considered to have a monopoly position in competition with SCO.
I think you're right. I think that things have to get pretty bad and start having a pretty direct and significant impact on people's lives before they will resign themselves to giving up their normal lives and possibly their jobs, freedom, and even their lives in order to fight back against the government. It takes a real commitment to make a real difference.
What's the difference really between a social networking site, and any other site where people communicate, be it about politics, religion, health issues, etc? Who says which ones can be anonymous and which can't, and why should we trust them?
That's why the government gave them billions in tax breaks to fund infrastructure buildouts, which they never bothered to do and just pocketed the money instead.
Actually, the way I read it, he wasn't using rice paddies as an analogy, he was simply saying that the words "net neutrality" in the sentence were irrelevant because it was the competition providing all the benefits. So, replacing those words with basically anything else totally unrelated would serve just as well.
Actually, they'd probably just get a slap on the wrist, as happens in most price-fixing cases. The fines never even come close to compensating people. The lawyers are the only ones that ever get much of anything out of it. What we need is municipally owned last-mile networks that any provider can provide services over. That's the only way to get real competition in this market.
Aquaria looks pretty amazing, especially for an indie game. Can't wait to try that one out.
You're joking right? Members of the federal government arguing to curb federal power? Especially when they're just now getting back into a position to start funneling that money to their own interests? Seriously?
There are plenty of people in law enforcement who would love to throw out a lot of the rules. It's much easier to get things done when you can just go house to house and kick down doors to hunt for evidence. I don't particularly want to live in that world though. Privacy is essential to allowing us to be who we are without having to share every aspect of our lives with everybody else. Giving police the right to invade the privacy of anybody they want, anytime they want, without the evidence needed to get a warrant, would destroy privacy completely. Even if it doesn't get "abused" as you say, the simple act of allowing it at all is an abuse.
At least then they could be prosecuted for it. If they are powerful enough to be above the law, then that's an entirely different problem, and one that would probably have to be solved outside the law.
I don't think he's advocating those. I think the point is that people in general will often support things that are just wrong, either because they aren't really affected by those things, or because they've only heard one side of the story, or because they are just not interested in rocking the boat, or for other similar reasons. Sometimes it takes someone or some group of people to stand up and tell people that they're wrong and that things have to change to wake people up and make them think about the things that they didn't care about or didn't want to think about. We saw that with slavery. We saw it with the women's rights and civil rights movements. It's gotten harder and harder to do over the years as things have become even more polarized (ok, not civil war polarized yet, but it's gotten pretty bad).
Now each side has its own news sources and pundits and there's very few common information or opinion sources. So both sides live in their own world's where people tell them how bad and horrible the other side is and give them the latest spin on what the other side has been doing. So each side sees the other as a bunch of corrupt, evil assholes out to screw everything up. While that may be true in some cases, it's certainly not limited to one side or the other. I see it every day where I work. You've got the guys that sit there listening to Rush Limbaugh and the like all day long, and are always talking about how the democrats are out to destroy the country and how Hillary Clinton is the anti-Christ. Then there's the ones that are listening to Air America or other similar outlets and believe that GWB is either a retarded chimp or a criminal mastermind, or both.
Unless we, as a country, get some perspective on things, and hopefully fix our election systems so that we don't continue with this two-party garbage, things will probably continue to get worse. I really don't want to see that happen.
I see what you're getting at, but really, they will probably want the stuff to actually sell
Of course, they're given a choice between two extremes there. The extreme of no protection, or the extreme of copyright law as it exists today. That doesn't really prove much of anything. What if copyrights lasted only 30 years? Would artists still create? History tells us that they would. Would companies be able to own these works forever and prohibit anyone from creating anything new based on those works? No. But I fail to see how that is a bad thing.
What makes one content host protected and another one not protected? Seems clear to me that they are talking about web hosting providers, which YouTube is, just as much as Yahoo! or AOL.
Yeah, well they had it set up on a public-facing web server, accessible by anyone. You don't test software on a public server. Given that the MPAA is not exactly known for being a forgiving bunch, I don't think their excuses amount to much. If they had some public goodwill, I could see giving them a pass on it, but they seem to feel so strongly about copyright infringement that it just wouldn't seem right to let them off on this. I'm sure they would agree, right? If copyright infringement is so terrible, surely they should be facing a really hefty fine here, right? Maybe some jail time? If they're going to insist on strict enforcement, then they had better get their own affairs and people under some seriously tight control too.
I think he's distinguishing between law and culture here. This makes sense, as we've seen many many instances throughout history where the law ends up being out of step with the current culture. Sometimes it's due to the law being out of date, and sometimes its due to certain powerful interests passing laws that conflict with the current culture. In this case, it's both really.
At this point, we don't even know if Vista is much more secure for most uses than XP. Some of us have been using XP just fine for at least a few years without having our boxes pwned and added to some dweeb's zombie army, or succumbing to any number of viruses that have gone around in that time. Vista hasn't been out long enough for it to be proven secure yet. Some of its security features are so annoying to users that they will likely disable them as well, negating at least some of the benefits of using it in the first place. I'm simply saying that the smartest move for most people is to at least wait for a year or so until sometime after the first service pack before deciding whether to make the move to Vista. An added benefit is that hardware capable of running it well will be cheaper too.
Aero is the feature that most regular users associate with Vista. If they don't get that, then why do they even want Vista now? It's not like there are a whole lot of compelling reasons to switch to it at this point. And there are definitely a number of drawbacks. So if their PC can't run Aero, most people probably couldn't care less about getting Vista.
Umm... you are aware that the oil industry and others are practically begging to fund scientists in an effort to disprove current global warming theories, aren't you?
And what's more, they don't even try. For the most part, they simply play what the recording industry pays them to play. This is to further the industry's continuing goal of promoting the hell out of a few artists to create a few bajillion-selling albums instead of getting a wider variety of music out there and making less from each artist. I assume it has to do with retail space concerns, which is just another reason we need to get away from traditional retail models for music. File-sharing has opened up a much larger world of music to many people. I know I've downloaded music from bands I've never heard of many times. Sometimes it's crap, but sometimes it's great. I can't even stand to listen to radio most of the time anymore. It's endlessly repetitive, boring, and annoying.