Which is what really annoys me. The O&G companies have been pointing the finger at oil prices as the cause of all this, yet their profits keep going up as well. If they weren't taking advantage of the situation, you'd expect profits to remain relatively flat. Instead they're breaking profit records every quarter. So it's not just oil prices, but O&G companies jacking up their profits on top of oil prices.
And on top of that, the O&G companies got subsidies in the energy bill. Why does that happen?
Remember, for every O&G company makeing money hand over fist, there's a supply company, or a drilling company, or a service company increaseing their rates as high as they can.
Yeah, but there's a lot more competition for those kinds of services, which keeps prices more reasonable.
Ok, so now the situation is that if you're a government employee who disagrees with something that the government is doing, whether it be for legal, moral/ethical, or personal reasons, you can be fired for saying it publicly, and you can be fired for saying it privately within the government chain of command. So basically, government employees should not think about anything they're doing, and "I was just following orders" becomes a valid defense in court? Is that how it works now?
They may not be a danger to the public, but they are dangerous to other inmates and guards. Inmates and staff have been murdered by criminals serving life sentences.
Sometimes that's the fault of the prison management. If you don't keep control of both the inmates AND the guards, then you're going to have major problems. However, on top of being less expensive to house an inmate for life than to go through the process required for the death penalty, we have the additional benefit of knowing that at the very least we're not killing innocent people. Given your pro-life stance, I'd think you'd be in favor of that as well. Our justice system is FAR from perfect, and I certainly wouldn't want my life to be on the line and have to depend on a public defender to represent me.
are the police ok with people unleashing a barrage of hot lead from an m-16 if someone breaks into their house?
They'd be fine with it as long as the M-16 isn't a full-auto version. Those are illegal without special permits. Well, I guess I should say that some police would be fine with that. Some police are in favor of private gun ownership, and some are against it. However, I don't particularly care whether they like it or not. They are neither capable of nor required to defend me. I don't particularly like taking chances, so owning a handgun for home defense is a no-brainer. As long as you're trained in the safety and proper use of the gun, it's much more of an asset than a liability. Most cops, even retired, keep at least one handgun around.
Which, it should go without saying, is as extreme and undesirable a solution as forbidding it altogether.
But since the industry wants to go to one extreme, it's probably a very good thing to have at least one comparatively small voice advocating the other. If we're very very lucky, we might end up in the middle somewhere.
If people get used to not being able to play home movies, then the guy who sells a player that can play home movies is going to make a killing. I'm serious, you do not want to keep people away from their home movies.
Not once the content industry gets the next DMCA passed. Then it will be illegal to produce a machine that does not contain all the DRM that they deem necessary. The original DMCA has already made all sorts of software and hardware illegal to distribute, do you think things are actually going to improve now that they've got a foothold?
I disagree that DRM is the Great Satan of software development (which I was under the impression was central to the issue at hand).
So what exactly is your position regarding the situation described by the gp poster? Is it ok to use DRM to render free software useless? The real problem is that software DRM will never really work as long as the hardware is open, and once the hardware is no longer open, then you no longer own your own PC. That is the inevitable outcome of DRM. Someone else decides what you can run on your PC.
I'm not a lawyer, but setting up a website with joke articles about Web 3.0 - Web Pi should allow you to register the term. Whether or not it will be enforcable is a matter you'll need to ask a lawyer.
You'll definitely want to talk to a lawyer. Web 3.0 would probably be considered too similar to Web 2.0 and you would likely not be able to enforce such a trademark.
Drive letter mappings are a good thing: how many tough problems in computer science are solved by Yet Another Level Of Redirection? This is one of them.
Drive letter mapping isn't the problem. The problem is not having a good way to remap things if the drive letter changes. Most decent applications can deal with that. You simply tell it where to find the data that it needs. It's not a hardcoded driveletter. If you're using Excel or Word, you can update links to the new driveletter.
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may mandate that we change the drive letters in use. That's fine. If all the document linking breaks, and we can blame him instead of taking the blame ourselves, it should let us change the infrastructure to accommodate MS's pissing on our environment.
Maybe you should attempt to educate your users a bit and get them to stop making moronic choices in their documents and applications that lock you into using specific drive letters (or other similar problems). If you don't start educating them now, you'll always have the same problem. That's just stupid.
Now, there's nothing stopping someone who paid the licence fee from suing Forgent if they believe that they acted fraudulently in demanding the licencing fee in the first place, but that's a different action.
Given the reason for overturning the patent, I think they might have a pretty good case against Fogent for acting in bad faith.
I doubt that users will ever actually have to type it on their phones or whatever. I can type Yahoo in my browser and it automatically goes to yahoo.com. I don't see why it would be any different on a phone. It would just go to yahoo.mobi instead.
Statistically you are much less likely to be murdered than you are to die in a car accident. Does that mean we shouldn't put murders in jail, or allocate resources to capture them? Your politics are clouding your judgement.
Not at all. I think the real point is that we shouldn't start wiping out our civil liberties and decreasing the checks on our government in pursuit of that goal.
I like team and objective based gameplay in an FPS so if they pull this off and I end up with a 360 I might play.
I'm a diehard PC gamer, but this game could have made me buy a 360 if it was any good. The 360 practically screams for cooperative multiplayer games. You've got the online capability and voice chat built in. All you really need to do is devise a game that encourages teamwork to succeed. Shadowrun would be a perfect setting for such a game. They could even include a cyberspace type of game so that the team could have a decker doing his thing to help the team, and the voice chat would actually make it seem fairly realistic and coherent. Nobody would feel cut off for being a decker. It'd be even better than the PnP game in that regard. Throw in vehicles for riggers, and you'd have the most awesome cooperative multiplayer game ever. I'd buy two 360s for that! This is just such a depressing turn of events. Why couldn't they hire a halfway decent game designer? You know, someone that knows something about Shadowrun and has a little imagination. Instead they give us UT 2004 with mages and elves. I'm so disgusted with them I can't stand it.
Yikes! Guys? Did any of you here on/. actually read what the guy was saying??
Dude, did you watch the gameplay video? That's NOT Shadowrun! That's a crappy UT 2004 mod that a couple guys thought up over beer and pizza one night. It's team deathmatch with magic thrown in. It looks absolutely retarded. That's why people are pissed. Not because they're reimagining or rewinding or rewhatevering Shadowrun. It's because they're trying to cash in on the name with a game that doesn't deserve to be called anything more than a reasonably polished mod. They obviously didn't have anyone who knows or understands Shadowrun involved in this. I could come up with 10 better ideas for a game in the next 10 minutes, and I'm not even a hardcore Shadowrun fanboy. I've only played the pnp game a few times, but I've read most of the novels and quite a few sourcebooks. The Shadowrun world has virtually unlimited gaming possibilities, and they completely copped out with this pathetic hack of a game design. They're abusing the Shadowrun name with this game, and when it flops it'll probably mean we have to wait another 10 years for the next Shadowrun game. That's what pisses me off.
Ha, no one wanted to even play deckers in my group. I always had to throw in decker NPCs for hire to assist my play group. Eventually someone rolled up one, but I had a hard time keeping their character involved, everyone else were mages/samurai/shaman/mercs, they wanted to beat on all the security guards, not wait around while the decker disabled the security systems.
I think that just shows that the games were made too easy. If you could brute-force your way through everything, then it's boring. Not much tension, and it would get old quick. That said, being a decker was pretty damn boring most of the time too. Everyone taking a munchy break while you are rolling and rolling to disable some cameras is kinda crappy. That part of the game really needed to be better. Haven't checked out the 4th ed rules yet, but I'm wondering if they improved things at all.
If it was truly a multi-player cooperative game, that might actually be cool. But then what are the odds of them actually making a good game out of this? Let's face it, it's gonna turn out to be Counter-Strike with mages and fireballs and shit. Lame.
I can only hope that it will happen. I wasn't planning to ever get a 360. This is probably the only thing that could convince me to buy one. If the game turns out halfway decent, I almost certainly will get one.
This is why it is of paramount importance that we have smart leaders who really have our interests at heart, and who know how to consult economists when making policy. Because it's the politicians who decide, on our behalf, what society wants, and in which directions it should go.
Let me know when you figure out how to elect smart politicians. From what I've seen around here, smart people don't run for office. People who are comfortable running around and having their picture taken while waving a flag or kissing a baby run for office. Those poeple generally give me the creeps.
If they were just self serving and opportunistic I don't see why they would keep campaining on the issue now that their own problems have been solved.
Because they know it could happen again, and they don't want that. It's still self-serving and opportunistic, but it also happens to be correct. I'm pretty sure that the irony of the situation is completely lost on them, and I'm sure they'll never say anything about regretting their past actions taken in the same vein.
A couple of people claim they bought it thinking it would make their horse harder to kill, and are angry that they only found out AFTER PAYING that it's just pretty wallpaper with no in-game effect.
If that's true, then I'd say they have a pretty good argument against Bethesda considering the description they have up on the downloads site (emphasis mine):
Horse Armor Pack (6.2 MB) DLC1 Tamriel is a dangerous place. Protect your horse from danger with this beautiful handcrafted armor.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a market for open platforms, and as long as this is true, all the worst fears surrounding DRM can be trivially circumvented.
Tell that to the lobbyists and politicians working on the next DMCA law. They want to legislate the market away.
Profits have gone up
Which is what really annoys me. The O&G companies have been pointing the finger at oil prices as the cause of all this, yet their profits keep going up as well. If they weren't taking advantage of the situation, you'd expect profits to remain relatively flat. Instead they're breaking profit records every quarter. So it's not just oil prices, but O&G companies jacking up their profits on top of oil prices.
And on top of that, the O&G companies got subsidies in the energy bill. Why does that happen?
Remember, for every O&G company makeing money hand over fist, there's a supply company, or a drilling company, or a service company increaseing their rates as high as they can.
Yeah, but there's a lot more competition for those kinds of services, which keeps prices more reasonable.
Ok, so now the situation is that if you're a government employee who disagrees with something that the government is doing, whether it be for legal, moral/ethical, or personal reasons, you can be fired for saying it publicly, and you can be fired for saying it privately within the government chain of command. So basically, government employees should not think about anything they're doing, and "I was just following orders" becomes a valid defense in court? Is that how it works now?
They may not be a danger to the public, but they are dangerous to other inmates and guards. Inmates and staff have been murdered by criminals serving life sentences.
Sometimes that's the fault of the prison management. If you don't keep control of both the inmates AND the guards, then you're going to have major problems. However, on top of being less expensive to house an inmate for life than to go through the process required for the death penalty, we have the additional benefit of knowing that at the very least we're not killing innocent people. Given your pro-life stance, I'd think you'd be in favor of that as well. Our justice system is FAR from perfect, and I certainly wouldn't want my life to be on the line and have to depend on a public defender to represent me.
are the police ok with people unleashing a barrage of hot lead from an m-16 if someone breaks into their house?
They'd be fine with it as long as the M-16 isn't a full-auto version. Those are illegal without special permits. Well, I guess I should say that some police would be fine with that. Some police are in favor of private gun ownership, and some are against it. However, I don't particularly care whether they like it or not. They are neither capable of nor required to defend me. I don't particularly like taking chances, so owning a handgun for home defense is a no-brainer. As long as you're trained in the safety and proper use of the gun, it's much more of an asset than a liability. Most cops, even retired, keep at least one handgun around.
Which, it should go without saying, is as extreme and undesirable a solution as forbidding it altogether.
But since the industry wants to go to one extreme, it's probably a very good thing to have at least one comparatively small voice advocating the other. If we're very very lucky, we might end up in the middle somewhere.
If people get used to not being able to play home movies, then the guy who sells a player that can play home movies is going to make a killing. I'm serious, you do not want to keep people away from their home movies.
Not once the content industry gets the next DMCA passed. Then it will be illegal to produce a machine that does not contain all the DRM that they deem necessary. The original DMCA has already made all sorts of software and hardware illegal to distribute, do you think things are actually going to improve now that they've got a foothold?
I disagree that DRM is the Great Satan of software development (which I was under the impression was central to the issue at hand).
So what exactly is your position regarding the situation described by the gp poster? Is it ok to use DRM to render free software useless? The real problem is that software DRM will never really work as long as the hardware is open, and once the hardware is no longer open, then you no longer own your own PC. That is the inevitable outcome of DRM. Someone else decides what you can run on your PC.
What I thought was funny was that he laughs at the car analogy that Peter Brown made, and then proceeds to throw out his own ridiculous claim:
"No DRM system ever told an artist what notes to play or what lyrics were OK to sing. But the FSF seems intent on doing just that."
Of course he does nothing to explain or justify this comment.
I'm not a lawyer, but setting up a website with joke articles about Web 3.0 - Web Pi should allow you to register the term. Whether or not it will be enforcable is a matter you'll need to ask a lawyer.
You'll definitely want to talk to a lawyer. Web 3.0 would probably be considered too similar to Web 2.0 and you would likely not be able to enforce such a trademark.
Drive letter mappings are a good thing: how many tough problems in computer science are solved by Yet Another Level Of Redirection? This is one of them.
Drive letter mapping isn't the problem. The problem is not having a good way to remap things if the drive letter changes. Most decent applications can deal with that. You simply tell it where to find the data that it needs. It's not a hardcoded driveletter. If you're using Excel or Word, you can update links to the new driveletter.
We don't really want to tell the users to convert to UNC either. One particular E: drive on our network has been hosted over the years by no less than five different servers. If we keep the drive mapping = E:, the old document links still work.
We do have a new CIO who may mandate that we change the drive letters in use. That's fine. If all the document linking breaks, and we can blame him instead of taking the blame ourselves, it should let us change the infrastructure to accommodate MS's pissing on our environment.
Maybe you should attempt to educate your users a bit and get them to stop making moronic choices in their documents and applications that lock you into using specific drive letters (or other similar problems). If you don't start educating them now, you'll always have the same problem. That's just stupid.
Now, there's nothing stopping someone who paid the licence fee from suing Forgent if they believe that they acted fraudulently in demanding the licencing fee in the first place, but that's a different action.
Given the reason for overturning the patent, I think they might have a pretty good case against Fogent for acting in bad faith.
Why would the software be "keyed" to the drive letter? What kind of software design is that?
I doubt that users will ever actually have to type it on their phones or whatever. I can type Yahoo in my browser and it automatically goes to yahoo.com. I don't see why it would be any different on a phone. It would just go to yahoo.mobi instead.
Statistically you are much less likely to be murdered than you are to die in a car accident. Does that mean we shouldn't put murders in jail, or allocate resources to capture them? Your politics are clouding your judgement.
Not at all. I think the real point is that we shouldn't start wiping out our civil liberties and decreasing the checks on our government in pursuit of that goal.
I'm a diehard PC gamer, but this game could have made me buy a 360 if it was any good. The 360 practically screams for cooperative multiplayer games. You've got the online capability and voice chat built in. All you really need to do is devise a game that encourages teamwork to succeed. Shadowrun would be a perfect setting for such a game. They could even include a cyberspace type of game so that the team could have a decker doing his thing to help the team, and the voice chat would actually make it seem fairly realistic and coherent. Nobody would feel cut off for being a decker. It'd be even better than the PnP game in that regard. Throw in vehicles for riggers, and you'd have the most awesome cooperative multiplayer game ever. I'd buy two 360s for that! This is just such a depressing turn of events. Why couldn't they hire a halfway decent game designer? You know, someone that knows something about Shadowrun and has a little imagination. Instead they give us UT 2004 with mages and elves. I'm so disgusted with them I can't stand it.
Yikes! Guys? Did any of you here on /. actually read what the guy was saying??
Dude, did you watch the gameplay video? That's NOT Shadowrun! That's a crappy UT 2004 mod that a couple guys thought up over beer and pizza one night. It's team deathmatch with magic thrown in. It looks absolutely retarded. That's why people are pissed. Not because they're reimagining or rewinding or rewhatevering Shadowrun. It's because they're trying to cash in on the name with a game that doesn't deserve to be called anything more than a reasonably polished mod. They obviously didn't have anyone who knows or understands Shadowrun involved in this. I could come up with 10 better ideas for a game in the next 10 minutes, and I'm not even a hardcore Shadowrun fanboy. I've only played the pnp game a few times, but I've read most of the novels and quite a few sourcebooks. The Shadowrun world has virtually unlimited gaming possibilities, and they completely copped out with this pathetic hack of a game design. They're abusing the Shadowrun name with this game, and when it flops it'll probably mean we have to wait another 10 years for the next Shadowrun game. That's what pisses me off.
I think that just shows that the games were made too easy. If you could brute-force your way through everything, then it's boring. Not much tension, and it would get old quick. That said, being a decker was pretty damn boring most of the time too. Everyone taking a munchy break while you are rolling and rolling to disable some cameras is kinda crappy. That part of the game really needed to be better. Haven't checked out the 4th ed rules yet, but I'm wondering if they improved things at all.
If it was truly a multi-player cooperative game, that might actually be cool. But then what are the odds of them actually making a good game out of this? Let's face it, it's gonna turn out to be Counter-Strike with mages and fireballs and shit. Lame.
The Genesis game dude. The Genesis game was the good one. The SNES game had Minesweeper instead of the Matrix.
I can only hope that it will happen. I wasn't planning to ever get a 360. This is probably the only thing that could convince me to buy one. If the game turns out halfway decent, I almost certainly will get one.
Let me know when you figure out how to elect smart politicians. From what I've seen around here, smart people don't run for office. People who are comfortable running around and having their picture taken while waving a flag or kissing a baby run for office. Those poeple generally give me the creeps.
If they were just self serving and opportunistic I don't see why they would keep campaining on the issue now that their own problems have been solved.
Because they know it could happen again, and they don't want that. It's still self-serving and opportunistic, but it also happens to be correct. I'm pretty sure that the irony of the situation is completely lost on them, and I'm sure they'll never say anything about regretting their past actions taken in the same vein.
A couple of people claim they bought it thinking it would make their horse harder to kill, and are angry that they only found out AFTER PAYING that it's just pretty wallpaper with no in-game effect.
If that's true, then I'd say they have a pretty good argument against Bethesda considering the description they have up on the downloads site (emphasis mine):