It should be frowned upon because it is unethical to go around and try to poach staff....
Google is the larger player with the largest user base around so, in your "sold out view", it should be OK to hurt the small player so the mass market can get something for free right?
Who's ethics? Mine or yours? Because mine doesn't agree. Whenever someone uses the words "ethics" or "morals" you know he's about to sell you his point of view of the matter. Do you not understand that ethics and morals are highly individual and to even assume that the opposite party shares yours is insanely egocentric. Let me tell you when it is OK to "hurt the small player" or the "big player" or any "player", for me: when I profit from it -- period. That's the way any profitable company play and that's the way any smart consumer plays. Nobody in their right mind goes into business because it's "nice", people go into business to make profit. And the consumer, aka the demandee -- which is on the other side of the tug of war of that which we call trade -- can only benefit from more suppliers. But seriously, you want to keep drawing the shorter straw because it helps you sleep at night, go ahead -- I can tell you I won't, no matter how many times you invoke your "ethics" or "morals" speach.
I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon.
Eh? It talks about them in some depth. It notes that RI's patents are pending so it can't sue until they issue, but it can amend them to strengthen a potential action. It has some discussion of their copyrights, as well.
You're right, I didn't read the preamble. Still it was one sentence. You'd think there would be at least something pointing to what pending patents in specific. I don't understand how the article can be so long with so little actual substance.
I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon. I don't care if Reframe is a small struggling company, as a consumer I want as many companies tearing eachother apart at the same time -- providing me with better services and lower prices. This is exactly the kind of nonsense that hinders development, and no the product might be very similar but it is not an exact copy, and even if it was I would never side with the people whom I do business with -- as that would be completely idiotic. I'm not even going to bother with the car analogies as you all know how silly this type of reasoning would be if it was applied there. What's next? Are we going to point fingers at Mozilla for not inventing the concept of the browser?
Unfortunately, anybody savvy enough to know about and install Google Frame isn't running IE anyway...
Google wave will change that. When people start migrating from Facebook (already a privacy scare for many, not to mention the "help" the media is giving), and even email, to wave -- Google will slap up some nice "propositions", such as "Oops! You're not running the Google frame. Click here to see how you can improve your wave experience!", or better yet "Oops! You're not using Google Chrome!..." -- click, smack, and done. Shortly thereafter netbook manufacturers will start shipping their hardware with Chrome OS, which fits like a glove to wave, youtube -- you name it. It doesn't take a genious to see how Google will make all this fit together. You might be wondering "why Google frame and not Chrome right away?" -- easy, it's their wave... wave (hah)... to surf on that is. You see if wave is slow, it won't catch on, but with the Google frame it won't be, and people don't need to leave their comfortable IE environment at all. Hence Google frame is just a stepping stone towards promoting wave, and it will be abandoned in due time. Basically: anybody who ever visits a Google owned page with IE will have a very, very easy way of installing the Google frame. Most people will probably not even know what hit them -- and they wouldn't even care if they did.
However, rights holders are usually the only group that clearly benefits from suppression of counterfeit goods
I disagree. Look at China. Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media). Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff (down to the same name/logo) driving the quality producer out of business. Now everything becomes a low quality product competing over price. This makes it hard to compete globally.
I realize this post will get a lot of heat for saying China has trouble exporting, but when is the last time you purchased something that had the name of a Chinese company on the box. They have the low end covered and their factories can make products for multinationals that oversee the quality, but it will be very difficult for them to sell a car in the US or to compete with a company like Caterpillar. They even have trouble selling major appliances, even though most of the name brands are made over there to begin with.
Let me turn this around. What if the rest of the world were like China in this matter? Isn't that more ideal? Companies fighting over pennies and adopting eachothers ideas constantly, and consumers that just keep getting better and cheaper products. With this in mind, is it so easy to say that the model in China is flawed? Rather than the artificial scarcity which the rest of the world has accepted.
Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary. It's easy to neglect the impacts OSS projects have on eachother, even if they don't share one single row of code.
It's an evolutionary advantage for the entire herd when a single injured member is incapacitated, thereby allowing predators to focus on the injured member instead of healthy members of the herd.
So by basically erasing all hope for recovery for the spinal injury victim, Evolution has enabled the non-injured humans a means of escape from lions, tigers, and bears.
Since we live in modern society, it's uncommon to see this kind of pursuit. However, evolutionarily speaking, the movement to cities and civilization is a pretty recent phenomenon. Until that fateful event, humans were preyed upon by many other wild animals.
You're correct, but only if that single injured member was impossible to save. Saving lives is also a part of evolutionary effects, as it further aids reproduction chances of the organism. Evolution is the extended arm of relativity, and evolution is solely based on individual vs. environment. Not smart vs. dumb, or ugly vs. beautiful, or strong vs. weak. It cannot be rightfully explained in any other way than that the organism which is best fitted to its environment will have the best chances of reproduction. If being saved is a real possibility then this factor is also included in the equation of evolution.
It is true that ultimately drugs (medicine) will end up removing our own built in abilities of coping with reality as those who are born with a complete lack of this mechanism also reproduce with the rest. This is however not to be feared because reality for us now is not what the reality for us was when we were in the jungle. So it would be a real slap in the face to evolution to say that we're "messing" with it, because you'd be so ignorant to think that you can control evolution. It is only a product of reality, it is only a product of relativity. You can't cheat evolution.
It all comes down to two opposing theories, fate vs. free will. It is very controversial to say that there is such a thing as fate, as it is usually associated with nonsensical TV-shows about anything from clarvoyants to fundamentalists (e.g. doomsday). However it seems that we tend to wish for the absence of fate and that we are in control of ourselves and our lives -- but then one has to question if this doesn't cloud our judgement of the truth. There is also the argument that if fate is "proven" then we would all just lie down and wait for death. The problem with this argument is that once again one makes the fatal assumption that all humans would be susceptible to this and that all humans would embrace it -- but without pointing any fingers I think we can conclude that even if you present the hardest evidence -- there are still many people who would deny it. This would then be another product of fate, that in return coexists with our existance, rather than our annihilation.
I think this is an effect of relativity and the fact that many people don't tend to accept proof of what they, with all their hearts, wish for is untrue further also becomes an effect of fate. What I'm trying to say is that even if fate is proven to exist, it wouldn't make a difference, as those who accept it and go down with it will die, those who accept yet ignore it and those who won't accept it will live on. And in evolutionary terms this would then lead to offspring less likely to go down with this "truth". Perhaps genetic, perhaps due to "alternative education." We would never accept murder or rape or genocide as an inevitable effect of the universe. If we do that, we're no longer what we consider human. We would be equal rocks, or water, the sun, or the moon. Peers with our futures written on our foreheads.
Then again -- as the uncertainty principle shows us -- we can never be sure of this. And if you think about it -- this is deeply rooted in our very definition of life itself -- uncertainty.
... but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
Hahaha I'm sorry, this one was very funny BadAnalogyGuy. Allow me let you in on a secret: professional lawyers don't give a shit about morals in court. They learn the legal system in order to play it in favor of their clients so that they get paid. It's a job, and you're a damn fool to even think for a second that they care about their clients other than how much money they make out of them. They get paid for getting their clients off the hook -- that's what they do, and that's what they'll always do, no matter if their client is RIAA, Hitler, Charles Manson, Ghandi, Martha Stewart or the god damn cookie monster himself -- period -- scene -- fin.
Hahahaha! Have you ever used government software? I have. It is anything but easy to use and provides virtually no feedback when it's doing something.
In the world that I live in things change and nothing lasts forever. It must be quite boring to live in your world where what once was will forever be.
Won't be long before "fraud sites" = "copyright infringement" sites. Who is behind this?
You know, an easy and proper way to handle this would be to have a governmental entity maintain a blocklist which ordinary citizens can optionally install/use/turn on/turn off (with some easy to use software). See it like a seatbelt (I know the seatbelt is required by law in some countries but in this case it doesn't kill you to not use it) which you can switch on and off. This would be an excellent example of the government aiding the public instead of dictating the public. Those of us who know what we're getting ourselves into when we turn it off of never install it can choose freely, and those who don't bother to learn can fallback on this solution -- free to anytime educate themselves and turn it off. This way the government offers a safe choice (with whatever blocked content, be it copyright infringement or not) yet is liberal enough to let you decide in the end. If you get "hurt", then you're to blame for deliberately turning it off while being uninformed. And the rest of us get to keep the net undictated. At the end of the day the friction is between people who know what they're doing and want to be free to do what they consider to be the best way to utilize the net, and those who don't know what they're doing that are in need of this type of protection.
What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?
I completely [TOO SMALL? WANT TO GET IT BIGGER? VISIT XXXXX.COM] agree with you. There [THIRSTY? DRINK COKE, IT'S HEALTHY] is absolutely [ARE YOU TIRED? SLEEPY? TRY RED BULL, IT WILL MAKE YOU FLY!] nothing to be [TRY THE NEW MCBURGER, YOUR TONGUE WILL THANK YOU!] annoyed about.
Ok, so this system proves that your vote reached the tally server, but how does it prove that your vote is actually in the total?
I'm serious. Just because your vote wasn't lost, doesn't mean it was counted. This helps guard against grievous mistakes, not against wholesale fraud.
I'm confused, are you replying to me? I only answered his question if we are concerned about votes not being counted. I never said nor did I imply that this was the right or the wrong way to do it.
But to answer your question, the only way to make sure of this is if the software that is in use is completely open source. That way anybody who's interested may view the source and follow the the procedure, from submission to results.
but are we that concerned about votes not being counted?
I was about to write a long reply about how democracy depends on the fact that bla bla bla... and how you cannot trust people, especially what in politics and bla bla bla... but you asked a simple question so I'll give you a simple answer:
The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com. X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999, initially as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999.
That doesn't add up. According to this article the existing single-letter second-level domains were all registered before 1993, as in 1993 IANA reserved the remaining domains. Originally x.com was owned by Weinstein & DePaolis. Some half assed googling led me to this, which isn't much. And a quick whois showed that they also own x.cx, judging by the email used.
You are trolling since you're trying to imply that this is the first time a flaw was found in the Linux kernel. This has happened numerous times, and it has been posted on/. numerous times, and there's always some fucking troll saying "If this was Windows...". Who the fuck cares!? Why make everything into some political bullshit with extremists throwing rocks at eachother?
I'm going to drop a bomb here and it might shock you all, but it's the truth, here it goes: Linux is not perfect nor did anybody with half a brain claim it to be so.
Wow you truly are an idiot. This is my last post because this is getting fucking tiresome. When you copy you do not "steal a copy" as that would, once again, mean that the owner has lost that copy. And I never said that violating copyright was right, I only said that copying != theft, so try your kindergarten rhetorics elsewhere.
And what would happen if all of these homebrewers, as (correct me if I'm wrong) is very likely amongst homebrewers, didn't bother to charge for their software?
Microsoft already solved this in its Xbox Live Indie Games environment: a price floor of 400 MP ($5.00), or 200 MP for games weighing under some size in megabytes.
And why is this the right way to do it? The way I see it with Nintendo you have the option to distribute it at whatever cost you want, allowing you to distribute free games with other sources of income (linking some parts to e.g. a web site where ads will cover your costs). Thus the investment risk is entirely on the developer side. Microsoft had a solution, so did Nintendo. They both generate revenue, only their sources are different. Microsoft gets theirs from players, Nintendo gets theirs from developers. Players don't make money on games, developers do. As stated, this isn't about the "right" way or the "wrong" way. It's about different approaches producing different results. Both the Xbox 360 and Wii have plenty of games, so there is no shortage. Honestly I'm not suffering from the high prices of Wii dev kits, if you're a serious developer (indie or not) with a good idea you'll make money, and if you only want a playground to play around in then Nintendo charges $1700 for theirs -- there is no gun pointed at your head and you may at any time play in Microsofts playground instead. Let supply and demand do its thing. Time will tell which solution was best.
If the additional revenue from the console maker's commission from sales of games developed by part-time developers outweigh the lost revenue from selling devkits at a reduced price, then revenue increases.
And what would happen if all of these homebrewers, as (correct me if I'm wrong) is very likely amongst homebrewers, didn't bother to charge for their software? Look I'm not bashing the idea of homebrewing, but obviously Nintendo values their ordinary players/consumers the most. Their products are way cheaper for the average consumer than their competitors.
a car crash is nothing like a computer infected with a virus....
and wouldn't most people just say it servs the idiot who stole the car right. while we are putting disjointed idea's together, how about houses made of coke bottles vs pepsi bottles?
Oh oh semantics! I love this game! Here, let me try: what about a worm? Or is that still the users fault for not being behind a firewall? Is a person with Windows supposed to always assume that his machine is vulnerable unless firewalled? And can you haul this responsibility to the firewall manufacturer if there is a breach anyway? Wouldn't this, in terms of car analogies, mean that a car owner should always assume that his car has manufacturing error unless frequently visitng a car shop? And that any responsibility for accidents caused by manufacturing error can be hauled on the car shops?
Wow, wouldn't that be a convenient world for producers...
No it is not different, you are violating a license and violating the law, if everybody is free to choose which law to follow and which to not follow, so find somebody can say "I don't think rape is a crime, so I will rape whenever I like". PERIOD
It doesn't matter how much you repeat it to yourself that pirating software is different than stealing, it will still be stealing and violating a license.
So what you're saying is that copying is the same as theft, when theft clearly produces different outcomes where the victim loses his possession whilst when copying -- the victim does not. And that there is no possibility for both theft and copying to be illegal, they both must be called theft. There is a reason why there are two words for two different actions, and your inability to comprehend this makes you my dear sir a ranting idiot -- period.
Oh, I have paid for legit student copies of MS products. But they always come hamstrung with things like a 1 install limit, so if you reformat you're SOL. That's why you have to resort to piracy to be able to use what you actually paid for.
No. In the Windows World of Pain you have to pay for the "software" again. That's the way the game works. If you are foolish enough to buy software with a 1 install limit, you're just going to have to pay each time you have to re-install it. Tough
Everybody knows that Windows requires regular reinstallation, so you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Ever heard of the phrase "For minor issues reboot, for major issues reinstall"? MS glanced at that and went "I bet we can make profit on this too" -- and so they obviously did. Next up: reboot for a modest sum of $10.
Why don't you use Linux for free instead of stealing??? I don't understand really
First: copying != theft != rape != murder. And no it's not "almost the same". It's fucking different, get that, period. Second: yes he should use Linux instead.
Are you saying that Nintendo should intentionally lower their revenue or raise the consumer price?
No, emag and I are saying that Nintendo should follow Apple's model of the iPhone developer program and the App Store, which in turn is a carbon copy of Microsoft's XNA Creators Club and Xbox Live Indie Games. But instead, Nintendo chooses to discriminate against people for whom developing video games is something other than a day job.
Wait what? Discriminate? Are you fucking serious? It's a source of income to match the revenue forecast. Either that comes from raising console prices/lowering dev kit prices, or keeping it the way it is. Not everybody is a homebrewer, so why should dev kits be considered as something "enjoyed by everyone"? Also as I clearly stated Nintendo is choosing another strategy, if you want to be a homebrewer perhaps it's not the console for you. But we already know that consoles cannot meet all criterias. However it is still very popular for indie developers, so all in all, I have lost nothing, so I'm still ok with drawing the longer straw.
It seems to me that it's more the large number of developers, and the diversity of games/apps, that could be a bigger issue. Sure, immediacy is nice, but...if Nintendo keeps up the policy of charging multi-thousands of dollars for a dev kit, with a requirement that it _must_ be a business location (no home offices), I don't see 3G as being much help...
I don't understand. Are you saying that Nintendo should intentionally lower their revenue or raise the consumer price? Because you can forget the former, and I hope you will forget the latter. Nintendo consoles have plenty of developers. I don't see why you assume that there is a shortage.
So Nintendo runs a different business model, which obviously produces different results, and pays off. Would you much rather have 3 clones of console makers, than the two already existing (Microsoft & Sony) ones? You saw what happened to Sega, right? Nintendo chose their own path of innovation rather than expansion.
But yes, I'd much rather see lower console prices, lower game prices and lower licensing prices. Then again I'd be living in a fairytale. For now I'm happy with drawing the longer straw.
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It should be frowned upon because it is unethical to go around and try to poach staff....
Google is the larger player with the largest user base around so, in your "sold out view", it should be OK to hurt the small player so the mass market can get something for free right?
Who's ethics? Mine or yours? Because mine doesn't agree. Whenever someone uses the words "ethics" or "morals" you know he's about to sell you his point of view of the matter. Do you not understand that ethics and morals are highly individual and to even assume that the opposite party shares yours is insanely egocentric. Let me tell you when it is OK to "hurt the small player" or the "big player" or any "player", for me: when I profit from it -- period. That's the way any profitable company play and that's the way any smart consumer plays. Nobody in their right mind goes into business because it's "nice", people go into business to make profit. And the consumer, aka the demandee -- which is on the other side of the tug of war of that which we call trade -- can only benefit from more suppliers. But seriously, you want to keep drawing the shorter straw because it helps you sleep at night, go ahead -- I can tell you I won't, no matter how many times you invoke your "ethics" or "morals" speach.
I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon.
Eh? It talks about them in some depth. It notes that RI's patents are pending so it can't sue until they issue, but it can amend them to strengthen a potential action. It has some discussion of their copyrights, as well.
You're right, I didn't read the preamble. Still it was one sentence. You'd think there would be at least something pointing to what pending patents in specific. I don't understand how the article can be so long with so little actual substance.
I don't understand. TFA mentions nothing about any legal issues. Unless there's any patent infringement or trademark issues I don't see why this should be frowned upon. I don't care if Reframe is a small struggling company, as a consumer I want as many companies tearing eachother apart at the same time -- providing me with better services and lower prices. This is exactly the kind of nonsense that hinders development, and no the product might be very similar but it is not an exact copy, and even if it was I would never side with the people whom I do business with -- as that would be completely idiotic. I'm not even going to bother with the car analogies as you all know how silly this type of reasoning would be if it was applied there. What's next? Are we going to point fingers at Mozilla for not inventing the concept of the browser?
Unfortunately, anybody savvy enough to know about and install Google Frame isn't running IE anyway...
Google wave will change that. When people start migrating from Facebook (already a privacy scare for many, not to mention the "help" the media is giving), and even email, to wave -- Google will slap up some nice "propositions", such as "Oops! You're not running the Google frame. Click here to see how you can improve your wave experience!", or better yet "Oops! You're not using Google Chrome! ..." -- click, smack, and done. Shortly thereafter netbook manufacturers will start shipping their hardware with Chrome OS, which fits like a glove to wave, youtube -- you name it. It doesn't take a genious to see how Google will make all this fit together. You might be wondering "why Google frame and not Chrome right away?" -- easy, it's their wave... wave (hah)... to surf on that is. You see if wave is slow, it won't catch on, but with the Google frame it won't be, and people don't need to leave their comfortable IE environment at all. Hence Google frame is just a stepping stone towards promoting wave, and it will be abandoned in due time. Basically: anybody who ever visits a Google owned page with IE will have a very, very easy way of installing the Google frame. Most people will probably not even know what hit them -- and they wouldn't even care if they did.
However, rights holders are usually the only group that clearly benefits from suppression of counterfeit goods
I disagree. Look at China. Due to rampant piracy, no company can make a name for themselves (I'm talking more physical products vs. media). Anyone trying to make a high quality product is undercut by someone making a low quality knockoff (down to the same name/logo) driving the quality producer out of business. Now everything becomes a low quality product competing over price. This makes it hard to compete globally.
I realize this post will get a lot of heat for saying China has trouble exporting, but when is the last time you purchased something that had the name of a Chinese company on the box. They have the low end covered and their factories can make products for multinationals that oversee the quality, but it will be very difficult for them to sell a car in the US or to compete with a company like Caterpillar. They even have trouble selling major appliances, even though most of the name brands are made over there to begin with.
Let me turn this around. What if the rest of the world were like China in this matter? Isn't that more ideal? Companies fighting over pennies and adopting eachothers ideas constantly, and consumers that just keep getting better and cheaper products. With this in mind, is it so easy to say that the model in China is flawed? Rather than the artificial scarcity which the rest of the world has accepted.
Take THAT gnome!
Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary. It's easy to neglect the impacts OSS projects have on eachother, even if they don't share one single row of code.
It's an evolutionary advantage for the entire herd when a single injured member is incapacitated, thereby allowing predators to focus on the injured member instead of healthy members of the herd.
So by basically erasing all hope for recovery for the spinal injury victim, Evolution has enabled the non-injured humans a means of escape from lions, tigers, and bears.
Since we live in modern society, it's uncommon to see this kind of pursuit. However, evolutionarily speaking, the movement to cities and civilization is a pretty recent phenomenon. Until that fateful event, humans were preyed upon by many other wild animals.
You're correct, but only if that single injured member was impossible to save. Saving lives is also a part of evolutionary effects, as it further aids reproduction chances of the organism. Evolution is the extended arm of relativity, and evolution is solely based on individual vs. environment. Not smart vs. dumb, or ugly vs. beautiful, or strong vs. weak. It cannot be rightfully explained in any other way than that the organism which is best fitted to its environment will have the best chances of reproduction. If being saved is a real possibility then this factor is also included in the equation of evolution.
It is true that ultimately drugs (medicine) will end up removing our own built in abilities of coping with reality as those who are born with a complete lack of this mechanism also reproduce with the rest. This is however not to be feared because reality for us now is not what the reality for us was when we were in the jungle. So it would be a real slap in the face to evolution to say that we're "messing" with it, because you'd be so ignorant to think that you can control evolution. It is only a product of reality, it is only a product of relativity. You can't cheat evolution.
It all comes down to two opposing theories, fate vs. free will. It is very controversial to say that there is such a thing as fate, as it is usually associated with nonsensical TV-shows about anything from clarvoyants to fundamentalists (e.g. doomsday). However it seems that we tend to wish for the absence of fate and that we are in control of ourselves and our lives -- but then one has to question if this doesn't cloud our judgement of the truth. There is also the argument that if fate is "proven" then we would all just lie down and wait for death. The problem with this argument is that once again one makes the fatal assumption that all humans would be susceptible to this and that all humans would embrace it -- but without pointing any fingers I think we can conclude that even if you present the hardest evidence -- there are still many people who would deny it. This would then be another product of fate, that in return coexists with our existance, rather than our annihilation.
I think this is an effect of relativity and the fact that many people don't tend to accept proof of what they, with all their hearts, wish for is untrue further also becomes an effect of fate. What I'm trying to say is that even if fate is proven to exist, it wouldn't make a difference, as those who accept it and go down with it will die, those who accept yet ignore it and those who won't accept it will live on. And in evolutionary terms this would then lead to offspring less likely to go down with this "truth". Perhaps genetic, perhaps due to "alternative education." We would never accept murder or rape or genocide as an inevitable effect of the universe. If we do that, we're no longer what we consider human. We would be equal rocks, or water, the sun, or the moon. Peers with our futures written on our foreheads.
Then again -- as the uncertainty principle shows us -- we can never be sure of this. And if you think about it -- this is deeply rooted in our very definition of life itself -- uncertainty.
... but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
Hahaha I'm sorry, this one was very funny BadAnalogyGuy. Allow me let you in on a secret: professional lawyers don't give a shit about morals in court. They learn the legal system in order to play it in favor of their clients so that they get paid. It's a job, and you're a damn fool to even think for a second that they care about their clients other than how much money they make out of them. They get paid for getting their clients off the hook -- that's what they do, and that's what they'll always do, no matter if their client is RIAA, Hitler, Charles Manson, Ghandi, Martha Stewart or the god damn cookie monster himself -- period -- scene -- fin.
Hahahaha! Have you ever used government software? I have. It is anything but easy to use and provides virtually no feedback when it's doing something.
In the world that I live in things change and nothing lasts forever. It must be quite boring to live in your world where what once was will forever be.
Won't be long before "fraud sites" = "copyright infringement" sites. Who is behind this?
You know, an easy and proper way to handle this would be to have a governmental entity maintain a blocklist which ordinary citizens can optionally install/use/turn on/turn off (with some easy to use software). See it like a seatbelt (I know the seatbelt is required by law in some countries but in this case it doesn't kill you to not use it) which you can switch on and off. This would be an excellent example of the government aiding the public instead of dictating the public. Those of us who know what we're getting ourselves into when we turn it off of never install it can choose freely, and those who don't bother to learn can fallback on this solution -- free to anytime educate themselves and turn it off.
This way the government offers a safe choice (with whatever blocked content, be it copyright infringement or not) yet is liberal enough to let you decide in the end. If you get "hurt", then you're to blame for deliberately turning it off while being uninformed. And the rest of us get to keep the net undictated. At the end of the day the friction is between people who know what they're doing and want to be free to do what they consider to be the best way to utilize the net, and those who don't know what they're doing that are in need of this type of protection.
Isn't a cookie of size 2 molecules technically known as a Crumb?
Or two Plack cookies (Ö, pron. "yummy").
What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?
I completely [TOO SMALL? WANT TO GET IT BIGGER? VISIT XXXXX.COM] agree with you. There [THIRSTY? DRINK COKE, IT'S HEALTHY] is absolutely [ARE YOU TIRED? SLEEPY? TRY RED BULL, IT WILL MAKE YOU FLY!] nothing to be [TRY THE NEW MCBURGER, YOUR TONGUE WILL THANK YOU!] annoyed about.
Ok, so this system proves that your vote reached the tally server, but how does it prove that your vote is actually in the total?
I'm serious. Just because your vote wasn't lost, doesn't mean it was counted. This helps guard against grievous mistakes, not against wholesale fraud.
I'm confused, are you replying to me? I only answered his question if we are concerned about votes not being counted. I never said nor did I imply that this was the right or the wrong way to do it.
But to answer your question, the only way to make sure of this is if the software that is in use is completely open source. That way anybody who's interested may view the source and follow the the procedure, from submission to results.
but are we that concerned about votes not being counted?
I was about to write a long reply about how democracy depends on the fact that bla bla bla... and how you cannot trust people, especially what in politics and bla bla bla... but you asked a simple question so I'll give you a simple answer:
Yes.
PayPal has always owned it:
The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com. X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999, initially as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal
That doesn't add up. According to this article the existing single-letter second-level domains were all registered before 1993, as in 1993 IANA reserved the remaining domains. Originally x.com was owned by Weinstein & DePaolis. Some half assed googling led me to this, which isn't much. And a quick whois showed that they also own x.cx, judging by the email used.
You are trolling since you're trying to imply that this is the first time a flaw was found in the Linux kernel. This has happened numerous times, and it has been posted on /. numerous times, and there's always some fucking troll saying "If this was Windows...". Who the fuck cares!? Why make everything into some political bullshit with extremists throwing rocks at eachother?
I'm going to drop a bomb here and it might shock you all, but it's the truth, here it goes: Linux is not perfect nor did anybody with half a brain claim it to be so.
There now troll elsewhere.
Wow you truly are an idiot. This is my last post because this is getting fucking tiresome. When you copy you do not "steal a copy" as that would, once again, mean that the owner has lost that copy. And I never said that violating copyright was right, I only said that copying != theft, so try your kindergarten rhetorics elsewhere.
And what would happen if all of these homebrewers, as (correct me if I'm wrong) is very likely amongst homebrewers, didn't bother to charge for their software?
Microsoft already solved this in its Xbox Live Indie Games environment: a price floor of 400 MP ($5.00), or 200 MP for games weighing under some size in megabytes.
And why is this the right way to do it? The way I see it with Nintendo you have the option to distribute it at whatever cost you want, allowing you to distribute free games with other sources of income (linking some parts to e.g. a web site where ads will cover your costs). Thus the investment risk is entirely on the developer side. Microsoft had a solution, so did Nintendo. They both generate revenue, only their sources are different. Microsoft gets theirs from players, Nintendo gets theirs from developers. Players don't make money on games, developers do. As stated, this isn't about the "right" way or the "wrong" way. It's about different approaches producing different results. Both the Xbox 360 and Wii have plenty of games, so there is no shortage. Honestly I'm not suffering from the high prices of Wii dev kits, if you're a serious developer (indie or not) with a good idea you'll make money, and if you only want a playground to play around in then Nintendo charges $1700 for theirs -- there is no gun pointed at your head and you may at any time play in Microsofts playground instead. Let supply and demand do its thing. Time will tell which solution was best.
If the additional revenue from the console maker's commission from sales of games developed by part-time developers outweigh the lost revenue from selling devkits at a reduced price, then revenue increases.
And what would happen if all of these homebrewers, as (correct me if I'm wrong) is very likely amongst homebrewers, didn't bother to charge for their software? Look I'm not bashing the idea of homebrewing, but obviously Nintendo values their ordinary players/consumers the most. Their products are way cheaper for the average consumer than their competitors.
Then what is?
Aren't Xbox and Playstation dev kits cheap?
uhuh, go go failchopters?
a car crash is nothing like a computer infected with a virus....
and wouldn't most people just say it servs the idiot who stole the car right. while we are putting disjointed idea's together, how about houses made of coke bottles vs pepsi bottles?
Oh oh semantics! I love this game! Here, let me try: what about a worm? Or is that still the users fault for not being behind a firewall? Is a person with Windows supposed to always assume that his machine is vulnerable unless firewalled? And can you haul this responsibility to the firewall manufacturer if there is a breach anyway? Wouldn't this, in terms of car analogies, mean that a car owner should always assume that his car has manufacturing error unless frequently visitng a car shop? And that any responsibility for accidents caused by manufacturing error can be hauled on the car shops?
Wow, wouldn't that be a convenient world for producers...
No it is not different, you are violating a license and violating the law, if everybody is free to choose which law to follow and which to not follow, so find somebody can say "I don't think rape is a crime, so I will rape whenever I like". PERIOD
It doesn't matter how much you repeat it to yourself that pirating software is different than stealing, it will still be stealing and violating a license.
So what you're saying is that copying is the same as theft, when theft clearly produces different outcomes where the victim loses his possession whilst when copying -- the victim does not. And that there is no possibility for both theft and copying to be illegal, they both must be called theft. There is a reason why there are two words for two different actions, and your inability to comprehend this makes you my dear sir a ranting idiot -- period.
Oh, I have paid for legit student copies of MS products. But they always come hamstrung with things like a 1 install limit, so if you reformat you're SOL. That's why you have to resort to piracy to be able to use what you actually paid for.
No. In the Windows World of Pain you have to pay for the "software" again. That's the way the game works. If you are foolish enough to buy software with a 1 install limit, you're just going to have to pay each time you have to re-install it. Tough
Everybody knows that Windows requires regular reinstallation, so you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Ever heard of the phrase "For minor issues reboot, for major issues reinstall"? MS glanced at that and went "I bet we can make profit on this too" -- and so they obviously did. Next up: reboot for a modest sum of $10.
Why don't you use Linux for free instead of stealing??? I don't understand really
First: copying != theft != rape != murder. And no it's not "almost the same". It's fucking different, get that, period. Second: yes he should use Linux instead.
Are you saying that Nintendo should intentionally lower their revenue or raise the consumer price?
No, emag and I are saying that Nintendo should follow Apple's model of the iPhone developer program and the App Store, which in turn is a carbon copy of Microsoft's XNA Creators Club and Xbox Live Indie Games. But instead, Nintendo chooses to discriminate against people for whom developing video games is something other than a day job.
Wait what? Discriminate? Are you fucking serious? It's a source of income to match the revenue forecast. Either that comes from raising console prices/lowering dev kit prices, or keeping it the way it is. Not everybody is a homebrewer, so why should dev kits be considered as something "enjoyed by everyone"? Also as I clearly stated Nintendo is choosing another strategy, if you want to be a homebrewer perhaps it's not the console for you. But we already know that consoles cannot meet all criterias. However it is still very popular for indie developers, so all in all, I have lost nothing, so I'm still ok with drawing the longer straw.
It seems to me that it's more the large number of developers, and the diversity of games/apps, that could be a bigger issue. Sure, immediacy is nice, but...if Nintendo keeps up the policy of charging multi-thousands of dollars for a dev kit, with a requirement that it _must_ be a business location (no home offices), I don't see 3G as being much help...
I don't understand. Are you saying that Nintendo should intentionally lower their revenue or raise the consumer price? Because you can forget the former, and I hope you will forget the latter. Nintendo consoles have plenty of developers. I don't see why you assume that there is a shortage.
So Nintendo runs a different business model, which obviously produces different results, and pays off. Would you much rather have 3 clones of console makers, than the two already existing (Microsoft & Sony) ones? You saw what happened to Sega, right? Nintendo chose their own path of innovation rather than expansion.
But yes, I'd much rather see lower console prices, lower game prices and lower licensing prices. Then again I'd be living in a fairytale. For now I'm happy with drawing the longer straw.