Sure it can. Pops, hisses, and clicks can all show up when transcoding, and that's a loss of quality that will annoy any listener who isn't used to cranking the volume on blown out speakers.
(Disclaimer: I don't know about AAC specifically, but I've tried transcoding a couple things between lossy formats, and it was a complete no-go)
I often download stuff that *might* be a virus, but I've found that generally, anything I'm actually suspicious of isn't worth opening. I don't even run Windows based AV software anymore, since I find re-installing Windows to be far too routine on all the machines that run it, and all the important stuff resides on more locked down *nix boxes, where I have been less lenient with execute permissions.
Read about lot's of seven year olds who got to some unlocked toolboxes and maimed themselves though. Guess that's just survival of the fittest? I don't know when I was seven, I had shot a.22 (and thus had a healthy respect for guns, rather than a desire to mess with them), used a chainsaw (with an adult holding it as well), and driven a tractor. If parents introduce these things to kids, kids are less likely to seek them out, and that means less accidental injuries and deaths. Go figure.
Why?
What benefit is derived from drawing a line?
I can say "a line must be drawn" too, watch: br>A line must be drawn. All people who believe that a purely fictitious depiction should be censored are fascists.
A line must be drawn. Those who believe that censorship can work are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and we must fight like the heroic Joe McCarthy to protect our freedom-loving country from these evil invaders.
But seriously, what the hell. If you believe in censorship, than as far as I'm concerned, your no better than the Muslims who sent death threats to cartoonists. There's the line I'm drawing.
The whole point for me isn't that DRM increases piracy
...
it's that it inconveniences normal users and doesn't hinder the proper pirates who have experience bypassing copy protection schemes.
Exactly. And thanks to games like CoD2, and Forged Alliance, along with Steam, I no longer purchase any game that a)Requires a CD be in the drive to play. b)Ties itself to a particular machine. c)Installs what amounts to malware on my computer.
That was part of what caused me to abandon WoW as well. The whole "collect 10 of X where X has a 60% drop chance on these creatures" mean I should have to kill appx 15-16 of the stupid critters, not 20, 30, or in one case 50.
Which games? I've never heard of a game like that. Also, there is such a thing as a middle ground. Games can model that sort of information without requiring that the player account for it unless the player tries to shoot from extreme distances. At 100 yards, most of those factors are irrelevant. At 400 yards, the bullet takes half a second to arrive at the target, and falls maybe a foot (depending on the source). At 1200 yards, the bullet is falling several feet, and the travel time is multiple seconds. For CoD, though, even the 400 yard shots are few and far between, so making the distinction between cover and concealment is probably more important. It all depends on the game.
Back before there was a good offline mode, I worked around it by the simple (relatively) expedient of borrowing a steam account from a friend who didn't have a moral objection to needing to be online to play a single player game. I got to not support a DRM scheme I didn't agree with, not break the law or pirate the game, and play the game. Since Valve introduced offline mode, more than half of my gaming dollars go through that store. Prices are often but not always a bit lower, and I love the convenience of not needing discs or anything. Go to friends house, borrow his old machine, log into Steam with my account, and we're LANing.
Breaking the law because you disagree with the law is also called civil disobedience. It usually involves being willing to challenge the law in court if the authorities press the issue, and is internationally regarded with considerable esteem as a tool to fight for societal change. See Mahatma Ghandi, or Martin Luther King for more details.
Whether most pirates are actually intending their actions to be interpreted this way, however, is something you would have to ask them about.
Pirating the game is often used (effectively or not, I cannot say) for another reason: to do harm.
I know somebody who got burned by DRM. He bought an EA game, which had StarForce on it. It would not work, and it bricked his DVD burner. Which was worth 100$. EA wouldn't replace it, wouldn't offer any method to fix it, wouldn't even refund him for the game. The categorically refused to even admit that the DRM might have been at fault. The way he sees it, he's out more 150$ plus time and irritation, EA is to blame, and EA is now trying to do the same thing to other people. He pirates every EA game that has any copy protection, not to play it, but to give it to people that would otherwise have paid for it. To hurt EAs sales, and to send a different message: the DRM isn't working. No matter what you do, we're still not paying.
Now his actions may or may not be morally justified. Revenge, even through legal means (punitive damages) is always morally grey. But he does still buy every game he actually plays.
I realize that, as a game developer, you have a dim view of piracy. But you also have to remember that not every game developer has the track record that you do with regards to dealing with customers in an open and aboveboard manner. What's more, thanks to laws like the DMCA, even attempting to troubleshoot the problems caused by StarForce becomes criminal. People feel persecuted, and they choose to fight back. When people fight back against a company, they usually go for the area where the company feels the most pain, the bottom line. What else can you do? Even taking EA to small claims court, the likelihood of recovering any money is negligible, and the cost of doing so makes it pointless.
To some people, it's a war, or at least a skirmish. EA certainly seems to see it, IIRC they've even used phrases such as "Arms Race". If you describe people as your enemies, you should expect them to behave as your enemies.
It isn't very hard to stop people shoplifting though. Do what they do with the console games, keep the disc behind the counter until the game is paid for. Just put the shiny box out front. Course, you would have to get rid of CD keys, since the box would now have to be open, or keep the keys behind the counter as well.
Is this Apple TV haxored in some way?
I still really want an Apple TV that I can attach external drives to, using the USB port that it has, so that I can boot it off of said external drive, and make it run linux, than leave a dvd drive hooked up to it.
Why can't anyone make and sell this kind of nice hardware and let me run whatever the hell I want on it?
Iraq was protected by international law, right?
What about Afghanistan?
What about Kuwait?
Pre-Russia Afghanistan?
Vietnam?
Where are the teeth in international law, where is the force that is used to make the law reality?
Law is an imposition of will through the threat of violence. What violence befalls those who disregard international law?
Then it's more like guidelines anyhow.
But the instructions of the cop on the street supercede normal traffic rules according to law.
The laws barring those companies from providing that information superceded the orders to provide that information.
Coercion might be a defense, but that would be something that would have to be brought up in trial. Immunity prevents the trial altogether, and the question of whether or not there should be repercussions, and against whom, is sidestepped.
The legal questions that should have been explored in this sort of trial would have been along the lines of "If the government threatens and cajoles until I commit a crime, who is the criminal?". Immunity means that the legal answer is "If the government wanted it done, it clearly was not a crime. All hail King Bush".
As Wal-Mart and others have consistently demonstrated, the only way to sell *anything* that isn't a race to 0 is to differentiate. If your good is a commodity, sooner or later, you'll be making as close to $0/unit as you can get without going out of business.
Here's the question at the root of the issue:
I am on site and ready to work. Employer provided hardware is not yet ready for me to work. Is this (a)My time, meaning that I am required to be at the office for unpaid time which is not part of my normal working day or (b) the employers time, meaning that my shift, which I am to be paid for is more than eight hours, or my productive time is less than my eight hour shift?
Try leaving your PC on and ready to work. Just lock the screen. Don't even turn off the monitor, and disable all the power management. That generally does the trick, as far as chopping 14 minutes off on each end.
Exactly. The same goes the other way too, I don't demand that I get paid for an extra half an hour when I come in early and kill some time on Slashdot. I just don't start working until I'm supposed to, unless they *want* me to get overtime.
Only if you believe that those people:
(a) Should be caught and punished.
(b) Should be found by the TSA, when the TSA's mandate is only related to keeping mass transit safe.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it can. Pops, hisses, and clicks can all show up when transcoding, and that's a loss of quality that will annoy any listener who isn't used to cranking the volume on blown out speakers.
(Disclaimer: I don't know about AAC specifically, but I've tried transcoding a couple things between lossy formats, and it was a complete no-go)
I often download stuff that *might* be a virus, but I've found that generally, anything I'm actually suspicious of isn't worth opening. I don't even run Windows based AV software anymore, since I find re-installing Windows to be far too routine on all the machines that run it, and all the important stuff resides on more locked down *nix boxes, where I have been less lenient with execute permissions.
Read about lot's of seven year olds who got to some unlocked toolboxes and maimed themselves though. Guess that's just survival of the fittest? I don't know when I was seven, I had shot a .22 (and thus had a healthy respect for guns, rather than a desire to mess with them), used a chainsaw (with an adult holding it as well), and driven a tractor. If parents introduce these things to kids, kids are less likely to seek them out, and that means less accidental injuries and deaths. Go figure.
Damn, /. hid the tags. Only the last sentence was non-sarcastic.
Why?
What benefit is derived from drawing a line?
I can say "a line must be drawn" too, watch: br>A line must be drawn. All people who believe that a purely fictitious depiction should be censored are fascists.
A line must be drawn. Those who believe that censorship can work are the enemies of freedom and democracy, and we must fight like the heroic Joe McCarthy to protect our freedom-loving country from these evil invaders.
But seriously, what the hell. If you believe in censorship, than as far as I'm concerned, your no better than the Muslims who sent death threats to cartoonists. There's the line I'm drawing.
I wonder if we can get people who prosecute this sort of thing labelled as 'terrorist' prosecutors...
The whole point for me isn't that DRM increases piracy
...
it's that it inconveniences normal users and doesn't hinder the proper pirates who have experience bypassing copy protection schemes.
Exactly. And thanks to games like CoD2, and Forged Alliance, along with Steam, I no longer purchase any game that a)Requires a CD be in the drive to play. b)Ties itself to a particular machine. c)Installs what amounts to malware on my computer.
Which I did not buy (or pirate) because I was worried about the DRM. Still haven't played it, though it looks awesome.
That was part of what caused me to abandon WoW as well. The whole "collect 10 of X where X has a 60% drop chance on these creatures" mean I should have to kill appx 15-16 of the stupid critters, not 20, 30, or in one case 50.
Which games? I've never heard of a game like that. Also, there is such a thing as a middle ground. Games can model that sort of information without requiring that the player account for it unless the player tries to shoot from extreme distances. At 100 yards, most of those factors are irrelevant. At 400 yards, the bullet takes half a second to arrive at the target, and falls maybe a foot (depending on the source). At 1200 yards, the bullet is falling several feet, and the travel time is multiple seconds. For CoD, though, even the 400 yard shots are few and far between, so making the distinction between cover and concealment is probably more important. It all depends on the game.
Consider the source before marking the parent a Troll. (Flamebait, otoh, is harder to dispute).
Anyway, anonymity is worthless in political speech if it can be bypassed by the force of government.
Log into his account. Go into offline mode. He can resume playing his other games.
Back before there was a good offline mode, I worked around it by the simple (relatively) expedient of borrowing a steam account from a friend who didn't have a moral objection to needing to be online to play a single player game. I got to not support a DRM scheme I didn't agree with, not break the law or pirate the game, and play the game. Since Valve introduced offline mode, more than half of my gaming dollars go through that store. Prices are often but not always a bit lower, and I love the convenience of not needing discs or anything. Go to friends house, borrow his old machine, log into Steam with my account, and we're LANing.
Breaking the law because you disagree with the law is also called civil disobedience. It usually involves being willing to challenge the law in court if the authorities press the issue, and is internationally regarded with considerable esteem as a tool to fight for societal change. See Mahatma Ghandi, or Martin Luther King for more details.
Whether most pirates are actually intending their actions to be interpreted this way, however, is something you would have to ask them about.
Pirating the game is often used (effectively or not, I cannot say) for another reason: to do harm.
I know somebody who got burned by DRM. He bought an EA game, which had StarForce on it. It would not work, and it bricked his DVD burner. Which was worth 100$. EA wouldn't replace it, wouldn't offer any method to fix it, wouldn't even refund him for the game. The categorically refused to even admit that the DRM might have been at fault. The way he sees it, he's out more 150$ plus time and irritation, EA is to blame, and EA is now trying to do the same thing to other people. He pirates every EA game that has any copy protection, not to play it, but to give it to people that would otherwise have paid for it. To hurt EAs sales, and to send a different message: the DRM isn't working. No matter what you do, we're still not paying.
Now his actions may or may not be morally justified. Revenge, even through legal means (punitive damages) is always morally grey. But he does still buy every game he actually plays.
I realize that, as a game developer, you have a dim view of piracy. But you also have to remember that not every game developer has the track record that you do with regards to dealing with customers in an open and aboveboard manner. What's more, thanks to laws like the DMCA, even attempting to troubleshoot the problems caused by StarForce becomes criminal. People feel persecuted, and they choose to fight back. When people fight back against a company, they usually go for the area where the company feels the most pain, the bottom line. What else can you do? Even taking EA to small claims court, the likelihood of recovering any money is negligible, and the cost of doing so makes it pointless.
To some people, it's a war, or at least a skirmish. EA certainly seems to see it, IIRC they've even used phrases such as "Arms Race". If you describe people as your enemies, you should expect them to behave as your enemies.
It isn't very hard to stop people shoplifting though. Do what they do with the console games, keep the disc behind the counter until the game is paid for. Just put the shiny box out front. Course, you would have to get rid of CD keys, since the box would now have to be open, or keep the keys behind the counter as well.
Is this Apple TV haxored in some way? I still really want an Apple TV that I can attach external drives to, using the USB port that it has, so that I can boot it off of said external drive, and make it run linux, than leave a dvd drive hooked up to it.
Why can't anyone make and sell this kind of nice hardware and let me run whatever the hell I want on it?
Iraq was protected by international law, right?
What about Afghanistan?
What about Kuwait?
Pre-Russia Afghanistan?
Vietnam?
Where are the teeth in international law, where is the force that is used to make the law reality?
Law is an imposition of will through the threat of violence. What violence befalls those who disregard international law?
Then it's more like guidelines anyhow.
One hopes that 'legal ramifications' == 'hanged for treason' but I doubt anyone has the balls.
But the instructions of the cop on the street supercede normal traffic rules according to law.
The laws barring those companies from providing that information superceded the orders to provide that information.
Coercion might be a defense, but that would be something that would have to be brought up in trial. Immunity prevents the trial altogether, and the question of whether or not there should be repercussions, and against whom, is sidestepped.
The legal questions that should have been explored in this sort of trial would have been along the lines of "If the government threatens and cajoles until I commit a crime, who is the criminal?". Immunity means that the legal answer is "If the government wanted it done, it clearly was not a crime. All hail King Bush".
As Wal-Mart and others have consistently demonstrated, the only way to sell *anything* that isn't a race to 0 is to differentiate. If your good is a commodity, sooner or later, you'll be making as close to $0/unit as you can get without going out of business.
Here's the question at the root of the issue: I am on site and ready to work. Employer provided hardware is not yet ready for me to work. Is this (a)My time, meaning that I am required to be at the office for unpaid time which is not part of my normal working day or (b) the employers time, meaning that my shift, which I am to be paid for is more than eight hours, or my productive time is less than my eight hour shift?
Try leaving your PC on and ready to work. Just lock the screen. Don't even turn off the monitor, and disable all the power management. That generally does the trick, as far as chopping 14 minutes off on each end.
Exactly. The same goes the other way too, I don't demand that I get paid for an extra half an hour when I come in early and kill some time on Slashdot. I just don't start working until I'm supposed to, unless they *want* me to get overtime.
Only if you believe that those people:
(a) Should be caught and punished.
(b) Should be found by the TSA, when the TSA's mandate is only related to keeping mass transit safe.