um... what? ABS increases your stopping distance? Help me out with your logic here since I'm no car pro... ABS works by keeping your tires in the static friction arena and avoiding moving into dynamic friction since static friction is greater. ABS works by feathering the breaking when it detects a tire slipping with respect to the other three, leading to not skidding, leadingto a reduction in your stopping distance.
"a person could break much better than ABS if he/she just knew what he/she was doing..." I'm expecting this type of argument but i have a hard time believing that an engineer couldn't design a better stopping mechanism with ABS than even the best person could do without ABS. Similar to how high tech automatic transmissions can out perform even the best drivers now a days... With modern computers, mechanics can out perform human reflexes.
Your statement sounds like BS to me, but since I don't know anything about your logic I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and ask you to enlighten me.
Right, 20 pieces of flair is pretty stupid IMHO... i think it's a lot more interesting if you're paying for items that actually make a difference. The summary was very specific to point out that this isn't what you're doing, but why not? All you have to do is make the items that you can buy also items you can skill up to.
Think about it this way... there are kids out there who have all the time in the world, either on summer break, or they just have free time, etc. And there are adults who want to play but they have jobs with families but for them, time is more valuable than money. Allowing players to buy weapons or exp or gold Its a good way to level the playing field a bit.
[this is a total flamebait rant and i expect it to be modded as such, but i needed to vent. This is not aimed at you et764 any more than everybody else here.]
Ok... shut up already. I can't take this crap anymore!
You guys are all morons! You've bought into Republican talking head news media bias crap hook line and sinker. You all somehow think that the massively biased fox news is equivalent to news networks that try to maintain unbaised news??? OMG, they're not perfect, they at least try to be unbaised... but now a days "thinking" and using "logic" are things like questioning your president are considered strong liberal bias.
Yes, it's true, nobody is unbaised. However I firmly believe that the vast majority of news outlets (fox not included) are NOT covered by people who sit down in the morning and say "how can i spin this to make (insert side here) look good?"
This is such a strawman BS issue to try and justify the screwed up propaganda at fox news by saying 'everybody is doing it' and you people are all propagating it over and over and over. Learn to think for yourselves and open your eyes to the propaganda that you're buying.
No news is perfect, but no that doesn't mean that everybody needs an (R) or (D) by their names!
An "immediate drop in oil prices" is a stupid concept on it's face. Oil prices are set by oil futures which don't go out 5 or 10 years. Nobody is paying today for oil 10 years out.
Oil prices are set by supply and demand the cost of oil in the next few months up to maybe a year, not the next five. No matter how many times you repeat this BS it's still just BS.
Anyone who has ever read a patent can tell you that there is no knowledge contained within it. They're all designed to be obtuse and general and hard to read. Even if patents were free, no one with any intelligence would EVER think "hey, rather than invent something I'll just find a patent and copy that!"
My name is on several patents... and even when I came up with the idea, the official documents are hard as hell to get through and there is no way I would get anything from them if i didn't understand it in the first place.
It's laughable that somehow these patents represent some big warehouse of knowledge that is for the benefit of all. Incredibility, mind-bogglingly, insanely laughable.
yes! I think you hit the nail on the head it so I'll re-emphise it.
High School Physics is the first place students get to see math as a tool. Sure you have word problems before that, but who gives a crap about two trains and when they cross paths? In physics class all the useless math that has been crammed down your throat with boring repetition and memorization finally becomes a tool!
To me, that's when the magic happens, thats when students become engineers, that's when they start to look at the world around them through engineer's eyes, and that's when they apply the tools that have been useless up until that point.
Most of the equations that were listed off by someone earlier who said (in high and mighty voice) "for a successful HS physics class you should learn this: blah blah blah". For me, I don't care... i think HS physics class is a success if the student comes away excited abobut science and physics and understands that the math they learned can be applied to real world problems in order to achieve successful results.
I guess i don't care about Spore. I read a review that I thought was good at one point, but currently i don't have any inclination to pirate the game. Personally I emotionally tend to prefer the grand parents mentality and not supporting companies that pull this crap so i don't want to use their software. I was arguing more from a theoretical standpoint of what hurts this software company more.
I've already admitted in previous posts that I pirate software but that I rarely pirate PC games becuase I want to support PC game developers. Frankly I'm a professional engineering and I don't really care about plunking down $50 for a good game (if it's good!)... but it'll be a cold day in hell before I put down money for a game that monitors the number of times i install it and makes me call up begging to be allowed to continue using the game i bought.
I have a hard enough time with XP and I truely despised the feeling I got when I had to call up MS and "justify" why i wanted to install the fucking software i own again on my own damn machine. I don't feel i have any choice with MS (becuase i play PC games a lot) so bear it... but i'll be damned if i purchase an optional piece of software and get fucked over by it!
So lets say that you bought a new stereo system and it breaks. You find out that the customer services SUCKS with this company so you log onto a customer review site and complain. Perfectly valid and in fact there are a TON of reviews just like this for many products on Amazon. This however has NOTHING to do with how good the sounds was coming out of the stereo or the usability of the stereo... Is that still a valid review?
What if photoshop had something written into their legaleze that said that everything you created with said version of photoshop was wholely owned by the makers of photoshop and not you. Would it be ok for you to go onto the site and "review" their product and point this out?
I think this "flash mob" is perfectly in the right with their review slamming. I almost bought the game a little bit ago but saw the reviews and changed my mind because I thought their negative ratings were COMPLETELY VALID and changed my mind on weather i should buy the product or not.
(BTW... lets not call it a "flash mob" if we can help it. That makes it sound like a hand full of people who are doing this rather than an "internet uprising" against a corporation that seeks to redefine the accepted software use model in the industry.)
Actually another way to look at it is as lost sales. If the game is massively popular and they *could* have made a ton of money off it by not pissing on their customer base, then it sucks even more than if the game itself blew chunks to begin with.
The goal is to prove to them is that this DRM scheme and the 3 install crap stuff will lose them more money than the piracy they're theoretically preventing.
Um... "how many times do you have to call them before they cut you off?" Who gives a shit? Look... we all have a choice of purchasing the game or DLing a copy off of the internet. I prefer to purchase my PC games, but I will NOT purchase a game that has a system like this.
MS can get away with this crap because they have a monopoly... what a massive pain in the ass to do this for every lame ass game that comes out! I for one am not going to pay money to have some company bend me over the barrel. Fuck that! And fuck any game that is sold with a system like this.
And regarding steam: I'm with you... I actually like steam. It just works. I don't have to go find my CD's to play them or install them... there's value added to their "copy protection" scheme... so much so that I also prefer to buy games on Steam.
Don't let DRM take away your power as a consumer!
d
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 1
My personal thoughts on ads are:
Ads are mind pollution. Avoid them whenever you can.
(There are exceptions to the rule, but not enough to be worth a damn.)
"All of those cities are heavily dependent on desert ecosystem, which is very fragile."
Can you explain this more? I was working under the belief that the primary reason to preserve the desert and it's ecosystem for the people who live there was scenic... as in the beauty of the landscape. That's a totally valid reason and one i support, but i didn't really think there was a lot of other benefits from the ecosystem.
Las Vegas, Reno, I always saw them as having to bring in everythingg from the outside. Food, water, etc. Perhaps they draw from the local water tables a little, but beyond that ??? I don't see the ecosystem benefits.
I guess i'd like to understand what you're referring to.
No matter where you go there's a huge ecosystem to destroy. Maybe I live in a make believe world, but i believe that a lot more things would live in the shade provided by solar panels (assuming that they're mounted) than would have been there before the panels were installed.
I don't think anybody's really theorizing about crapping all over the desert other than what it takes to build the sites. From a NIMBY aspect, this seems pretty tame.
I don't value your plants and critters more or less than mine, but I do weigh value based upon quantity of life and the uniqueness of life. Those are the two things that I think need to be weighted when you talk about environmental damage. Actually, the third thing which must be weighted is "how long will it take the ecosystem to recover". That's probably the biggest place where the desert should get it's due.
The desert is an area that is a lot less in demand than many (most?) other areas of our planet and this is a lot less destructive than many of the things that have been done in the name of power generation.
I mean, I like the desert as much as the next guy, but if i were to list the places that should be left pristine and untouched, the desert would be low on the list. it just isn't that nice to live in IMHO and there isn't a huge ecosystem there to destroy.
I'm not advocating that we all get ATV's and tear up the entire desert, but with roads and simple rules we can preserve what doesn't have to be trampled on.
I mean, if you're going to screw up SOMEPLACE with solar panels or wind farms, that's about the best place we could have hoped for.
Ok... here's whats interesting... I don't have an ethical problem with piracy. It doesn't have to be a test drive or anything, I just don't see myself harming anyone by doing it.
My ethics revolve around judging how my actions hurt other people and that's why software piracy doesn't really bother me. It's like pirating music. Who gets hurt by me listening to a track that wouldn't have listened to before? If there's a small indy band selling CD's that I like I always try to buy it to support them, but if some huge mega-conglomerate is selling something i don't think anything of DLing their music off the internet.
I don't want to get caught and I don't want spyware on my computer, and if i find something that I use a lot I want to pay for it, solely to support the people who made it, not "to be legal" or anything, but to give something back.
"I cross the line when i decide that I like the project but not the offered price...". In the end it's all free market economics, it's just more of a mind game.
If all the software was $10 bucks i wouldn't think anything of becoming totally legal. If all the software was $400 a pop, I wouldn't have a single legal thing on my computer. It's all about value to me and me wanting to feel good that I'm supporting the people who write the stuff i like.
I could go on and on, but my point was that it's all economics in the end. Sometimes I think a piece of software is very good, but i only use it a few times a year so I don't want to pony up $100 for a copy. Sometimes the price is too high, sometimes it's difficult to get (I don't live in the US). It's all economics. Time, effort, money vs the good feeling i get knowing i'm giving my money to the people who have made my life better.
To bring this back on topic, in the end i think that's all the game developer can do to deal with pirates. Why do people pirate? It's easier than paying for a product. If you offer a feature (like online play) that justifies buying the game poeple will buy your product. Some people will always pirate your game, for some it will depend on the cost of the game, others will pirate becuase you have or don't have DRM. In the end i think it all comes down to convincing people that they *want* to pay for your game. That you're a small developer who should be supported or that you get some cool online features that you wouldn't get otherwise.
At least that's my 2 cents. That's how i view the pirate scene.
I pirate software and i enjoy the feeling of freedom I get when I want to do something (video editing, photo editing, burning a DVD, or creating something cool) and I can do it without that agonizing over the question "am i buying the right product?" and that depressing feeling I get watching money flow from my wallet without knowing if i'm spending it in the right place.
However I *want* to pay money for the products that I like. About 25% off the software i use I want to pay money for BECAUSE I think it rocks. Unfortunately some software, even though I like, I won't pay for becuase the cost is too high (i'm looking at you photoshop)... so they get bubkis.
I started pirating when i was a kid and never stopped and I'm a professional engineer now so i can afford just about anything i want software wise (with the exception of some professional tools like solidworks or something).
So for now, I think for now I'll stick with my current model. If a company writes good software and charges a reasonable fee, and I'll gladly pay for it after the fact.
(BTW, PC games are actually a completely different story. Their cost is almost never outside of my budget and I want to support the PC gaming industry so it doesn't go away and get taken over by the console gaming industry. It's rare that I pirate a game.)
....an unlimited line of credit seems ill-timed considering the whole reality of taxes being reduced repeatedly over Dubya's term.
That's like saying "it's ok dear, i put my shopping on my credit card and therefore i didn't spend any money."
The fact that we're in massive debt spending is even more to the grand parents point than how much today's tax rate is. I don't find his comment ill-timed at all.
um... we get a long with cows pretty well... at least from our stand point.
Although you're right, eradication is an advantage if they are a direct competitor. However you can easily substitute race, religion, or nation for "species" and you can say the exact same thing. The fact that we're all humans matters not at all from a "pass of your genetics" point of view. All that matters is that YOUR genetics or close family genetics survive.
hey... can you point to some raw manga or where you got said manga? I tried looking for that online at one point but didn't have any luck.
I've been interested in doing just what you described for a little bit now. (I've been living in japan and learning the language for the past 2 yrs and I've been wanting to work on my reading skills.)
No, you're not alone in thinking full immersion classes are stupid and ineffective. I think it's part that you're an engineer (i'm projecting here), so we tend to classify things in our heads. If you can't classify things then it becomes MUCH more difficult to retain the information.
In the silly total immersion method of teaching you must figure out what/how a grammer point is from the examples before you can classify it. Whereas the engineer in me wants to classify it right away and THEN "test" how well that classification works against the example use cases to find out where it differs from my expectation. Other people might be able to pick it up the other way, but it would take me 3-5x as long to do that.
I'm currently living in Japan and have been for about the past 2 yrs. Neither my wife or i spoke a lick of Japanese when we came over here and now we're both basically understandable for most commen things. I'm taking a mix of classes some of which are entirely in japanese and tutoring where I can speak english. I try to learn all the new stuff in the english tought japanese class so I'm not lost and confused during the full Japanese class. I find it works much better that way.
yeah... actually well his quote was appropriate for the situation. The full quote didn't work, so i just used a slice... however quoting JMS was intentional.
I'm a lot more inclined to put some heads on some pikes as a warning to future generations. That'll work much better than "passing a law" as to "make it illegal in the future"... guess what, it's illegal NOW. Why do you think they're asking for immunity?
The whole problem is that the current administration has run rough-shot over the laws by violating them and then thumbing their noses at us and show us how little teeth the current batch of laws has over them. And your solution is to pass a law? Screw that. I'm all in favor of taking a tier 1 telcom company and burning it to the ground so maybe next time they'll actually protect the citizens rights instead of kowtowing to a schmuck president. After that, THEN pass a law and poeple will actually take notice.
They had a duty to us, the citizens, and they screwed us. Fuck 'em. And unfortunately, they're just a poor substitute for the REAL criminals.
What's really the goal? why is this an issue? If the government is really looking for something specific in laptops there should be an automated process where they plug in a thumb drive on EVERYONE's laptop and sort through all your stuff, not some schmo rambling through your files who doesn't have a clue. That doesn't do squat and serves no meaningful purpose.
Really, what the hell are they looking for? This almost seems like the government equivalent of a governmental Mt Everest. They do it "because they can". It seems to me the same as giving everyone a drug test as they cross the border and then arresting those who test positive.
There's nothing that is getting "smuggled" across our border on laptops that isn't going across in 1000x more massive streams over the internet. The idea that the fear of terrorism is involved is simply ludicrous. What's the thought here, that someone was writing their terrorist memorandum in MS word while on the plane and the border agent is going to turn on the laptop and see it???
Exactly, and maybe the car starts on a hill too! Then you don't have a closed system, you get GREAT miles per gallon (of water) and the laws of physics are maintained.
"Yeah, there's a hidden partition there that I've encrypted." "no, i'm not going to give you the key"
What are they going to do, deny you entry to the country even if you're a US citizen? Removing the property is about the best they can do.
They have no right to lock you up until you provide a password. Well... *maybe* if they dragged you in front of some immigration judge and he held you in contempt until you produced the password, but that's about the worst that could happen. Plus, if you know that's where you've been keeping evidence of your crimes or child porn or whatever, it's an easy decision to wait in jail for 60 days or whatever and then go free.
Slashdot Mirror
um... what? ABS increases your stopping distance? Help me out with your logic here since I'm no car pro... ABS works by keeping your tires in the static friction arena and avoiding moving into dynamic friction since static friction is greater. ABS works by feathering the breaking when it detects a tire slipping with respect to the other three, leading to not skidding, leadingto a reduction in your stopping distance.
"a person could break much better than ABS if he/she just knew what he/she was doing..." I'm expecting this type of argument but i have a hard time believing that an engineer couldn't design a better stopping mechanism with ABS than even the best person could do without ABS. Similar to how high tech automatic transmissions can out perform even the best drivers now a days... With modern computers, mechanics can out perform human reflexes.
Your statement sounds like BS to me, but since I don't know anything about your logic I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and ask you to enlighten me.
don
Right, 20 pieces of flair is pretty stupid IMHO... i think it's a lot more interesting if you're paying for items that actually make a difference. The summary was very specific to point out that this isn't what you're doing, but why not? All you have to do is make the items that you can buy also items you can skill up to.
Think about it this way... there are kids out there who have all the time in the world, either on summer break, or they just have free time, etc. And there are adults who want to play but they have jobs with families but for them, time is more valuable than money. Allowing players to buy weapons or exp or gold Its a good way to level the playing field a bit.
d
[this is a total flamebait rant and i expect it to be modded as such, but i needed to vent. This is not aimed at you et764 any more than everybody else here.]
Ok... shut up already. I can't take this crap anymore!
You guys are all morons! You've bought into Republican talking head news media bias crap hook line and sinker. You all somehow think that the massively biased fox news is equivalent to news networks that try to maintain unbaised news??? OMG, they're not perfect, they at least try to be unbaised... but now a days "thinking" and using "logic" are things like questioning your president are considered strong liberal bias.
Yes, it's true, nobody is unbaised. However I firmly believe that the vast majority of news outlets (fox not included) are NOT covered by people who sit down in the morning and say "how can i spin this to make (insert side here) look good?"
This is such a strawman BS issue to try and justify the screwed up propaganda at fox news by saying 'everybody is doing it' and you people are all propagating it over and over and over. Learn to think for yourselves and open your eyes to the propaganda that you're buying.
No news is perfect, but no that doesn't mean that everybody needs an (R) or (D) by their names!
d
An "immediate drop in oil prices" is a stupid concept on it's face. Oil prices are set by oil futures which don't go out 5 or 10 years. Nobody is paying today for oil 10 years out.
Oil prices are set by supply and demand the cost of oil in the next few months up to maybe a year, not the next five. No matter how many times you repeat this BS it's still just BS.
d
Anyone who has ever read a patent can tell you that there is no knowledge contained within it. They're all designed to be obtuse and general and hard to read. Even if patents were free, no one with any intelligence would EVER think "hey, rather than invent something I'll just find a patent and copy that!"
My name is on several patents... and even when I came up with the idea, the official documents are hard as hell to get through and there is no way I would get anything from them if i didn't understand it in the first place.
It's laughable that somehow these patents represent some big warehouse of knowledge that is for the benefit of all. Incredibility, mind-bogglingly, insanely laughable.
d
yes! I think you hit the nail on the head it so I'll re-emphise it.
High School Physics is the first place students get to see math as a tool. Sure you have word problems before that, but who gives a crap about two trains and when they cross paths? In physics class all the useless math that has been crammed down your throat with boring repetition and memorization finally becomes a tool!
To me, that's when the magic happens, thats when students become engineers, that's when they start to look at the world around them through engineer's eyes, and that's when they apply the tools that have been useless up until that point.
Most of the equations that were listed off by someone earlier who said (in high and mighty voice) "for a successful HS physics class you should learn this: blah blah blah". For me, I don't care... i think HS physics class is a success if the student comes away excited abobut science and physics and understands that the math they learned can be applied to real world problems in order to achieve successful results.
HS Physics = Applied Math (IMHO)
d
I guess i don't care about Spore. I read a review that I thought was good at one point, but currently i don't have any inclination to pirate the game. Personally I emotionally tend to prefer the grand parents mentality and not supporting companies that pull this crap so i don't want to use their software. I was arguing more from a theoretical standpoint of what hurts this software company more.
I've already admitted in previous posts that I pirate software but that I rarely pirate PC games becuase I want to support PC game developers. Frankly I'm a professional engineering and I don't really care about plunking down $50 for a good game (if it's good!)... but it'll be a cold day in hell before I put down money for a game that monitors the number of times i install it and makes me call up begging to be allowed to continue using the game i bought.
I have a hard enough time with XP and I truely despised the feeling I got when I had to call up MS and "justify" why i wanted to install the fucking software i own again on my own damn machine. I don't feel i have any choice with MS (becuase i play PC games a lot) so bear it... but i'll be damned if i purchase an optional piece of software and get fucked over by it!
d
So lets say that you bought a new stereo system and it breaks. You find out that the customer services SUCKS with this company so you log onto a customer review site and complain. Perfectly valid and in fact there are a TON of reviews just like this for many products on Amazon. This however has NOTHING to do with how good the sounds was coming out of the stereo or the usability of the stereo... Is that still a valid review?
What if photoshop had something written into their legaleze that said that everything you created with said version of photoshop was wholely owned by the makers of photoshop and not you. Would it be ok for you to go onto the site and "review" their product and point this out?
I think this "flash mob" is perfectly in the right with their review slamming. I almost bought the game a little bit ago but saw the reviews and changed my mind because I thought their negative ratings were COMPLETELY VALID and changed my mind on weather i should buy the product or not.
(BTW... lets not call it a "flash mob" if we can help it. That makes it sound like a hand full of people who are doing this rather than an "internet uprising" against a corporation that seeks to redefine the accepted software use model in the industry.)
d
Actually another way to look at it is as lost sales. If the game is massively popular and they *could* have made a ton of money off it by not pissing on their customer base, then it sucks even more than if the game itself blew chunks to begin with.
The goal is to prove to them is that this DRM scheme and the 3 install crap stuff will lose them more money than the piracy they're theoretically preventing.
d
Um... "how many times do you have to call them before they cut you off?" Who gives a shit? Look... we all have a choice of purchasing the game or DLing a copy off of the internet. I prefer to purchase my PC games, but I will NOT purchase a game that has a system like this.
MS can get away with this crap because they have a monopoly... what a massive pain in the ass to do this for every lame ass game that comes out! I for one am not going to pay money to have some company bend me over the barrel. Fuck that! And fuck any game that is sold with a system like this.
And regarding steam: I'm with you... I actually like steam. It just works. I don't have to go find my CD's to play them or install them... there's value added to their "copy protection" scheme... so much so that I also prefer to buy games on Steam.
Don't let DRM take away your power as a consumer!
d
My personal thoughts on ads are:
Ads are mind pollution. Avoid them whenever you can.
(There are exceptions to the rule, but not enough to be worth a damn.)
"All of those cities are heavily dependent on desert ecosystem, which is very fragile."
Can you explain this more? I was working under the belief that the primary reason to preserve the desert and it's ecosystem for the people who live there was scenic ... as in the beauty of the landscape. That's a totally valid reason and one i support, but i didn't really think there was a lot of other benefits from the ecosystem.
Las Vegas, Reno, I always saw them as having to bring in everythingg from the outside. Food, water, etc. Perhaps they draw from the local water tables a little, but beyond that ??? I don't see the ecosystem benefits.
I guess i'd like to understand what you're referring to.
d
No matter where you go there's a huge ecosystem to destroy. Maybe I live in a make believe world, but i believe that a lot more things would live in the shade provided by solar panels (assuming that they're mounted) than would have been there before the panels were installed.
I don't think anybody's really theorizing about crapping all over the desert other than what it takes to build the sites. From a NIMBY aspect, this seems pretty tame.
I don't value your plants and critters more or less than mine, but I do weigh value based upon quantity of life and the uniqueness of life. Those are the two things that I think need to be weighted when you talk about environmental damage. Actually, the third thing which must be weighted is "how long will it take the ecosystem to recover". That's probably the biggest place where the desert should get it's due.
The desert is an area that is a lot less in demand than many (most?) other areas of our planet and this is a lot less destructive than many of the things that have been done in the name of power generation.
d
Um, sorry to say this, but "so what?"
I mean, I like the desert as much as the next guy, but if i were to list the places that should be left pristine and untouched, the desert would be low on the list. it just isn't that nice to live in IMHO and there isn't a huge ecosystem there to destroy.
I'm not advocating that we all get ATV's and tear up the entire desert, but with roads and simple rules we can preserve what doesn't have to be trampled on.
I mean, if you're going to screw up SOMEPLACE with solar panels or wind farms, that's about the best place we could have hoped for.
Just my city folk opinion.
d
Ok... here's whats interesting... I don't have an ethical problem with piracy. It doesn't have to be a test drive or anything, I just don't see myself harming anyone by doing it.
My ethics revolve around judging how my actions hurt other people and that's why software piracy doesn't really bother me. It's like pirating music. Who gets hurt by me listening to a track that wouldn't have listened to before? If there's a small indy band selling CD's that I like I always try to buy it to support them, but if some huge mega-conglomerate is selling something i don't think anything of DLing their music off the internet.
I don't want to get caught and I don't want spyware on my computer, and if i find something that I use a lot I want to pay for it, solely to support the people who made it, not "to be legal" or anything, but to give something back.
"I cross the line when i decide that I like the project but not the offered price...". In the end it's all free market economics, it's just more of a mind game.
If all the software was $10 bucks i wouldn't think anything of becoming totally legal. If all the software was $400 a pop, I wouldn't have a single legal thing on my computer. It's all about value to me and me wanting to feel good that I'm supporting the people who write the stuff i like.
I could go on and on, but my point was that it's all economics in the end. Sometimes I think a piece of software is very good, but i only use it a few times a year so I don't want to pony up $100 for a copy. Sometimes the price is too high, sometimes it's difficult to get (I don't live in the US). It's all economics. Time, effort, money vs the good feeling i get knowing i'm giving my money to the people who have made my life better.
To bring this back on topic, in the end i think that's all the game developer can do to deal with pirates. Why do people pirate? It's easier than paying for a product. If you offer a feature (like online play) that justifies buying the game poeple will buy your product. Some people will always pirate your game, for some it will depend on the cost of the game, others will pirate becuase you have or don't have DRM. In the end i think it all comes down to convincing people that they *want* to pay for your game. That you're a small developer who should be supported or that you get some cool online features that you wouldn't get otherwise.
At least that's my 2 cents. That's how i view the pirate scene.
d
hello everyone, I'm a pirate.
I pirate software and i enjoy the feeling of freedom I get when I want to do something (video editing, photo editing, burning a DVD, or creating something cool) and I can do it without that agonizing over the question "am i buying the right product?" and that depressing feeling I get watching money flow from my wallet without knowing if i'm spending it in the right place.
However I *want* to pay money for the products that I like. About 25% off the software i use I want to pay money for BECAUSE I think it rocks. Unfortunately some software, even though I like, I won't pay for becuase the cost is too high (i'm looking at you photoshop)... so they get bubkis.
I started pirating when i was a kid and never stopped and I'm a professional engineer now so i can afford just about anything i want software wise (with the exception of some professional tools like solidworks or something).
So for now, I think for now I'll stick with my current model. If a company writes good software and charges a reasonable fee, and I'll gladly pay for it after the fact.
(BTW, PC games are actually a completely different story. Their cost is almost never outside of my budget and I want to support the PC gaming industry so it doesn't go away and get taken over by the console gaming industry. It's rare that I pirate a game.)
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....an unlimited line of credit seems ill-timed considering the whole reality of taxes being reduced repeatedly over Dubya's term.
That's like saying "it's ok dear, i put my shopping on my credit card and therefore i didn't spend any money."
The fact that we're in massive debt spending is even more to the grand parents point than how much today's tax rate is. I don't find his comment ill-timed at all.
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um... we get a long with cows pretty well... at least from our stand point.
Although you're right, eradication is an advantage if they are a direct competitor. However you can easily substitute race, religion, or nation for "species" and you can say the exact same thing. The fact that we're all humans matters not at all from a "pass of your genetics" point of view. All that matters is that YOUR genetics or close family genetics survive.
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hey... can you point to some raw manga or where you got said manga? I tried looking for that online at one point but didn't have any luck.
I've been interested in doing just what you described for a little bit now. (I've been living in japan and learning the language for the past 2 yrs and I've been wanting to work on my reading skills.)
don
No, you're not alone in thinking full immersion classes are stupid and ineffective. I think it's part that you're an engineer (i'm projecting here), so we tend to classify things in our heads. If you can't classify things then it becomes MUCH more difficult to retain the information.
In the silly total immersion method of teaching you must figure out what/how a grammer point is from the examples before you can classify it. Whereas the engineer in me wants to classify it right away and THEN "test" how well that classification works against the example use cases to find out where it differs from my expectation. Other people might be able to pick it up the other way, but it would take me 3-5x as long to do that.
I'm currently living in Japan and have been for about the past 2 yrs. Neither my wife or i spoke a lick of Japanese when we came over here and now we're both basically understandable for most commen things. I'm taking a mix of classes some of which are entirely in japanese and tutoring where I can speak english. I try to learn all the new stuff in the english tought japanese class so I'm not lost and confused during the full Japanese class. I find it works much better that way.
don
yeah... actually well his quote was appropriate for the situation. The full quote didn't work, so i just used a slice... however quoting JMS was intentional.
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Fuck forgiveness.
I'm a lot more inclined to put some heads on some pikes as a warning to future generations. That'll work much better than "passing a law" as to "make it illegal in the future"... guess what, it's illegal NOW. Why do you think they're asking for immunity?
The whole problem is that the current administration has run rough-shot over the laws by violating them and then thumbing their noses at us and show us how little teeth the current batch of laws has over them. And your solution is to pass a law? Screw that. I'm all in favor of taking a tier 1 telcom company and burning it to the ground so maybe next time they'll actually protect the citizens rights instead of kowtowing to a schmuck president. After that, THEN pass a law and poeple will actually take notice.
They had a duty to us, the citizens, and they screwed us. Fuck 'em. And unfortunately, they're just a poor substitute for the REAL criminals.
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What's really the goal? why is this an issue? If the government is really looking for something specific in laptops there should be an automated process where they plug in a thumb drive on EVERYONE's laptop and sort through all your stuff, not some schmo rambling through your files who doesn't have a clue. That doesn't do squat and serves no meaningful purpose.
Really, what the hell are they looking for? This almost seems like the government equivalent of a governmental Mt Everest. They do it "because they can". It seems to me the same as giving everyone a drug test as they cross the border and then arresting those who test positive.
There's nothing that is getting "smuggled" across our border on laptops that isn't going across in 1000x more massive streams over the internet. The idea that the fear of terrorism is involved is simply ludicrous. What's the thought here, that someone was writing their terrorist memorandum in MS word while on the plane and the border agent is going to turn on the laptop and see it???
This is mindbogglingly stupid.
What the hell is the real motivation here?
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Exactly, and maybe the car starts on a hill too! Then you don't have a closed system, you get GREAT miles per gallon (of water) and the laws of physics are maintained.
hm... i don't get it. What's going to happen?
"Yeah, there's a hidden partition there that I've encrypted." "no, i'm not going to give you the key"
What are they going to do, deny you entry to the country even if you're a US citizen? Removing the property is about the best they can do.
They have no right to lock you up until you provide a password. Well... *maybe* if they dragged you in front of some immigration judge and he held you in contempt until you produced the password, but that's about the worst that could happen. Plus, if you know that's where you've been keeping evidence of your crimes or child porn or whatever, it's an easy decision to wait in jail for 60 days or whatever and then go free.
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