I can't argue too much on that basis, though it's somewhat understandable since a) these ISPs typically make users "sign" agreements that basically say YouTube (or whomever) can pull their content whenever they feel like it (it just happens that they "feel like it" when someone sends them a DMCA notice) and b) they have every reason to be scared that some RIAA/MPAA asshat will tie them, and their financial resources, up in court for years and little reason to fear the same from their users.
Oh, bullshit. If he actually owned the copyright, could demonsrate said ownership and evade the issue of "fair use," THEN I (a supporter of copyright in principle, but a believer that current law is way out of whack) would support Uri Geller. Since I believe that even if he does own the copyright in question, an 8-second clip being used as a demonstration of a hypothesis is, by definition, "fair use," I can believe in copyright and still call Geller out as a douche who is attempting to use misinterpreted (being generous) copyright law as a hammer against his critics.
YouTube can't defend a user's legal rights or they stop being covered in the law as a "safe harbor." Once they lose their neutrality their liability goes through the roof.
Indeed, let's let people have all their new, demonstrably false religions so that maybe in a thousand or so years we can have yet more groups of irrational zealots doing violence on unbelievers. Ignorance isn't a good thing, whether it's in you, your next-door neighbor or some poor douchebag on the other side of the planet.
Wrong. It is currently "banned," in the sense that none of the 3 console manufacturers will permit AO games on their systems. This means that without evading whatever "DRM" is present in the big consoles, a company can't sell an AO game. There are also probably legal questions in terms of licensing, but I don't know what sorts of contracts have to be signed in order to get development kits and the like. As others note, the game could be released for PC as an AO game, though they'd still have the same retail stumbling block and would likely have to settle for mail-order/online distribution.
It's not. Even the summary covers this: The hook was to get people to download the client which searched for "other copyrighted files." Besides, there's nothing in the story to indicate that they actually did let people download real movies. They might all have been dummy files.
Yes, well, the word "people" is of limited use when trying to identify a specific subset of the human race. That is why words are created in order to easily identify specific subsets such as "consumers," "professionals" and "oversensitive assholes." I suspect that everyone at Slashdot falls into one or more of these groups. Guess which of those terms I use for you and your ilk?
I would say that the state from which the creator of The Simpsons was born and raised and is the basis for the more or less generic cartoon Springfield certainly deserves a Kwik-E-Mart. Not having one there is a ridiculous oversight.
I can't see a good reason for you to have been modded so far down, and I can't agree with the above quote enough...and not just because I live in Portland (well, West Linn, but same diff).:)
That's all fine, and in those specific instances I have no problem with the criticism. My point was only that sales on commission should not be dismissed as being bad for the customer. In fact, it can be good for the customer since the service s/he receives can actually be improved by the desire of the salesperson to get continued business.
I would also ask the GP this pretty simple question: Would the service at a cell phone store improve if they offered their employees no sales commissions? I don't think it would since there would still be mandates to push particular items, and I think you'd reduce the intelligence of the employees because the people (even if they're only there for the short-term) who are smart and motivated enough to do better than the average will just find someplace else to work.
I often wonder if the people who complain the loudest about salespeople working on commission are those who are just jealous of the good ones who make "the big bucks."
Salesmen on commission simply can never be counted on to act in the customer's interest in any way.
Amen! Because no salesman working on commission has ever made a ton of money off repeat business from satisfied customers.
Cell phone providers overall are trying to screw you out of your money. They want you to buy the most expensive phone possible (even if you really don't need the features) and they want you to buy the most expensive plan possible (even if you might only talk on the phone for an hour or two per month). In that situation, yes, salespeople on commission tend to stop caring, in large part because satisfying the customer can end up being entirely out of their hands, dependent on customer service phone reps and overall company policy. That, however, is not the case in every business, and I'm sure there are innumerable car salespeople (for example) who will tell you that making the customer happy is key to maintaining their lifestyle.
It sure as hell makes that person superior to a tool who will buy any over-priced piece of shit with the Apple logo on it, features/bugs be damned!
"What, we can't have high-speed mobile Internet? Oh, that's okay. We'll just be sure to do most of our browsing at Starbuck's where everyone can see us!"
"I can't use my iPhone as a modem for my notebook? Oh, well. Why would I buy an iPhone and carry a notebook anyway? My MacBook Pro can just stay at home now!"
"Thanks for selling me a shiny new iPhone. Hey, what's that stick you're pulling from behind the counter? You're going to shove that up my ass? Gosh, my iPhone experience is already feature-rich!!"
am not concerned by this. It is obvious that there will be many software releases in iPhone's future even for these 1.0 devices. If it is a big deal for many people, it can be fixed in the field.
Well, gosh, if it can be fixed later then everyone should run out and buy the iPhone immediately! While doing so, I can't recommend highly enough that everyone using Windows XP immediately upgrade to Vista because, heck, whatever problems there might be will be fixed down the road in a Service Pack or two.
I was consistently taking enemies out in 1 or 2 total turns and just had to stop playing. It lost even the standard, long-form Bejeweled charm since I was really only making a maximum of 5 moves (within those 1-2 actual turns) per battle. I ended up having more fun forging items where you didn't have any skills/spells to fall back on.
Indeed. The pig-shit sandwich I had the other day was delicious! Enjoying my cafe urina del maiale while waiting for the check just made the afternoon perfect.
What makes you think they would be so nice? What makes you think they would never go after an innocent person?
Probably because I don't accept the myth that the FBI is a collection of mindless automatons running around putting innocent people in jail for the entertainment of their bosses. Probably because I think that FBI agents are, in the main, otherwise normal Americans who got into federal law enforcement to help their country and not to play out some fascist power fantasy. Probably because I think that even if the FBI was full to the gills with people who want to take away their fellow citizens' freedoms, they still wouldn't want to waste their counterintelligence resources on people who they can quickly and easily determine are not foreign agents.
PS- Using the word "never" indicates a childishness that never ceases to sadden me. Yes, innocent people can end up the targets of investigations, but said innocence is far more commonly discovered and acknowledged than it is punished.
PPS- You need to watch less TV, or at least figure out the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
Or how about Russia? Or have people not noticed how much that country's government has regressed in the past several years? I don't remember what TV show I was watching - probably some dumb conspiracy-related thing - but this [para]phrase stuck in my head: "You think the Cold War's over? It's only halftime."
I'm sure you and others will wave their hands and hyperventilate while insisting that they are sure that the government will somehow not fuck it up, but you're going to have to try harder than that.
Not fuck what up? Taking a report from someone at a university who finds a set of traits and activities of a particular person suspicious and then following up said report with an investigation of the circumstances behind the "suspicious" information? "Hey, why did you work late in the lab last week?" "I had to get some work done." "Really?" "Yeah." "Okay, thanks. Good luck with the project!"
People in this discussion are acting like the FBI is setting up field offices on college campuses in order to nab spies. That's not the case. The linked article only says that the FBI is offering to brief college staffs on possible warning signs that could indicate espionage activity. There's no mandate to attend such briefings, there's no requirement to report anything and there's certainly no per-university quota requiring a particular number of reports be filed per semester. The FBI is offering information and that is all. This is a total non-story.
Here's my simple answer to all this: If you want to ban a game about murder, or about child rape, or about anything else society finds objectionable - at least in my country - then you'd better write a law to do so, and you'll just have to hope that the judiciary is kind enough to find it constitutional. Apart from that, I say that the videogame industry should experience no more legal restraint than the movie industry, the literary industry, etc. The bottom line, IMHO, is that YOU don't get to decide what art is or isn't for anyone else, any more than I do, any more than the government does. Apart from extremely narrow exceptions, the judiciary has agreed with me, and I'll just have to be happy that they continue to do so, preventing a bunch of reactionary idiots from going around banning all the entertainment that make them uncomfortable.
Are we going to get into defining "art" here? Are we going to pick and choose now what we protect based on how many people appreciate it and how many don't?
I have absolutely zero interest in playing a videogame all about child rape and, frankly, I have near-zero interest in playing Manhunt 2 - it may well be that I would consider both to be so offensive that I wouldn't even want to be in the same house with someone who was playing the game and might even boycott the company making said game in the future (big "might" since I love the GTA series). However, I am not willing to take the responsibility of telling everyone else in my country that they can't play the games, nor am I willing to cede said responsibility to someone else.
I suspect that a game about child rape would be illegal in the US under existing laws regarding the representation of child pornography - even if no minors participate in said representation. For example, as I recall, there are rules that producers of pornographic movies have to follow where the actors can't play characters who are stated to be minors and who have sexual contact on screen. I can live with that kind of narrow restriction of freedom of expression since its specific intent is related to discouraging the sexual exploitation of children. What I cannot tolerate, however, is if my government decided to say that, for example, one game is banned while another is okay to sell because the first spends 10 seconds more decapitating a victim than the second, or that game A is banned because killings take place in Downtown Los Angeles while game B slides by because killings take place in Ancient Greece and the victims have snakes on their heads.
PS- I also want to note that I did not tell the fellow to whom I was originally replying that he was wrong for stating his opinion; I [basically] told him that his opinion was shit. There's a big difference between disagreeing with someone and telling them they can't say what they think, and it's too bad that some people (including, apparently, the UK) can't discern that difference.
The british law might be a little harsh, but I think this should be like what video game laws in the USA should be. M-rated games should not be sold to kids. Period. Adults should be able to do what they want, as long as it doesen't interfere with other adults' right to mind their own business.
If I may retort? RTFA! This is a complete banning (pending appeal) of the game in the UK, not just restricting it to adults only. For the record (such as it is), I've got no problem with putting restrictions on what games can be sold to minors, just as I have no problem with restricting what magazines, books and videos can be sold to children. This, however, is not that.
Movies such as Hostile or Saw are the ones that we really should be the most concerned with.
Exactly how concerned should we be, and about what should we be concerned? Violent crime has been trending down for years now (at least in the US - I admit that I don't pay a lot of attention to the statistics in other countries) while during the same period videogames have gone through the proverbial roof, with many of the most popular games being extremely violent (I won't even mention how long "slasher" films have been a part of the culture). So, what problem, exactly, is being addressed by the banning of a violent videogame apart from catering to the distaste of a few people who can't seem to mind their own business?
Of course, since you don't even know the title of one of the films you mentioned (Hostel), I can't imagine that you're really that concerned...
What rights actually are in our societies and what they should be, indeed, are two different things.
I would note that your example is lousy in that one party to the speech you described is being negatively targeted by said speech and is thus not desirous of the communication, where in the case of Rockstar selling Manhunt 2 to an adult both parties are willing participants in the expression. Maybe they do things different in the UK where people are legally required to buy and play videogames? Or, maybe, parents don't have the right in the UK to restrict the content to which their children are exposed? Or, given your example, is the government afraid that parents will punish their children by warping their minds with Manhunt 2?
Slashdot Mirror
I can't argue too much on that basis, though it's somewhat understandable since a) these ISPs typically make users "sign" agreements that basically say YouTube (or whomever) can pull their content whenever they feel like it (it just happens that they "feel like it" when someone sends them a DMCA notice) and b) they have every reason to be scared that some RIAA/MPAA asshat will tie them, and their financial resources, up in court for years and little reason to fear the same from their users.
Oh, bullshit. If he actually owned the copyright, could demonsrate said ownership and evade the issue of "fair use," THEN I (a supporter of copyright in principle, but a believer that current law is way out of whack) would support Uri Geller. Since I believe that even if he does own the copyright in question, an 8-second clip being used as a demonstration of a hypothesis is, by definition, "fair use," I can believe in copyright and still call Geller out as a douche who is attempting to use misinterpreted (being generous) copyright law as a hammer against his critics.
YouTube can't defend a user's legal rights or they stop being covered in the law as a "safe harbor." Once they lose their neutrality their liability goes through the roof.
Indeed, let's let people have all their new, demonstrably false religions so that maybe in a thousand or so years we can have yet more groups of irrational zealots doing violence on unbelievers. Ignorance isn't a good thing, whether it's in you, your next-door neighbor or some poor douchebag on the other side of the planet.
Wrong. It is currently "banned," in the sense that none of the 3 console manufacturers will permit AO games on their systems. This means that without evading whatever "DRM" is present in the big consoles, a company can't sell an AO game. There are also probably legal questions in terms of licensing, but I don't know what sorts of contracts have to be signed in order to get development kits and the like. As others note, the game could be released for PC as an AO game, though they'd still have the same retail stumbling block and would likely have to settle for mail-order/online distribution.
I'm sorry, but I can't read the rest of your post because I'm too busy laughing myself to death at this amusing turn of phrase.
It's not. Even the summary covers this: The hook was to get people to download the client which searched for "other copyrighted files." Besides, there's nothing in the story to indicate that they actually did let people download real movies. They might all have been dummy files.
Yes, well, the word "people" is of limited use when trying to identify a specific subset of the human race. That is why words are created in order to easily identify specific subsets such as "consumers," "professionals" and "oversensitive assholes." I suspect that everyone at Slashdot falls into one or more of these groups. Guess which of those terms I use for you and your ilk?
I can't see a good reason for you to have been modded so far down, and I can't agree with the above quote enough...and not just because I live in Portland (well, West Linn, but same diff).
That's all fine, and in those specific instances I have no problem with the criticism. My point was only that sales on commission should not be dismissed as being bad for the customer. In fact, it can be good for the customer since the service s/he receives can actually be improved by the desire of the salesperson to get continued business.
I would also ask the GP this pretty simple question: Would the service at a cell phone store improve if they offered their employees no sales commissions? I don't think it would since there would still be mandates to push particular items, and I think you'd reduce the intelligence of the employees because the people (even if they're only there for the short-term) who are smart and motivated enough to do better than the average will just find someplace else to work.
I often wonder if the people who complain the loudest about salespeople working on commission are those who are just jealous of the good ones who make "the big bucks."
Amen! Because no salesman working on commission has ever made a ton of money off repeat business from satisfied customers.
Cell phone providers overall are trying to screw you out of your money. They want you to buy the most expensive phone possible (even if you really don't need the features) and they want you to buy the most expensive plan possible (even if you might only talk on the phone for an hour or two per month). In that situation, yes, salespeople on commission tend to stop caring, in large part because satisfying the customer can end up being entirely out of their hands, dependent on customer service phone reps and overall company policy. That, however, is not the case in every business, and I'm sure there are innumerable car salespeople (for example) who will tell you that making the customer happy is key to maintaining their lifestyle.
It sure as hell makes that person superior to a tool who will buy any over-priced piece of shit with the Apple logo on it, features/bugs be damned!
"What, we can't have high-speed mobile Internet? Oh, that's okay. We'll just be sure to do most of our browsing at Starbuck's where everyone can see us!"
"I can't use my iPhone as a modem for my notebook? Oh, well. Why would I buy an iPhone and carry a notebook anyway? My MacBook Pro can just stay at home now!"
"Thanks for selling me a shiny new iPhone. Hey, what's that stick you're pulling from behind the counter? You're going to shove that up my ass? Gosh, my iPhone experience is already feature-rich!!"
Well, gosh, if it can be fixed later then everyone should run out and buy the iPhone immediately! While doing so, I can't recommend highly enough that everyone using Windows XP immediately upgrade to Vista because, heck, whatever problems there might be will be fixed down the road in a Service Pack or two.
I was consistently taking enemies out in 1 or 2 total turns and just had to stop playing. It lost even the standard, long-form Bejeweled charm since I was really only making a maximum of 5 moves (within those 1-2 actual turns) per battle. I ended up having more fun forging items where you didn't have any skills/spells to fall back on.
Indeed. The pig-shit sandwich I had the other day was delicious! Enjoying my cafe urina del maiale while waiting for the check just made the afternoon perfect.
Probably because I don't accept the myth that the FBI is a collection of mindless automatons running around putting innocent people in jail for the entertainment of their bosses. Probably because I think that FBI agents are, in the main, otherwise normal Americans who got into federal law enforcement to help their country and not to play out some fascist power fantasy. Probably because I think that even if the FBI was full to the gills with people who want to take away their fellow citizens' freedoms, they still wouldn't want to waste their counterintelligence resources on people who they can quickly and easily determine are not foreign agents.
PS- Using the word "never" indicates a childishness that never ceases to sadden me. Yes, innocent people can end up the targets of investigations, but said innocence is far more commonly discovered and acknowledged than it is punished.
PPS- You need to watch less TV, or at least figure out the difference between fiction and non-fiction.
Or how about Russia? Or have people not noticed how much that country's government has regressed in the past several years? I don't remember what TV show I was watching - probably some dumb conspiracy-related thing - but this [para]phrase stuck in my head: "You think the Cold War's over? It's only halftime."
Not fuck what up? Taking a report from someone at a university who finds a set of traits and activities of a particular person suspicious and then following up said report with an investigation of the circumstances behind the "suspicious" information? "Hey, why did you work late in the lab last week?" "I had to get some work done." "Really?" "Yeah." "Okay, thanks. Good luck with the project!"
People in this discussion are acting like the FBI is setting up field offices on college campuses in order to nab spies. That's not the case. The linked article only says that the FBI is offering to brief college staffs on possible warning signs that could indicate espionage activity. There's no mandate to attend such briefings, there's no requirement to report anything and there's certainly no per-university quota requiring a particular number of reports be filed per semester. The FBI is offering information and that is all. This is a total non-story.
Here's my simple answer to all this: If you want to ban a game about murder, or about child rape, or about anything else society finds objectionable - at least in my country - then you'd better write a law to do so, and you'll just have to hope that the judiciary is kind enough to find it constitutional. Apart from that, I say that the videogame industry should experience no more legal restraint than the movie industry, the literary industry, etc. The bottom line, IMHO, is that YOU don't get to decide what art is or isn't for anyone else, any more than I do, any more than the government does. Apart from extremely narrow exceptions, the judiciary has agreed with me, and I'll just have to be happy that they continue to do so, preventing a bunch of reactionary idiots from going around banning all the entertainment that make them uncomfortable.
Are we going to get into defining "art" here? Are we going to pick and choose now what we protect based on how many people appreciate it and how many don't?
I have absolutely zero interest in playing a videogame all about child rape and, frankly, I have near-zero interest in playing Manhunt 2 - it may well be that I would consider both to be so offensive that I wouldn't even want to be in the same house with someone who was playing the game and might even boycott the company making said game in the future (big "might" since I love the GTA series). However, I am not willing to take the responsibility of telling everyone else in my country that they can't play the games, nor am I willing to cede said responsibility to someone else.
I suspect that a game about child rape would be illegal in the US under existing laws regarding the representation of child pornography - even if no minors participate in said representation. For example, as I recall, there are rules that producers of pornographic movies have to follow where the actors can't play characters who are stated to be minors and who have sexual contact on screen. I can live with that kind of narrow restriction of freedom of expression since its specific intent is related to discouraging the sexual exploitation of children. What I cannot tolerate, however, is if my government decided to say that, for example, one game is banned while another is okay to sell because the first spends 10 seconds more decapitating a victim than the second, or that game A is banned because killings take place in Downtown Los Angeles while game B slides by because killings take place in Ancient Greece and the victims have snakes on their heads.
PS- I also want to note that I did not tell the fellow to whom I was originally replying that he was wrong for stating his opinion; I [basically] told him that his opinion was shit. There's a big difference between disagreeing with someone and telling them they can't say what they think, and it's too bad that some people (including, apparently, the UK) can't discern that difference.
If I may retort? RTFA! This is a complete banning (pending appeal) of the game in the UK, not just restricting it to adults only. For the record (such as it is), I've got no problem with putting restrictions on what games can be sold to minors, just as I have no problem with restricting what magazines, books and videos can be sold to children. This, however, is not that.
Exactly how concerned should we be, and about what should we be concerned? Violent crime has been trending down for years now (at least in the US - I admit that I don't pay a lot of attention to the statistics in other countries) while during the same period videogames have gone through the proverbial roof, with many of the most popular games being extremely violent (I won't even mention how long "slasher" films have been a part of the culture). So, what problem, exactly, is being addressed by the banning of a violent videogame apart from catering to the distaste of a few people who can't seem to mind their own business?
Of course, since you don't even know the title of one of the films you mentioned (Hostel), I can't imagine that you're really that concerned...
Anyone who would ban "The Godfather" is someone with whom you cannot reason.
What rights actually are in our societies and what they should be, indeed, are two different things.
I would note that your example is lousy in that one party to the speech you described is being negatively targeted by said speech and is thus not desirous of the communication, where in the case of Rockstar selling Manhunt 2 to an adult both parties are willing participants in the expression. Maybe they do things different in the UK where people are legally required to buy and play videogames? Or, maybe, parents don't have the right in the UK to restrict the content to which their children are exposed? Or, given your example, is the government afraid that parents will punish their children by warping their minds with Manhunt 2?