Categorize my comment as you will - if it was "self righteous" then so be it. The simple fact, however, is that there shouldn't have to be any "good" social/political reason for speech/art for it to be "free" from restraint. In the US, there are already laws in place to criminalize child pornography and incitement to dangerous/criminal acts, and those seem like more than enough to me. Further, the idea that Manhunt can be deemed illegal while, for example, Grand Theft Auto could still be on shelves indicates a kind of subjectivity that *I* find objectionable.
Hey, I'm not a citizen of the UK and if, as a nation, they're willing to accept this sort of garbage then they're welcome to it. Further, I never played the first game and have no intention of playing the sequel. In my mind, however, like Germany, this lowers the UK on my ranking list of countries I consider "free." Unless or until videogames are scientifically demonstrated to have a causal link with violence in people over 18 (adults who should be able to enjoy whatever non-criminal entertainment they wish), this is just old, out-of-touch people with an irrational fear of videogames restricting the rights of others for no good reason.
As a final note, from here on out I'm going to eschew the use of the phrase "freedom of speech" in favor of "freedom of expression." That way, maybe the idiots who want to boil this down to written law instead of human rights will take their semantical arguments elsewhere.
I'll give you the ones from your list I'd see banned from videogames:
kiddie porn
There, all done. And, since the western world, I believe, has already banned this kind of thing, we're already done. Everything else on your list should be fair ground for videogames to cover, just like they're fair ground for books and movies to cover. Suggesting otherwise is bullshit.
If communities want to keep the stuff from kids, that's fine, but adults are fully vested members of both their nation's society and the human society, and restricting our access to material based on someone's concept of what is "objectionable" is, again, bullshit.
Freedom of speech is important, but we shouldn't be slaves to that phrase, becuse it does get used as an excuse for a lot of grotesque rubbish.
Good god. "Freedom of speech" isn't an "excuse." It's a fucking right! I'm hoping that either a) you grew up under a repressive regime and just haven't recovered from it or b) this is a very nicely, subtly constructed troll. Anything else marks you as a tool, in at least a couple senses of the word. If it's option B, then I'll just say, "Well done."
One wonders, too, if California will next encourage employees of the district to donate their salaries because, gosh, that school district has had such problems and just needs a little help. It's a damned shame that this community (like many others) and state (again, like so many others) can't manage to make their school system work, but I've got to agree with the position that IBM shouldn't be strong-armed into taking the hit - and making this kind of public appeal, where IBM could end up looking like scum if they don't forgive the debt, is definitely a strong-arm tactic.
Wow, hi AJ! I thought for sure that the black screen at the end last Sunday meant that you and your whole family got whacked. I thought the hot underage girl and new car would have kept you happy longer, too...
Hey there, Sparky. Maybe if George Lucas had turned his "vision" over to someone with talent today as opposed to talent 30 years ago, we wouldn't have ended up with JJB and company.
LCD use forms the bulk of the explanation, but there are two other groups that would add into the 60-Hz majority: 1) Folks who just never realized they could change their refresh rate and 2) folks who are running at the highest resolution their CRT can handle, even if it only supports 60 Hz. So, it's really easy to end up at 60 Hz, even with a CRT.:)
The sample-set should also include musicians and audiophiles into the mix. They are far more likely to give an objective opinion compared to people randomly pulled off the street.
Bullshit. First of all, the testing procedure should be designed to eliminate subjectivity. That's the purpose of double-blind testing. Second, why would anyone but a musician or audiophile care what a musician or audiophile has to say on this issue? Are they experts on hearing? The latter group would be particularly useless since, in the main, "audiophiles" tend to equate spending more money to a better listening experience, even if they can't demonstrate the difference to the unwashed masses.
No, unless you're specifically looking for the differences between the way an "audiophile" perceives different bitrates and how an average person does, such "experts" would be the last people you'd want involved in a test like this.
Of course, the whole thing is pointless because even if their test setup was perfect the small sample size renders the results anecdotal at best.
You pointed out a drawback to Vorbis. That's enough to mark you as either a Microsoft "fanboy" or Apple "zealot" for a lot of people around these parts. I'm sure there are even a few who would consider you a "troll" for the same reason. Of course, that last group would be forgetting that if someone wants to troll a discussion like this, they'd mention their preference for encoding in WMA - something I encouraged my parents to do for simplicity's sake since they don't need the files to be portable.
True, but I wouldn't be surprised if the creation of Google Video was just an attempt to see if they could pull enough people from YouTube to make buying the latter unnecessary. When they didn't get enough mindshare, they went to plan B.
Fancy that, people who vehemently defend the status quo usually profit from it.
And people who vehemently attack the status quo are usually too stupid or lazy to do so themselves.
The status quo works for a lot of people who aren't super-rich. The fact that it doesn't work for you may be less an indication of how bad things are and more an indication of what a dolt you are.
Actually, he said he had a beautiful Sony plasma. While I'm sure someone may have made 1080p plasmas somewhere for a ridiculous price, as far as I know Sony has not (their 1080p offerings are all LCD), and finding a consumer-grade 1080p display without an HDCP-enabled input (outside of the PC monitor world) would be virtually impossible.
In other words, if he has a plasma TV then the maximum input signal it will take is 1080i and I am 99+% certain (I'd welcome correction) that such a display would have a maximum resolution of 768p (or 1024x1024 with non-square pixels) regardless. Thus, the only potential worry is, again, with the ICT (image constraint token) which is a worry borrowed from the future - though a somewhat reasonable worry for those without an HDCP-enabled input.
My HDTV, for example, is a 27" Samsung without a digital input, bought mainly for 480p applications such as Xbox.
Oh, for pity's sake, your own quote indicates that the owner did not think it was okay because he didn't "come in."
There are many things which are illegal not because they always lead to damage to people or property, but because they're "quality of life" issues. For example, in many municipalities riding bicycles on the sidewalk is illegal. These laws are not enforced with the same fervor as those covering theft, assault and the like, and most of the time nobody minds when the law is broken (for example, by little kids who people expect to ride on the sidewalk). Still, if someone is riding their bike recklessly, annoying pedestrians and potentially compromising their safety, such a rider can be stopped by the police and issued a ticket/summons. I would hope for the same level of enforcement of an "anti-WiFi-piggybacking" law, where enforcement would depend on the level of the infraction and how much of a nuisance the person is causing.
Hell, nobody is going to mind if somebody "hijacks" a WiFi connection to check e-mail or do some light web-surfing, but when a person is essentially using someone else's Internet connection as a replacement for their own, without obtaining permission, then it's over the line and I consider it reasonable to levy a fine for such. It's surprising how many people here can't see that.
While making it a felony is probably overdoing it, making it a civil issue would go too far in the other direction. Doing so would put the onus of enforcement on the owners of the WiFi and would put them in the position of a) identifying the people "stealing" their bandwidth and b) going to even more trouble by first attempting to quantify their real damages (maybe there were none?) and then taking those people to court. Making the violation a misdemeanor would be sufficient to ensure that the WiFi piggybackers know that there's a penalty attached to such misuse, which I think is reasonable since people like the owner of this coffee shop are trying to offer a free service to their customers - something which the public usually applauds.
You need to check into that because, AFAIK, the HDCP flag that downgrades video output through the component or non-HDCP-enabled DVI connections hasn't been enabled yet in any movie. It still could be added to movies down the road, of course, but maybe by that time you'll have a 2160p TV that you "adopted early.":)
A) It's hilarious.
2) It's a recounting of the guy's tall tales and doesn't seem to allege the truth of the stories. It's thus as valid as many other entries that discuss fables, comic books, etc.
#) It's hilarious. The story of the alternate-universe dimes is reason enough to keep the article in perpetuity!
Actually, by my logic you can always afford to pay nothing when you have that choice, either by pirating Windows or using a free OS such as one of the many flavors of Linux. What you shouldn't do is present Windows piracy as a moral choice just because it costs too much. That's the part that works on my last nerve.
Oh yeah, and what the hell are you going to do with that potential Windows PC you just priced out without a floppy/CD, a hard drive on which to store Windows and a monitor/TV (pretending they're always "free" is a crock). Leaving the CD, HD and screen out of your calculation is just intellectually dishonest and wouldn't change the fact that Windows is overpriced (by itself, a point with which I do not disagree).
The average person in India earns less in a year than you earn in a month and there is no way that they can afford to 'buy' a genuine copy of windows.
And, yet, they can afford to buy the PC on which to run the pirated (suggest another fucking word, by the way, if you don't like that one - someone says "stolen" they get jumped, someone says "pirated" and an asshat like you chimes in [/parenthetical rant]) software? Times are tough all over, aren't they?
I've pirated software before and I'll do it again (lazy+cheap) but justifying it by whining about affordability - whatever the country - is bullshit. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take Linux, modify it to run on a specialized device and distribute it under my own copyright because I don't like the GPL and I can't afford to hire someone to write me an OS from scratch.
I think you're making an unfounded assumption. Bioware isn't actively hunting people to sue in order to get nice settlements. They're not SCO, and their business plan is not based on lawsuits. So, unless a game is clearly an attempt to "steal" their ideas ("But, but, I called my game OPAL Empire!") they're very unlikely to sue. A litigious individual, however, someone looking to get a lottery-type payday, might look much harder to find "similarities" to their proposal over which to file a lawsuit.
The radio personalities in question offer a value to their employers, but when they embarrass the people who sign the paychecks enough, it shouldn't be surprising that they are removed from the air. The employer has to decide if the money they generate (from a minority of listeners) is worth the time and effort it takes to deal with the hassle keeping them on the air brings. Personally, I suspect that I would have been far less tolerant, and I would have asked the question "How much money do they bring in compared to how much they cost?" a long time ago. The margin there is absolutely the issue.
Bingo, and this is the reason that Howard Stern will never be treated similarly on Sirius. Where Opie & Anthony's impact on subscriber numbers can be measured in the thousands, Howard Stern was and is a key factor in the satellite radio decision of millions. Heck, Sirius gave Stern a bonus of $80 million less than a year into his contract because of the huge jump in subscriber numbers they feel they got from his show.
I suspect that the situation was similar with Imus. Nothing he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team was any more offensive than thousands of comments made by him and his cronies in the past. It was just that a) this time there was a public backlash and b) he doesn't bring in the listeners that he once did. If his employers still considered him vital to their business he would have gotten his suspension and then been right back on the air.
None of that, though, is to say that XM acted properly in this situation. While I don't care about Opie & Anthony (their previous controversies turned me off, I wasn't a morning talk listener and I've since become a Stern listener), XM at the very least implied by hiring them and tolerating them up until now that the show was to be uncensored. If you're going to make that claim, then I think you have to back it up, even if they're taking shots at management (maybe even especially then) - at least until the contracts are up when you can just let them go. I feel similarly about the Imus firing in that his employers knew what they were getting into every time they gave him a new contract.
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Categorize my comment as you will - if it was "self righteous" then so be it. The simple fact, however, is that there shouldn't have to be any "good" social/political reason for speech/art for it to be "free" from restraint. In the US, there are already laws in place to criminalize child pornography and incitement to dangerous/criminal acts, and those seem like more than enough to me. Further, the idea that Manhunt can be deemed illegal while, for example, Grand Theft Auto could still be on shelves indicates a kind of subjectivity that *I* find objectionable.
Hey, I'm not a citizen of the UK and if, as a nation, they're willing to accept this sort of garbage then they're welcome to it. Further, I never played the first game and have no intention of playing the sequel. In my mind, however, like Germany, this lowers the UK on my ranking list of countries I consider "free." Unless or until videogames are scientifically demonstrated to have a causal link with violence in people over 18 (adults who should be able to enjoy whatever non-criminal entertainment they wish), this is just old, out-of-touch people with an irrational fear of videogames restricting the rights of others for no good reason.
As a final note, from here on out I'm going to eschew the use of the phrase "freedom of speech" in favor of "freedom of expression." That way, maybe the idiots who want to boil this down to written law instead of human rights will take their semantical arguments elsewhere.
I'll give you the ones from your list I'd see banned from videogames:
kiddie porn
There, all done. And, since the western world, I believe, has already banned this kind of thing, we're already done. Everything else on your list should be fair ground for videogames to cover, just like they're fair ground for books and movies to cover. Suggesting otherwise is bullshit.
If communities want to keep the stuff from kids, that's fine, but adults are fully vested members of both their nation's society and the human society, and restricting our access to material based on someone's concept of what is "objectionable" is, again, bullshit.
Good god. "Freedom of speech" isn't an "excuse." It's a fucking right! I'm hoping that either a) you grew up under a repressive regime and just haven't recovered from it or b) this is a very nicely, subtly constructed troll. Anything else marks you as a tool, in at least a couple senses of the word. If it's option B, then I'll just say, "Well done."
One wonders, too, if California will next encourage employees of the district to donate their salaries because, gosh, that school district has had such problems and just needs a little help. It's a damned shame that this community (like many others) and state (again, like so many others) can't manage to make their school system work, but I've got to agree with the position that IBM shouldn't be strong-armed into taking the hit - and making this kind of public appeal, where IBM could end up looking like scum if they don't forgive the debt, is definitely a strong-arm tactic.
Wow, hi AJ! I thought for sure that the black screen at the end last Sunday meant that you and your whole family got whacked. I thought the hot underage girl and new car would have kept you happy longer, too...
If only Greedo had rolled a Mandalorian...
Hey there, Sparky. Maybe if George Lucas had turned his "vision" over to someone with talent today as opposed to talent 30 years ago, we wouldn't have ended up with JJB and company.
LCD use forms the bulk of the explanation, but there are two other groups that would add into the 60-Hz majority: 1) Folks who just never realized they could change their refresh rate and 2) folks who are running at the highest resolution their CRT can handle, even if it only supports 60 Hz. So, it's really easy to end up at 60 Hz, even with a CRT. :)
Was that in the long-ago days before the ".com" extension or the ".bat" file...unless you're referring to some halcyon period before MS-DOS?
Bullshit. First of all, the testing procedure should be designed to eliminate subjectivity. That's the purpose of double-blind testing. Second, why would anyone but a musician or audiophile care what a musician or audiophile has to say on this issue? Are they experts on hearing? The latter group would be particularly useless since, in the main, "audiophiles" tend to equate spending more money to a better listening experience, even if they can't demonstrate the difference to the unwashed masses.
No, unless you're specifically looking for the differences between the way an "audiophile" perceives different bitrates and how an average person does, such "experts" would be the last people you'd want involved in a test like this.
Of course, the whole thing is pointless because even if their test setup was perfect the small sample size renders the results anecdotal at best.
You pointed out a drawback to Vorbis. That's enough to mark you as either a Microsoft "fanboy" or Apple "zealot" for a lot of people around these parts. I'm sure there are even a few who would consider you a "troll" for the same reason. Of course, that last group would be forgetting that if someone wants to troll a discussion like this, they'd mention their preference for encoding in WMA - something I encouraged my parents to do for simplicity's sake since they don't need the files to be portable.
Shows how well I pay attention! :)
True, but I wouldn't be surprised if the creation of Google Video was just an attempt to see if they could pull enough people from YouTube to make buying the latter unnecessary. When they didn't get enough mindshare, they went to plan B.
Or, I could laugh and walk away. I think I'll take that option.
And people who vehemently attack the status quo are usually too stupid or lazy to do so themselves.
The status quo works for a lot of people who aren't super-rich. The fact that it doesn't work for you may be less an indication of how bad things are and more an indication of what a dolt you are.
Actually, he said he had a beautiful Sony plasma. While I'm sure someone may have made 1080p plasmas somewhere for a ridiculous price, as far as I know Sony has not (their 1080p offerings are all LCD), and finding a consumer-grade 1080p display without an HDCP-enabled input (outside of the PC monitor world) would be virtually impossible.
In other words, if he has a plasma TV then the maximum input signal it will take is 1080i and I am 99+% certain (I'd welcome correction) that such a display would have a maximum resolution of 768p (or 1024x1024 with non-square pixels) regardless. Thus, the only potential worry is, again, with the ICT (image constraint token) which is a worry borrowed from the future - though a somewhat reasonable worry for those without an HDCP-enabled input.
My HDTV, for example, is a 27" Samsung without a digital input, bought mainly for 480p applications such as Xbox.
Oh, for pity's sake, your own quote indicates that the owner did not think it was okay because he didn't "come in."
There are many things which are illegal not because they always lead to damage to people or property, but because they're "quality of life" issues. For example, in many municipalities riding bicycles on the sidewalk is illegal. These laws are not enforced with the same fervor as those covering theft, assault and the like, and most of the time nobody minds when the law is broken (for example, by little kids who people expect to ride on the sidewalk). Still, if someone is riding their bike recklessly, annoying pedestrians and potentially compromising their safety, such a rider can be stopped by the police and issued a ticket/summons. I would hope for the same level of enforcement of an "anti-WiFi-piggybacking" law, where enforcement would depend on the level of the infraction and how much of a nuisance the person is causing.
Hell, nobody is going to mind if somebody "hijacks" a WiFi connection to check e-mail or do some light web-surfing, but when a person is essentially using someone else's Internet connection as a replacement for their own, without obtaining permission, then it's over the line and I consider it reasonable to levy a fine for such. It's surprising how many people here can't see that.
While making it a felony is probably overdoing it, making it a civil issue would go too far in the other direction. Doing so would put the onus of enforcement on the owners of the WiFi and would put them in the position of a) identifying the people "stealing" their bandwidth and b) going to even more trouble by first attempting to quantify their real damages (maybe there were none?) and then taking those people to court. Making the violation a misdemeanor would be sufficient to ensure that the WiFi piggybackers know that there's a penalty attached to such misuse, which I think is reasonable since people like the owner of this coffee shop are trying to offer a free service to their customers - something which the public usually applauds.
You need to check into that because, AFAIK, the HDCP flag that downgrades video output through the component or non-HDCP-enabled DVI connections hasn't been enabled yet in any movie. It still could be added to movies down the road, of course, but maybe by that time you'll have a 2160p TV that you "adopted early." :)
Why would it be deleted?
A) It's hilarious.
2) It's a recounting of the guy's tall tales and doesn't seem to allege the truth of the stories. It's thus as valid as many other entries that discuss fables, comic books, etc.
#) It's hilarious. The story of the alternate-universe dimes is reason enough to keep the article in perpetuity!
Actually, by my logic you can always afford to pay nothing when you have that choice, either by pirating Windows or using a free OS such as one of the many flavors of Linux. What you shouldn't do is present Windows piracy as a moral choice just because it costs too much. That's the part that works on my last nerve.
Oh yeah, and what the hell are you going to do with that potential Windows PC you just priced out without a floppy/CD, a hard drive on which to store Windows and a monitor/TV (pretending they're always "free" is a crock). Leaving the CD, HD and screen out of your calculation is just intellectually dishonest and wouldn't change the fact that Windows is overpriced (by itself, a point with which I do not disagree).
And, yet, they can afford to buy the PC on which to run the pirated (suggest another fucking word, by the way, if you don't like that one - someone says "stolen" they get jumped, someone says "pirated" and an asshat like you chimes in [/parenthetical rant]) software? Times are tough all over, aren't they?
I've pirated software before and I'll do it again (lazy+cheap) but justifying it by whining about affordability - whatever the country - is bullshit. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take Linux, modify it to run on a specialized device and distribute it under my own copyright because I don't like the GPL and I can't afford to hire someone to write me an OS from scratch.
Walking out of the room so you can talk to your mistress in private is not "polite." It's "shrewd" or "cunning."
I think you're making an unfounded assumption. Bioware isn't actively hunting people to sue in order to get nice settlements. They're not SCO, and their business plan is not based on lawsuits. So, unless a game is clearly an attempt to "steal" their ideas ("But, but, I called my game OPAL Empire!") they're very unlikely to sue. A litigious individual, however, someone looking to get a lottery-type payday, might look much harder to find "similarities" to their proposal over which to file a lawsuit.
Bingo, and this is the reason that Howard Stern will never be treated similarly on Sirius. Where Opie & Anthony's impact on subscriber numbers can be measured in the thousands, Howard Stern was and is a key factor in the satellite radio decision of millions. Heck, Sirius gave Stern a bonus of $80 million less than a year into his contract because of the huge jump in subscriber numbers they feel they got from his show.
I suspect that the situation was similar with Imus. Nothing he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team was any more offensive than thousands of comments made by him and his cronies in the past. It was just that a) this time there was a public backlash and b) he doesn't bring in the listeners that he once did. If his employers still considered him vital to their business he would have gotten his suspension and then been right back on the air.
None of that, though, is to say that XM acted properly in this situation. While I don't care about Opie & Anthony (their previous controversies turned me off, I wasn't a morning talk listener and I've since become a Stern listener), XM at the very least implied by hiring them and tolerating them up until now that the show was to be uncensored. If you're going to make that claim, then I think you have to back it up, even if they're taking shots at management (maybe even especially then) - at least until the contracts are up when you can just let them go. I feel similarly about the Imus firing in that his employers knew what they were getting into every time they gave him a new contract.