if you want to think about it in terms of limiting the use of the hardware, then they're not doing anything of the sort. The only thing you get out of these fixes are online play and the ability to use their online store, both of which are value added services which require effort on the part of Nintendo to run and maintain. You're welcome to do whatever you want with the hardware, but if you don't use their firmware, you don't get to use their other services. In this case, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
We should be complaining about the other locked down hardware that we get, like cell phones, where we're paying for the service and the hardware and get to use neither like we'd like. The Wii could be used almost to its fullest potential without installing a single update, but you can't say that about the iphone.
Hmm, I fail to see how that constitutes a troll. True, it's almost certainly untrue that the code was actually outsourced to India. At the same time, we know that the code was outputting the wrong rating from a previous story, and we also know that code from India is often subpar.
I believe the parent wasn't trolling as much as he was making an observation about how faulty code and outsourcing to india ultimately have the same root: that software development isn't given the resources that it so often deserves. When you're running a multi-billion dollar business and you need a program to help you with that business that's going to make decisions that have repercussions reaching towards trillions of dollars, there are methods to make sure that you get correct code. These methods almost certainly were not used, and they're certainly not used in over 90% of the programs released. In other words, software quality is sacrificed for short term profits almost all of the time, which is certainly pertinent to the issue at hand.
Team Melee mode on Starcraft. My friends and I once got 6 people together to play on a huge map with team melee. Huge battles with massive units, one person running around queuing up the next assault, another person holding off the enemy's assault, and overall a lot of fun. It had the added benefit of allowing someone with great tactical skills the ability to beat someone with better logistics skills. In a single player game it usually came down to whoever got the most amount of money and pumped out the most guys. In that game, my team ended up winning even though we produced 1/3 less troops. We just used ours better.
Do you think Dead Space would be as scary without the amazing graphics and audio?
I don't know if this is exactly the same thing, but I remember playing Wolfenstein back when it was still cool. There were levels that resembled mazes, and sometimes you'd get a random machine gun dude around a corner, where you couldn't possibly know he was there. I had to run through one area with extremely low health and only my pistol. When I met one of those guys around a corner, it was the scariest moment I've had while gaming.
So, while I know that you're referring to a creepy atmosphere in addition to everything else, Wolfenstein got me on the suspense and tension without the pretty graphics.
It was compensating for the heart beat, which means that if it just stopped it would nick the heart unless it was already at the maximum distance from the heart. I wonder if there could be a hardware failsafe where losing power or direction from the software would make it pull back an inch from the heart.
Even with the risks of a BSOD, though, it's a much better alternative than being put on a bypass machine and having human hands in there. With properly built hardware and software, the failure rate should be much lower than even the best trained human.
That's not related at all to Stephen King's attempt. He tried doing the suggested pay-by-chapter method where readers could optionally pay if they liked it, and it ended up being a waste of his time.
My point was that he was only wasting his time if he was looking to make money on that one novel, and since he didn't he killed the project. If you're looking to make money off of that project specifically, then you're doing it wrong, especially when you've already got a proven vehicle to make a ton of money (which was my point with the red hot chili peppers).
Radiohead made money off of sales which were benefited by the free/donation release, and because of that it was a huge success. Cory Doctorow releases everything for free and he's successful. Many bloggers make a lot of money off of content that they give away.
However for new artists like the one you linked, it'll give him goodwill among small circles but it doesn't have nearly the punch as getting on the radio (another jar of worms) or your music on some movie soundtrack (which is what the giant labels do.)
Actually, it helps to keep excitement up for him, it helped to get good feedback, and it gave his fans something to read between his books (there was a break there for a while). And nothing can beat the publicity generated by having a video go viral on Youtube, just ask Jonathon Coulter. Releasing without copyright or with a permissive license isn't something that everyone can do successfully, but it works phenomenally well for a lot of people.
And the Red Hot Chili Peppers shouldn't give their music away for free either, at least not in an attempt to make money. For people who are already extremely successful in the traditional methods, they're not going to see the same amount of money using this new technique. However, for people like Brandon Sanderson who are just getting into it, letting out free works can be a good way to get entrenched and build good will.
Not if they were to keep the puzzle layouts and success conditions on the server. It would be very bandwidth and resource intensive, but that's the only way I can think of to keep everything a secret.
Shocking disregard for personal privacy? Nobody can do more than glean a few random statistical probabilities from DNA as it stands now. It may be that in ten years we'll know more, but if our knowledge of DNA goes at the same pace that it did for the last ten years, it'll be half a century before we're able to tell enough about a person that it could be considered an invasion of privacy.
If this will really help the science move forward more quickly, then the benefits of everyone not knowing my DNA will easily be offset by the new scientific knowledge.
No, it's better to simply accept the occasional teenager who "beats the system." Oftentimes the best "security" is just social norms.
I would highlight this with another example. My friends and I would often go to a particular restaurant to eat. This restaurant serves popcorn to eat while waiting for the meal and they have some relatively cheap appetizers. We'd order one small appetizer and fill up on popcorn. To some people, looking from the outside, this would look like "gaming the system", where we take something intended to help paying customers and use it without paying.
However, today, not a month goes by when I don't eat there with at least a group of 6 people, and my wife and I go there all the time. Had a manager or waitress been a hardass and kicked us out, my friends and I certainly wouldn't be eating there on a regular basis today. Sometimes it's better to accept the short term loss if it builds customer loyalty.
If you factor something's popularity into its worth, you're doing it wrong.
XKCD is reaching the point where I can call the reference before it's made on slashdot. The jokes are original and funny and worth reading a few time, as the OP pointed out. However, once it hits the point where XKCD is right now, where there's a reference on nearly every comment page, the jokes get old really fast. I can't read that Summer Glau comic without thinking about how many people have used it in obviously bad ways.
Basically, being popular isn't bad per se, but the consequences of that popularity are.
Last year I gave the government 3000 extra which could have stayed as a cushion in a bank account or have been invested rather than getting it back with no interest.
I am curious how much of your points are devil's advocate, and how much you truly believe. If you believe that telecom immunity is good or that blanket surveillance violating the 4th amendment is okay, I'd love to hear a sane rational reason for it.
I donated to the EFF again when I heard that they were fighting telecom immunity. I nearly donated again today and still might, depending on how the finances look at the end of the day (and by that I mean if I can convince my wife that it's worth it). I believe that the constitutional abuses of the bush administration are criminal.
However, I also believe that marginalizing the other side by saying things like people who support it "are those kinds of people who don't really know how to think things through," which sounds a lot like "they don't come to the same conclusion, so they're obviously dumb." 2700 people died in a single attack which came after a string of earlier attacks on embassies, ships, etc. There are virtually no other external threats to the US.
You're reacting with derision towards a group of people who disagree with you and are assigning them labels that marginalize/demonize them. You're doing the same thing that conservative talk shows do, but it's all right because they're wrong and you're right. The whole idea behind democracy is that people can make decisions for themselves; if you take away that choice from people, why was the revolution fought in the first place?
I disagree. Most people have nothing to hide. Most people aren't paranoid and believe that if things got too bad, then they would be able to reign them in, whether through voting or through revolution. They also believe that this administration has gone too far, with ridiculously low approval ratings.
The problem is 49% of Americans don't understand what we fought for in the revolution, or in the World Wars. They thing that "fighting for freedom" means going to another country
In the world wars fighting for freedom DID mean going to other countries.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"
(Unknown - attributed to Thomas Jefferson)
That could just as well apply to vigilance against tyrants and oppressors in other countries.
My point is that your post marginalizes other people and paints them as ignorant rather than admitting that it's a difference of opinion. For liberals, the platform that they stand on is freedom of choosing your own moral standard and the freedom to live without fear of being left in an impossible situation. For conservatives, they strive for the freedom to do what they want with their own money and the freedom to govern themselves on a more granular level. If an individual state wants to institute welfare, that's fine, just don't force me and my state into it. If my state wants to ban abortion, what's it to your state? You don't believe it's murder, we do. If you believe that an unborn baby is still a human being, then allowing abortions is roughly equivalent to allowing a mother to kill her children whenever she wants.
Quantum crypto does just that, if I remember correctly. Because of the nature of quantum mechanics, you can't intercept the message without simultaneously changing it. Having changed it, you're unable to hide your eavesdropping. The mathematics and science of cryptography is always the strongest thing about security, it's just those darned humans continually screwing things up.
Hmm. The opener was an old stand-by of the site. Well divided between different lines when given the space to do so, refusing to repeat the topic. Methinks I see a republican.
I would also guess that you're going to get a disproportionately high number of people who care about these issues in the hardcore gamer crowd than in the general population. When you're dealing with people who want to squeeze every last frame out of their rig, adding DLL's whose only purpose is to police your CD drive is just this side of legal.
In other words, their target audience coincides nicely with people who are going to care about this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
if you want to think about it in terms of limiting the use of the hardware, then they're not doing anything of the sort. The only thing you get out of these fixes are online play and the ability to use their online store, both of which are value added services which require effort on the part of Nintendo to run and maintain. You're welcome to do whatever you want with the hardware, but if you don't use their firmware, you don't get to use their other services. In this case, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
We should be complaining about the other locked down hardware that we get, like cell phones, where we're paying for the service and the hardware and get to use neither like we'd like. The Wii could be used almost to its fullest potential without installing a single update, but you can't say that about the iphone.
Agreed.
Hmm, I fail to see how that constitutes a troll. True, it's almost certainly untrue that the code was actually outsourced to India. At the same time, we know that the code was outputting the wrong rating from a previous story, and we also know that code from India is often subpar.
I believe the parent wasn't trolling as much as he was making an observation about how faulty code and outsourcing to india ultimately have the same root: that software development isn't given the resources that it so often deserves. When you're running a multi-billion dollar business and you need a program to help you with that business that's going to make decisions that have repercussions reaching towards trillions of dollars, there are methods to make sure that you get correct code. These methods almost certainly were not used, and they're certainly not used in over 90% of the programs released. In other words, software quality is sacrificed for short term profits almost all of the time, which is certainly pertinent to the issue at hand.
If you read further down into the article, though, it still gave them nightmares for years afterwards. Sounds similar enough to me.
Sorry, they've already registered 200 votes for some nigerian guy and another 150 for penis enhancements.
Team Melee mode on Starcraft. My friends and I once got 6 people together to play on a huge map with team melee. Huge battles with massive units, one person running around queuing up the next assault, another person holding off the enemy's assault, and overall a lot of fun. It had the added benefit of allowing someone with great tactical skills the ability to beat someone with better logistics skills. In a single player game it usually came down to whoever got the most amount of money and pumped out the most guys. In that game, my team ended up winning even though we produced 1/3 less troops. We just used ours better.
Do you think Dead Space would be as scary without the amazing graphics and audio?
I don't know if this is exactly the same thing, but I remember playing Wolfenstein back when it was still cool. There were levels that resembled mazes, and sometimes you'd get a random machine gun dude around a corner, where you couldn't possibly know he was there. I had to run through one area with extremely low health and only my pistol. When I met one of those guys around a corner, it was the scariest moment I've had while gaming.
So, while I know that you're referring to a creepy atmosphere in addition to everything else, Wolfenstein got me on the suspense and tension without the pretty graphics.
It was compensating for the heart beat, which means that if it just stopped it would nick the heart unless it was already at the maximum distance from the heart. I wonder if there could be a hardware failsafe where losing power or direction from the software would make it pull back an inch from the heart.
Even with the risks of a BSOD, though, it's a much better alternative than being put on a bypass machine and having human hands in there. With properly built hardware and software, the failure rate should be much lower than even the best trained human.
That's not related at all to Stephen King's attempt. He tried doing the suggested pay-by-chapter method where readers could optionally pay if they liked it, and it ended up being a waste of his time.
My point was that he was only wasting his time if he was looking to make money on that one novel, and since he didn't he killed the project. If you're looking to make money off of that project specifically, then you're doing it wrong, especially when you've already got a proven vehicle to make a ton of money (which was my point with the red hot chili peppers).
Radiohead made money off of sales which were benefited by the free/donation release, and because of that it was a huge success. Cory Doctorow releases everything for free and he's successful. Many bloggers make a lot of money off of content that they give away.
However for new artists like the one you linked, it'll give him goodwill among small circles but it doesn't have nearly the punch as getting on the radio (another jar of worms) or your music on some movie soundtrack (which is what the giant labels do.)
Actually, it helps to keep excitement up for him, it helped to get good feedback, and it gave his fans something to read between his books (there was a break there for a while). And nothing can beat the publicity generated by having a video go viral on Youtube, just ask Jonathon Coulter. Releasing without copyright or with a permissive license isn't something that everyone can do successfully, but it works phenomenally well for a lot of people.
I recall Stephen King trying this and giving up.
And the Red Hot Chili Peppers shouldn't give their music away for free either, at least not in an attempt to make money. For people who are already extremely successful in the traditional methods, they're not going to see the same amount of money using this new technique. However, for people like Brandon Sanderson who are just getting into it, letting out free works can be a good way to get entrenched and build good will.
Not if they were to keep the puzzle layouts and success conditions on the server. It would be very bandwidth and resource intensive, but that's the only way I can think of to keep everything a secret.
Shocking disregard for personal privacy? Nobody can do more than glean a few random statistical probabilities from DNA as it stands now. It may be that in ten years we'll know more, but if our knowledge of DNA goes at the same pace that it did for the last ten years, it'll be half a century before we're able to tell enough about a person that it could be considered an invasion of privacy.
If this will really help the science move forward more quickly, then the benefits of everyone not knowing my DNA will easily be offset by the new scientific knowledge.
No, it's better to simply accept the occasional teenager who "beats the system." Oftentimes the best "security" is just social norms.
I would highlight this with another example. My friends and I would often go to a particular restaurant to eat. This restaurant serves popcorn to eat while waiting for the meal and they have some relatively cheap appetizers. We'd order one small appetizer and fill up on popcorn. To some people, looking from the outside, this would look like "gaming the system", where we take something intended to help paying customers and use it without paying.
However, today, not a month goes by when I don't eat there with at least a group of 6 people, and my wife and I go there all the time. Had a manager or waitress been a hardass and kicked us out, my friends and I certainly wouldn't be eating there on a regular basis today. Sometimes it's better to accept the short term loss if it builds customer loyalty.
I'll let you know when the free market caters to my demand for affordable healthcare coverage so I can have more than 8 hours awake per day.
Instacare facilities cost a fraction of what a normal doctor's visit does and handles most of the things that people go to the doctor for.
You should move to America. Things are a ton better over here as anyone who watched the presidential debates can tell you.
I wonder what the minimum figure is that could still accomplish this.
20k / year?
If you factor something's popularity into its worth, you're doing it wrong.
XKCD is reaching the point where I can call the reference before it's made on slashdot. The jokes are original and funny and worth reading a few time, as the OP pointed out. However, once it hits the point where XKCD is right now, where there's a reference on nearly every comment page, the jokes get old really fast. I can't read that Summer Glau comic without thinking about how many people have used it in obviously bad ways.
Basically, being popular isn't bad per se, but the consequences of that popularity are.
Last year I gave the government 3000 extra which could have stayed as a cushion in a bank account or have been invested rather than getting it back with no interest.
Does that mean you should be thanking them?
I am curious how much of your points are devil's advocate, and how much you truly believe. If you believe that telecom immunity is good or that blanket surveillance violating the 4th amendment is okay, I'd love to hear a sane rational reason for it.
I donated to the EFF again when I heard that they were fighting telecom immunity. I nearly donated again today and still might, depending on how the finances look at the end of the day (and by that I mean if I can convince my wife that it's worth it). I believe that the constitutional abuses of the bush administration are criminal.
However, I also believe that marginalizing the other side by saying things like people who support it "are those kinds of people who don't really know how to think things through," which sounds a lot like "they don't come to the same conclusion, so they're obviously dumb." 2700 people died in a single attack which came after a string of earlier attacks on embassies, ships, etc. There are virtually no other external threats to the US.
You're reacting with derision towards a group of people who disagree with you and are assigning them labels that marginalize/demonize them. You're doing the same thing that conservative talk shows do, but it's all right because they're wrong and you're right. The whole idea behind democracy is that people can make decisions for themselves; if you take away that choice from people, why was the revolution fought in the first place?
The problem is 49% of Americans don't understand what we fought for in the revolution, or in the World Wars. They thing that "fighting for freedom" means going to another country
In the world wars fighting for freedom DID mean going to other countries.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" (Unknown - attributed to Thomas Jefferson)
That could just as well apply to vigilance against tyrants and oppressors in other countries.
My point is that your post marginalizes other people and paints them as ignorant rather than admitting that it's a difference of opinion. For liberals, the platform that they stand on is freedom of choosing your own moral standard and the freedom to live without fear of being left in an impossible situation. For conservatives, they strive for the freedom to do what they want with their own money and the freedom to govern themselves on a more granular level. If an individual state wants to institute welfare, that's fine, just don't force me and my state into it. If my state wants to ban abortion, what's it to your state? You don't believe it's murder, we do. If you believe that an unborn baby is still a human being, then allowing abortions is roughly equivalent to allowing a mother to kill her children whenever she wants.
Quantum crypto does just that, if I remember correctly. Because of the nature of quantum mechanics, you can't intercept the message without simultaneously changing it. Having changed it, you're unable to hide your eavesdropping. The mathematics and science of cryptography is always the strongest thing about security, it's just those darned humans continually screwing things up.
Hmm. The opener was an old stand-by of the site. Well divided between different lines when given the space to do so, refusing to repeat the topic. Methinks I see a republican.
No we're not. The legislature, on the other hand...
They should make a new domain for sex offender e-mail addresses...The domain can be called. hotmail.com
That sounds more like a domain for their targets.
I would also guess that you're going to get a disproportionately high number of people who care about these issues in the hardcore gamer crowd than in the general population. When you're dealing with people who want to squeeze every last frame out of their rig, adding DLL's whose only purpose is to police your CD drive is just this side of legal.
In other words, their target audience coincides nicely with people who are going to care about this issue.