Since? SINCE? Have you been screwing with the space-time continuum again? "Ecosystem" was around before Twitter first started.
I half agree, though..Net is a platform, not an ecosystem, although "ecosystem" can be a reasonable term (e.g. for an interaction of technologies in a computer-based environment).
You'd think so - it contains huge botnets, lots of spammers, and I'm sure there are more crimes committed online from within its borders than it generally admits. It'll be interesting to see how it trades less with itself or imposes sanctions on itself to make it behave better towards itself!
Well, I'm sure the UK will be on the right side of that law once our politicians completely ignore the Digital Economy Bill and end up accepting ACTA...
Made sense to me - although I'm not sure how it'd be done. If a computer runs a web browser then 99%+ of the time it won't need to run a web server, so blocking inbound requests on port 80 would stop it being used as a server. I assume that's important and that it is indicative of zombies, but I could be trusting Taco too much there!
A very large reason for this is the fact that it's rather obvious that you need to have Steam running and be logged in to play. They don't really need to warn you of that. It'd be kind of like warning you that you need to turn on your computer before you can play it.
Not really. I can download games from places like Direct2Drive and GOG.com and not have to have some client logged in. Just because they use a custom client rather than a browser (one that automatically logs me in so I can easily purchase and which is tailored to their catalogue) then why does that indicate I've got to have it running? You've got to know about the way that Steam works to know that.
Which is all well and good until they move to a Console-style saving system of only letting you save at arbitrary points (which they might do anyway, but I've not been paying much attention after they said it had the terrible DRM). Then you could be a few yards from the next checkpoint, have your Net die and lose all that progress. Do that a couple of times and I bet he'd be cursing it.
Also:
Does it ever slow down or disconnect quickly when someone else in the house is downloading some music, or have to reboot your modem / router sometimes?
"Yeah, but I usually play a game while it reboots."
He'll have fun once Ubisoft-style DRM is in all games - if the router is rebooting then the game won't be able to connect and so won't start and so he won't be able to use it as a diversion while it reboots!
But Assassin's Creed 2 doesn't have a need for a CD, so no-CD cracks won't work. And Ubisoft said that their new "always online" DRM is proof against anything, so there's not going to be a "no-Internet" crack and even the 'real' gamers will be stuck with it:(
DRM is teaching a generation of game players that buying games == "problems" while priating games == "it just works".
And piracy advocates are teaching that same generation that "if you don't agree with it then it is fine to break the law, even for the flimsiest of excuses". Neither side is really helping civilisation in that case.
It generally took a while, but it was always one of the good things with some of the patches from Relic Entertainment (creators of Dawn of War). Dawn of War and its expansions were all DRM protected (although I think each was broken before release) but after a while one of their patches removed the DRM. Some companies would keep it on indefinitely, but at least some get it half-right and remove it in the end.
The bad thing about that DRM was that it was the only thing stopping the game running fine in Wine. The demo (even the last expansion) worked fine, but the game then failed because of the DRM. Granted, Linux isn't a supported platform, but it is technically sufficient for the game, just not for the DRM (which is all a "treat your customers as criminals" thing anyway).
Except that surely it would be jarring in a different way to have all of this background noise but then not have the characters speak?
I do agree that the voice acting can be terrible in RPGs, though. Oblivion and Fallout 3 sounded very "samey" with a lot of characters, even if you've walked miles to get to them. They also didn't always match the character that well.
Or are you suggesting she somehow accidentally answered the phone, or accidentally drove the car?
"I'm sorry, officer. I was just sat in the car, then my hand slipped and started the ignition, then my feet slipped at the same time as my hand slipped and I ended up dropping the car into gear and driving off*, then my left foot kept slipping on to the clutch at the same time as my hand slipped on the gear stick. It was all just accidental driving."
* Note for Americans: We in the UK generally have these things called "gear sticks" and "clutch pedals" that let you change gear by yourself;)
People want the kids but not the responsibility, so they're outsourcing the responsibility and blaming everyone but themselves when they do a bad job.
And I say this as a guy in his mid-20s with a kid approaching 2. The wife and I are both annoyed at times by all of these laws and complaints from parents who basically don't want to do a proper job of bringing their kids up.
72"? 65"? 50"? 42"? They're not "televisions" they're "room dominating behemoths equivalent to a home cinema screen"! Sizes in the 20s and low 30s are TVs;)
I always love those graphs. For our "reasonable sized" TV (26" in a ~12'-14' room, which is fairly standard in a UK terrace and includes a 2' extension) we need to be sat stupidly close to hit the "visibile difference" distance.
I do sometimes watch things like House on standard-def Sky and wonder why, when I can already see enough apparent individual hairs, I'd need to go high-def. It always just seems like overkill.
...but monkeys do, too! If they've got a gun. Without a gun, they're pretty friendly. But with a gun, they're pretty dangerous.
"Guns don't kill people, people do," but I think the gun helps, you know? I think it helps. I just think just standing there going, "Bang!" That's not going to kill too many people, is it? You'd have to be really dodgy on the heart to have that... ( imitates gunfire noises )
Because guns don't kill people, it's just that certain noise they make. It's just a bullet ripping through peoples' bodies. That's what kills people! Yeah, have guns but don't allow any ammunition. There! We got it! We got it sorted! And they just go ( mimes throwing gun in frustration )
One theory is that it's common to have a snack in front of the TV, while a computer requires a more active user, for example when chatting or playing games.
Yeah, because sitting there and typing or moving the mouse is huge amounts of activity! I can eat a bag of M&Ms and drink coke while coding, and I'm sure there are plenty who can scoff pizza, coke and crisps without a problem!
You've got to lick your fingers well to make sure that you don't leave a mess on your keyboard, but other than that the computer "activity" isn't that much of an obstacle for eating.
Yes it could; there was a well-known system of notation, and plenty of printers who could print more copies of sheet music. It might not have been as easy as it is now, but there were pirate printers. (Although to be fair, the market for regular books was bigger, so it had more pirates) Sound recordings couldn't be made at all yet, but that only helped to keep performers in business, not composers. And Beethoven himself had to put up with pirates and such.
However 1) Beethoven would probably have got paid an awful lot more for his work before it got copied and 2) having the sheet music (which needs a skilled group to play it) is nowhere near the same as having a perfect copy of the artist's performance - it is more like getting some 16Kbps MP3 of a drunk singing notes in the bath and claiming "I've got Beethoven's music for free".
There is no technological reason why the RIAA, MPAA, etc. cannot use P2P file sharing in order to distribute their goods. Pirates have no advantage here.
True enough - the BBC even does it itself in the form of the BBC iPlayer. If you're not careful and don't realise it then the damned thing chews through your monthly bandwidth allowance even when you aren't running it so that they can share their programmes without everyone having to flood out a collection of BBC servers. Not ideal when it is not obvious that it does it, but certainly useful from the BBC's point of view.
People have always thought that. And frankly, you nailed the sensible reason. 'Because I can, and because I want things for free (i.e. I want to profit the most from the least investment)' is a perfectly sensible reason.
"Sensible" as in "completely short-sighted and self-serving", yes. But not "sensible" as in "has some kind of logical basis that isn't to the detriment of the people putting in the work".
Rather, a copyright is a way for authors to prohibit other people from competing with them for identical, commodity goods. It only appeals to an author's desire to profit the most from the least investment.
So the pro-copying people say, but my wife is an amateur author and wouldn't want to try to publish her books if everyone was free to copy it, and I'm a programmer with apps released under the GPL and I wouldn't bother with any of those projects if it wasn't for copyright. If I want to put in my time and effort to write a program to help people, and as 'payment' I want people to contribute changes back when they distribute (a requirement that can only really happen under copyright, since EULAs are void in many nations and dubious in others) but I can't guarantee that then I wouldn't bother with the apps and I'd just waste away my time on more private hobbies that don't involve me distributing things.
Authors and pirates have different motives. Authors (in general) want to publish for people's enjoyment and to be recompensed for their work and effort (since it often involves effort that would otherwise have gone in to a job, leaving them requiring some form of 'wage' or else a) they wouldn't live or b) they've had to get a different job and so wouldn't be able to write). Pirates, on the other hand, want to get enjoy other people's work for zero effort on their part (unless you count "finding a torrent" as effort).
What makes a story or a song the wealth of the entire society? Why should a craftsman of (for example) a chair be paid hundreds of [insert currency] for a chair but the craftsman of a story or song be paid 99 [insert fractions of currencies] for the same amount of hours work put in before everyone decides they have some inherent right to copy it for free?
As for "lierspeak"[sic], fine, replace it with whatever you want that doesn't imply consumption of a resource. I use "take" in a non-depriving manner for "take a copy" or "take a photo". If you're particularly upset about that then the question still stands while using a less 'contentious' phrase.
I agree that copying is not theft (despite what the media companies say), but copying not being theft doesn't make it an instantly and undeniably good thing for the cultural world if everyone is free to copy everything.
Mu. Nobody's talking about taking anything from them.
Even if you don't remove the item from their possession and deprive them of it, you're still "taking" a copy of their work, using it and enjoying it (presumably).
For the other two - why do you have the right to read my post without compensating me? You're doing it right now.
Because you posted it to a place where the purpose is for other people to read the content and comments for free.
My example was of writing and publishing a book or music through retail channels then finding people are getting it without compensating you. Yours is like writing a story and posting it to FanFiction.net or any other "free to read" Internet archive and then asking why you aren't getting compensated.
Why do you have an a priori right to take, use and enjoy their work without compensating them?
In the time of Beethoven then music couldn't easily be copied and so some benefactor would pay for its creation or performance - the people responsible got paid for the creation of entertainment. Now that it is easily copyable, people assume that they have some all-powerful right to take whatever they want for no particular reason and with no compensation, and I've yet to see any sensible reason why that doesn't devolve to "because I can and because I want everything for free".
I hate that GPL argument. Sure it's technically correct, but the GPL was written with the intent of subverting copyright using it's own rules. The GPL would be unnecessary, and would most definitely not be common had the copyright system been much more lax during the last few decades.
And I hate the anti-GPL copyright argument. Sure it looks correct, but the GPL was written to ensure that source code remains free by using copyright's own rules. The GPL would be unnecessarily compromised, and would most definitely still be common had the copyright system been much more lax during the last few decades.
Without copyright then the BSD/MIT license would still be about functional ("anyone can use our code, including closing it off") but there'd be a question over attribution requirements. Without copyright the GPL would be screwed for any way to say "...and you must make the source of distributed versions and modifications available under the same or similar license".
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That'll be a real PITA for anyone who wants to go to sleep at any point after they buy it!
Since? SINCE? Have you been screwing with the space-time continuum again? "Ecosystem" was around before Twitter first started.
I half agree, though. .Net is a platform, not an ecosystem, although "ecosystem" can be a reasonable term (e.g. for an interaction of technologies in a computer-based environment).
You'd think so - it contains huge botnets, lots of spammers, and I'm sure there are more crimes committed online from within its borders than it generally admits. It'll be interesting to see how it trades less with itself or imposes sanctions on itself to make it behave better towards itself!
Well, I'm sure the UK will be on the right side of that law once our politicians completely ignore the Digital Economy Bill and end up accepting ACTA...
Looks like you need to block Google as well! http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com
Made sense to me - although I'm not sure how it'd be done. If a computer runs a web browser then 99%+ of the time it won't need to run a web server, so blocking inbound requests on port 80 would stop it being used as a server. I assume that's important and that it is indicative of zombies, but I could be trusting Taco too much there!
Not really. I can download games from places like Direct2Drive and GOG.com and not have to have some client logged in. Just because they use a custom client rather than a browser (one that automatically logs me in so I can easily purchase and which is tailored to their catalogue) then why does that indicate I've got to have it running? You've got to know about the way that Steam works to know that.
Which is all well and good until they move to a Console-style saving system of only letting you save at arbitrary points (which they might do anyway, but I've not been paying much attention after they said it had the terrible DRM). Then you could be a few yards from the next checkpoint, have your Net die and lose all that progress. Do that a couple of times and I bet he'd be cursing it.
Also:
He'll have fun once Ubisoft-style DRM is in all games - if the router is rebooting then the game won't be able to connect and so won't start and so he won't be able to use it as a diversion while it reboots!
But Assassin's Creed 2 doesn't have a need for a CD, so no-CD cracks won't work. And Ubisoft said that their new "always online" DRM is proof against anything, so there's not going to be a "no-Internet" crack and even the 'real' gamers will be stuck with it :(
Oh, hang on...
And piracy advocates are teaching that same generation that "if you don't agree with it then it is fine to break the law, even for the flimsiest of excuses". Neither side is really helping civilisation in that case.
It generally took a while, but it was always one of the good things with some of the patches from Relic Entertainment (creators of Dawn of War). Dawn of War and its expansions were all DRM protected (although I think each was broken before release) but after a while one of their patches removed the DRM. Some companies would keep it on indefinitely, but at least some get it half-right and remove it in the end.
The bad thing about that DRM was that it was the only thing stopping the game running fine in Wine. The demo (even the last expansion) worked fine, but the game then failed because of the DRM. Granted, Linux isn't a supported platform, but it is technically sufficient for the game, just not for the DRM (which is all a "treat your customers as criminals" thing anyway).
Except that surely it would be jarring in a different way to have all of this background noise but then not have the characters speak?
I do agree that the voice acting can be terrible in RPGs, though. Oblivion and Fallout 3 sounded very "samey" with a lot of characters, even if you've walked miles to get to them. They also didn't always match the character that well.
No, "person who wants to have a TV in their front room, not a room built around their TV" ;)
"I'm sorry, officer. I was just sat in the car, then my hand slipped and started the ignition, then my feet slipped at the same time as my hand slipped and I ended up dropping the car into gear and driving off*, then my left foot kept slipping on to the clutch at the same time as my hand slipped on the gear stick. It was all just accidental driving."
* Note for Americans: We in the UK generally have these things called "gear sticks" and "clutch pedals" that let you change gear by yourself ;)
People want the kids but not the responsibility, so they're outsourcing the responsibility and blaming everyone but themselves when they do a bad job.
And I say this as a guy in his mid-20s with a kid approaching 2. The wife and I are both annoyed at times by all of these laws and complaints from parents who basically don't want to do a proper job of bringing their kids up.
72"? 65"? 50"? 42"? They're not "televisions" they're "room dominating behemoths equivalent to a home cinema screen"! Sizes in the 20s and low 30s are TVs ;)
I always love those graphs. For our "reasonable sized" TV (26" in a ~12'-14' room, which is fairly standard in a UK terrace and includes a 2' extension) we need to be sat stupidly close to hit the "visibile difference" distance.
I do sometimes watch things like House on standard-def Sky and wonder why, when I can already see enough apparent individual hairs, I'd need to go high-def. It always just seems like overkill.
(Good old Eddie Izzard: 1, 2 and 3!)
Yeah, because sitting there and typing or moving the mouse is huge amounts of activity! I can eat a bag of M&Ms and drink coke while coding, and I'm sure there are plenty who can scoff pizza, coke and crisps without a problem!
You've got to lick your fingers well to make sure that you don't leave a mess on your keyboard, but other than that the computer "activity" isn't that much of an obstacle for eating.
However 1) Beethoven would probably have got paid an awful lot more for his work before it got copied and 2) having the sheet music (which needs a skilled group to play it) is nowhere near the same as having a perfect copy of the artist's performance - it is more like getting some 16Kbps MP3 of a drunk singing notes in the bath and claiming "I've got Beethoven's music for free".
True enough - the BBC even does it itself in the form of the BBC iPlayer. If you're not careful and don't realise it then the damned thing chews through your monthly bandwidth allowance even when you aren't running it so that they can share their programmes without everyone having to flood out a collection of BBC servers. Not ideal when it is not obvious that it does it, but certainly useful from the BBC's point of view.
"Sensible" as in "completely short-sighted and self-serving", yes. But not "sensible" as in "has some kind of logical basis that isn't to the detriment of the people putting in the work".
So the pro-copying people say, but my wife is an amateur author and wouldn't want to try to publish her books if everyone was free to copy it, and I'm a programmer with apps released under the GPL and I wouldn't bother with any of those projects if it wasn't for copyright. If I want to put in my time and effort to write a program to help people, and as 'payment' I want people to contribute changes back when they distribute (a requirement that can only really happen under copyright, since EULAs are void in many nations and dubious in others) but I can't guarantee that then I wouldn't bother with the apps and I'd just waste away my time on more private hobbies that don't involve me distributing things.
Authors and pirates have different motives. Authors (in general) want to publish for people's enjoyment and to be recompensed for their work and effort (since it often involves effort that would otherwise have gone in to a job, leaving them requiring some form of 'wage' or else a) they wouldn't live or b) they've had to get a different job and so wouldn't be able to write). Pirates, on the other hand, want to get enjoy other people's work for zero effort on their part (unless you count "finding a torrent" as effort).
What makes a story or a song the wealth of the entire society? Why should a craftsman of (for example) a chair be paid hundreds of [insert currency] for a chair but the craftsman of a story or song be paid 99 [insert fractions of currencies] for the same amount of hours work put in before everyone decides they have some inherent right to copy it for free?
As for "lierspeak"[sic], fine, replace it with whatever you want that doesn't imply consumption of a resource. I use "take" in a non-depriving manner for "take a copy" or "take a photo". If you're particularly upset about that then the question still stands while using a less 'contentious' phrase.
I agree that copying is not theft (despite what the media companies say), but copying not being theft doesn't make it an instantly and undeniably good thing for the cultural world if everyone is free to copy everything.
Even if you don't remove the item from their possession and deprive them of it, you're still "taking" a copy of their work, using it and enjoying it (presumably).
Because you posted it to a place where the purpose is for other people to read the content and comments for free.
My example was of writing and publishing a book or music through retail channels then finding people are getting it without compensating you. Yours is like writing a story and posting it to FanFiction.net or any other "free to read" Internet archive and then asking why you aren't getting compensated.
Why do you have an a priori right to take, use and enjoy their work without compensating them?
In the time of Beethoven then music couldn't easily be copied and so some benefactor would pay for its creation or performance - the people responsible got paid for the creation of entertainment. Now that it is easily copyable, people assume that they have some all-powerful right to take whatever they want for no particular reason and with no compensation, and I've yet to see any sensible reason why that doesn't devolve to "because I can and because I want everything for free".
And I hate the anti-GPL copyright argument. Sure it looks correct, but the GPL was written to ensure that source code remains free by using copyright's own rules. The GPL would be unnecessarily compromised, and would most definitely still be common had the copyright system been much more lax during the last few decades.
Without copyright then the BSD/MIT license would still be about functional ("anyone can use our code, including closing it off") but there'd be a question over attribution requirements. Without copyright the GPL would be screwed for any way to say "...and you must make the source of distributed versions and modifications available under the same or similar license".
Or "vigilantism"