I agree that Blizzard used to be more subtle with it. You might remember from the days of old how you needed to do an insane amount of pre-quests to finally do some end-quest somewhere in a dungeon. Like... what was the name of that level 40ish dungeon in the desert? Where you had to get some clapper for the gong to make the water dragon appear? Whatever. Getting that clapper was a feat and a half. Eventually, they did away with it, no more need for it, just go in and GONG. Or the baron and his keys. Eventually they were patched out, no more need to get them. Instead of making dungeons obsolete, they fast-passed them. Which is quite fine, actually, and certainly preferable to simply making them obsolete altogether.
Oh hell, what about getting attuned for Karazhan? "Sorry, I don't have my keys yet, we need to get a guild group for 4 different 5-mans so this person can enter Kara. Oh, and we have to do this every week because we have new people constantly coming in."
Or there was the Onyxia attunement, the BWL attunement..
Certain old-school progression barriers just weren't fun, especially for the people trying to organize and fill raids.
What WoW did was reset progress each time a new raid came out. Suddenly everyone had access to items that were BETTER then what HC raiders had just spent the last few months grinding for
I can't think of a single point where everyone gets items, except maaaybe for valor point purchases. I can't think of any actual hardcore raiders who complain everyone has access to those. When we're talking about HC raiders, we're looking at people who run raids in heroic mode. Let's look at previous content patches and the gear progression:
*) T12 (Firelands) -> T13 (dragon soul). T12 heroic item level: 391-397. T13 raid finder (everyone) item level: 384-390. T13 regular mode: 397-403. T13 five-man dungeons: 378. I didn't like this scenario, where they introduced really easy (and boring) 5-mans. Each patch they would introduce new 5-man dungeons which gave items close to the ilvl of the previous tier's normal-mode raid. They did this in Wrath and Cataclysm, and it seems to be a model they've abandoned. *) T14 -> T15 (most recent). T14 Heroic item level: 509 (for the regular dungeons, T14 was a weird split tier). T15 raid finder (everyone) item level: 502. T15 'normal mode': 522. This gives the HC people a reason not to feel bored, they'll actually get something out of doing normal modes, and it won't be a cakewalk either. No new 5-mans either -- you're now expected to run Mogu'shan Vaults, Heart of Fear, and Terrace of Endless Spring to gear up before hopping into the T15 raids. This isn't nearly as bad a situation as it was in vanilla because raid finder raids are easy to queue for and get into.
Yes, I would expect that once the next content patch comes out, everyone should be able to get fairly easy gear equivalent to the previous tier's level. We've seen what the alternative is: Vanilla and Burning Crusade, where the pool of 'hardcore' raiders grows smaller and smaller because people stop raiding, and other people, who may be talented, can't catch up on the gear curve. It's why so few people saw Naxx 40 when it came out, or to a less extent, progressed very far into Sunwell when it came out. Not that there were no talented raiders, but because if you rolled a new character or were a new player, or just behind on the curve, you'd have to go find a raid that did Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj. You needed the gear, and it came slowly.
The big mistake about raiding is thinking that the gear itself is the be-all end-all. Gear is a tool and nothing more. You exist only in the moment -- your progression last patch does not, and should not matter. If you suck, you'll fall behind the other groups rather quickly. As it should be.
This, though, is not the case if the new player would first of all have to raid through 5 years of content before he can play with the "big boys". Imagine people would have to start raiding in Molten Core today. Even if we ignored the impossibility to assemble 40 people to do it since everyone who is raiding with the "elite" doesn't give half a poop (unlike when it was new), how exciting do you think it is to start at the bottom?
I understand your point, but that might actually be better than what they've been doing. What happens right now is that every 1-2 years the game resets, most of the guilds fall apart because different people level at different speeds and the old content is completely useless. New players never see much of it because they never have to do a dungeon until they hit the level cap, and if they actually do a dungeon it's usually a speed run with a level-capped player destroying the dungeon for them.
Maybe they need to find a middle ground, but the current process seems to alienate a considerable number of players every other year, which can't be good for their subscription rates.
I think more guilds actually fell apart at the end of an expansion rather than when the next expansion came out. This happened at the end of Wrath and Cataclysm.. especially with Wrath when Blizzard was focusing on making the next expansion and there was a one-year delay between the last major content update and the next expansion. New expansions typically see a greatly increased surge of subscriptions and guild participation as people start playing the game again. Several months later, subscriptions drop because people have gone through the content.
Really, when a new expansion comes up, it's not only that the old content doesn't give new gear. People don't want to do the old content at that point -- they're sick of it. There's only a certain number of Dragon Soul runs you can do before you're happy you've outleveled it.
If you think WoW requires a lot of grinding, you never played EQ or any of the other early MMOs.
One of WoW's initial selling points was leveling without grinding. Although I'm not sure I've seen a worse grind than the High Warlord/Grand Marshall push in Vanilla WoW PvP. That was pretty brutal.
Vanilla was by far the most simple of all with exception of Naxx which less than 1% of the players saw. Bosses had 1-3 abilities max. It was all about resist gear.
Well it wasn't -all- about the resist gear, but certain gatekeeper bosses (like Princess in AQ40, Baron Geddon in Molten Core, Firemaw in Blackwing Lair) had very high resist requirements.
Back in vanilla, most bosses were taunt immune. You didn't have Vengeance, so tanks out-threated each other to force tank transitions. Characters were far less mobile then than they are now. Tanks (almost exclusively prot or arms/prot hybrid warriors) had no heroic leap, could not charge in defensive stance, and their taunt was melee-range only -- this made keeping control of the frequently-deaggroing Battleguard Satura (and her adds) quite the tank challenge. There were almost no AOE threat abilities, making things like adds on the Fankriss encounter a challenge (a number of tanks used EZ Dynamite consumables to get aggro). Forget using Thunderclap for aggro, they used Demoralizing Shout.
The vanilla raids were designed back before various "essential" addons became popular. No Deadly Boss Mods telling you to move, no threat mods helping you on Vaelestraz. There were things like CT RaidAssist, but they pale in comparison to what DBM does these days. Bosses were simpler because your tools (abilities and addons) were simpler or more limited. Eventually addons were crafted to automate various tasks greatly (IE, a single button that will target any raid member with a debuff and cleanse it) and the addon API was rewritten for BC to make such things impossible.
Blizzard devs have confirmed that they design encounters now under the assumption that all raiders will have standard raiding mods, like DBM or Bigwig's.
Stop-motion Jurassic park would have been like CGI Star Wars. Get it, Lucas?
Jurassic Park was originally going to be stop-motion in wide shots (or really, go-motion like the walkers from Empire Strikes Back) and Phil Tippett was hired to oversee this. The results just weren't what Spielberg was hoping for, and then the CGI dinosaurs started to look amazing...
You forgot the worst part of zero tolerance: that the lesson schools are teaching to kids is that heavy-handed, inflexible rules and imposing authority is normal. The next generation isn't going to overturn the patriot act or roll back arbitrary and secret no fly lists, or demand that the government abide by the constitution because they will be used to having absolutely no rights, save what the authority lets them have.
Eehhh.. I went to a fairly authoritarian private elementary school when I was young and I rankled at the rules that I felt were silly, or there for no other reason than to be rules to follow. The zero-tolerance attitude may have encouraged my more anti-authoritarian leanings later on. Oh, I also went to a Catholic high school that was a lot more relaxed. >_> I ended up liking the teachers (except one weirdo) and the nuns a lot more than the students.
Yeah, see that's the problem there. If everyone actually used the same network and if everyone was -willing- to use the same network we wouldn't have any problem. Fortunately the vast, vast majority of my contacts (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, even skype using the silly plugin) show up in pidgin, so just one client to talk to everyone.
Even Google Talk can be pretty annoying. If I send email from my gmail account to someone else's, they get added to my Google Talk contacts. That's fairly intrusive. Most networks require authorization from both parties before a contact list add. I know it goes against Google's whole philosophy, but I don't -want- synchronization of all services.
This really REALLY frustrating part of me is that many of my friends are starting to only chat on Steam. They might have other chat clients or such but don't always sign on with them, while they're always signed into steam if they're at their computer. Uuuuugggghh, I thought skype was bad with standards. Steam is about as bad as a chat client can get.
Usenet's death is not greatly exaggerated. Just because a few people still use it doesn't mean it has much relevancy in the modern Internet. Outside of your one kernel mail list example (a mailing list is not a usenet newsgroup.. do they use a news-to-mail gateway?) I haven't heard anyone mention Usenet's use outside of piracy, that is, as a dumping ground for binaries that is off media lawyers' radar since they're focused on web sites and bittorrent. I used to use it all the time -- it was email and newsgroups (archie was pretty useless by the time I started using the 'net, and the web hadn't really been developed yet). But long gone are the days when a majority of Internet users used it, long gone are the days when your ISP would provide an NNTP server for you to use.
Most people use website-specific forums now which SUCK compared to what you had on Usenet 20 years ago. Instead of rec.sports.*, most people comment on espn.com or some other sports-related web portal.
Hell, Slashdot is a replacement for Usenet. At least its discussion tools are better than most.
What exactly are people doing that requires 16:10?
There's really only one advantage that 16:9 has over 16:10, and that's smaller black borders (or no borders at all) for widescreen video content. Otherwise, the vertical real estate is very nice to have, and I've found 2560x1600 (which I've used for the last 5 years) somehow really hits the sweet spot between vertical size and widescreen.
One of the funny things about the Clinton era is that he worked with a Republican congress to shrink government spending. I'm kind of amazed that he was more conservative than either of the 2 Presidents named Bush, economically that is.
Clinton is interesting. I actually think he may be our most -pragmatic- President in recent decades, as opposed to idealistic or dogmatic. Not saying he doesn't have ideals or philosophies, but he was amazingly adept at working within a system to achieve parts of his goals, as opposed to butting heads with the system.
I always find it amusing when someone who claims to be pro-free market supports patents and/or copyright. When I think of the free market, I think of monopolies sustained through the threat of violence that infringe upon other people's property rights. Clearly.
It makes sense once you redefine property to include "intellectual property" and someone's ideas become IP. At that point it the government's job is to enforce property rights, like it always has, you just expanded the definition of property.
that won't work, people would howl and scream! Hey, what if there were a way to charge some kind of fee to the people that use the infrastructure? Naw, that'd never work either.
I'd much rather be taxed and use basic infrastructure for free, as it should be. Having driven all over the country, I can easily say that toll roads are an abomination, and fewer things are more tourist-hostile.
I used to like the Green Party loooong ago, just because it seemed like they were the ones pushing for accountability -- corporate accountability at least. Then I decided to read the party platform and the statements by their candidates in the early 2000s, and yes, this was a running theme: that if you earned more than $80k/year (at the time) you must have been earning it dishonestly (like being an executive at a company), so you had no moral claim to the money that you'd earned.
This is an American problem. In other countries it doesn't work this way. I lived in Japan and China for several years, and public construction projects in both of them are done amazingly fast.
, it was estimated to take a month just to clear debris from the site. Then-Governor Schwarzenegger promised that the process would be expedited (the interchange services much of the traffic for the San Francisco East Bay area), incentives were offered to contractors who finished early. From the Wikipedia article:
"A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007. On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident."
Now that's how to do it! Government officials need to know how to evaluate contractors and provide incentives like this. Surprise surprise, when rewards are offered to people who work better.. you get better work.
Duh. Why do you think the copyright laws were made federal in 1972?
It seems to me that it never made sense that it wasn't federal before. Copyright is listed in the US Constitution as being in the federal domain, so it's one of the few areas that Congress is supposed to make laws for.
Why would somebody video tape cops? What could their motive possibly be?
Same reason they take videos of a parade, or a weird guy shouting, or their friend eating ice cream. People take video now of anything that they might consider the least bit interesting.
Of course you don't 'have' to use it. Chance are that it will work out like javascript -- you don't 'have' to use it, just like you don't 'have' to be able to view the majority of popular sites out there without them being, well, broken.
It's "nerd" to watch movies on a computer? Grow up you antiquated moron. I set up exactly that kind of thing for friends and family because they found it easier to type out a movie name into Netflix search despite their horrendous point and peck typing.
Oh I see, so you like only being able to find the movie you want to watch one fifth of the time due to Netflix's incredibly shitty selection.
They'll ban you from the Internet. They'll also ban you from Sneakernet. Or having a computer. Or cable TV. Or even an over-the-air TV. Or a telephone. Or...
Wait. They won't do any of these things. Not to any extent that actually matters.
No, they can just get you banned from various ISPs.
And the lawsuit business has already peaked.
They have something far more efficient now anyway -- agreements with all the major ISPs. You can find yourself quickly banned from the only broadband provider in town.
That's not the truth. The truth is that a banal bunch in Hollywood think DRM is actually useful, and are trying to force their twisted view of reality on everyone else.
The truth is the people actually in control of the video content all want DRM, and are unwilling to release any of their content without it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that Blizzard used to be more subtle with it. You might remember from the days of old how you needed to do an insane amount of pre-quests to finally do some end-quest somewhere in a dungeon. Like ... what was the name of that level 40ish dungeon in the desert? Where you had to get some clapper for the gong to make the water dragon appear? Whatever. Getting that clapper was a feat and a half. Eventually, they did away with it, no more need for it, just go in and GONG. Or the baron and his keys. Eventually they were patched out, no more need to get them. Instead of making dungeons obsolete, they fast-passed them. Which is quite fine, actually, and certainly preferable to simply making them obsolete altogether.
Oh hell, what about getting attuned for Karazhan? "Sorry, I don't have my keys yet, we need to get a guild group for 4 different 5-mans so this person can enter Kara. Oh, and we have to do this every week because we have new people constantly coming in."
Or there was the Onyxia attunement, the BWL attunement..
Certain old-school progression barriers just weren't fun, especially for the people trying to organize and fill raids.
What WoW did was reset progress each time a new raid came out. Suddenly everyone had access to items that were BETTER then what HC raiders had just spent the last few months grinding for
I can't think of a single point where everyone gets items, except maaaybe for valor point purchases. I can't think of any actual hardcore raiders who complain everyone has access to those. When we're talking about HC raiders, we're looking at people who run raids in heroic mode. Let's look at previous content patches and the gear progression:
*) T12 (Firelands) -> T13 (dragon soul). T12 heroic item level: 391-397. T13 raid finder (everyone) item level: 384-390. T13 regular mode: 397-403. T13 five-man dungeons: 378. I didn't like this scenario, where they introduced really easy (and boring) 5-mans. Each patch they would introduce new 5-man dungeons which gave items close to the ilvl of the previous tier's normal-mode raid. They did this in Wrath and Cataclysm, and it seems to be a model they've abandoned.
*) T14 -> T15 (most recent). T14 Heroic item level: 509 (for the regular dungeons, T14 was a weird split tier). T15 raid finder (everyone) item level: 502. T15 'normal mode': 522. This gives the HC people a reason not to feel bored, they'll actually get something out of doing normal modes, and it won't be a cakewalk either. No new 5-mans either -- you're now expected to run Mogu'shan Vaults, Heart of Fear, and Terrace of Endless Spring to gear up before hopping into the T15 raids. This isn't nearly as bad a situation as it was in vanilla because raid finder raids are easy to queue for and get into.
Yes, I would expect that once the next content patch comes out, everyone should be able to get fairly easy gear equivalent to the previous tier's level. We've seen what the alternative is: Vanilla and Burning Crusade, where the pool of 'hardcore' raiders grows smaller and smaller because people stop raiding, and other people, who may be talented, can't catch up on the gear curve. It's why so few people saw Naxx 40 when it came out, or to a less extent, progressed very far into Sunwell when it came out. Not that there were no talented raiders, but because if you rolled a new character or were a new player, or just behind on the curve, you'd have to go find a raid that did Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj. You needed the gear, and it came slowly.
The big mistake about raiding is thinking that the gear itself is the be-all end-all. Gear is a tool and nothing more. You exist only in the moment -- your progression last patch does not, and should not matter. If you suck, you'll fall behind the other groups rather quickly. As it should be.
This, though, is not the case if the new player would first of all have to raid through 5 years of content before he can play with the "big boys". Imagine people would have to start raiding in Molten Core today. Even if we ignored the impossibility to assemble 40 people to do it since everyone who is raiding with the "elite" doesn't give half a poop (unlike when it was new), how exciting do you think it is to start at the bottom?
I understand your point, but that might actually be better than what they've been doing. What happens right now is that every 1-2 years the game resets, most of the guilds fall apart because different people level at different speeds and the old content is completely useless. New players never see much of it because they never have to do a dungeon until they hit the level cap, and if they actually do a dungeon it's usually a speed run with a level-capped player destroying the dungeon for them.
Maybe they need to find a middle ground, but the current process seems to alienate a considerable number of players every other year, which can't be good for their subscription rates.
I think more guilds actually fell apart at the end of an expansion rather than when the next expansion came out. This happened at the end of Wrath and Cataclysm.. especially with Wrath when Blizzard was focusing on making the next expansion and there was a one-year delay between the last major content update and the next expansion. New expansions typically see a greatly increased surge of subscriptions and guild participation as people start playing the game again. Several months later, subscriptions drop because people have gone through the content.
Really, when a new expansion comes up, it's not only that the old content doesn't give new gear. People don't want to do the old content at that point -- they're sick of it. There's only a certain number of Dragon Soul runs you can do before you're happy you've outleveled it.
If you think WoW requires a lot of grinding, you never played EQ or any of the other early MMOs.
One of WoW's initial selling points was leveling without grinding.
Although I'm not sure I've seen a worse grind than the High Warlord/Grand Marshall push in Vanilla WoW PvP. That was pretty brutal.
Vanilla was by far the most simple of all with exception of Naxx which less than 1% of the players saw. Bosses had 1-3 abilities max. It was all about resist gear.
Well it wasn't -all- about the resist gear, but certain gatekeeper bosses (like Princess in AQ40, Baron Geddon in Molten Core, Firemaw in Blackwing Lair) had very high resist requirements.
Back in vanilla, most bosses were taunt immune. You didn't have Vengeance, so tanks out-threated each other to force tank transitions. Characters were far less mobile then than they are now. Tanks (almost exclusively prot or arms/prot hybrid warriors) had no heroic leap, could not charge in defensive stance, and their taunt was melee-range only -- this made keeping control of the frequently-deaggroing Battleguard Satura (and her adds) quite the tank challenge. There were almost no AOE threat abilities, making things like adds on the Fankriss encounter a challenge (a number of tanks used EZ Dynamite consumables to get aggro). Forget using Thunderclap for aggro, they used Demoralizing Shout.
The vanilla raids were designed back before various "essential" addons became popular. No Deadly Boss Mods telling you to move, no threat mods helping you on Vaelestraz. There were things like CT RaidAssist, but they pale in comparison to what DBM does these days. Bosses were simpler because your tools (abilities and addons) were simpler or more limited. Eventually addons were crafted to automate various tasks greatly (IE, a single button that will target any raid member with a debuff and cleanse it) and the addon API was rewritten for BC to make such things impossible.
Blizzard devs have confirmed that they design encounters now under the assumption that all raiders will have standard raiding mods, like DBM or Bigwig's.
Stop-motion Jurassic park would have been like CGI Star Wars. Get it, Lucas?
Jurassic Park was originally going to be stop-motion in wide shots (or really, go-motion like the walkers from Empire Strikes Back) and Phil Tippett was hired to oversee this. The results just weren't what Spielberg was hoping for, and then the CGI dinosaurs started to look amazing...
Why do Americans keep putting "an" instead of "a"? Idiots.
That's not supposed to be standard in America, I can tell you that. Americans who think it is fell asleep during English class.
His company sounds perfectly normal, it's "slashmydots" that sounds like an incompetent moron
I've been to a number of them myself, and I've yet to see one where the relationship between executive and IT is as disfunctional as he describes!
Nerds are the perfect example of the beta or omega male. Betas and omegas, or as some call "nice guys"
You don't really know many nerds, do you?
You forgot the worst part of zero tolerance: that the lesson schools are teaching to kids is that heavy-handed, inflexible rules and imposing authority is normal. The next generation isn't going to overturn the patriot act or roll back arbitrary and secret no fly lists, or demand that the government abide by the constitution because they will be used to having absolutely no rights, save what the authority lets them have.
Eehhh.. I went to a fairly authoritarian private elementary school when I was young and I rankled at the rules that I felt were silly, or there for no other reason than to be rules to follow. The zero-tolerance attitude may have encouraged my more anti-authoritarian leanings later on. Oh, I also went to a Catholic high school that was a lot more relaxed. >_> I ended up liking the teachers (except one weirdo) and the nuns a lot more than the students.
make them get on Google talk
Yeah, see that's the problem there.
If everyone actually used the same network and if everyone was -willing- to use the same network we wouldn't have any problem. Fortunately the vast, vast majority of my contacts (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, even skype using the silly plugin) show up in pidgin, so just one client to talk to everyone.
Even Google Talk can be pretty annoying. If I send email from my gmail account to someone else's, they get added to my Google Talk contacts. That's fairly intrusive. Most networks require authorization from both parties before a contact list add. I know it goes against Google's whole philosophy, but I don't -want- synchronization of all services.
This really REALLY frustrating part of me is that many of my friends are starting to only chat on Steam. They might have other chat clients or such but don't always sign on with them, while they're always signed into steam if they're at their computer. Uuuuugggghh, I thought skype was bad with standards. Steam is about as bad as a chat client can get.
Usenet's death is not greatly exaggerated. Just because a few people still use it doesn't mean it has much relevancy in the modern Internet. Outside of your one kernel mail list example (a mailing list is not a usenet newsgroup.. do they use a news-to-mail gateway?) I haven't heard anyone mention Usenet's use outside of piracy, that is, as a dumping ground for binaries that is off media lawyers' radar since they're focused on web sites and bittorrent. I used to use it all the time -- it was email and newsgroups (archie was pretty useless by the time I started using the 'net, and the web hadn't really been developed yet). But long gone are the days when a majority of Internet users used it, long gone are the days when your ISP would provide an NNTP server for you to use.
Most people use website-specific forums now which SUCK compared to what you had on Usenet 20 years ago. Instead of rec.sports.*, most people comment on espn.com or some other sports-related web portal.
Hell, Slashdot is a replacement for Usenet. At least its discussion tools are better than most.
This is a shitty attempt at a google bomb.
Hell, First-posters are more meaningful.
What exactly are people doing that requires 16:10?
There's really only one advantage that 16:9 has over 16:10, and that's smaller black borders (or no borders at all) for widescreen video content. Otherwise, the vertical real estate is very nice to have, and I've found 2560x1600 (which I've used for the last 5 years) somehow really hits the sweet spot between vertical size and widescreen.
One of the funny things about the Clinton era is that he worked with a Republican congress to shrink government spending. I'm kind of amazed that he was more conservative than either of the 2 Presidents named Bush, economically that is.
Clinton is interesting. I actually think he may be our most -pragmatic- President in recent decades, as opposed to idealistic or dogmatic.
Not saying he doesn't have ideals or philosophies, but he was amazingly adept at working within a system to achieve parts of his goals, as opposed to butting heads with the system.
I always find it amusing when someone who claims to be pro-free market supports patents and/or copyright. When I think of the free market, I think of monopolies sustained through the threat of violence that infringe upon other people's property rights. Clearly.
It makes sense once you redefine property to include "intellectual property" and someone's ideas become IP. At that point it the government's job is to enforce property rights, like it always has, you just expanded the definition of property.
that won't work, people would howl and scream! Hey, what if there were a way to charge some kind of fee to the people that use the infrastructure? Naw, that'd never work either.
I'd much rather be taxed and use basic infrastructure for free, as it should be. Having driven all over the country, I can easily say that toll roads are an abomination, and fewer things are more tourist-hostile.
I used to like the Green Party loooong ago, just because it seemed like they were the ones pushing for accountability -- corporate accountability at least. Then I decided to read the party platform and the statements by their candidates in the early 2000s, and yes, this was a running theme: that if you earned more than $80k/year (at the time) you must have been earning it dishonestly (like being an executive at a company), so you had no moral claim to the money that you'd earned.
This is an American problem. In other countries it doesn't work this way. I lived in Japan and China for several years, and public construction projects in both of them are done amazingly fast.
It depends on the urgency and who happens to be looking over your shoulder. In California as well, after the 580 freeway overpass collapse due to a tanker explosion
, it was estimated to take a month just to clear debris from the site. Then-Governor Schwarzenegger promised that the process would be expedited (the interchange services much of the traffic for the San Francisco East Bay area), incentives were offered to contractors who finished early. From the Wikipedia article:
"A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.
On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident."
Now that's how to do it!
Government officials need to know how to evaluate contractors and provide incentives like this. Surprise surprise, when rewards are offered to people who work better.. you get better work.
Duh. Why do you think the copyright laws were made federal in 1972?
It seems to me that it never made sense that it wasn't federal before. Copyright is listed in the US Constitution as being in the federal domain, so it's one of the few areas that Congress is supposed to make laws for.
Why would somebody video tape cops? What could their motive possibly be?
Same reason they take videos of a parade, or a weird guy shouting, or their friend eating ice cream. People take video now of anything that they might consider the least bit interesting.
Of course you don't 'have' to use it. Chance are that it will work out like javascript -- you don't 'have' to use it, just like you don't 'have' to be able to view the majority of popular sites out there without them being, well, broken.
It's not a tin-foil hat discussion.
It's "nerd" to watch movies on a computer? Grow up you antiquated moron. I set up exactly that kind of thing for friends and family because they found it easier to type out a movie name into Netflix search despite their horrendous point and peck typing.
Oh I see, so you like only being able to find the movie you want to watch one fifth of the time due to Netflix's incredibly shitty selection.
They'll ban you from the Internet. They'll also ban you from Sneakernet. Or having a computer. Or cable TV. Or even an over-the-air TV. Or a telephone. Or...
Wait. They won't do any of these things. Not to any extent that actually matters.
No, they can just get you banned from various ISPs.
And the lawsuit business has already peaked.
They have something far more efficient now anyway -- agreements with all the major ISPs. You can find yourself quickly banned from the only broadband provider in town.
That's not the truth. The truth is that a banal bunch in Hollywood think DRM is actually useful, and are trying to force their twisted view of reality on everyone else.
The truth is the people actually in control of the video content all want DRM, and are unwilling to release any of their content without it.