It's because by law, you can not make more copies than the copyright holder allows. If they library lends out ten copies at a time then they need to buy ten copies! Otherwise you could have one library buy one copy and then lend it to the entire world; congrats the author spent a couple years writing the book and got only $20 for it.
The meat from the store didn't used to be cut up so secretly when I was a kid. Sure they kept the carcasses back in the freezer but they'd bring out large parts to custom carve cuts for the shoppers. So you now it's fresh that way. Not too long ago I walked into a small grocery store and you could smell the meat immediately upon walking in which told me it wasn't fresh.
If the copyright allows it though. Which would mean that all those copies were originally legally purchased and only one player at a time played the game. I certain this is not the case here, so they'd need to get additional permission from the copyright owners.
Sure some people feel the law is outdated or more likely they think the law is inconvenient, but people can not just make up their own laws on the fly. There are large sections of laws regarding libraries, what they can and cannot do, and so forth.
Why, are libraries making copies of entire books and giving them away? Last I checked all the books they had were legally purchased with a valid copyright page and could only be lent to one person at a time.
Yup. I think it's wasted mental effort though. If they want to pirate a game, then just pirate the game without trying to come up with some excuse about why it's not really pirating.
Try doing this with movies and a massive amount of legal fallout would ensue. And excuse that the movie hasn't been shown in several years would be laughed at. Here you all go, a copy of "Star Wars Christmas Special" for free download, it's all legal until Lucas sues me or sends a hit squad after me.
Being for sale or not is irrelevant to the law. Nothing is abandonware unless the owner of the intellectual property declares it to be so. Companies have created retro game packages in the past, "best of" collections, and so forth. These games do come up for sale on Steam or GoG often enough, and those licensing agreements can fall through if there's a warez site like this offering it for free. And yes, this is a warez site, the pretense of being an archive has vanished.
Too many mentally challenged people seriously can't have no clue about copyright and other issues. The whole concept of "abandonware" is bad enough in itself, and if it did exist it is not up to some 13 year old to define what games are or are not in that category. But some even claim that relatively new games are abandonware merely because there hasn't been a sequel announced or the DLCs have dried up.
I think these people would be better off just to be honest and say "yar I'm a pirate!" than to do more contortions than a yoga class to morally justify their stealing.
Because it stopped being an electronics store a very long time ago. Now it sells phones, batteries, and consumer goods. Though a few rare die hard stores will still sell a few components.
True. I'd hardly call MATLAB a little known language, it's very commonly used in EE circles, and I've seen it other places doing engineering or science. I've worked on a product that included lengthy MATLAB computations as a part of the build. MATLAB also has the problem of being a one-vendor proprietary product.
But this is a Dice story after all. They seem to just love stories about "hey, here are some languages that aren't Java or C!" They forget that Slashdot is for nerds who actually know stuff and is not a site for job seekers.
Or just don't worry about it. I work with systems where you must deal with clock drift over time and time drift across the network. So the addition of a second doesn't change much at all. The times when it matters most is with things like satellite navigation systems.
The better way is just to ignore the drift. Define UTC to unrelated to the rotation of the earth or its revolution around the sun. There have been attempts to define UTC this way but is still ongoing. Ie, there's a UT1 time zone that does this and the leap second for UTC is only to keep it within a certain range of UT1.
Someone who discovered it before does not mean recently. Ie, pirate buries his gold, comes back ten years later and retrieves it. Why would a pirate bury the gold in a way that was unretrievable?
True. I had hoped that Hulu would provide both the shows I wanted but it is only providing one (probably some licensing dispute). So I'll just hold off a year until the shows are on Netflix instead.
I want to see what the scene is like in another decade when streaming is more mainstream. Everything's changing rapidly.
I don't understand the being first in line thing either. I hate the crowds. I also don't like jumping into a TV series that has a plot somewhere in the middle as I usually just end up confused. But watching it later makes things work.
However there was this time when a newspaper gave the major spoiler for The Sixth Sense, before the movie was even out on DVD and on cable. It was just a throwaway line in an article about something else too. Felt like the author figured everyone of importance already saw the movie so why keep Rosebud a secret. So now I'm not watching the current seasons of Doctor Who and Walking dead and hoping no spoilers leak out (but I know at someone point a major character will be killed off and it'll start trending).
Sorry, I have been to Europe a lot. Yes some things are better. I've had the chocolates locally in Germany, I've had the real Belgian and Swiss chocolates, etc. But I like Hershey's too and it's not because I'm a subhuman with no taste, but because that's what I grew up with. I have some nice imported (not relicensed) chocolates as well, but the Hershey's bar is what my grandmother gave me when I visited.
And yes there is a lot of anti American talk around and frankly it gets tiring. This is not coming from a right wing or jingoist perspective. But to be told were always inferior all the time is frustrating. It's subtle too, like the passenger in my car who said "I didn't know Americans could use a manual transmission". It like being told that you're not as stupid as the rest of your family.
You can get good beer in many many places in the US. Good microbrews come from big cities and tiny towns. I'm actually surprised at some of the places good beer comes from, not hipster central but from farming and working class towns. You don't even need a good microbrew beer as there is decent large market stuff like Sierra Nevada or Samuel Adams. Which is better than some of the mass market beer I've had in parts of Europe. We import stuff too, at least in larger cities and college towns. Coors and Bud are not all there is, not even in the middle of Iowa. And of course, good wine is available everywhere.
Wasn't it the EU who didn't want Cadbury's chocolate to be labeled real chocolate? This sounds like just more "Europe is better than America" crap. People like what they like, no need to act superior about it. Guess what, American beers and wines are winning contests in Europe.
You're probably talking about Hershey's, which is net the entirety of American chocolate. The thing with Hersheys is that it had a process that was not highly sensitive to milk quality which was important to the time it was invented. Converted it from a high end luxury product to an affordable product. The process stops the milk fermentation but adds some butyric acid which makes it slightly sour. Today though we don't need that because of refrigeration, however everyone grew up associating that taste with pleasant childhood memories and so even competitors now add a bit of butyric acid.
The childhood memories part is important! What we eat as desserts as children influences what we love as adults. In hotter climates they like to add lots of sugar to chocolate to prevent it from melting so quickly. I find that chocolate awful, and yet some people prefer that style. I wouldn't call them stupid or lacking in taste, it would be quite rude to insult someone's food preferences, much less an entire country's.
There's really no discovery left on the Discovery channel, the the History channel is all about goofy stuff now like ancient aliens and Nazi conspiracies. Never watched that much Science channel but the few times it didn't seem that special though better than average (I like How Its Made though, it's on netflix). Most of cable has really declined badly, it's all about satisfying the hordes who don't like to think.
Yes it has no Fox News but then again it was never intended to supply all channels. Just a small subset of the most popular ones. Note that it has no news channels at all. Maybe if the experiment catches on they'll supply bundles for other stuff.
I do find it a bit strange that people seem to think that Dish is being some sort of activist liberal company by cancelling Fox News on purpose, when really this sort of thing has happened in the past with other cable and satellite companies when negotiating licensing terms for renewal. Not a conspiracy. I told my mother this when I heard her on the phone with a friend discussing whether to switch to comcast (gasp!). I had to explain to her that comcast was the country's most hated corporation and that Fox would almost certainly be back within a month. It helped only slightly, she instead cancelled it and got DirecTV...
This happens all the time, it's just not as visible as to the reasons. Highly rated shows with loyal fan bases find out their favorite show is gone mid-season and replaced with a reality show. The media industry is not the sort of devil you need to stay loyal to because it's most definitely not loyal to you.
Times change. The Home Shopping Network may have to figure out a new way to make money. It is NOT our job as consumers to subsidize companies like they were charities, corporations need to learn to treat the customers like real people. You certainly don't go to the grocery store and are forced to purchase Cheez-Whiz with every purchase of carrots, the customers wouldn't put up it. Maybe it's sad that my local grocery store doesn't carry the brand of food I want but that's ok. So why do we have to put up with it with an entertainment service? The reason is that with grocery stores we have competition and with cable companies we have had to settle with monopolies for a long time. The times changed and now the brick walls of the monopolies are crumbling.
If they can't figure out how to make money in a competitive environment then that's too bad, maybe I'll feel sorry for them but I will not give them my charity dollars!
The amount that goes to service and the amount that goes to the actual content provider are not divided so neatly into that fee structure. Advertising most definitely does not cover $100/month of the cost for the majority of people. The cost to the content provider comes out of part of that $20, and possibly some comes from the commercials. The biggest reason for commercials is as it always has been with pay TV: it's an easy way to get some extra revenue.
When cable TV was new part of the rationale given by marketing and word of mouth is that you don't have to put up with commercials. And indeed in the early days that was true, you only got commercials for those programs that were rebroadcast (not counting interstitial promotions for their own upcoming shows and the like). Ie, MTV was music videos all day and all night with the occasional commentary and news from "VJs". Even up until recently there were channels still like this, such as IFC or AMC not interrupting movies with ads. However it was not long until cable companies realized they could double dip and get subscription fees plus advertisement dollars, with only "premium" channels having fewer ads.
It's because by law, you can not make more copies than the copyright holder allows. If they library lends out ten copies at a time then they need to buy ten copies! Otherwise you could have one library buy one copy and then lend it to the entire world; congrats the author spent a couple years writing the book and got only $20 for it.
The meat from the store didn't used to be cut up so secretly when I was a kid. Sure they kept the carcasses back in the freezer but they'd bring out large parts to custom carve cuts for the shoppers. So you now it's fresh that way. Not too long ago I walked into a small grocery store and you could smell the meat immediately upon walking in which told me it wasn't fresh.
If the copyright allows it though. Which would mean that all those copies were originally legally purchased and only one player at a time played the game. I certain this is not the case here, so they'd need to get additional permission from the copyright owners.
Sure some people feel the law is outdated or more likely they think the law is inconvenient, but people can not just make up their own laws on the fly. There are large sections of laws regarding libraries, what they can and cannot do, and so forth.
Why, are libraries making copies of entire books and giving them away? Last I checked all the books they had were legally purchased with a valid copyright page and could only be lent to one person at a time.
Yup. I think it's wasted mental effort though. If they want to pirate a game, then just pirate the game without trying to come up with some excuse about why it's not really pirating.
Try doing this with movies and a massive amount of legal fallout would ensue. And excuse that the movie hasn't been shown in several years would be laughed at. Here you all go, a copy of "Star Wars Christmas Special" for free download, it's all legal until Lucas sues me or sends a hit squad after me.
Wow, the laws on your planet seem interesting.
Being for sale or not is irrelevant to the law. Nothing is abandonware unless the owner of the intellectual property declares it to be so. Companies have created retro game packages in the past, "best of" collections, and so forth. These games do come up for sale on Steam or GoG often enough, and those licensing agreements can fall through if there's a warez site like this offering it for free. And yes, this is a warez site, the pretense of being an archive has vanished.
Too many mentally challenged people seriously can't have no clue about copyright and other issues. The whole concept of "abandonware" is bad enough in itself, and if it did exist it is not up to some 13 year old to define what games are or are not in that category. But some even claim that relatively new games are abandonware merely because there hasn't been a sequel announced or the DLCs have dried up.
I think these people would be better off just to be honest and say "yar I'm a pirate!" than to do more contortions than a yoga class to morally justify their stealing.
Because it stopped being an electronics store a very long time ago. Now it sells phones, batteries, and consumer goods. Though a few rare die hard stores will still sell a few components.
True. I'd hardly call MATLAB a little known language, it's very commonly used in EE circles, and I've seen it other places doing engineering or science. I've worked on a product that included lengthy MATLAB computations as a part of the build. MATLAB also has the problem of being a one-vendor proprietary product.
But this is a Dice story after all. They seem to just love stories about "hey, here are some languages that aren't Java or C!" They forget that Slashdot is for nerds who actually know stuff and is not a site for job seekers.
Or just don't worry about it. I work with systems where you must deal with clock drift over time and time drift across the network. So the addition of a second doesn't change much at all. The times when it matters most is with things like satellite navigation systems.
The better way is just to ignore the drift. Define UTC to unrelated to the rotation of the earth or its revolution around the sun. There have been attempts to define UTC this way but is still ongoing. Ie, there's a UT1 time zone that does this and the leap second for UTC is only to keep it within a certain range of UT1.
Someone who discovered it before does not mean recently. Ie, pirate buries his gold, comes back ten years later and retrieves it. Why would a pirate bury the gold in a way that was unretrievable?
And soon they'll uncover the secret message about Ovaltine.
Wotan approves this message.
True. I had hoped that Hulu would provide both the shows I wanted but it is only providing one (probably some licensing dispute). So I'll just hold off a year until the shows are on Netflix instead.
I want to see what the scene is like in another decade when streaming is more mainstream. Everything's changing rapidly.
I think $2 an episode is too much, but handy if you are on vacation and miss an episode. Plus it's iTunes which is a drawback.
I don't understand the being first in line thing either. I hate the crowds. I also don't like jumping into a TV series that has a plot somewhere in the middle as I usually just end up confused. But watching it later makes things work.
However there was this time when a newspaper gave the major spoiler for The Sixth Sense, before the movie was even out on DVD and on cable. It was just a throwaway line in an article about something else too. Felt like the author figured everyone of importance already saw the movie so why keep Rosebud a secret. So now I'm not watching the current seasons of Doctor Who and Walking dead and hoping no spoilers leak out (but I know at someone point a major character will be killed off and it'll start trending).
Sorry, I have been to Europe a lot. Yes some things are better. I've had the chocolates locally in Germany, I've had the real Belgian and Swiss chocolates, etc. But I like Hershey's too and it's not because I'm a subhuman with no taste, but because that's what I grew up with. I have some nice imported (not relicensed) chocolates as well, but the Hershey's bar is what my grandmother gave me when I visited.
And yes there is a lot of anti American talk around and frankly it gets tiring. This is not coming from a right wing or jingoist perspective. But to be told were always inferior all the time is frustrating. It's subtle too, like the passenger in my car who said "I didn't know Americans could use a manual transmission". It like being told that you're not as stupid as the rest of your family.
You can get good beer in many many places in the US. Good microbrews come from big cities and tiny towns. I'm actually surprised at some of the places good beer comes from, not hipster central but from farming and working class towns. You don't even need a good microbrew beer as there is decent large market stuff like Sierra Nevada or Samuel Adams. Which is better than some of the mass market beer I've had in parts of Europe. We import stuff too, at least in larger cities and college towns. Coors and Bud are not all there is, not even in the middle of Iowa. And of course, good wine is available everywhere.
Except if you read the article, it's not "healthy" chocolate once the cocoa has been processed, no matter how much you cram in.
Wasn't it the EU who didn't want Cadbury's chocolate to be labeled real chocolate? This sounds like just more "Europe is better than America" crap. People like what they like, no need to act superior about it. Guess what, American beers and wines are winning contests in Europe.
You're probably talking about Hershey's, which is net the entirety of American chocolate. The thing with Hersheys is that it had a process that was not highly sensitive to milk quality which was important to the time it was invented. Converted it from a high end luxury product to an affordable product. The process stops the milk fermentation but adds some butyric acid which makes it slightly sour. Today though we don't need that because of refrigeration, however everyone grew up associating that taste with pleasant childhood memories and so even competitors now add a bit of butyric acid.
The childhood memories part is important! What we eat as desserts as children influences what we love as adults. In hotter climates they like to add lots of sugar to chocolate to prevent it from melting so quickly. I find that chocolate awful, and yet some people prefer that style. I wouldn't call them stupid or lacking in taste, it would be quite rude to insult someone's food preferences, much less an entire country's.
There's really no discovery left on the Discovery channel, the the History channel is all about goofy stuff now like ancient aliens and Nazi conspiracies. Never watched that much Science channel but the few times it didn't seem that special though better than average (I like How Its Made though, it's on netflix). Most of cable has really declined badly, it's all about satisfying the hordes who don't like to think.
Yes it has no Fox News but then again it was never intended to supply all channels. Just a small subset of the most popular ones. Note that it has no news channels at all. Maybe if the experiment catches on they'll supply bundles for other stuff.
I do find it a bit strange that people seem to think that Dish is being some sort of activist liberal company by cancelling Fox News on purpose, when really this sort of thing has happened in the past with other cable and satellite companies when negotiating licensing terms for renewal. Not a conspiracy. I told my mother this when I heard her on the phone with a friend discussing whether to switch to comcast (gasp!). I had to explain to her that comcast was the country's most hated corporation and that Fox would almost certainly be back within a month. It helped only slightly, she instead cancelled it and got DirecTV...
This happens all the time, it's just not as visible as to the reasons. Highly rated shows with loyal fan bases find out their favorite show is gone mid-season and replaced with a reality show. The media industry is not the sort of devil you need to stay loyal to because it's most definitely not loyal to you.
Times change. The Home Shopping Network may have to figure out a new way to make money. It is NOT our job as consumers to subsidize companies like they were charities, corporations need to learn to treat the customers like real people. You certainly don't go to the grocery store and are forced to purchase Cheez-Whiz with every purchase of carrots, the customers wouldn't put up it. Maybe it's sad that my local grocery store doesn't carry the brand of food I want but that's ok. So why do we have to put up with it with an entertainment service? The reason is that with grocery stores we have competition and with cable companies we have had to settle with monopolies for a long time. The times changed and now the brick walls of the monopolies are crumbling.
If they can't figure out how to make money in a competitive environment then that's too bad, maybe I'll feel sorry for them but I will not give them my charity dollars!
The amount that goes to service and the amount that goes to the actual content provider are not divided so neatly into that fee structure. Advertising most definitely does not cover $100/month of the cost for the majority of people. The cost to the content provider comes out of part of that $20, and possibly some comes from the commercials. The biggest reason for commercials is as it always has been with pay TV: it's an easy way to get some extra revenue.
When cable TV was new part of the rationale given by marketing and word of mouth is that you don't have to put up with commercials. And indeed in the early days that was true, you only got commercials for those programs that were rebroadcast (not counting interstitial promotions for their own upcoming shows and the like). Ie, MTV was music videos all day and all night with the occasional commentary and news from "VJs". Even up until recently there were channels still like this, such as IFC or AMC not interrupting movies with ads. However it was not long until cable companies realized they could double dip and get subscription fees plus advertisement dollars, with only "premium" channels having fewer ads.