You can get the first two seasons of it in the US on DVD - 3rd in June, or the first 5 seasons in the UK (region 2, bleh). You probably knew that though.:)
The end is that say.. Disney gets to charge the cable companies more by offering 15 channels instead of 10. The cable companies know that people want ESPN, so they bend over, take it for a few seconds, and then it on to the end-consumer (pun?).
Channels a la carte would be marvelous. I watch maybe 5 channels, through my TiVo. I'd sure save a lot.
As much as I'm against big government, it seems like the highway* and road system works pretty well. If they owned the "fiber highway", they could more easily guarantee competition without forcing companies to invest in other companies futures.
They could. But they probably wouldn't. Anyways, it'd be nice...
* Of course, I don't mean the way they're paid for - that is done very poorly, and harmfully.
They could take it a step further and photograph your face as you're entering the vehicle, and then use some face matching algorithm to decide if you're authorized to use your car.
I'd imagine if a system allowed you to pay real money for items, and you had real money in there as a "reserve" to buy more items, that they'd be basically like a bank, ala Paypal. I admit that sort of thing does make it more complicated; luckily it is in the minority as far as games go.
What if the game engine allowed me to import a building I drew in autocad?
You'd still own the autocad file - you could use it elsewhere (unless you assign the rights to it to them upon uploading, I suppose. Still, that'd be your choice to make.)
The log cutting - if you choose to pay money to cut logs in a game, I'd say you were paying for the amusement involved with cutting virtual logs (yippie!), rather than the logs themselves.
This does raise an interesting point though. What will they do with games once they reach a state where people can actually influence the game's progress? So far this is only barely there. But in the future, maybe we'll see situations where people are generating content for the games for other people to use.
I dunno what to say about that. One side of me wants the content creators to be compensated, since they're doing something the publisher would previously do, the other side tells me that the publishers are pretty clearly selling entertainment, and if people think creating content is entertaining, then they've(publishers) done their job.
They pay people to cut down the logs. They're not paying people so that they can watch them cut down logs, and then watch them refine them down to 2x4s and watch them assemble them into a house.
In this case, technically, all of the "work" was already done. We're just paying to view it, and interact with it.
Every MMOG I've played has had something in the user agreement stating that the game publishers own everything and that the players own nothing. It's not as personal as your interaction with your builders, but with 100,000+ folks, can you blame 'em?:)
If I build a house online, would you deny it has value? If so, why?
If you built the house yourself - as in, wrote the code or designed this virtual house with HTML or whathaveyou, using your own tools (or tools you've bought) on your own servers, then it may have value to you.
However, in this case, you didn't build the house. You interacted with a game engine which flipped bits on EA's servers. You didn't write the code that did it, you don't own the hardware it is stored on. You're merely playing a game on someone else's machine/network, and paying money for the privilege.
A key point here - if EA shuts down those servers tomorrow, they don't owe you anything, except perhaps a partial credit for any pre-paid game time. They won't and should not compensate you for the virtual house and the virtual pizza oven, because you never owned them. They won't (and also shouldn't) compensate you for the money you spent playing the game to try and build that house, either, because you were only paying to play the game.
And/. is doing everything it can to shine that spotlight directly on SCO's FUD. Who would have thought that they'd work so hard to aid in the discrediting of Linux.
I find it far easier to just accept that hey, I'm on the Internet, and someone from China can scan my ports. Even if they did warn me, I do not speak Chinese of any form.
I can take steps to protect my servers (like, say, not putting them on the Internet, except for a few secured front-ends), so it's not a big deal.
Education is a very sticky subject. Who would write the textbooks, and who controls what goes in those textbooks? As things are now, you can bet Microsoft would play a big part in it, and, for example, Linux may end up nothing more than a chapter in a 1000 page book - that chapter discussing how it is used to circumvent the economy or some such nonsense.
We'd be better off educating the public. Granted, the US is not a democracy, so we cannot vote for or against laws like the DMCA, but if enough of us want something and we tell our representatives there's at least a slim chance we can get it. Better yet, perhaps we could convince the Big Evil Corporations(tm) not to do big evil things.
You're arguing the MPAA side - they don't sell you a copy of a movie, they sell you a disc which may have something on it, which may resemble a movie, and which can be used only in approved devices. The Linux side is arguing that they are buying a copy of the movie so that they can watch it on their computer.
I'm on the Linux side, myself.
It'd sure be awful to build a great tool and then have it declared illegal because other people found some "bad" use for it. That may not have been the case here, but it sure opens that doorway.
For a lot of people, being available so that people can just walk up to you and ask you a question is a big inconvenience - especially developers. The solution here is to have a ticketing system mediating all questions. This increases productivity for everyone because everyone benefits from the answers to questions - not only those who were within earshot and were listening in.
Meetings can be more of a pain, but quite honestly, meetings are automatically a pain. Most meetings are non-interactive - they're manager-to-employees dissemination of information. I have not been in a interactive meeting that could not have been handled over e-mail, and in fact, in our 24x7 environment, this makes more sense because it can involve everyone.
In the US, if you have an area in your home solely dedicated to work (second computer and everything) you can take a home office deduction on your taxes (IANATaxGuy).
Netscape didn't exactly have clean hands here, either. While they didn't have the OS to leverage with, they created some Netscape-only features and convinced thousands of webmasters to start filtering traffic based no User Agent (You must use Netscape 2.0 to view this site! Download it now!)
Now I know Netscape didn't force them to do the User Agent thing, but the NS proprietary tags (one of which was BLINK) were definitely not competition-friendly.
All applications except Netscape and Mozilla are quick at resolving DNS. For some reason Netscape was really bad, even the Linux version running on FreeBSD. And then I guess Mozilla must have incorporated whatever suck from Netscape - just a guess, though.
Anyways, as the bug is getting more and more votes, it's nearing the top 20. I think we can look forward to it being fixed soon.
Oh, who knows if there is actual basis for the claim. But at least/. is helping the 'denial of service attack' on the economy by posting multiple SCO-issued FUD articles, each of which contain no actual evidence, per day. Go/., champion of software patent abuse!
Slashdot Mirror
mmm. SG-1.
:)
You can get the first two seasons of it in the US on DVD - 3rd in June, or the first 5 seasons in the UK (region 2, bleh). You probably knew that though.
The end is that say.. Disney gets to charge the cable companies more by offering 15 channels instead of 10. The cable companies know that people want ESPN, so they bend over, take it for a few seconds, and then it on to the end-consumer (pun?).
Channels a la carte would be marvelous. I watch maybe 5 channels, through my TiVo. I'd sure save a lot.
As much as I'm against big government, it seems like the highway* and road system works pretty well. If they owned the "fiber highway", they could more easily guarantee competition without forcing companies to invest in other companies futures.
They could. But they probably wouldn't. Anyways, it'd be nice...
* Of course, I don't mean the way they're paid for - that is done very poorly, and harmfully.
They could take it a step further and photograph your face as you're entering the vehicle, and then use some face matching algorithm to decide if you're authorized to use your car.
:)
That doesn't sound so great.
Yeah, but now they're rotating the insert/delete/pageup/pagedown box and expanding the delete button. I dunno what they're thinking.
:)
Yet all keyboards I've seen still have the sysrq key. Heh. I know it has some use, but, sheesh.
I'd imagine if a system allowed you to pay real money for items, and you had real money in there as a "reserve" to buy more items, that they'd be basically like a bank, ala Paypal. I admit that sort of thing does make it more complicated; luckily it is in the minority as far as games go.
What if the game engine allowed me to import a building I drew in autocad?
You'd still own the autocad file - you could use it elsewhere (unless you assign the rights to it to them upon uploading, I suppose. Still, that'd be your choice to make.)
The log cutting - if you choose to pay money to cut logs in a game, I'd say you were paying for the amusement involved with cutting virtual logs (yippie!), rather than the logs themselves.
This does raise an interesting point though. What will they do with games once they reach a state where people can actually influence the game's progress? So far this is only barely there. But in the future, maybe we'll see situations where people are generating content for the games for other people to use.
I dunno what to say about that. One side of me wants the content creators to be compensated, since they're doing something the publisher would previously do, the other side tells me that the publishers are pretty clearly selling entertainment, and if people think creating content is entertaining, then they've(publishers) done their job.
They pay people to cut down the logs. They're not paying people so that they can watch them cut down logs, and then watch them refine them down to 2x4s and watch them assemble them into a house.
In this case, technically, all of the "work" was already done. We're just paying to view it, and interact with it.
Every MMOG I've played has had something in the user agreement stating that the game publishers own everything and that the players own nothing. It's not as personal as your interaction with your builders, but with 100,000+ folks, can you blame 'em? :)
I am lame. Mod me down.
If I build a house online, would you deny it has value? If so, why?
If you built the house yourself - as in, wrote the code or designed this virtual house with HTML or whathaveyou, using your own tools (or tools you've bought) on your own servers, then it may have value to you.
However, in this case, you didn't build the house. You interacted with a game engine which flipped bits on EA's servers. You didn't write the code that did it, you don't own the hardware it is stored on. You're merely playing a game on someone else's machine/network, and paying money for the privilege.
A key point here - if EA shuts down those servers tomorrow, they don't owe you anything, except perhaps a partial credit for any pre-paid game time. They won't and should not compensate you for the virtual house and the virtual pizza oven, because you never owned them. They won't (and also shouldn't) compensate you for the money you spent playing the game to try and build that house, either, because you were only paying to play the game.
You can't sell what you don't own, however, and in this case you don't own anything on the game servers.
And /. is doing everything it can to shine that spotlight directly on SCO's FUD. Who would have thought that they'd work so hard to aid in the discrediting of Linux.
What? When did he deny that? Did you miss the answer to question 5?
I find it far easier to just accept that hey, I'm on the Internet, and someone from China can scan my ports. Even if they did warn me, I do not speak Chinese of any form.
I can take steps to protect my servers (like, say, not putting them on the Internet, except for a few secured front-ends), so it's not a big deal.
Somewhat O/T.
Education is a very sticky subject. Who would write the textbooks, and who controls what goes in those textbooks? As things are now, you can bet Microsoft would play a big part in it, and, for example, Linux may end up nothing more than a chapter in a 1000 page book - that chapter discussing how it is used to circumvent the economy or some such nonsense.
We'd be better off educating the public. Granted, the US is not a democracy, so we cannot vote for or against laws like the DMCA, but if enough of us want something and we tell our representatives there's at least a slim chance we can get it. Better yet, perhaps we could convince the Big Evil Corporations(tm) not to do big evil things.
You're arguing the MPAA side - they don't sell you a copy of a movie, they sell you a disc which may have something on it, which may resemble a movie, and which can be used only in approved devices. The Linux side is arguing that they are buying a copy of the movie so that they can watch it on their computer.
I'm on the Linux side, myself.
It'd sure be awful to build a great tool and then have it declared illegal because other people found some "bad" use for it. That may not have been the case here, but it sure opens that doorway.
For a lot of people, being available so that people can just walk up to you and ask you a question is a big inconvenience - especially developers. The solution here is to have a ticketing system mediating all questions. This increases productivity for everyone because everyone benefits from the answers to questions - not only those who were within earshot and were listening in.
Meetings can be more of a pain, but quite honestly, meetings are automatically a pain. Most meetings are non-interactive - they're manager-to-employees dissemination of information. I have not been in a interactive meeting that could not have been handled over e-mail, and in fact, in our 24x7 environment, this makes more sense because it can involve everyone.
In the US, if you have an area in your home solely dedicated to work (second computer and everything) you can take a home office deduction on your taxes (IANATaxGuy).
Oh I agree. :) But they did try.
Netscape didn't exactly have clean hands here, either. While they didn't have the OS to leverage with, they created some Netscape-only features and convinced thousands of webmasters to start filtering traffic based no User Agent (You must use Netscape 2.0 to view this site! Download it now!)
Now I know Netscape didn't force them to do the User Agent thing, but the NS proprietary tags (one of which was BLINK) were definitely not competition-friendly.
ME TOO!!
Er, ahem. Yeah. I agree.
Their lymph nodes must be as big as cats!
All applications except Netscape and Mozilla are quick at resolving DNS. For some reason Netscape was really bad, even the Linux version running on FreeBSD. And then I guess Mozilla must have incorporated whatever suck from Netscape - just a guess, though.
Anyways, as the bug is getting more and more votes, it's nearing the top 20. I think we can look forward to it being fixed soon.
Huh, why would you donate your shares that you spent money on to other corporations?
Maybe donate 'em to the FSF - now that'd be highly amusing.
Oh, who knows if there is actual basis for the claim. But at least /. is helping the 'denial of service attack' on the economy by posting multiple SCO-issued FUD articles, each of which contain no actual evidence, per day. Go /., champion of software patent abuse!