You know how when you're done eating the waiter or waitress usually comes over to ask if you want either (a) dessert or (b) the check? They're not trying to make conversation with you, they want you to either spend money or get out of the chair.
There are a lot of nice coffee shops where they won't do that, they make you feel at home, etc. But not all of them are like that, and in what way is preferring a paying customer to one who's already finished indicative of scumbaggery?
"Goat head"...wonder if they taught you that when you got one of your many degrees:P
There was a time when most concert tape trading was done via snail mail. But nowadays it's mostly moved to torrents, and in order to find the few people that will still mail you some CDs, you need to have access to the web forums they frequent.
You're right, the proposal isn't bad. But my response was mostly aimed at the parent to my post, and in defense of the "isn't open source grand?" line.
Adblock is (a) popular and (b) designed around something selfish.* For both those reasons, it's not the sort of project that a larger percentage of users will have an irrational love for. If it stops doing its job, one of the many other options will step up to take its place, or there will be a fork.
I think maybe the maintainer is worried about it exploding too much. He figures that by making the default a little friendlier to webmasters, people new to ABP will at least see some ads but anyone that wants to can go totally clean.
It's an interesting slope that things slip down as they become more conservative to better fit the masses. Ah well.
* I block ads. I have for a long time. Selfish might be the wrong word. I don't know what the right one is.
I have honestly never seen an article bring up the Nazi comparison without hesitation and then later succeed in making an actual point. Lazy journalists were doing it long before there were forums and it was always just as hackish.
Except, of course, for articles that are actually about Nazi Germany.
Seeing how quickly the Nazis get brought up is a great way to tell whether or not an article is worth reading. The higher on the page you see Hitler, the higher it will rank on the the unintentional humor scale.
I love the work that Ken Silverman did. I was a big Ken's Labyrinth fan and I enjoyed other games with the Build engine and have checked out all of his tech demos. It's a shame he got out of the games industry.
And everything you mentioned was great. But I'm thinking of Duke 1 and 2 as well. The common theme between all of those games was the humor (and the stuff like giving money to the dancers is definitely part of that). Judging from all of the replies I received I guess people were more into Duke 3D.
Anybody who knows the law is going to end up on the bad side of either a prosecutor or a defense lawyer. Period. I've never served on a jury, despite wanting to, because I'm not an idiot.
They want people who don't know about hung juries, don't know how Bayes' theorem affects forensics tests, etc, etc...
Once you remove all those people, then you have to remove the majority of folks with jobs. I agree, it's terrible.
But having a jury of your peers means having a jury of regular folks, as opposed to having a jury packed with, say, cops.
"Any driver making more than 2 lane changes within a 1 mile range shall be issued a ticket for reckless driving"
I thought everyone was saying that the laws need to be more general, more it is what it is?
Regardless, I'm all for clearer definitions of things like reckless driving, since the more general the charge, the more likely the police will use it to threaten or punish you, which is not their job.
The fact that we can go back and forth on what constitutes speeding or reckless driving is exactly why the folks above who are just saying "let's have a system where everyone just has to be 'honest'" are blowing smoke. There is overhead to having clear legislation, but it's worth the abuse it prevents.
The problem with having overly general laws is that it places more of a burden on the interpreter. The judgment becomes more "arbitrary"...we are basically talking rule of law vs. rule of man.
Right now there is an ad for Extenze on tv. We have truth in advertising laws. Yet they still run this ad that says:
(a) they have a pill (also a soda!) that will enlarge a penis...yeah, sure thing (b) they will let you try it for free.
In reality, I'm sure it's a complete waste of time, and if you read the legal copy at the bottom, the free trial is an enrollment in a monthly shipping program. Like Columbia House, but for penis pills. Imagine what they could get away with if the only upfront restriction on them was "be honest". They clearly don't give a crap about honesty!
On the other hand, look at Nutrition Facts on food...the FDA has clear guidelines on what constitutes a claim like "fat free" or "excellent source of fiber". It's annoying because, as with legalese, words take on extra meanings that the layperson does not expect. Excellent might mean something like "16g or more". And it's limiting, because not everyone will agree that 16g is excellent. It also creates a barrier to entry, since there's also a good amount of research that you have to do before designing a Nutrition Facts label (as I often do in my work).
I posted a quote from A Man for All Seasons somewhere else on the page. More (in the play) basically says he would not cut a path through the law to get at the devil, because then there would be nowhere to hide when the devil turned round on him. Law doesn't just protect us from crooks, it protects us from vigilantes as well.
Despite all this, I do not doubt that there is a good chunk of legal procedure that exists just to give lawyers something to charge people for.
Just don't do it on a site where people can post comments.
The Daily WTF puts old computer ads in a folder that's, oddly enough, named "ads". A lot of their traffic is from people who've never seen the site before. They pop in, they post about how terrible it is that they can't see the ads, and they leave.
So yeah, you can annoy people all you want. But if you *have* to harass people just to make a buck, it's probably a sign that a new line of business might be more lucrative.
You agree to their terms the moment you access the site.
The problem is, the author doesn't get to decide what constitutes access. At least not where I'm from. They can also tell you that you have to be sitting in a blue chair when you read their site, and put it on a page with "Terms" really big at the top, but it doesn't mean anything.
Here's the question though: might it also be within your "rights" to selectively download parts of the site, as long as their server is happy to serve those parts? Even if one of those parts happens to be a block of text that says, "stop doing that"?
Frankly I think the word "right" doesn't fit, and though we all use it in this context, it can lead the conversation to confusing places. My view is that, if I send a GET request (provided that it isn't illegal to make the request), and the file gets served, I've done nothing wrong nor failed in any responsibility to the site owner.
This is not to say that I don't support sites and projects that I think are worthwhile, or remove sites from Adblock when asked. But it's my call. Hypothetically, were someone to demand patronage of me, my only option wouldn't be to stop visiting the site, I'd also have the option to just ignore the demands. As long as the server is also configured to ignore them, my relationship to the site owner has not changed.
Most of the useful content on slashdot.org is comments. Many of them were written by me. It says on the bottom of the home page, "Comments are owned by the Poster". If I were to send SourceForge a bill for all the content I've provided to this site, would they be on the hook for paying it? Would their only option be to respond to it by blocking my account?
I think that they'd probably ignore it, since we don't have the kind of relationship that prevents them from doing so.
Exactly. The actual clickthrough rates on site ads are so low that bothering with individuals doesn't matter. Making the ad a few pixels higher might even make up the difference.
This does not make sense for site owners or ABP users. But the site owners are always desperate and ABP's maintainer is probably sick of listening to them.
100% of the value in ABP is the fact that it blocks ads. As soon as that changes, I and everyone else who cares to will switch to ABPP, which I guarantee you will show up within a day or two.
You know what? Based on the "trailer" they showed at E3, I think those guys have the stones and the sense of humor to make a Duke game. And if not, they are still going to entertain us in the process. I guess I'm looking forward to DNT now:)
Definitely. It's not like 60% finished software has 60% of the value of a finished product. There's a large amount of waste.
It's similar in the music industry. One example (out of probably hundreds of thousands) is Paul Pena's New Train...cameos by established stars, and at least one song that was already a hit ("Jet Airliner" which Steve Miller butchered). And musically just a great album, something that any label would be proud to put out.
But Albert Grossman's ego was such that it only came out in 2000, despite being recorded in 1973.
My friend was working on something for THQ subsidiary that will most likely will never see the light of day. I get the impression that most game code has a similar fate.
It's unfortunate when people in creative professions have to submit to people who don't value the work outside of what it will sell for. On the other hand, many a company has been mismanaged by a creative professional who undervalued the art of business and/or compromise and thought, "I'll just be my own boss, it's not that hard". Look at Apple Records in the 70s, or Image Comics in the 90s.
The problem is that the public at large did not fund the game. If there are investors involved, the assets, however worthless, belong to them and it is their within their right to get whatever they can from them. Maybe the code itself would be worthless but there might be good gameplay ideas, etc.
Surely the cultural loss of media like this is far greater than the cultural loss claimed by copyright proponents as due to lack of compensation.
Can't say I disagree. Capitalism is a double-edged sword.
The first Quake was pretty creepy, I think. Much more atmospheric than Doom. In any case, I'm sure id would rather work on their own properties. In the long run it makes more business sense. Also, really the only thing novel about Duke is the humor. That goes for all of the Duke Nukem games. I think I'd be more interested in seeing a new Duke platformer for WiiWare than I would a new Duke FPS.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
What exactly is Judge Judy without the attitude? She acts like an asshole and demean people who need help for ratings. Don't act like the appeal of Judge Judy isn't "OMG what trash does she have on there today, I hope she yells at them." That's not the purpose of a courtroom, and the fact that this behavior is covered with a veneer of "telling it like it is" is incredibly hypocritical of her.
She's a showboat. I could go on. I won't. The fact that you think she represents something positive about or legal system tells me all I need to know.
As an aside, I'd never heard of estoppel. I went to the wikipedia page to find out more, and I'm still not much clearer. It seems a perfect example of how the feedback loop in the legal system has made the system too closed to the layman.
You read something, didn't understand it, and your immediate reaction was that the legal system's precision is in fact a conspiracy to stop people from valuing honesty. Estoppel is not based on a specific circumstance, just as a fork is not used in a specific circumstance merely because it is not a spoon. You're just more willing to condemn an entire profession than you are to read and absorb an encyclopedia article.
And if you think I'm mean...call up Judge Judy and tell her you think estoppel is bullshit. Lower the volume on your phone first.
Slashdot Mirror
You know how when you're done eating the waiter or waitress usually comes over to ask if you want either (a) dessert or (b) the check? They're not trying to make conversation with you, they want you to either spend money or get out of the chair.
There are a lot of nice coffee shops where they won't do that, they make you feel at home, etc. But not all of them are like that, and in what way is preferring a paying customer to one who's already finished indicative of scumbaggery?
"Goat head"...wonder if they taught you that when you got one of your many degrees :P
There was a time when most concert tape trading was done via snail mail. But nowadays it's mostly moved to torrents, and in order to find the few people that will still mail you some CDs, you need to have access to the web forums they frequent.
You're right, the proposal isn't bad. But my response was mostly aimed at the parent to my post, and in defense of the "isn't open source grand?" line.
Adblock is (a) popular and (b) designed around something selfish.* For both those reasons, it's not the sort of project that a larger percentage of users will have an irrational love for. If it stops doing its job, one of the many other options will step up to take its place, or there will be a fork.
I think maybe the maintainer is worried about it exploding too much. He figures that by making the default a little friendlier to webmasters, people new to ABP will at least see some ads but anyone that wants to can go totally clean.
It's an interesting slope that things slip down as they become more conservative to better fit the masses. Ah well.
* I block ads. I have for a long time. Selfish might be the wrong word. I don't know what the right one is.
I have honestly never seen an article bring up the Nazi comparison without hesitation and then later succeed in making an actual point. Lazy journalists were doing it long before there were forums and it was always just as hackish.
Except, of course, for articles that are actually about Nazi Germany.
Seeing how quickly the Nazis get brought up is a great way to tell whether or not an article is worth reading. The higher on the page you see Hitler, the higher it will rank on the the unintentional humor scale.
I love the work that Ken Silverman did. I was a big Ken's Labyrinth fan and I enjoyed other games with the Build engine and have checked out all of his tech demos. It's a shame he got out of the games industry.
And everything you mentioned was great. But I'm thinking of Duke 1 and 2 as well. The common theme between all of those games was the humor (and the stuff like giving money to the dancers is definitely part of that). Judging from all of the replies I received I guess people were more into Duke 3D.
Anybody who knows the law is going to end up on the bad side of either a prosecutor or a defense lawyer. Period. I've never served on a jury, despite wanting to, because I'm not an idiot.
They want people who don't know about hung juries, don't know how Bayes' theorem affects forensics tests, etc, etc...
Once you remove all those people, then you have to remove the majority of folks with jobs. I agree, it's terrible.
But having a jury of your peers means having a jury of regular folks, as opposed to having a jury packed with, say, cops.
"Any driver making more than 2 lane changes within a 1 mile range shall be issued a ticket for reckless driving"
I thought everyone was saying that the laws need to be more general, more it is what it is?
Regardless, I'm all for clearer definitions of things like reckless driving, since the more general the charge, the more likely the police will use it to threaten or punish you, which is not their job.
The fact that we can go back and forth on what constitutes speeding or reckless driving is exactly why the folks above who are just saying "let's have a system where everyone just has to be 'honest'" are blowing smoke. There is overhead to having clear legislation, but it's worth the abuse it prevents.
I was unnecessarily harsh, I think.
The problem with having overly general laws is that it places more of a burden on the interpreter. The judgment becomes more "arbitrary"...we are basically talking rule of law vs. rule of man.
Right now there is an ad for Extenze on tv. We have truth in advertising laws. Yet they still run this ad that says:
(a) they have a pill (also a soda!) that will enlarge a penis...yeah, sure thing
(b) they will let you try it for free.
In reality, I'm sure it's a complete waste of time, and if you read the legal copy at the bottom, the free trial is an enrollment in a monthly shipping program. Like Columbia House, but for penis pills. Imagine what they could get away with if the only upfront restriction on them was "be honest". They clearly don't give a crap about honesty!
On the other hand, look at Nutrition Facts on food...the FDA has clear guidelines on what constitutes a claim like "fat free" or "excellent source of fiber". It's annoying because, as with legalese, words take on extra meanings that the layperson does not expect. Excellent might mean something like "16g or more". And it's limiting, because not everyone will agree that 16g is excellent. It also creates a barrier to entry, since there's also a good amount of research that you have to do before designing a Nutrition Facts label (as I often do in my work).
I posted a quote from A Man for All Seasons somewhere else on the page. More (in the play) basically says he would not cut a path through the law to get at the devil, because then there would be nowhere to hide when the devil turned round on him. Law doesn't just protect us from crooks, it protects us from vigilantes as well.
Despite all this, I do not doubt that there is a good chunk of legal procedure that exists just to give lawyers something to charge people for.
Not on machines I own. Maybe if I had a jealous wife...
Yes. You can also blink during Taco Bell commercials without clearing it with their legal department. We don't have thought police (yet).
Just don't do it on a site where people can post comments.
The Daily WTF puts old computer ads in a folder that's, oddly enough, named "ads". A lot of their traffic is from people who've never seen the site before. They pop in, they post about how terrible it is that they can't see the ads, and they leave.
So yeah, you can annoy people all you want. But if you *have* to harass people just to make a buck, it's probably a sign that a new line of business might be more lucrative.
Hell, let's just call it the "SCO approach."
You agree to their terms the moment you access the site.
The problem is, the author doesn't get to decide what constitutes access. At least not where I'm from. They can also tell you that you have to be sitting in a blue chair when you read their site, and put it on a page with "Terms" really big at the top, but it doesn't mean anything.
Here's the question though: might it also be within your "rights" to selectively download parts of the site, as long as their server is happy to serve those parts? Even if one of those parts happens to be a block of text that says, "stop doing that"?
Frankly I think the word "right" doesn't fit, and though we all use it in this context, it can lead the conversation to confusing places. My view is that, if I send a GET request (provided that it isn't illegal to make the request), and the file gets served, I've done nothing wrong nor failed in any responsibility to the site owner.
This is not to say that I don't support sites and projects that I think are worthwhile, or remove sites from Adblock when asked. But it's my call. Hypothetically, were someone to demand patronage of me, my only option wouldn't be to stop visiting the site, I'd also have the option to just ignore the demands. As long as the server is also configured to ignore them, my relationship to the site owner has not changed.
Most of the useful content on slashdot.org is comments. Many of them were written by me. It says on the bottom of the home page, "Comments are owned by the Poster". If I were to send SourceForge a bill for all the content I've provided to this site, would they be on the hook for paying it? Would their only option be to respond to it by blocking my account?
I think that they'd probably ignore it, since we don't have the kind of relationship that prevents them from doing so.
Exactly. The actual clickthrough rates on site ads are so low that bothering with individuals doesn't matter. Making the ad a few pixels higher might even make up the difference.
This does not make sense for site owners or ABP users. But the site owners are always desperate and ABP's maintainer is probably sick of listening to them.
Remember the original Adblock? Me neither.
100% of the value in ABP is the fact that it blocks ads. As soon as that changes, I and everyone else who cares to will switch to ABPP, which I guarantee you will show up within a day or two.
DNF: brought to you by the guys who spent a decade on Prey, except this time they don't have faith in the product.
Ah, I see. So the Trilogy is not a 3DR project.
You know what? Based on the "trailer" they showed at E3, I think those guys have the stones and the sense of humor to make a Duke game. And if not, they are still going to entertain us in the process. I guess I'm looking forward to DNT now :)
Definitely. It's not like 60% finished software has 60% of the value of a finished product. There's a large amount of waste.
It's similar in the music industry. One example (out of probably hundreds of thousands) is Paul Pena's New Train...cameos by established stars, and at least one song that was already a hit ("Jet Airliner" which Steve Miller butchered). And musically just a great album, something that any label would be proud to put out.
But Albert Grossman's ego was such that it only came out in 2000, despite being recorded in 1973.
My friend was working on something for THQ subsidiary that will most likely will never see the light of day. I get the impression that most game code has a similar fate.
It's unfortunate when people in creative professions have to submit to people who don't value the work outside of what it will sell for. On the other hand, many a company has been mismanaged by a creative professional who undervalued the art of business and/or compromise and thought, "I'll just be my own boss, it's not that hard". Look at Apple Records in the 70s, or Image Comics in the 90s.
3D Realms is Apogee.
I can't see why that would be funny, unless Duke Nukem Forever was some sort of shining example of an unfinished project.
The problem is that the public at large did not fund the game. If there are investors involved, the assets, however worthless, belong to them and it is their within their right to get whatever they can from them. Maybe the code itself would be worthless but there might be good gameplay ideas, etc.
Surely the cultural loss of media like this is far greater than the cultural loss claimed by copyright proponents as due to lack of compensation.
Can't say I disagree. Capitalism is a double-edged sword.
The first Quake was pretty creepy, I think. Much more atmospheric than Doom. In any case, I'm sure id would rather work on their own properties. In the long run it makes more business sense. Also, really the only thing novel about Duke is the humor. That goes for all of the Duke Nukem games. I think I'd be more interested in seeing a new Duke platformer for WiiWare than I would a new Duke FPS.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Judge Judy, only without the attitude
What exactly is Judge Judy without the attitude? She acts like an asshole and demean people who need help for ratings. Don't act like the appeal of Judge Judy isn't "OMG what trash does she have on there today, I hope she yells at them." That's not the purpose of a courtroom, and the fact that this behavior is covered with a veneer of "telling it like it is" is incredibly hypocritical of her.
She's a showboat. I could go on. I won't. The fact that you think she represents something positive about or legal system tells me all I need to know.
As an aside, I'd never heard of estoppel. I went to the wikipedia page to find out more, and I'm still not much clearer. It seems a perfect example of how the feedback loop in the legal system has made the system too closed to the layman.
You read something, didn't understand it, and your immediate reaction was that the legal system's precision is in fact a conspiracy to stop people from valuing honesty. Estoppel is not based on a specific circumstance, just as a fork is not used in a specific circumstance merely because it is not a spoon. You're just more willing to condemn an entire profession than you are to read and absorb an encyclopedia article.
And if you think I'm mean...call up Judge Judy and tell her you think estoppel is bullshit. Lower the volume on your phone first.