Sluggy's great, but if unresolved plot threads make your stomach queasy, stay away.
I have to disagree. Pete wraps things up, just not in a linear fashion or brief time-line. All characters/events/plot points get revisited, although at times there is a lot of space between A and B. And then, too, there's the need for a few ongoing mysteries (Oasis being one of them)...
Anybody care to comment on both the technical and procedural points of, say, doing your web-based 'net banking over SSL from work? Granted, I'm sure they could see where the connection went, and then wouldn't be too concerned with the contents of the communication beyond that - or at least, no more so than non-encrypted traffic.
Or connecting with the outside world (say, your home *nix box) via SSH, assuming you can get through the firewall that way, to access your home files and/or email?
Am I missing something stupid/simple about the points of encrpytion/decryption in SSL/H in thinking that said employer would not be able to monitor the contents of that traffic? Thoughts from the peanut gallery?
William Atherton and Tea Leoni were also quite good and very believable
As I recall, you've mixed up your Williams. Atherton was the nemesis-scientist in Bio-Dome, among other things, while JP3 fatures William H. Macy (of Pleasantville and loads of others).
For those who don't seem to understand polymers and plastics and keep quoting the RIT dye FAQ, plastic != vinyl. The GBA case is likely either a styrene or an acrylic (my best guess, having not really taken all the close a look at one), neither of which is gonna take to a waterborne dye or pigment all that well. Stick with the suggestions of solvent-softening and painting.
Also...Most games these days dont come with much more than a box (that's 20 times larger than it needs to be for the purposes of shelf-visibility)...So you don't lose much by just downloading the rental version.
That's something I don't understand at all - given the uproar over the waste due to audio CD longboxes ten to fifteen years ago, I would have thought that people would clamor over the same situation in video games. I mean, come on, a box measuring 9"x11"x2" to hold a jewelcase?
So when is the first Green gamer gonna stage a protest at your local Babbage's?
For example, without advertising, your average newspaper would cost around $5 (rough estimate). But add in ads and you get a 90% discount.
The problem seriously starts when the advertising outweighs the content, which has already happened in the print world. Anecdotal example - while waiting for an appointment somewhere, I picked up a magazine (GQ, as it were) and flipped through. Within seconds I began counting ads versus non-ad pages. In the first 120 pages of the magazine, there were only 17 pages that had content, and four of those were the table of contents and the staff listing, which still had margin ads. We're not just talking full-page ads here - some of them ran for six pages!
TV's well on its way to such ad bloat - time how many minutes the show is on-screen the next time you watch a half-hour sitcom. I'd hate to think of something similar happening to games.
So what's wrong with supporting sites by providing an occasional click-through to their ad banners, that no one has brought it up? I make a point of going through my favorite content sites (shameless plug for Sluggy here, as an example), reloading the page and clicking-through on the banners a few times. It's not tons of revenue, I'm aware, but it helps - and if more fans did that on occasion, wouldn't the sites get a bit of a boost?
I'm aware that, at some point of saturation, click-throughs would be meaningless to the ad vendors and payments would decrease/cease altogether, but it's a nice intermediate way to provide a little help to artists/writers/producers-of-things-of-value-to-me in the current atmosphere.
When I need or want your product, I'll research it. Until then, leave me alone.
Therein lies the problem, so far as the marketdroids are concerned - the very core of marketing is forcing the person (hereafter referred to as "consumer") to believe that they need to buy the product or service. It never occurs to them to think that the consumer might be right when they assert that they don't, because your recalcitrance is standing between them and your money, and that money has one rightful place as far as they're concerned. In their pockets.
Preaching to the choir, I know - but find and meet and talk with a marketdroid sometime, if you haven't. Take a sales or marketing course or seminar. You'll see what I mean. If it seems an awful lot like a carny attitude ("everyone's a mark"), then you're on the right track.
Well that's completely wrong. The value of info you bring with you as industrial espionage is worth far, far more than your pitiful salary to other large corporations. Just the knowledge of the status of an opponent's project can be worth far more than years of a bloated techie's salary.
I would be of the opinion that this is more indicative of the disparity in worth as it exists in the typical corporate environment. If that knowledge is worth that much more than the salary, then something is amiss, either in personal values of the individual or personnel values of the corp.
My point isn't in refuting circumstances as they exist - I'm aware of how shitty things can get when IP trading is involved. At the risk of sounding like a Pollyana, some combination of the techie having some integrity and the company properly valuing and treating its employees should make industrial espionage a non-issue. I know that ain't the case - but that doesn't make it suck less.
Also, consider industrial espionage. This is an area where it is clearly in the interest of us all that the freedom of speech of employees be curtailed. You can't have your top researcher spend all your money finding things out and designing magnificient devices for you and then have them bugger off to the company down the road and give them all the info. There has to be safeguards against this sort of thing.
Says who? Suits who want to participate in having too much corporate control over every little detail. Assuming no personal/personnel issues, why would someone leave and take IP with them? Maybe the first company wasn't compensating them adequately. If someone else was willing to pay said researcher more to lure them away from you, capitalist principle alone says that you weren't paying what it was apparently worth on the market to keep them.
I would love to see this thing get a lot of travel and appear all over the world, fueled by our imaginations and the fun of it all.
Much like the roughly ten-pound ceramic frog that was kidnapped from a yard in Rhode Island and taken around the world for nine months in 1998. The mystified owners received photos of the frog in various locations from around the world (Paris comes to mind, for some reason, as one of the places said frog appeared), and cryptic postcards, before the frog was returned anonymously, in a limo, to the owners. Too funny - made national newswires, guy and owner made the talk shows, but I can only find a few passing references to it on the web.
Of course, the monolith doesn't look carry-on size.
I've sold a Lego set or two on the Internet (via Usenet) before. I might even have hit a hundred transactions over the eight or so years I've been on Usenet. But a thousand is incredible!
Yet not unfathomable. Imagine a long-time sports-card collector or dealer who's whittling down their collection. Been to a card show? Some of them have multiple truckloads of boxes of cards. Just one example...
Do these people just sit around all day and sell crap online? Is it a business? Or are these folks just bored soccer moms? Are they dealers? New age pawn shops?
There was an interesting take on one possible answer to that question in an article on Salon a while ago. In some cases, people were scouring the surrounding regions (flea markets, estate sales, meatspace auctions, etc.) to find stuff to sell on eBay, sometimes for hefty profits. In some cases, they did turn it into a small-business enterprise.
Some time ago, in several of the computer hardware categories, you could find quite a few sellers who had a large quantity of sales-by-auction under their belts, and numerous items up at any one time. Several of these were small to mid-size computer shops, clearing out older inventory for which there wasn't a local market, but for which some general demand did exist. (One fella used a little rubber frog named "Skippee" and had lots of old Mac and Apple stuff. Cute.)
he other thing I always wanted to ask was: Is it me, or are a lot of these things being bought and sold again, and bought and sold again, over and over again? ie, are people making money by rehashing the same auction items repeatedly?
There's some of that, too, both by small-time sellers and the power-sellers. It's really no different than speculation of any other kind to try and make a profit - it just seems like that's too much work for the general eBay going price.
Read a software license agreement. You do not OWN the software at all. You have a license to use it under certain proscribed conditions.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment...
You're assuming that an EULA, a click-wrap license, the likes of which has never been tested in court and was crafted solely by the mouthpiece(s) of a software company intent on keeping as many benefits and privileges and avenues to profit and potential revenue streams, etc., close to heart and minimize any and all potential liabilities, is a sound, fair, and legally binding document. No court has ever said that the term of ownership versus license-to-use lies one way or the other - we have only the corporate word on what our rights are. Now which side do you think they're going to err on in their "judgement" - ours or theirs?
Me, I'd think that the business-card CDs and CD-Rs you see at trade shows and advertised in the classifieds would have become more common than they are by now; no special hardware needed to play them, while the article on the ThinDisc mentioned a need for a hub adaptor. Since I haven't seen the former taking off, I have trouble imagining the latter will actually see widespread use - and that's neglecting the notions of "vaporware" already making the rounds here on/.
Time will only tell if the PS2 is more successful than the Saturn was, but Sony desperately needs to get these things in peoples' homes if they're going to have any success. There's a lot of demand now, but it's not going to last forever.
One of the things that's credited with crippling the poor Saturn from the start was Sega's mystifying move-up-the-launch bit. Originally intended for the Christmas season, Sega launched out-of-the-blue in May of 1995, coming as a surprise to many/most. The rest of the list smacks true, as well - just wanted to chip that in. (Check the Saturn system FAQ on GameFAQs.)
Throughout the history of man, the single biggest consequence of technology has been to allow us to spend less time gathering food, shivering in a dark cave, and being sick so that we could instead spend more time writing stories, singing songs, and occasionally even just twiddling our thumbs.
You'd think, with all this spare time spent creating cultural advances, that boy bands would have fallen by the evolutionary wayside centuries ago.
Thanks for answering with specific reasons for concern, instead of just spouting generic "a bored FBI dude might want to blackmail me" rhetoric.
Had I an example to share (such as one of the other posters), I wouldn't have needed the "rhetoric" - and as you pointed out, since they have such a history of abusing their tools and methods, it seems a pretty justified rhetoric.
News for hiryuu: If they want to find stuff out about you (for legit reasons or otherwise), they don't need Carnivore. They've got other stuff to watch you with already. As I said, the potential for abuse is pretty much the same as with wiretapping, if I'm not mistaken.
And that ain't news to me - my point (however muddled it might have been - I was scrawling that in a hurry) was that I'm not comfortable giving them yet another tool to abuse, particularly one that gives them the scope and ease of reach that this one could. Someone else in the thread pointed out a vast difference between Carnivore and wiretapping, and that's the potential scale.
Sure, the potential for abuse exists, but if the FBI gathers evidence through illegal means it isn't admissible in court anyway.
I don't give a damn about whether it's admissible in court or not. Is that the only use you can imagine for information gained illegally? What happens when information obtained illegally is used to pressure confessions or submission of further evidence - i.e., "We know you performed act X, why don't you come clean?" Or when the information is misinterpreted/miscredited, and an innocent party is then pursued/harrased?
Hell, what happens if - hell, when - some agent or FBI IT dude gets bored/broke/unscrupulous and decides to screen and use information for personal entertainment/blackmail/wrecking someone's life? They have (near) ready access to that information, waiting for them - or at the very least, much closer than I'd be comfortable having them.
(Apologies to anyone who dislikes compulsive use of the slashes.:))
Kaplan was referring to the DCMA, not the lawsuit of which he was the judge.
I think it would be safe to say that the DMCA was pretty central to both sides of the case. Judges decide whether someone has broken a law by specifically interpreting that law - its wording, intent, framework, etc. If he's not equipped for the circumstances - even somewhat extended considerations of the arguments - then it would seem he should not have been presiding over this case.
"Judges are not best suited to deal with cases like these. Judges are best suited to deal with matters between private parties.... Judges do not have any special training to rule on decisions such as these and lack the objective perspective to make those best decisions."
Given that there were already concerns about his impartiality (due to his past), and he didn't believe that he (since, presuambly, he would include himself amongst "judges") was equipped to deal with this, why on earth did he not recluse himself? It's like saying "I stand by my judgement, but I have no idea what I was doing because I never learned how."
Aside from that, not much he said was a surprise - we knew he held "our side" in pretty high disregard, and that he had a strong bias toward the big money. Big shock.
To paraphrase Larry Flynt, if the law/policy/actions protect the perverse, then we can rest assured that the remainder of the population (on- or offline) can expect to be treated fairly, sensibly, and justly.
Not that I really care whether or not some porn tycoon makes money on such an opportunity, but the principle still holds.
Slashdot Mirror
Dunno about your mode of thinking, but as far as I can tell, an attack on "www.whitehouse.gov" != a "massive DDoS against" the US gub'mint.
I have to disagree. Pete wraps things up, just not in a linear fashion or brief time-line. All characters/events/plot points get revisited, although at times there is a lot of space between A and B. And then, too, there's the need for a few ongoing mysteries (Oasis being one of them)...
Anybody care to comment on both the technical and procedural points of, say, doing your web-based 'net banking over SSL from work? Granted, I'm sure they could see where the connection went, and then wouldn't be too concerned with the contents of the communication beyond that - or at least, no more so than non-encrypted traffic.
Or connecting with the outside world (say, your home *nix box) via SSH, assuming you can get through the firewall that way, to access your home files and/or email?
Am I missing something stupid/simple about the points of encrpytion/decryption in SSL/H in thinking that said employer would not be able to monitor the contents of that traffic? Thoughts from the peanut gallery?
As I recall, you've mixed up your Williams. Atherton was the nemesis-scientist in Bio-Dome, among other things, while JP3 fatures William H. Macy (of Pleasantville and loads of others).
For those who don't seem to understand polymers and plastics and keep quoting the RIT dye FAQ, plastic != vinyl. The GBA case is likely either a styrene or an acrylic (my best guess, having not really taken all the close a look at one), neither of which is gonna take to a waterborne dye or pigment all that well. Stick with the suggestions of solvent-softening and painting.
That's something I don't understand at all - given the uproar over the waste due to audio CD longboxes ten to fifteen years ago, I would have thought that people would clamor over the same situation in video games. I mean, come on, a box measuring 9"x11"x2" to hold a jewelcase?
So when is the first Green gamer gonna stage a protest at your local Babbage's?
The problem seriously starts when the advertising outweighs the content, which has already happened in the print world. Anecdotal example - while waiting for an appointment somewhere, I picked up a magazine (GQ, as it were) and flipped through. Within seconds I began counting ads versus non-ad pages. In the first 120 pages of the magazine, there were only 17 pages that had content, and four of those were the table of contents and the staff listing, which still had margin ads. We're not just talking full-page ads here - some of them ran for six pages!
TV's well on its way to such ad bloat - time how many minutes the show is on-screen the next time you watch a half-hour sitcom. I'd hate to think of something similar happening to games.
So what's wrong with supporting sites by providing an occasional click-through to their ad banners, that no one has brought it up? I make a point of going through my favorite content sites (shameless plug for Sluggy here, as an example), reloading the page and clicking-through on the banners a few times. It's not tons of revenue, I'm aware, but it helps - and if more fans did that on occasion, wouldn't the sites get a bit of a boost?
I'm aware that, at some point of saturation, click-throughs would be meaningless to the ad vendors and payments would decrease/cease altogether, but it's a nice intermediate way to provide a little help to artists/writers/producers-of-things-of-value-to-me in the current atmosphere.
Therein lies the problem, so far as the marketdroids are concerned - the very core of marketing is forcing the person (hereafter referred to as "consumer") to believe that they need to buy the product or service. It never occurs to them to think that the consumer might be right when they assert that they don't, because your recalcitrance is standing between them and your money, and that money has one rightful place as far as they're concerned. In their pockets.
Preaching to the choir, I know - but find and meet and talk with a marketdroid sometime, if you haven't. Take a sales or marketing course or seminar. You'll see what I mean. If it seems an awful lot like a carny attitude ("everyone's a mark"), then you're on the right track.
I would be of the opinion that this is more indicative of the disparity in worth as it exists in the typical corporate environment. If that knowledge is worth that much more than the salary, then something is amiss, either in personal values of the individual or personnel values of the corp.
My point isn't in refuting circumstances as they exist - I'm aware of how shitty things can get when IP trading is involved. At the risk of sounding like a Pollyana, some combination of the techie having some integrity and the company properly valuing and treating its employees should make industrial espionage a non-issue. I know that ain't the case - but that doesn't make it suck less.
Says who? Suits who want to participate in having too much corporate control over every little detail. Assuming no personal/personnel issues, why would someone leave and take IP with them? Maybe the first company wasn't compensating them adequately. If someone else was willing to pay said researcher more to lure them away from you, capitalist principle alone says that you weren't paying what it was apparently worth on the market to keep them.
Just my thought on that li'l nugget.
Much like the roughly ten-pound ceramic frog that was kidnapped from a yard in Rhode Island and taken around the world for nine months in 1998. The mystified owners received photos of the frog in various locations from around the world (Paris comes to mind, for some reason, as one of the places said frog appeared), and cryptic postcards, before the frog was returned anonymously, in a limo, to the owners. Too funny - made national newswires, guy and owner made the talk shows, but I can only find a few passing references to it on the web.
Of course, the monolith doesn't look carry-on size.
Yet not unfathomable. Imagine a long-time sports-card collector or dealer who's whittling down their collection. Been to a card show? Some of them have multiple truckloads of boxes of cards. Just one example...
There was an interesting take on one possible answer to that question in an article on Salon a while ago. In some cases, people were scouring the surrounding regions (flea markets, estate sales, meatspace auctions, etc.) to find stuff to sell on eBay, sometimes for hefty profits. In some cases, they did turn it into a small-business enterprise.
Some time ago, in several of the computer hardware categories, you could find quite a few sellers who had a large quantity of sales-by-auction under their belts, and numerous items up at any one time. Several of these were small to mid-size computer shops, clearing out older inventory for which there wasn't a local market, but for which some general demand did exist. (One fella used a little rubber frog named "Skippee" and had lots of old Mac and Apple stuff. Cute.)
There's some of that, too, both by small-time sellers and the power-sellers. It's really no different than speculation of any other kind to try and make a profit - it just seems like that's too much work for the general eBay going price.
On the offhand chance someone else hasn't done it:
And the top-ten runners-up were:
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment...
You're assuming that an EULA, a click-wrap license, the likes of which has never been tested in court and was crafted solely by the mouthpiece(s) of a software company intent on keeping as many benefits and privileges and avenues to profit and potential revenue streams, etc., close to heart and minimize any and all potential liabilities, is a sound, fair, and legally binding document. No court has ever said that the term of ownership versus license-to-use lies one way or the other - we have only the corporate word on what our rights are. Now which side do you think they're going to err on in their "judgement" - ours or theirs?
Me, I'd think that the business-card CDs and CD-Rs you see at trade shows and advertised in the classifieds would have become more common than they are by now; no special hardware needed to play them, while the article on the ThinDisc mentioned a need for a hub adaptor. Since I haven't seen the former taking off, I have trouble imagining the latter will actually see widespread use - and that's neglecting the notions of "vaporware" already making the rounds here on /.
One of the things that's credited with crippling the poor Saturn from the start was Sega's mystifying move-up-the-launch bit. Originally intended for the Christmas season, Sega launched out-of-the-blue in May of 1995, coming as a surprise to many/most. The rest of the list smacks true, as well - just wanted to chip that in. (Check the Saturn system FAQ on GameFAQs.)
You'd think, with all this spare time spent creating cultural advances, that boy bands would have fallen by the evolutionary wayside centuries ago.
Had I an example to share (such as one of the other posters), I wouldn't have needed the "rhetoric" - and as you pointed out, since they have such a history of abusing their tools and methods, it seems a pretty justified rhetoric.
And that ain't news to me - my point (however muddled it might have been - I was scrawling that in a hurry) was that I'm not comfortable giving them yet another tool to abuse, particularly one that gives them the scope and ease of reach that this one could. Someone else in the thread pointed out a vast difference between Carnivore and wiretapping, and that's the potential scale.
At least we agree on a distro.:P
I don't give a damn about whether it's admissible in court or not. Is that the only use you can imagine for information gained illegally? What happens when information obtained illegally is used to pressure confessions or submission of further evidence - i.e., "We know you performed act X, why don't you come clean?" Or when the information is misinterpreted/miscredited, and an innocent party is then pursued/harrased?
Hell, what happens if - hell, when - some agent or FBI IT dude gets bored/broke/unscrupulous and decides to screen and use information for personal entertainment/blackmail/wrecking someone's life? They have (near) ready access to that information, waiting for them - or at the very least, much closer than I'd be comfortable having them.
(Apologies to anyone who dislikes compulsive use of the slashes.:))
I think it would be safe to say that the DMCA was pretty central to both sides of the case. Judges decide whether someone has broken a law by specifically interpreting that law - its wording, intent, framework, etc. If he's not equipped for the circumstances - even somewhat extended considerations of the arguments - then it would seem he should not have been presiding over this case.
According to Kaplan:
Given that there were already concerns about his impartiality (due to his past), and he didn't believe that he (since, presuambly, he would include himself amongst "judges") was equipped to deal with this, why on earth did he not recluse himself? It's like saying "I stand by my judgement, but I have no idea what I was doing because I never learned how."
Aside from that, not much he said was a surprise - we knew he held "our side" in pretty high disregard, and that he had a strong bias toward the big money. Big shock.
Ahh, hadn't considered that. I think I let the source and the sound carry me away.
To paraphrase Larry Flynt, if the law/policy/actions protect the perverse, then we can rest assured that the remainder of the population (on- or offline) can expect to be treated fairly, sensibly, and justly.
Not that I really care whether or not some porn tycoon makes money on such an opportunity, but the principle still holds.
Is that anything like "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others" [sic]?
The very fact that someone in a position of (quasi-) authority has used reasoning like this to make a decision hurts my brain.