And I bet that they provide email based customer service to those folks. It is really about whether any Joe Idiot should be able to email them when they can't find something in a search and expect an email reply.
Based on that into, you have New Zealand, Finland and Denmark tied for equal first. Seeing as NZ jumped into the US pockets with the whole megaupload/kim dotcom thing a while back, you can rule out all three. I mean, clearly you can't trust the folks at the top. Next up, Sweden in 4th place. You can't trust those crazy folks, I mean...they are like Swedish. Enough said. I can't even find who they are tied with, so that rules them out as well. Switzerland is next up. You simply must rule them out, I mean like they have holes in their cheese, what's to say they don't have the same sort of glaring holes in all the regulations. Then you have Norway and Australia next up.
Seeing as we have crossed so many off already - that leaves the internet in the firm control of either a bunch of folks who can't pronounce W's and everything is a V as they sing along to absurd amounts of death metal - or in the steady hands of a bunch of beer swilling outdoorsey folk who are freakishly good at swimming and medal tallys at the Olympics and Commonwealth games based on the size of their population.
Goodbye internets... we liked you while you were around...
Anyone who prefers debt is a fucking idiot and shouldn't be trusted.
That statement is plain daft. It's much too broad. Sometimes debt can be good. For example, getting a mortgage for a home might not be bad. Sure, it would be better to buy with cash and avoid paying all the interest, but if you don't have a pile of cash lying around, you are limited to saving while paying rent. It might actually work out better to get the mortgage.
Also, getting a loan to start a company might be a great way to have enough capital to get to the market quickly and by doing so make a huge profit.
Not all debt is bad. Debt without any plan to pay it off and without evaluating whether the costs of managing the debt outweigh the benefits is bad. The problem is that most political parties these days seem to have a horizon of the next election when it comes to balancing the books. The problem with this sort of debt is that they spend up big and have no real plan to pay it back.
LOL, we have a few applications that folks use that require IE6 (seriously) and are still considered to be business critical. Trust me, I am looking forward to this transition with eager anticipation.
Interesting, when I was a gamer/developer (was working on the Unreal Engine) we used to do a lot of testing on older machines, designing to certain specs was fine, but most of the time, testing on a machine that not only had a slow graphics card, but also a slower HDD, older memory bus etc etc was still the true test of level design.
I work for a multinational company, very structured, AMAZING levels of bureaucracy and I thought we were joined at the hip, neck and everywhere else to Microsoft products - yet I was amazed to hear they are moving this company (200k+ employees) over to Gmail for emails and contacts as well as a bunch of other things. Until I heard that, I would have bet body parts to say that they would never move off their current technology.
Having said that, we are still on XP rather than having skipped Vista to Win 7.
The entire game looks pretty basic - and who the heck cares? Watch a two year old and see what happens when you give em a present. They are as likely to play in the big box as with the toy.
Graphics might be important for the latest 3D shooter, but a good game doesn't HAVE to have cutting edge graphics. A game with amazing graphics can still be crap.
If the idea is to teach kids how to code, and they enjoy playing the game enough to at least learn a little coding - then it is a GREAT product. If I was ten and wanted to learn java and had a choice of following tutorials/reading books/etc or playing a game that taught me the concepts, then I certainly know how I would have learned java. Sure, all my projectst might also include a random "Save the GNOMES!!" routine, but you know..
That's not entirely true. From my experience when I seed a torrent on the sute (legal ones by the way), it normally offers a direct download to the torrent file until a certain number of seeders become available. Then it only gives the magnet/hash. If the seeder count drops below a ce3rtain criteria, it again gives the link for the torrent file.
Actually, while a mirror reflects light without sending it in all directions, a normal (aluminium) mirror only relfects about 85% f the light, which means it would probably toast up from the laser quick smart. Given that, you might actually be better off using something white and with a high melting point which might actually reflect more of the energy away. Sure you can't target it back to the attacker, but it might save your bacon.
If I were in the recording/movie business, I would start packaging other stuff with albums/movies to encourage purchase of the physical medium
No offence, but this is why you aren't in the entertainment selling industry.
The things you listed all cost money to make. Then you have to distribute it to all the folks selling it. If you offer the products online, you have almost pure profit. Sure, you have to have a website, and you have to pay for bandwidth, but in reality, you have a pure profit business. You have infinite stock. You don't worry about refunds, stock control, your inventory is zero.
Add to that, the fact that courts are apparently siding with the entertainment industry, you can now also add to that the fact that users cannot resell (legally anyhow), so they *have* to buy from you.
Even assuming (which I don't personally agree with) that piracy reduces the number of sales, your profits are still pretty much 100%. It is simply a race to get as many sales as possible. Physical sales might be nice for a business, but if you want to increase profit margins, going online is the way to go.
But when you're talking about "intellectual property", some of those things aren't allowed, and some of them don't really make sense. "Selling" an MP3 that you've bought is a bit weird, because what you hand over will probably be a *copy* of the MP3 file you bought. A perfect and identical copy, sure, but a copy. You can then destroy the original, but then what are you really selling?
Following that logic, you should be able to ask for a full refund at any time. You never GOT the original. You were only given a copy. The original is still at the store that is selling it.
Erm, apart from when they move their stock around to different servers. Or do a disc defrag. Or a folder rename. Or a file rename... etc etc ad nauseum.
This has been brought up many times here on/. before. The problem is that the corp is worth MUCH more than the actual mp3 file itself, so doesn't really solve the problem.
That case actually goes further than that though, as the folks commiting the copyright infrigement actually bought the games legally. The ruling was that even if you bought the game legally, you couldn't use it in a manner that Blizzard didn't condone.
That's funny, my trips through Heathrow have always been great - save for one fifteen minute queue waiting to get through customs. I found the staff to be pretty efficient, though not "out of the box thinkers" for the most part. The only thing that irked me was that the folks on EU passports had ZERO lines while we had a few, which really made me want to get my EU passport.
When travelling to Ireland, I do have to admit that the customs folks were amazing (I went across via the ferry crossing from north Wales), but seriously, they were so good and friendly I was almost looking around for the complimentary whiskey during the process.
Get enough of them going and it would be near impossible to filter out the noise.
I don't think you understand the way that these folks work. If you do that, they will just ask for more funds to be able to add more power to their listening-in operation. Oh, to do that, they need to raise your taxes just a touch.
Slashdot Mirror
They sell advertising services to Germans though.
And I bet that they provide email based customer service to those folks. It is really about whether any Joe Idiot should be able to email them when they can't find something in a search and expect an email reply.
Logging. Logging could go very wrong.
Could... is... apparently they are interchangable these days. Interesting...
*sips coffee*
Here you go:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/376482095/coral-bots-teams-of-robots-that-repair-coral-reefs
The link to the actual Kickstarter project:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/376482095/coral-bots-teams-of-robots-that-repair-coral-reefs
Hmmm, lets see...
Based on that into, you have New Zealand, Finland and Denmark tied for equal first. Seeing as NZ jumped into the US pockets with the whole megaupload/kim dotcom thing a while back, you can rule out all three. I mean, clearly you can't trust the folks at the top. Next up, Sweden in 4th place. You can't trust those crazy folks, I mean...they are like Swedish. Enough said. I can't even find who they are tied with, so that rules them out as well. Switzerland is next up. You simply must rule them out, I mean like they have holes in their cheese, what's to say they don't have the same sort of glaring holes in all the regulations. Then you have Norway and Australia next up.
Seeing as we have crossed so many off already - that leaves the internet in the firm control of either a bunch of folks who can't pronounce W's and everything is a V as they sing along to absurd amounts of death metal - or in the steady hands of a bunch of beer swilling outdoorsey folk who are freakishly good at swimming and medal tallys at the Olympics and Commonwealth games based on the size of their population.
Goodbye internets... we liked you while you were around...
Anyone who prefers debt is a fucking idiot and shouldn't be trusted.
That statement is plain daft. It's much too broad. Sometimes debt can be good. For example, getting a mortgage for a home might not be bad. Sure, it would be better to buy with cash and avoid paying all the interest, but if you don't have a pile of cash lying around, you are limited to saving while paying rent. It might actually work out better to get the mortgage.
Also, getting a loan to start a company might be a great way to have enough capital to get to the market quickly and by doing so make a huge profit.
Not all debt is bad. Debt without any plan to pay it off and without evaluating whether the costs of managing the debt outweigh the benefits is bad. The problem is that most political parties these days seem to have a horizon of the next election when it comes to balancing the books. The problem with this sort of debt is that they spend up big and have no real plan to pay it back.
Oh my goodness, a chance to actualy use a In Soviet Russia joke appropriately!!
In Soviet Russia, Meteor Finds YOU!
A penny for your thoughts?
Google Docs and Gmail are not IE 8
LOL, we have a few applications that folks use that require IE6 (seriously) and are still considered to be business critical. Trust me, I am looking forward to this transition with eager anticipation.
*sips coffee*
Interesting, when I was a gamer/developer (was working on the Unreal Engine) we used to do a lot of testing on older machines, designing to certain specs was fine, but most of the time, testing on a machine that not only had a slow graphics card, but also a slower HDD, older memory bus etc etc was still the true test of level design.
corporate IT is so tied to Microsoft
I work for a multinational company, very structured, AMAZING levels of bureaucracy and I thought we were joined at the hip, neck and everywhere else to Microsoft products - yet I was amazed to hear they are moving this company (200k+ employees) over to Gmail for emails and contacts as well as a bunch of other things. Until I heard that, I would have bet body parts to say that they would never move off their current technology.
Having said that, we are still on XP rather than having skipped Vista to Win 7.
The entire game looks pretty basic - and who the heck cares? Watch a two year old and see what happens when you give em a present. They are as likely to play in the big box as with the toy.
Graphics might be important for the latest 3D shooter, but a good game doesn't HAVE to have cutting edge graphics. A game with amazing graphics can still be crap.
If the idea is to teach kids how to code, and they enjoy playing the game enough to at least learn a little coding - then it is a GREAT product. If I was ten and wanted to learn java and had a choice of following tutorials/reading books/etc or playing a game that taught me the concepts, then I certainly know how I would have learned java. Sure, all my projectst might also include a random "Save the GNOMES!!" routine, but you know..
I was more making a point that it isn't used soley for illegalz stuffz. :)
no content is hosted
That's not entirely true. From my experience when I seed a torrent on the sute (legal ones by the way), it normally offers a direct download to the torrent file until a certain number of seeders become available. Then it only gives the magnet/hash. If the seeder count drops below a ce3rtain criteria, it again gives the link for the torrent file.
Just sayin.
Actually, while a mirror reflects light without sending it in all directions, a normal (aluminium) mirror only relfects about 85% f the light, which means it would probably toast up from the laser quick smart. Given that, you might actually be better off using something white and with a high melting point which might actually reflect more of the energy away. Sure you can't target it back to the attacker, but it might save your bacon.
If I were in the recording/movie business, I would start packaging other stuff with albums/movies to encourage purchase of the physical medium
No offence, but this is why you aren't in the entertainment selling industry.
The things you listed all cost money to make. Then you have to distribute it to all the folks selling it. If you offer the products online, you have almost pure profit. Sure, you have to have a website, and you have to pay for bandwidth, but in reality, you have a pure profit business. You have infinite stock. You don't worry about refunds, stock control, your inventory is zero.
Add to that, the fact that courts are apparently siding with the entertainment industry, you can now also add to that the fact that users cannot resell (legally anyhow), so they *have* to buy from you.
Even assuming (which I don't personally agree with) that piracy reduces the number of sales, your profits are still pretty much 100%. It is simply a race to get as many sales as possible. Physical sales might be nice for a business, but if you want to increase profit margins, going online is the way to go.
But when you're talking about "intellectual property", some of those things aren't allowed, and some of them don't really make sense. "Selling" an MP3 that you've bought is a bit weird, because what you hand over will probably be a *copy* of the MP3 file you bought. A perfect and identical copy, sure, but a copy. You can then destroy the original, but then what are you really selling?
Following that logic, you should be able to ask for a full refund at any time. You never GOT the original. You were only given a copy. The original is still at the store that is selling it.
Erm, apart from when they move their stock around to different servers. Or do a disc defrag. Or a folder rename. Or a file rename... etc etc ad nauseum.
This has been brought up many times here on /. before. The problem is that the corp is worth MUCH more than the actual mp3 file itself, so doesn't really solve the problem.
I was about to make the exact same point.
That case actually goes further than that though, as the folks commiting the copyright infrigement actually bought the games legally. The ruling was that even if you bought the game legally, you couldn't use it in a manner that Blizzard didn't condone.
That's funny, my trips through Heathrow have always been great - save for one fifteen minute queue waiting to get through customs. I found the staff to be pretty efficient, though not "out of the box thinkers" for the most part. The only thing that irked me was that the folks on EU passports had ZERO lines while we had a few, which really made me want to get my EU passport.
When travelling to Ireland, I do have to admit that the customs folks were amazing (I went across via the ferry crossing from north Wales), but seriously, they were so good and friendly I was almost looking around for the complimentary whiskey during the process.
Careful, that whoooosh was actually an asteroid... maybe from Mercury.
I don't think that the current year is what you think it is.
OMG! The first rule of BitMessage is not to talk about Bitmessage!!
Or keep shaking the cage to see what falls out of our pockets that they might want.
Get enough of them going and it would be near impossible to filter out the noise.
I don't think you understand the way that these folks work. If you do that, they will just ask for more funds to be able to add more power to their listening-in operation. Oh, to do that, they need to raise your taxes just a touch.