I don't know if one could shoot a kid or not, but, if you did, that would have a negative impact on your character's karma, so in-game there would be sanctions against you.
Perzakly. You can kill Little Sisters in Bioshock, but that decision stays with you right to the end of the game.
The reason that people with european ancestors can be found on every continent is because those ancestors explored.
If they could have sent robot ships across the Atlantic first, that would have been the clever thing to do.
If human culture and DNA is to survive, we need to explore. Finding out what is elsewhere is only a small part of it.
We already know that Earth is our only hope for sustaining the human race inside the solar system. If we want to colonise anywhere outside the solar system, we're not going to achieve it with traditional manned spacecraft (in the sense of having a living crew).
...are rightly over. America got to the Moon first and no-one can take that away from them. All future space exploration should be done by robots because it just isn't worth it to place a human being on another planet.
The thing is, though: Will these small companies pay enough for support to enable Canonical to continue to employ the same number of full-time staff ? Or is it the case that smaller companies will employ a full-time sysadmin who relies on Ubuntu forums to fix his problems ?
A good sign that music has some sort of worth is if someone other than the band in question has put up the money to have a run of silver discs manufactured. Simply having free files available for download is just not enough these days.
I own a Wii. When I first saw one, I HAD to get it. Pure irrational lust. Haven't regretted it one iota. As a family, we're pretty much casual gamers and it's 'party games' which hold our attention longest. Youngest daughter has a slimline PS2 and will hack away for hours on serious games, but she's very much the exception. Even on the PS2, the most popular games with the family have been Eye-Toy, Singstar and Buzz variants - ie, kids' party games !
Hardcore gamers are in the minority.
Nintendo's masterstroke was to make a killer application which appeals to gamers and non-gamers alike (Wii Sports), to manufacture the only hardware that supports it, and to sell that hardware for a profit, not as a loss-leader. They did exactly the same thing with the original Gameboy and Tetris combo.
Hell, it's a great phrase to drop into any conversation. I'm currently on the lookout for a reason to say "Plasmonic Nanolithography". It's right up there with Flux Capacitor.
So there's nothing contradictory about believing that god values everything he made and thinking it's ok to kill things he made for the purposes of food, clothing or entertainment.
Cool ! One thing stopping me joining a religion was that I'd have to give up badger-baiting. If it gets God's seal of approval, then I might still be interested.
In my world, the real world, DRM is largely a necessary evil. People deserve to get paid for their work. Software and entertainment content requires work to create and the producers have the right to compensation. Couple that with the entitlement mentality rampant today and you'll find without DRM people will just give other people's shit away for free without a second thought, and other people will download said shit for free without a twinge of conscience.
DVD movies are trivially easy to copy, yet people still buy and rent them. CD's even more so. Your jaundiced view of the general public is wrong. People still want a decent product - something they can put on their own shelf or give to people as a gift (would you give someone a hand-labelled CD-R for Xmas, even if you'd legitimately downloaded all tracks from iTunes ?). DRM'ed gifts could 'fail' after a time if the DRM can't be validated at the time the owner wants to play it. Nice 'present' !
Sorry, but I see all DRM as equivalent to those anti-piracy ads from FACT that you are forced to watch before you can access the menu on your PURCHASED movie. Pointless, and more annoying to legitimate users than to pirates.
"Geologists recently discovered that "earthquakes" are nothing more than Bruce Schneier and Chuck Norris communicating via a roundhouse kick-based cryptosystem."
His criticism of the Drake equation is even less well informed, in that he's criticising the equation itself, not the parameters that go into it. But the equation is trivially true; it's nearly a tautology. If the correct statement is "we don't know", it's not because the equations wrong, it's because we don't know what values go on the right side.
From Crichton's piece:
"The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses."
He IS talking about the parameters (on the right side). Your criticism is meaningless.
In short, Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at, and not critiquing SETI, something he seems to know little about.
And, naturally, Free games will be cheaper than $40 since FOSS model will make development more efficient(no licensing costs, reuse of existing code and other resources instead of constantly redoing everything from scratch)
You don't really know very much about games development, do you ? No-one 'starts from scratch' these days.
Players that are too young for a good job pirate anyway. And no law will be able to do anything about that. Even if it would, those people would not play games at all which won't increase sales..
Yet the games industry makes more money than the entire movie industry. I guess there are still enough people willing to buy the licensed product rather than finding some means of ripping off the games houses. If FOSS is such a great model, why are people still flocking to the proprietary games ?
And you can still sell disks even if your software is GPLd.
But would the original software producer get the profit from those sales, or would they be forced by the GPL into allowing any Joe Sixpack to sell a second-generation copy for any price he decides and keeping the all the profits to himself ? In that situation, people would buy their games from Knock-Off Nigel for £2 rather than Rockstar for £40.
People should be rewarded for writing software, *not* for licensing it. Selling support is a viable alternative to nonsense notion of "selling" the software itself.
Games houses couldn't make today's games without the income raised from selling/licensing software as a product. How could Rockstar have sold 'support' for GTA3 on the PS2 ? Would that have raised the same income as disc sales ?
Yes, killing proprietary software would be good...
If the guys at Propellerhead software didn't get paid well for producing closed-source proprietary software, their Reason virtual recording studio would never have seen the light of day. Sometimes it's good to reward people for writing software and provide them with a source of income with which they can support their families while continuing to improve and support their product.
The same goes for games developers. They simply wouldn't put the effort into creating killer products if they couldn't earn an income from it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if one could shoot a kid or not, but, if you did, that would have a negative impact on your character's karma, so in-game there would be sanctions against you.
Perzakly. You can kill Little Sisters in Bioshock, but that decision stays with you right to the end of the game.
The reason that people with european ancestors can be found on every continent is because those ancestors explored.
If they could have sent robot ships across the Atlantic first, that would have been the clever thing to do.
If human culture and DNA is to survive, we need to explore. Finding out what is elsewhere is only a small part of it.
We already know that Earth is our only hope for sustaining the human race inside the solar system. If we want to colonise anywhere outside the solar system, we're not going to achieve it with traditional manned spacecraft (in the sense of having a living crew).
...are rightly over. America got to the Moon first and no-one can take that away from them. All future space exploration should be done by robots because it just isn't worth it to place a human being on another planet.
The thing is, though: Will these small companies pay enough for support to enable Canonical to continue to employ the same number of full-time staff ? Or is it the case that smaller companies will employ a full-time sysadmin who relies on Ubuntu forums to fix his problems ?
A good sign that music has some sort of worth is if someone other than the band in question has put up the money to have a run of silver discs manufactured. Simply having free files available for download is just not enough these days.
I own a Wii. When I first saw one, I HAD to get it. Pure irrational lust. Haven't regretted it one iota. As a family, we're pretty much casual gamers and it's 'party games' which hold our attention longest. Youngest daughter has a slimline PS2 and will hack away for hours on serious games, but she's very much the exception. Even on the PS2, the most popular games with the family have been Eye-Toy, Singstar and Buzz variants - ie, kids' party games !
Hardcore gamers are in the minority.
Nintendo's masterstroke was to make a killer application which appeals to gamers and non-gamers alike (Wii Sports), to manufacture the only hardware that supports it, and to sell that hardware for a profit, not as a loss-leader. They did exactly the same thing with the original Gameboy and Tetris combo.
Hell, it's a great phrase to drop into any conversation. I'm currently on the lookout for a reason to say "Plasmonic Nanolithography". It's right up there with Flux Capacitor.
How long did it take Uncle Sam to realise he was a tool, though ? All they had to do was post an 'Ask Slashdot'.
So there's nothing contradictory about believing that god values everything he made and thinking it's ok to kill things he made for the purposes of food, clothing or entertainment.
Cool ! One thing stopping me joining a religion was that I'd have to give up badger-baiting. If it gets God's seal of approval, then I might still be interested.
I wonder if the Marlin team are going to buy some DRM'ed songs from iTunes with their thirty pieces of silver ?
In my world, the real world, DRM is largely a necessary evil. People deserve to get paid for their work. Software and entertainment content requires work to create and the producers have the right to compensation. Couple that with the entitlement mentality rampant today and you'll find without DRM people will just give other people's shit away for free without a second thought, and other people will download said shit for free without a twinge of conscience.
DVD movies are trivially easy to copy, yet people still buy and rent them. CD's even more so. Your jaundiced view of the general public is wrong. People still want a decent product - something they can put on their own shelf or give to people as a gift (would you give someone a hand-labelled CD-R for Xmas, even if you'd legitimately downloaded all tracks from iTunes ?). DRM'ed gifts could 'fail' after a time if the DRM can't be validated at the time the owner wants to play it. Nice 'present' !
Sorry, but I see all DRM as equivalent to those anti-piracy ads from FACT that you are forced to watch before you can access the menu on your PURCHASED movie. Pointless, and more annoying to legitimate users than to pirates.
That painting looks like Chuck Norris to me.
"Geologists recently discovered that "earthquakes" are nothing more than Bruce Schneier and Chuck Norris communicating via a roundhouse kick-based cryptosystem."
http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/58
step 1: wrap a string around a tennis ball and a brick so they are tightly snug; I suggest to use the "1337 h4x0r knot" for extra tightness.
step 2: throw the tennis ball-brick at the driver side car door window.
"Like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon"
"wrapped around a large gold brick."
http://www.bigrat.co.uk/equipment/bigrat.html
Base 13 ?
His criticism of the Drake equation is even less well informed, in that he's criticising the equation itself, not the parameters that go into it. But the equation is trivially true; it's nearly a tautology. If the correct statement is "we don't know", it's not because the equations wrong, it's because we don't know what values go on the right side.
From Crichton's piece:
"The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses."
He IS talking about the parameters (on the right side). Your criticism is meaningless.
In short, Crichton should stick with novels, which he's good at, and not critiquing SETI, something he seems to know little about.
Hehehe. Marvelous. Keep it up.
Michael Crichton criticised the Drake equation years ago:
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html
My personal guess is that there are OVER 9000 civilisations out there.
Maya Rudolph uses Linux.
Fantastic ! I LOL'd.
a tyme masheen
That ride sucks !
And, naturally, Free games will be cheaper than $40 since FOSS model will make development more efficient(no licensing costs, reuse of existing code and other resources instead of constantly redoing everything from scratch)
You don't really know very much about games development, do you ? No-one 'starts from scratch' these days.
Players that are too young for a good job pirate anyway. And no law will be able to do anything about that. Even if it would, those people would not play games at all which won't increase sales..
Yet the games industry makes more money than the entire movie industry. I guess there are still enough people willing to buy the licensed product rather than finding some means of ripping off the games houses. If FOSS is such a great model, why are people still flocking to the proprietary games ?
And you can still sell disks even if your software is GPLd.
But would the original software producer get the profit from those sales, or would they be forced by the GPL into allowing any Joe Sixpack to sell a second-generation copy for any price he decides and keeping the all the profits to himself ? In that situation, people would buy their games from Knock-Off Nigel for £2 rather than Rockstar for £40.
More cowbell !
People should be rewarded for writing software, *not* for licensing it. Selling support is a viable alternative to nonsense notion of "selling" the software itself.
Games houses couldn't make today's games without the income raised from selling/licensing software as a product. How could Rockstar have sold 'support' for GTA3 on the PS2 ? Would that have raised the same income as disc sales ?
Yes, killing proprietary software would be good...
If the guys at Propellerhead software didn't get paid well for producing closed-source proprietary software, their Reason virtual recording studio would never have seen the light of day. Sometimes it's good to reward people for writing software and provide them with a source of income with which they can support their families while continuing to improve and support their product.
The same goes for games developers. They simply wouldn't put the effort into creating killer products if they couldn't earn an income from it.