What's funny to me about that is that it actually worked with Redbox. I live in a small city, pop 350k or so, and we have 1 Sam's, 1 Costco, 4 (freaking four) Walmarts, 1 Target, and 1 Best Buy. Those are the major retailers that I can think of off the top of my head, that's 40 discs in a couple hours easy per buyer per trip to the store. Are they really putting 40 of any one disc into a Redbox machine?
When the law was written I'm fairly certain it was intended to mean transmission to multiple people, and probably over the air or some such multicast method.
What Zediva is doing is no different than plugging a DvD player up to your computer or TV directly in your own home. The DvD player is "transmitting" over a wire, the length of that wire and where it leads so long as the signal is only going to one customer should not be legally relevant. Hell you could even plug your DvD player at home up to multiple TV's in every room of your home, that's not illegal that I am aware of.
Hopefully Zediva will win the case at large even if they lose on this temporary injuntion. Some where along the line some court should manage to acurately interpret the law instead of acting as a MPAA shill.
I would doubt that. That's a 15% return on investment in one week. If you can consistently pick stocks that average 10% or better return in a year you've got a very lucrative job with some investment bank waiting.
Granted you can't exploit this flaw year round but the return rate is still better than most any other legal method.
Except that it should be painfully obvious that an auction house for non-battlenet characters is worthless.
In D2 if you were not playing on the battlenet server games you could just hack in whatever equipment you wanted. Everyone could do it, so the playing field was perfectly level. On the battlenet game servers you couldn't hack in items as your save was on the server, duping bugs still existed but that's a near eternal cat and mouse game.
The only logical reason for requiring a constant connection is as a DRM mechanism. And it's not even all that great of one as no doubt someone will have a hack ready for it inside of a week. While I've mainly played D2 on the official Ladder servers making D3 require the connection might end up as a deal breaker for me.
Your theory is just as flimsy as Hatta's because we don't know how many hours of streaming they are doing in any given time frame. And we also don't know what the current price is for the licensing whether it's per movie or studio. The only known values for us are the subscription fees and possibly Netflix's annual revenues.
It could go either way but there is no reason that Netflix shouldn't be able to figure out an average for what the normal consumer uses and base their negotiations with the studios on that.
My only personal complaints so far with Netflix has been that the streaming catalog is pretty restricted, and even their DvD selection is often missing movies that I would expect them to have. And the quality of the Streamed content is generally medium to low for me.
And so far all of my notifications for being added by people have shown up under the same notification. It's not like you get a dozen different notifications.
The law does not establish guilt, that is the job of the jury.
And as others have said, yes jury nullification can lead to miscarriages of justice. But the whole legal process as it currently exists is vulnerable to this kind of problem. I hardly think that 12 people unaminously deciding that the police and DA were wrong in their reading of the law is a travesty of justice.
And what about people that benefit from government spending even if they aren't recieving cash. For instance any person that uses the road and highway system to transport goods or their own person. How about people who conduct business over government subsidized phone lines and draw power from government subsidized power lines and plants?
And on the civil rights issue, how many people know what their civil rights are, or when they are trespassing on another person's? Allowing vigilante capital punishment for possibly imagined violations of rights is unconsionable.
Part of your problem is that for a few years there the AF was trying to decide if they were going to keep Programmers and whatnot at all. I think it's finally settled out now and you might want to look into it again.
The extra test (EDPT) is or at least was required to be a programmer, so if you can't pass that then you'll have to look into some of the other related jobs.
The best thing I got out of my AF job though was the basic experienve, veterans preference, and clearance that landed me my first contractor job.
What you say couldn't be more true. When I worked as a developer I was aware of some security practices such as secure password handling and things like that. But when I was our shop's DBA I had no idea what was in the DB STIG. Now I wish I could bring in the developers for every program we support and teach them the current STIG. That way they could design their system more securely.
As it stands it's impossible to get things fixed because it means convincing a PMO to spend their ever shrinking budget and time fixing a vulnerability in their system versus fixing functionality bugs and such that are readily visible to their customers. No one making budget designs in their chain of command cares one whit about security issues until there is an exploit, because they seemingly have more pressing concerns. This is probably the same in most commercial organizations.
The thing with the STIG though is that it's not even much of a comfort to be fully STIG compliant. A lot of our state level competitors have access to zero day exploits that the STIG has not yet adressed except in general policy decisions.
My Criminal Justice teacher always taught this. The example that I remember from him was unmarked patrol cars.
When he was a captain in the local Sherrif Department he fought against using unmarked cars for patrol. His reasoning was that a visible patrol car detered criminal and traffic violations wherever it went. It also let the general public know that the police were in the area and there for you. And in case of an emergency a member of the public could quickly recognize a police vehicle to flag it down.
The only upside of the unmarked cars was that you could collect more ticket revenue easily. But ticket revenue was not the purpose of the department, so why should they give up ground in crime prevention for marginal gains in catching offenders unawares.
It boils down to the question, is it better to prevent a crime or catch the criminal after the fact?
I'm a Dispatch fan. I have a bunch of their albums on CD, and went to see them at the Garden when I lived in Alabama.
I can't speak to whether or not the MAFIAA controls booking in 99% of the large venues or not. But when Dispatch played at Madison Square Garden they had already contracted with a major label to distribute their old albums. That may or may not have had anything to do with them being able to book three consecutive days of sold out shows there.
What ritzy neighborhood did you grow up in where kids had cellphones? I'm 32 and I can barely remember people having cell phones in '96 but they weren't so widespread that kids had them until '99 or later as I recall. I knew teenagers that had beepers but no one had a cell phone, not even the rich kids.
The test I took didn't even require that. We did have to reverse through some cones with a slight turn involved though. You could go as slow as you wanted but were not allowed to stop.
I don't know that technical incompetence is exactly right. It's more likely management incompetence.
I worked once as a government code monkey. The most imporant thing was getting stuff done according to schedule. Security was important but nobody knew the details of what was required until it was too late. Security configurations should have been considered and built in from the design phase on, instead it was always tacked on at the end. Which means there is never any money/time to get anything but the most trivial issues addressed.
So far as the play ground equipment goes, I'd rather it be made of untreated wood and need annual repair. Otherwise it would need to be made of a non-renewable resource or heavily treated lumber that would need less repair but introduce lots of extra carcinogens and toxins where children spend a lot of time.
Although for a hefty chunk of money it could be constructed out of cypress or cedar heart wood. That's not as easily renewable though and is premium priced lumber.
That is correct, being able to trade is not a strictly required. But if players are not capable of exchanging items in game then you've created a game without any kind of economy. And it turns out economies are a lot of fun to play in and of themselves. Crafting in many games would not be feasible without player trades.
I don't know that I can agree that it's greener than bulludozing a few mountains. If this is poisoning the water table of large parts of the country that could lead to much more devestation than a few mountains.
Or how about since this is the United States of America we are talking about, we go back to a presumption of innocense(sp) and leave it up to the accuser to prove guilt. Of course the danger in that approach is that it's out of vogue in some circles and you have to get a competent enough judge and jury to understand the issues involved.
I actually think that D3 will be more like D2 than D2 was like D1.
Diablo 2 added and changed a ton of stuff. Area's repopulating, Way Points, Unique and Champion Mob packs, gold going to a wallet instead of stacks in inventory, Stash for items and gold, crafting via Horadric Cube, a nearly monolithic skill system with three unique main branches for each class, Socketing and eventually runewords, and finally ammunition requirements. I can't remember clearly if mobs in D1 used any special abilities at all, I remember that some had ranged attacks but that's about it, where as in D2 mob size, attack styles/skills and such including immunities is varied to a huge degree.
D3 seems to be more about improving the graphics, designing more intricate boss events, and coming up with new skills and abilities. They are also changing the loot drop method, in a positive way I feel. And I seem to remember reading about how the rune system for augmenting abilities and equipment will be completely different but I don't remember much other than thinking it didn't sound as fun as D2's system.
I'm using two software SLI'd 8600's and the game runs pretty smoothly with some exceptions. Those exceptions being that the menus are very sluggish and stuttery, and sometimes I get seemingly random game crashes. I haven't finish the Fafnir chapter because I always crash before reaching him.
Even with those issues though I've gotten my money's worth out of it easily.
I haven't bothered with multiplayer because multiplayer rarely interests me unless it's an MMO.
Starcraft 2 is also essentially a reskin of a million other RTS games. Yes it looks pretty and runs on everything from a Ti-85 to the latest gaming rig. But it also was developed by a behemoth studio over the course of many years with a budget that could fund several small nations.
Magicka was developed by ten or less people in much less time with a budget to match. The gameplay is actually inovative and original. And while I haven't played through either game completely Magicka's story line even seems to be much more entertaining.
Are those all things you consider drawbacks?
In my opinion those are some of the elements that make the game really great. It makes the game a real challenge. Too many games have gone the route of making the player too powerful and the game might as well be a giant cutscene.
My only complaints have been that in a specific chapter my game always crashes before I can reach the end and sometimes it seems like the game is dropping keypresses for summoning elements. The crash happens seemingly at random so I eventually gave up on it, although I should go back and see if they fixed it. The keypress thing was a bit frustrating but I just learned to live with it by checking to make sure I had the combo right before actually casting it.
I was just doing that, researching the possibility of switching. Unfortunately every other provider in my area has one or both of the following issues: Notorious horribly terribad service Existing bandwidth caps that are lower than the proposed 150 GB's a month
Not that I think my household uses anywhere near the cap. I'd just like to drop their service on principle.
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What's funny to me about that is that it actually worked with Redbox. I live in a small city, pop 350k or so, and we have 1 Sam's, 1 Costco, 4 (freaking four) Walmarts, 1 Target, and 1 Best Buy. Those are the major retailers that I can think of off the top of my head, that's 40 discs in a couple hours easy per buyer per trip to the store. Are they really putting 40 of any one disc into a Redbox machine?
When the law was written I'm fairly certain it was intended to mean transmission to multiple people, and probably over the air or some such multicast method.
What Zediva is doing is no different than plugging a DvD player up to your computer or TV directly in your own home. The DvD player is "transmitting" over a wire, the length of that wire and where it leads so long as the signal is only going to one customer should not be legally relevant. Hell you could even plug your DvD player at home up to multiple TV's in every room of your home, that's not illegal that I am aware of.
Hopefully Zediva will win the case at large even if they lose on this temporary injuntion. Some where along the line some court should manage to acurately interpret the law instead of acting as a MPAA shill.
I would doubt that. That's a 15% return on investment in one week. If you can consistently pick stocks that average 10% or better return in a year you've got a very lucrative job with some investment bank waiting.
Granted you can't exploit this flaw year round but the return rate is still better than most any other legal method.
Except that it should be painfully obvious that an auction house for non-battlenet characters is worthless.
In D2 if you were not playing on the battlenet server games you could just hack in whatever equipment you wanted. Everyone could do it, so the playing field was perfectly level. On the battlenet game servers you couldn't hack in items as your save was on the server, duping bugs still existed but that's a near eternal cat and mouse game.
The only logical reason for requiring a constant connection is as a DRM mechanism. And it's not even all that great of one as no doubt someone will have a hack ready for it inside of a week. While I've mainly played D2 on the official Ladder servers making D3 require the connection might end up as a deal breaker for me.
Your theory is just as flimsy as Hatta's because we don't know how many hours of streaming they are doing in any given time frame. And we also don't know what the current price is for the licensing whether it's per movie or studio. The only known values for us are the subscription fees and possibly Netflix's annual revenues.
It could go either way but there is no reason that Netflix shouldn't be able to figure out an average for what the normal consumer uses and base their negotiations with the studios on that.
My only personal complaints so far with Netflix has been that the streaming catalog is pretty restricted, and even their DvD selection is often missing movies that I would expect them to have. And the quality of the Streamed content is generally medium to low for me.
And so far all of my notifications for being added by people have shown up under the same notification. It's not like you get a dozen different notifications.
The law does not establish guilt, that is the job of the jury.
And as others have said, yes jury nullification can lead to miscarriages of justice. But the whole legal process as it currently exists is vulnerable to this kind of problem. I hardly think that 12 people unaminously deciding that the police and DA were wrong in their reading of the law is a travesty of justice.
And what about people that benefit from government spending even if they aren't recieving cash. For instance any person that uses the road and highway system to transport goods or their own person. How about people who conduct business over government subsidized phone lines and draw power from government subsidized power lines and plants?
And on the civil rights issue, how many people know what their civil rights are, or when they are trespassing on another person's? Allowing vigilante capital punishment for possibly imagined violations of rights is unconsionable.
Part of your problem is that for a few years there the AF was trying to decide if they were going to keep Programmers and whatnot at all. I think it's finally settled out now and you might want to look into it again.
The extra test (EDPT) is or at least was required to be a programmer, so if you can't pass that then you'll have to look into some of the other related jobs.
The best thing I got out of my AF job though was the basic experienve, veterans preference, and clearance that landed me my first contractor job.
And to think I let mod points rot yesterday...
What you say couldn't be more true. When I worked as a developer I was aware of some security practices such as secure password handling and things like that. But when I was our shop's DBA I had no idea what was in the DB STIG. Now I wish I could bring in the developers for every program we support and teach them the current STIG. That way they could design their system more securely.
As it stands it's impossible to get things fixed because it means convincing a PMO to spend their ever shrinking budget and time fixing a vulnerability in their system versus fixing functionality bugs and such that are readily visible to their customers. No one making budget designs in their chain of command cares one whit about security issues until there is an exploit, because they seemingly have more pressing concerns. This is probably the same in most commercial organizations.
The thing with the STIG though is that it's not even much of a comfort to be fully STIG compliant. A lot of our state level competitors have access to zero day exploits that the STIG has not yet adressed except in general policy decisions.
My Criminal Justice teacher always taught this. The example that I remember from him was unmarked patrol cars.
When he was a captain in the local Sherrif Department he fought against using unmarked cars for patrol. His reasoning was that a visible patrol car detered criminal and traffic violations wherever it went. It also let the general public know that the police were in the area and there for you. And in case of an emergency a member of the public could quickly recognize a police vehicle to flag it down.
The only upside of the unmarked cars was that you could collect more ticket revenue easily. But ticket revenue was not the purpose of the department, so why should they give up ground in crime prevention for marginal gains in catching offenders unawares.
It boils down to the question, is it better to prevent a crime or catch the criminal after the fact?
I'm a Dispatch fan. I have a bunch of their albums on CD, and went to see them at the Garden when I lived in Alabama.
I can't speak to whether or not the MAFIAA controls booking in 99% of the large venues or not. But when Dispatch played at Madison Square Garden they had already contracted with a major label to distribute their old albums. That may or may not have had anything to do with them being able to book three consecutive days of sold out shows there.
What ritzy neighborhood did you grow up in where kids had cellphones? I'm 32 and I can barely remember people having cell phones in '96 but they weren't so widespread that kids had them until '99 or later as I recall. I knew teenagers that had beepers but no one had a cell phone, not even the rich kids.
The test I took didn't even require that. We did have to reverse through some cones with a slight turn involved though. You could go as slow as you wanted but were not allowed to stop.
I don't know that technical incompetence is exactly right. It's more likely management incompetence.
I worked once as a government code monkey. The most imporant thing was getting stuff done according to schedule. Security was important but nobody knew the details of what was required until it was too late. Security configurations should have been considered and built in from the design phase on, instead it was always tacked on at the end. Which means there is never any money/time to get anything but the most trivial issues addressed.
So far as the play ground equipment goes, I'd rather it be made of untreated wood and need annual repair. Otherwise it would need to be made of a non-renewable resource or heavily treated lumber that would need less repair but introduce lots of extra carcinogens and toxins where children spend a lot of time.
Although for a hefty chunk of money it could be constructed out of cypress or cedar heart wood. That's not as easily renewable though and is premium priced lumber.
That is correct, being able to trade is not a strictly required. But if players are not capable of exchanging items in game then you've created a game without any kind of economy. And it turns out economies are a lot of fun to play in and of themselves. Crafting in many games would not be feasible without player trades.
"The only useful thing in this submission is that I learned the word 'snaffled.'"
Damnit, and on the one day in the month that I don't have mod points!
I don't know that I can agree that it's greener than bulludozing a few mountains. If this is poisoning the water table of large parts of the country that could lead to much more devestation than a few mountains.
Or how about since this is the United States of America we are talking about, we go back to a presumption of innocense(sp) and leave it up to the accuser to prove guilt. Of course the danger in that approach is that it's out of vogue in some circles and you have to get a competent enough judge and jury to understand the issues involved.
I actually think that D3 will be more like D2 than D2 was like D1.
Diablo 2 added and changed a ton of stuff. Area's repopulating, Way Points, Unique and Champion Mob packs, gold going to a wallet instead of stacks in inventory, Stash for items and gold, crafting via Horadric Cube, a nearly monolithic skill system with three unique main branches for each class, Socketing and eventually runewords, and finally ammunition requirements. I can't remember clearly if mobs in D1 used any special abilities at all, I remember that some had ranged attacks but that's about it, where as in D2 mob size, attack styles/skills and such including immunities is varied to a huge degree.
D3 seems to be more about improving the graphics, designing more intricate boss events, and coming up with new skills and abilities. They are also changing the loot drop method, in a positive way I feel. And I seem to remember reading about how the rune system for augmenting abilities and equipment will be completely different but I don't remember much other than thinking it didn't sound as fun as D2's system.
I'm using two software SLI'd 8600's and the game runs pretty smoothly with some exceptions. Those exceptions being that the menus are very sluggish and stuttery, and sometimes I get seemingly random game crashes. I haven't finish the Fafnir chapter because I always crash before reaching him.
Even with those issues though I've gotten my money's worth out of it easily.
I haven't bothered with multiplayer because multiplayer rarely interests me unless it's an MMO.
Starcraft 2 is also essentially a reskin of a million other RTS games. Yes it looks pretty and runs on everything from a Ti-85 to the latest gaming rig. But it also was developed by a behemoth studio over the course of many years with a budget that could fund several small nations.
Magicka was developed by ten or less people in much less time with a budget to match. The gameplay is actually inovative and original. And while I haven't played through either game completely Magicka's story line even seems to be much more entertaining.
Are those all things you consider drawbacks? In my opinion those are some of the elements that make the game really great. It makes the game a real challenge. Too many games have gone the route of making the player too powerful and the game might as well be a giant cutscene. My only complaints have been that in a specific chapter my game always crashes before I can reach the end and sometimes it seems like the game is dropping keypresses for summoning elements. The crash happens seemingly at random so I eventually gave up on it, although I should go back and see if they fixed it. The keypress thing was a bit frustrating but I just learned to live with it by checking to make sure I had the combo right before actually casting it.
I was just doing that, researching the possibility of switching. Unfortunately every other provider in my area has one or both of the following issues:
Notorious horribly terribad service
Existing bandwidth caps that are lower than the proposed 150 GB's a month
Not that I think my household uses anywhere near the cap. I'd just like to drop their service on principle.