Then they would need to pay for workers to service those robots too. I kind of suppose (and somewhat hope) Google isn't yet able to build robots to service other robots yet.
This kind of thing is more complicated than that. At the end of the day, businesses only care about the bottom line. While it's true that hitting companies will also hurt their workforce in reduced work to be done (and be even somewhat paid for), sometimes it's the only way to drive the point home to those companies that the customers simply do not want to have this work done under slave-like conditions.
But then again, customers have to care enough to fork over the cash, in the form of so-called "inflated" prices. I'm not holding my breath to see that happen, sadly.
At the end of the day, the only language the manufacturing companies (actually, any companies) really understand and obey is written with numbers on their financial statements. Driving petitions, customer demonstrations, shouting on top of soapboxes and whatnot is all fine and dandy in the feel-good way but unless it also shows up as numbers on company finances, it tends to amount to... absolutely nothing.
I would suppose that if this kind of behavior was widespread, the people with money could simply stop give out loans to them? Or require heftier collaterals?
There's also talks about Source Engine being ported to Linux.
Now, I'm not really privy to how high-end game development works, so I can't really say how much the engine lets developers really keep their hands off of DirectX/OpenGL stuff, but I have let myself to believe that stuff really is handled mostly by the engine.
Ergo, if the engine handles the graphics stuff and it's ported to use OpenGL on Linux, it should, in essence, make Linux & OpenGL at least a little bit less repulsive choice for game devs.
The issue about 3D video drivers still stands, though. However... if people are able to put up with closed-source, proprietary stuff like Steam Client, Source Engine and the games themselves in the first place, they are most likely going to have proprietary binary blob drivers, too.
Note: I don't do much current gaming, I am only in near future going to switch all-linux, and haven't really had any experience how good or bad the binary drivers are. So take my comments with a grain of salt.
And if said virus killed your family? It's easy to make off the cuff statements that 'censorship' is bad, when researchers also have a responsibility to think of the ramifications of their research.
Wrong question.
I'd be much, much more concerned if the scientists will discover a working vaccine before this mutation happens in the wild, and to that end, SCIENCE needs to be done. Suppression of research is clearly harmful to this goal. So, I'd be asking the question: "And if said virus, having mutated in wild, killed your family, and the vaccine wasn't ready in time thanks to idiots who wanted to make it harder to discover with their security theater?"
And honestly, the way I see it, the harmful info is already out there. If the terrorists have a grasp of biology, and the resources at the level they would be able to actually do these things, the information that H5N1 can actually mutate into something this dangerous is enough. Suppressing this research is doing nothing else but letting the bad guys have all the weapons.
I could recommend this book too, but... Well, it certainly has some huge pros:
a) teaches a relevant language,
b) actually teaches some higher-level concepts like lists as they should be teached,
c)...not to mention teaching the reader to actually think algorithmically
d) actually gives exact (as in really, EXACT instructions how to actually get the code run... Oh, how I would have liked a book like this when I was younger...)
e) it's available at no cost in HTML form
But there are also cons with that book, which might or might not be a problem especially since the intended audience in this case is 11 year old:
a) language is worded in a way that's somewhat "direct" and "in your face",
b) it also goes through the "drab" things first, and quite thoroughly too. On the other hand, there's a promise of teaching the reader to develop a game out there, so it doesn't leave motivation out... even if a text adventure might not be what 11 year old at this time and age thinks first when thinking about "computer game".
I'm not saying a 11 year old couldn't learn immensely much from that book. I would have liked to read it with a computer at my hands when I was 11 year old. But this is something the original submitter should make the final call on. Personally, I would think that it might be better to go through the setup and first two or three chapters together with the child and only then leave him get cracking at it by himself.
What if I build a $50 million safe with walls as thick as a normal house, a hundred different lock mechanisms and all sorts of thinkable measures to protect its content to the point where you would need to pour insane amounts of resources (costing along the lines of the cost of a supercomputer or two) to get into it. Would that mean I should suddenly be held in contempt by default if I forget how to access my safe's contents?
The thing with meatspace is that none of those intricate lock mechanisms or even house-thick steel walls really matter a damn (I have no idea who would end up footing the bill for drilling it, though) when they are faced with destructive power tools. Any amount of any physical stuff between the prosecutor and evidence is still just physical stuff that can be drilled through, not some kind of extradimensional wall of universe that simply "won't get punched through no matter what". On the other hand in cyberspace, with encryption, the supercomputer or two won't do shit against properly-done strong encryption, unless the three letter agencies have actually built that quantum computer already. The power of math behind encryption is exactly that nothing short of really impressive paradigm-shift stuff (the stuff that happens once or twice in a century, max) will undo it.
Honestly, I have seen more than few of my friends using android phone enter the grid swipe only once... and I think still remember every single one of them. I myself use the grid swipe too, but I also enter the PIN for my SIM card when I boot the device up. I consider the swipe the grid to be more of a "keypad lock" function than anything even resembling actual security from data confidentiality standpoint.
If I ever use my android device to hold anything really confidential (no, sorry, honey-bunny text messages with my girlfriend don't count in this sense of the word because, at the end of the day, no one really cares enough about those type of things [and our messaging is somewhat "innocent" stuff in any case]) I'm going to use some real measures like strong encryption. Until that day, I'm not going to be bothered and just keep good care of my device.
Now, how long do you think that it'll be until someone at the various copyright lobbies wants to force a macrovision-like drm technology in there just because someone might someday include video recording capability into artificial eyes?
Show them this: Rite of passage, and you'll save them some pain, at least.
On the more serious side, tell them to simply get cracking with maps, mods, skins, simple game programming (like asteroids/minesweeper/etc), scripting, etc.
I sure hope someone could tell me if these findings tell us if the stars will be right during the next 50k years... It would make me at ease knowing how much time we have left before the great old ones... unless, of course, they are coming soon. Even then, I'd like to have the information so I could make preparations (namely, leave this world.)
I'm not the GP, and I can see he used "low profile title" to mean the games that just barely make it to the shelves of physical stores, without any serious advertising campaigns etc. Those games are still built with serious budgets and 100+ person workforce and have to compete with the high-profile games. To just break even, those games need to sell in the 100K+ units scale. These are the games that, according to the GP, are going to be hit the hardest by copyright infringement.
Indie games are done in teams of maximum of 10 people, in some cases only one, where sales amounts of 5K - 10K units might (maybe) be enough to make it worth the developers' time financially speaking. These are the games which "are probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy."
...yes, I pulled the numbers in this post out of my ass, but I honestly see them as somewhere in the correct ballpark. Feel free to correct me with solid information if you have any.
So. Like all corporations, when push comes to shove, they'll bow to the almighty Dollar - or in this case and probably moreso in future, Renminbi. News at 11.
Who were the guys behind NEXTStep, again?
And sure, they took stuff from BSD, but so what? The end result is, the system ended up being better that way. Please don't get me wrong, I hate Apple's shenanigans these days as much as anyone else, but saying that NEXTStep is nothing else but BSD is just dishonest or ignorant.
Come on now, things are not that black and white. That should be where The Constitution kicks in. And international Human Rights treaties....In theory, at least.
As a finnish person myself, I'd like to point out that there are few loopholes; first, the regulation states that the theoretical maximum of the available connection must be at least 1 Mb/s, and it can be provided whatever technology is the "most viable choice", including wireless and such. Looking at the track record of what kind of actual speeds finnish telcos are able to provide over wireless technologies around the country, I wouldn't shout out in rejoice just yet. Luckily I live in Helsinki where I can actually get a passable & affordable broadband access by cable.
Depends on a game and overall design. I'm not going to say that there is a genre where it would never work (because someone would just prove me wrong with a single datapoint saying otherwise) but I'd say that
a) It must be very carefully balanced
b) Game should have better rewards for those who handle the greater challenge. That should solve the problem of "rewarding mediocrity".
Take shmups, for instance. The better the player plays in them, the harder they usually get. (at least most of the good ones.) However, the "better" playing is also tightly coupled with the mechanics of scoring, which is essentially the main rewarding system, which means that harder difficulty=higher scores. I actually like this type of system more than pre-set easy-normal-hard-very hard -steps, because first, they are by definition able (when executed right) to give the "right" difficulty for everyone, and second because it keeps everyone's scores on the same scale.
Of course, this type of system does not fit into every game. Also, if awards for good playing are items, completely losing opportunity to get some specialized gear because of good play would be mildly off-putting.
But you can still sell them to someone who is crazy enough for retro gaming that he keeps an antiquated system running for games. Or you can use emulators/virtual environments to still play those games without having completely artificial technological barriers stopping or inconveniencing you just because some business-type assholes said so.
I honestly do think of the bolded part to be relevant to this issue, especially since DMCA and it's ilk make it illegal for anyone else help you bypass those artificial barriers.
There is NOTHING preventing people from selling music that plays on the iPod, UNLESS you want DRM - then you're stuck with Apple.
No DRM, no Apple control.
It really is not that simple... Because, for most people, the iTunes integration as both the place people can buy music and the only tool that can reliably sync and interoperate with iPods' music directory/database is the killer feature. Yeah, there are opensource projects trying to sync with iPods in order to let oss people use iPods, but Apple is notorious with breaking them with iPod firmware/iTunes updates. Why? Apple is using their dominance with portable music players to keep the competition away from the downloadable music market. Or vice versa. YEAH YEAH, I KNOW you can import non-drm music from any source into your iTunes Music Library and put that into iPod. But it is an additional hassle. And when it comes to the masses, they will not put up with the hassle unless they have a really good reason to do so. And no, having their music in FLAC or cutting down the price, like 30-50 cents apiece, is just not worth it for most consumers.
If the other digital music retailers really want to have any hope of beating Apple, they really need to figure out how to beat the end-user experience while working with the iPod. That would mean they have to somehow magically hook into iPod and probably into iTunes music library for most people.
And don't these things some how suck up more battery life? (but how much are we talking, and what about things like the M3 Perfect?)
As an AK2.1 owner, I have found it somewhat does. OTOH, I also found that remembering to set the light into dimmer in AK menu helps quite a bit. I felt little dumbfounded when I realized AK menu always defaults the background light into max regardless of what was set up in the DS main menu. I haven't even searched, really, for a way to set it to default at other settings.
Anyway, since I always remember to set the light to lowest or second-to-lowest setting, I have not had any real problems with battery life. Of course, I'm not that mobile a person so YMMV. I also live in Finland and it's dark here now in winter so it's easy for me to use low light levels. Come summer and sunshine, and this might be a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they would need to pay for workers to service those robots too. I kind of suppose (and somewhat hope) Google isn't yet able to build robots to service other robots yet.
This kind of thing is more complicated than that. At the end of the day, businesses only care about the bottom line. While it's true that hitting companies will also hurt their workforce in reduced work to be done (and be even somewhat paid for), sometimes it's the only way to drive the point home to those companies that the customers simply do not want to have this work done under slave-like conditions.
But then again, customers have to care enough to fork over the cash, in the form of so-called "inflated" prices. I'm not holding my breath to see that happen, sadly.
At the end of the day, the only language the manufacturing companies (actually, any companies) really understand and obey is written with numbers on their financial statements. Driving petitions, customer demonstrations, shouting on top of soapboxes and whatnot is all fine and dandy in the feel-good way but unless it also shows up as numbers on company finances, it tends to amount to... absolutely nothing.
I would suppose that if this kind of behavior was widespread, the people with money could simply stop give out loans to them? Or require heftier collaterals?
There's also talks about Source Engine being ported to Linux.
Now, I'm not really privy to how high-end game development works, so I can't really say how much the engine lets developers really keep their hands off of DirectX/OpenGL stuff, but I have let myself to believe that stuff really is handled mostly by the engine.
Ergo, if the engine handles the graphics stuff and it's ported to use OpenGL on Linux, it should, in essence, make Linux & OpenGL at least a little bit less repulsive choice for game devs.
The issue about 3D video drivers still stands, though. However... if people are able to put up with closed-source, proprietary stuff like Steam Client, Source Engine and the games themselves in the first place, they are most likely going to have proprietary binary blob drivers, too.
Note: I don't do much current gaming, I am only in near future going to switch all-linux, and haven't really had any experience how good or bad the binary drivers are. So take my comments with a grain of salt.
And if said virus killed your family? It's easy to make off the cuff statements that 'censorship' is bad, when researchers also have a responsibility to think of the ramifications of their research.
Wrong question.
I'd be much, much more concerned if the scientists will discover a working vaccine before this mutation happens in the wild, and to that end, SCIENCE needs to be done. Suppression of research is clearly harmful to this goal. So, I'd be asking the question: "And if said virus, having mutated in wild, killed your family, and the vaccine wasn't ready in time thanks to idiots who wanted to make it harder to discover with their security theater?"
And honestly, the way I see it, the harmful info is already out there. If the terrorists have a grasp of biology, and the resources at the level they would be able to actually do these things, the information that H5N1 can actually mutate into something this dangerous is enough. Suppressing this research is doing nothing else but letting the bad guys have all the weapons.
I could recommend this book too, but... Well, it certainly has some huge pros:
...not to mention teaching the reader to actually think algorithmically
a) teaches a relevant language,
b) actually teaches some higher-level concepts like lists as they should be teached,
c)
d) actually gives exact (as in really, EXACT instructions how to actually get the code run... Oh, how I would have liked a book like this when I was younger...)
e) it's available at no cost in HTML form
But there are also cons with that book, which might or might not be a problem especially since the intended audience in this case is 11 year old:
a) language is worded in a way that's somewhat "direct" and "in your face",
b) it also goes through the "drab" things first, and quite thoroughly too. On the other hand, there's a promise of teaching the reader to develop a game out there, so it doesn't leave motivation out... even if a text adventure might not be what 11 year old at this time and age thinks first when thinking about "computer game".
I'm not saying a 11 year old couldn't learn immensely much from that book. I would have liked to read it with a computer at my hands when I was 11 year old. But this is something the original submitter should make the final call on. Personally, I would think that it might be better to go through the setup and first two or three chapters together with the child and only then leave him get cracking at it by himself.
What if I build a $50 million safe with walls as thick as a normal house, a hundred different lock mechanisms and all sorts of thinkable measures to protect its content to the point where you would need to pour insane amounts of resources (costing along the lines of the cost of a supercomputer or two) to get into it. Would that mean I should suddenly be held in contempt by default if I forget how to access my safe's contents?
The thing with meatspace is that none of those intricate lock mechanisms or even house-thick steel walls really matter a damn (I have no idea who would end up footing the bill for drilling it, though) when they are faced with destructive power tools. Any amount of any physical stuff between the prosecutor and evidence is still just physical stuff that can be drilled through, not some kind of extradimensional wall of universe that simply "won't get punched through no matter what". On the other hand in cyberspace, with encryption, the supercomputer or two won't do shit against properly-done strong encryption, unless the three letter agencies have actually built that quantum computer already. The power of math behind encryption is exactly that nothing short of really impressive paradigm-shift stuff (the stuff that happens once or twice in a century, max) will undo it.
Honestly, I have seen more than few of my friends using android phone enter the grid swipe only once... and I think still remember every single one of them. I myself use the grid swipe too, but I also enter the PIN for my SIM card when I boot the device up. I consider the swipe the grid to be more of a "keypad lock" function than anything even resembling actual security from data confidentiality standpoint.
If I ever use my android device to hold anything really confidential (no, sorry, honey-bunny text messages with my girlfriend don't count in this sense of the word because, at the end of the day, no one really cares enough about those type of things [and our messaging is somewhat "innocent" stuff in any case]) I'm going to use some real measures like strong encryption. Until that day, I'm not going to be bothered and just keep good care of my device.
Now, how long do you think that it'll be until someone at the various copyright lobbies wants to force a macrovision-like drm technology in there just because someone might someday include video recording capability into artificial eyes?
Show them this: Rite of passage, and you'll save them some pain, at least.
On the more serious side, tell them to simply get cracking with maps, mods, skins, simple game programming (like asteroids/minesweeper/etc), scripting, etc.
I sure hope someone could tell me if these findings tell us if the stars will be right during the next 50k years... It would make me at ease knowing how much time we have left before the great old ones... unless, of course, they are coming soon. Even then, I'd like to have the information so I could make preparations (namely, leave this world.)
Shouldn't / Doesn't the time start running only when the work is published? I always thought that to be the case...
*Groan*
...yes, I pulled the numbers in this post out of my ass, but I honestly see them as somewhere in the correct ballpark. Feel free to correct me with solid information if you have any.
I'm not the GP, and I can see he used "low profile title" to mean the games that just barely make it to the shelves of physical stores, without any serious advertising campaigns etc. Those games are still built with serious budgets and 100+ person workforce and have to compete with the high-profile games. To just break even, those games need to sell in the 100K+ units scale. These are the games that, according to the GP, are going to be hit the hardest by copyright infringement.
Indie games are done in teams of maximum of 10 people, in some cases only one, where sales amounts of 5K - 10K units might (maybe) be enough to make it worth the developers' time financially speaking. These are the games which "are probably not going to be popular enough to attract that much piracy."
So. Like all corporations, when push comes to shove, they'll bow to the almighty Dollar - or in this case and probably moreso in future, Renminbi. News at 11.
Who were the guys behind NEXTStep, again? And sure, they took stuff from BSD, but so what? The end result is, the system ended up being better that way. Please don't get me wrong, I hate Apple's shenanigans these days as much as anyone else, but saying that NEXTStep is nothing else but BSD is just dishonest or ignorant.
Come on now, things are not that black and white. That should be where The Constitution kicks in. And international Human Rights treaties. ...In theory, at least.
As a finnish person myself, I'd like to point out that there are few loopholes; first, the regulation states that the theoretical maximum of the available connection must be at least 1 Mb/s, and it can be provided whatever technology is the "most viable choice", including wireless and such. Looking at the track record of what kind of actual speeds finnish telcos are able to provide over wireless technologies around the country, I wouldn't shout out in rejoice just yet. Luckily I live in Helsinki where I can actually get a passable & affordable broadband access by cable.
Depends on a game and overall design. I'm not going to say that there is a genre where it would never work (because someone would just prove me wrong with a single datapoint saying otherwise) but I'd say that
a) It must be very carefully balanced
b) Game should have better rewards for those who handle the greater challenge. That should solve the problem of "rewarding mediocrity".
Take shmups, for instance. The better the player plays in them, the harder they usually get. (at least most of the good ones.) However, the "better" playing is also tightly coupled with the mechanics of scoring, which is essentially the main rewarding system, which means that harder difficulty=higher scores. I actually like this type of system more than pre-set easy-normal-hard-very hard -steps, because first, they are by definition able (when executed right) to give the "right" difficulty for everyone, and second because it keeps everyone's scores on the same scale.
Of course, this type of system does not fit into every game. Also, if awards for good playing are items, completely losing opportunity to get some specialized gear because of good play would be mildly off-putting.
But you can still sell them to someone who is crazy enough for retro gaming that he keeps an antiquated system running for games. Or you can use emulators/virtual environments to still play those games without having completely artificial technological barriers stopping or inconveniencing you just because some business-type assholes said so.
I honestly do think of the bolded part to be relevant to this issue, especially since DMCA and it's ilk make it illegal for anyone else help you bypass those artificial barriers.
You forgot a few:
[--]VI vs. EMACS [--]
etc.
No, he didn't forget that. You see, he wrote:
(...Or is this an eternal, undecidable holy-war question along the lines of ATI/nVidia, AMD/Intel, Coke/Pepsi, etc...?)
... and it's quite clear that VI is the winner.
pining for the fjords.
There is NOTHING preventing people from selling music that plays on the iPod, UNLESS you want DRM - then you're stuck with Apple. No DRM, no Apple control.
It really is not that simple... Because, for most people, the iTunes integration as both the place people can buy music and the only tool that can reliably sync and interoperate with iPods' music directory/database is the killer feature. Yeah, there are opensource projects trying to sync with iPods in order to let oss people use iPods, but Apple is notorious with breaking them with iPod firmware/iTunes updates. Why? Apple is using their dominance with portable music players to keep the competition away from the downloadable music market. Or vice versa. YEAH YEAH, I KNOW you can import non-drm music from any source into your iTunes Music Library and put that into iPod. But it is an additional hassle. And when it comes to the masses, they will not put up with the hassle unless they have a really good reason to do so. And no, having their music in FLAC or cutting down the price, like 30-50 cents apiece, is just not worth it for most consumers.
If the other digital music retailers really want to have any hope of beating Apple, they really need to figure out how to beat the end-user experience while working with the iPod. That would mean they have to somehow magically hook into iPod and probably into iTunes music library for most people.
Isn't the R4 out of production now?
I'd buy a DSTT or Acekard2.1
And don't these things some how suck up more battery life? (but how much are we talking, and what about things like the M3 Perfect?)
As an AK2.1 owner, I have found it somewhat does. OTOH, I also found that remembering to set the light into dimmer in AK menu helps quite a bit. I felt little dumbfounded when I realized AK menu always defaults the background light into max regardless of what was set up in the DS main menu. I haven't even searched, really, for a way to set it to default at other settings. Anyway, since I always remember to set the light to lowest or second-to-lowest setting, I have not had any real problems with battery life. Of course, I'm not that mobile a person so YMMV. I also live in Finland and it's dark here now in winter so it's easy for me to use low light levels. Come summer and sunshine, and this might be a problem.