Wait.... what? This is a massive piece of gaming culture. An important fact to remember about history. How could you get this wrong?
Civilization is stolen IP. Straight up stolen. Sid Meiers took a board game, and made a video game out of it. He didn't credit it, weaseled around questions about it, and straight up lied about it. The game is fantastic, and honestly, better suited for a computer. But as far as "Sid Meir master game designer of Civilization" goes, that's bullshit. And this is an important lesson kiddies: STEAL. And if your field is new and hip and not yet quite mainstream and free of regulation, you can be famous for it.
Ok, I'll bite back, it's the first sentence. See above:
These are workshops but with a twist:
They ARE workshops. They don't have to be new and revolutionary to be worthy of praise. Indeed, Bill and Freddie and Donald and Danner sound like awesome guys. And even though their daddies didn't have power tools, radio, or autos to put upholstery in, it doesn't make them any less awesome.
And workshop collaborative have been around since before Bill and Freddie. The new batch simply has a twist that they're often have more programmers. Much like the last generations of geeks had radios. The whole "community run" thing adds a dash of free and open culture to the mix.
Oh, and those radios DID change the world. Call up Bill and tell him "thank you".
Better than the brain-dead consumers that go home and watch TV for 4 hours until bedtime.
There's actually a bit of a schism at our space. Most of them want to use the term "makerspace" simply to get away from the term "hackerspace". Not that there's supposed to be anything wrong with being a hacker... but there is. While the "maker movement" is kind of a push against the throw away consumer culture that has developed in the USA, some fights aren't worth it. "Hackerspaces" simply bring up too many awkward explanations.
The petulant child is usually the one that resorts to hyperboles and strawmen.
You keep making the distinction between bad DRM and good DRM. You seem to have a hard time accepting that Steam is an example of bad DRM. You're exactly right you know. Any time you encounter the DRM in a medium, it's a sign that the DRM is failing. That it's causing grief to the users. That it's "bad DRM".
And I'm letting you know that Steam has caused me grief.
And to that extent, anything wrapped in DRM (But let's call it "bad' DRM, so you don't have a conniption fit), simply won't be getting my money. I'll stick to the indie game developers, the humble-bundle, and the classics.
It's not fair or unfair. They're selling something I want with strings attached that I don't want. And so I don't buy. And if you really don't mind those strings, you can buy if you want.
PhxBlue, I am going to shoot you and eat your still-beating heart. I'm going to do this is person, and I'm specifically threatening you which is more than what this teenager did. Since he had more of a blanket threat against a nebulous "school" and did it online over facebook.
But relax, I'm joking. It's just something to try and make a point.
And no, you can't have me arrested, you can complain to the cops who make a judgement call about whether or not they feel the need to arrest me or really do anything at all. Typically that's only if there's an immediate threat or fear that I'd run away. A citation seems more appropriate for the whole "call the cops and get justice" scenario. But really, lip-service to the importance of your complaint seems like the more probable outcome. Maybe someone would swing by and ask some questions and leave a warning.
manufacturers don't want to deal with 1 piece orders constantly - it's way too much overhead for them
Yes, traditionally that's the case. Manufacturers want to sell in large palettes of whateverthefuck.
But just to, you know, throw this out there... Why?
I mean, right now, someone else buys a pallet, turns around and sells the individual things for more than they bought it for. That mark up pays all their wages, bosses, and corporate profits. And yet it would be "too much over head" for the manufacturing companies to do all that.
What's keeping the manufacturing plants from doing everything the resellers do?
And the answer is that the resellers are more agile than the ancient manufacturers. The young ones can use the hip new technology that let's them deal with small orders without having to pay a small army of accountants to file paperwork. You know, a webpage with a shopping cart. The manufacturing plants are largely rooted in their old ways and if you want to buy 1 or 1 million widgets you have to literally fax them an ordering contract. It really is cheaper for the old manufacturing plant to sell in bulk.
But there's really nothing keeping the technology out of the hands of the manufacturing plant other than their reluctance to change and their investment in fax machines.
When you get a new manufacturer on the scene, like Tesla, why the hell would they buy fax machines?
You know, you could probably do that at a movie theater. If you bought all the tickets to the movies throughout the day, you could wave the ticket at whoever is tasked with clearing the place out and cleaning the floors. As if they cleaned the floors. But meatspace is amazingly easy to hack. With the right smile and reassuring tone, and having cleared it with their manager before-hand, trust me, people are willing to bend rules. Computers? not so much.
Also, your analogy is about 10-20 years out of date. "I should be able to sit at my couch getting a better view of the big screen, with better sound, in the comfort of my own home, and watch movies all day long. With cheaper popcorn." And that has already come to pass. There are A LOT of people with home theaters that rival movie theaters.
I think I'm entitled to what I pay for. I am a HUGE starcraft fan. It's a sizeable facet of my teenage years. When SCII was coming out, I was most certainly going to buy it. And then they announced there's no LAN play, and the thing has to phone home every time. What? Shenanigians! So I didn't buy it. Well, until a month or two ago. I got it for $1 in some promo deal. And you know what? THE DRM IS FUCKING BULLSHIT! In just two short months I've been shut out of multiplayer 3 times because their servers were down. I've got full Internet connectivity, but no, daddy-Blizzard doesn't want me to partake of their game. And there's this really weird thing where it routinely doesn't want me to play 1v1. I can play 2v2 just fine. I think their ladder system just chokes or something. Anyway, there's a bullshit work around where you attempt to log into the European servers, cancel, log back into the American ones, and bam, 1v1 is enabled again. It takes about 2 minutes. I like their match-making. I really do. But the DRM is enormously frustrating. I mean, the load-screen takes longer, but I know that's a limitation of my laptop. The time I have to waste because Blizzard sucks? It means I'm not shelling out real money for heart of the swarm.
And yeah, I know that's whining. It's just games. In an age where there are a lot bigger problems. But if you want to seperate me from my money you have to actually sell me something.
Also:
If you couldn't manage an internet connection every few months, you should have known better than to invest in steam games.
I'm connected the vast majority of the time. But I have to "manage" my steam games to let them know I want to play them offline. It's a thing in Steam you can do. It's just a hassle I don't put up with. You can be playing one day, lose the Internet (or walk somewhere with the laptop) and the games will not work the next. I'm not "managing to connect to the Internet", I'm "managing my gaming rights". Reading comprehension. Try it.
you don't get to dictate YOUR terms to Valve, or the movie theatre, or any other company.
Actually, I can perfectly dictate my abstinence. I tried it out in earnest early on, but most of the games I have on steam now are gifts from friends.
And to say DRM doesn't help you at all is VERY shortsighted
and saying that DRM helps the industry is short-sighted. There's a lot of culture out there that is simply going to be gone because it was locked up. When mommy-may-I servers shut down that game is DEAD. It's possible that crackers of tomorrow may find a solution and everyone can have a nice dose of nostalgia, but DRM works against that. And if you can't see that the digital era is working hard at eroding consumer rights, that you don't own anything anymore, that the nebulous "they" want you to be merely a resource to squeeze money out of, then you are a short-sighted fool that doesn't see the big picture.
Digital Rights Management isn't necessarily a bad thing, and used properly can be very helpful.
To who? It certainly doesn't help me, the user, in any way, shape, or form. It serves absolutely zero purpose for me. It is, AT IT'S BEST, a constraint that I never bump into. To me.
To companies and IP owners, it can be helpful to stem the tide of piracy and fight back against their user-base. Squirrling away their property so that no-one may see it. Except maybe select users. As if that was a good thing.
And Steam is not DRM done right. Steam blows. It locks me out of my games on a regular basis. I know, I know, I'm supposed to go and set it up for offline mode once every x months for the games I want to play when our Internet drops, or we travel. But guess what? My interest in managing my gaming rights is approximately zilch and I want to play the games I bought because I god-damn own them. Oh, sorry, that's not quite right now is it. I only "licensed" them.
Steam has done fantastically well to turn Valve in to a game publishing company. They distribute games. They saw digital downloads on the horizon and they conquered it. They somehow got the beast which is their user base to swallow DRM and now those hooks have sunk deep. Now they hold those keys to the gate and they are making a ludicrous amount of money. But do they need the DRM? There's a lot of value in the ease of downloading, installing, and running steam games. They packed the original X-Com quite nicely with dosbox. If these games would play without the bloody mother-may-I from Valve corporate, I'd care a lot more about whatever sales they throw.
Yeah, I've only flown r/c planes for 40 years. They can NOT carry a big enough payload to do any substantial damage.
To what? A building? No, they really can't. A crowd? They could really fuck up a crowd. And if you had a particular person/car/window office that you wanted to take out, RC planes with a brick of C-4 strapped to it would certainly do the trick.
But the state? An RC controlled aircraft of any shape or size from less-than 1lbs toys, to gas-powered FOV enthusiast wet-dreams, to military grade UAV with hellfires will not be a threat to the state of Germany. Germany will prevail. A UAV might blow up a couple things which we would lament, but the state is not so fragile as to crumble at the loss of a building and a few people. Even 4 airliners full of fuel were not a threat to the state of the USA. They inflicted damage, and the unrestrained terror that everyone exhibited certainly steered the course over the next decade, but there was no threat of there not being a USA after the event. None.
It takes a handful of nukes for that.
So when you talk about what constitutes a "real threat" you have to clarify what it is that's being threatened.
Yes I have, and yet you can't run circles around the elementary school with your cock waving in the wind. What are you, some sorta brain-dead libertarian that wants to own a suitcase nuke, just for fun? Put on some fuckin pants and don't swear on the air-waves.
[what keeps spammers from mucking up the airwaves]
Because advertising is a commercial endeavor and illegal on HAM bands.
If they are being paid to advertise on the HAM bands, that's a violation and the FCC will cite them, fine them, ban them, and then take all their stuff after HAM operators report them for being spammers. Imagine that ads were illegal on the Inetnet, do you think users would report that annoying pop-up if they had the authority to get it shut down?
You can boast about how good product X is, but if others feel that you're a shill. That you're being paid to advertize, they will complain to the FCC, who will investiagate, there's a cat'n'mouse game, and then they bring out the hammer. If you're not a shill, then the FCC's investigation will, in theory, absolve you.
And just like in public, if someone doesn't like you swearing they can get the cops to give you a citation. You know, that "public disturbance" law? I think it's actually a city-by-city thing, but it's generally illegal to just start swearing in public.
Yes, it's exactly like that. Except you never know who is listening on a HAM band while you might have a better idea about who is around you in person.
it seems like a simple limit on how often one can use the resource would be far more valuable
HOLY BLOODY HELL! that is a BALLS TO THE WALLS bad idea. Seriously, how could you even THINK this is a good idea. You want HAM operators to be TIME LIMITED on how much they can talk on air!?!? Seriously? Whoa dude. WHOA.
Lemme.... lemme just think about this for a second. Let's just let that stew and see what comes out. 1) What are the limits? Obviously you've got the bare minimum idea that it's a public resource and commercial interests could come in and take all that resource, pushing out the hobbyists. And, for whatever reason, you think TIME LIMITS would keep the corporations in check. So what are those time limits? Everyone is allows half an hour each day to chat on air? 24-hours is divided evenly amoungst the local HAM licenses? Do you want a Pay-as-you-go plan curtosy of VerisonAir? 2) How is this time tracked? Right now all the regulations really just mean that if an operator reports you to the FCC, they can slap your wrists, and if you continue, you get fined or banned. Are you expecting the hobbyists to know how long KDPizzaHut54 operates? 3) What's to keep a Spammer from using a collection of callsigns (from real people, a pool of employees) to simply multiply their on-air time? 4) Does simply listening count against your time allotment? If the spammers come and give a 5 second ad every half hour, how much time have they used? 5) Have you even thought about this idea of yours or are you just taking the current limitations of the Internet that you apparently nuzzle up with at night and trying to shoe-horn it into a different medium where none of those limitations exist?
Because it's a limited resource. There's only so much bandwidth on the air. The equipment is made to work within a specific frequency, (because outside of that band, those frequencies are used for other things). Think of it like a river, it's owned by everyone or no-one, with lots of people wanting to use it. It's a natural monopoly. So it's regulated.
A lot of really good uses for the airwaves exist and have their sections defined. One of those sections was set aside for the hobbyists to do with as they please. But they still have to play by the rules, because it's still a public place, using a limited resource, with others' rights you have to respect.
Imagine if your internet connection stopped working whenever someone sent you a packet. You had a single channel for up and down communication, and you didn't have control over when people talked to you. Every time someone sent you an email, your downloads stop. Every time someone pings you, your wabpage stops loading. That's radio. If someone is an asshole, they can barge into your channel and talk over you. If they're malicious they could jam the entire band and DOS everyone.
And yes, officially you can't swear. Just like you can't pirate movies over the Internet. You also can't sing.
You all know there's a used bookstore in your town. Go give them some business.
I grew up in Omaha. Downtown there was a used bookstore with more character than was probably healthy. It had more books then it knew what to to do with, a healthy set of extraneous stairs, an honor system for coffee, and a set of couches in front with a constant crowd. I think the regulars manned the register when the workers were busy.
But it didn't make too much money and they couldn't make rent. They tried selling records in the basement and some sort of art gallary on the upper levels, but that didn't pan out. So it closed up. And Omaha lost something important that day.
Now, apparently, a small town about 20 minutes gained something eventually, because the owner bought a building, moved his books there, and is still doing business. I'll have to find out if it has the same magic.
But anyway, just a reminder to support your local church of the literate.
Um, yes, the industrial revolution is certainly waning. But we've experienced the digital revolution (computers) and the information revolution (the Internet) since then. The Renaissance before that and the agriculture revolution, and that thing where they invented tools from rocks were all similar "big changes" that are still having ramification but have more or less played themselves out. The rate of revolutions has increased so much that many don't see the difference between the digital one and the information one. All of them more or less depend on the technology of the one before it.
The change from horse'n'buggy to automobiles took a decade. Think of the cell phone today compared to the one in 2003. Everyone is walking around with a amazingly fast, ultra-connected computer in their pocket. Honestly, the biggest hold-up is the culture shock. Nobody is really using those computers as much as they could, and the guy that suggested "hey, how about we actually use these cameras that we carry around" gets labeled as a "glasshole".
So yeah, just sit there complaining that the industrial revolution is waning while you instantaneously communicate with a distributed crowd spread out across the world on a whim.
He hasn't unilaterally invaded any nations based on a lie... yet. But yeah, there's the same slippage into a police-state that we saw with Bush. And we got a taste of that DURING the election. Anyone remember him voting to grant immunity to the telcoms when the NSA was caught red-handed spying on everyone? Yeah... So Obama was our best choice. And a hell of a lot better than anything the republicans even considered.
Hi, I'm a software engineer living in Davenport Iowa. I was born in Omaha. I went to school in Ames, Iowa (ISU) and got my degree in computer engineering. I work on Avionics, OBOGS.
Just to inform the ignorant masses that live on the coast and think the world doesn't have electricity once you get past Jersey, we live in the same first world nation and have all the toys and advances that you do. We just don't sell hotdogs to wallstreet execs. We also do not have wooden sidewalks. We don't ride horses to our one-room school. We don't (all) love country music.
I know two people that work in food production. An uncle that inherited my grandfather's farm, and his son that will inherit from him. My father didn't get the farm, he moved off to the city. My 2 other cousins didn't get the farm. They also moved off to the city. And honestly, my farming relations are lucky. A lot of family farms have been bought up. Because farmland has been consolidated because a single person can farm a ludicrous amount of land these days because the machinery is so big. And my uncle likes round-up. It makes crops easier to farm. Monsanto, for all their evil shit, really does have a viable product that helps people. And actually, there's quite a lot of food production jobs in Davenport because we have a Kraft plant, but I don't know any of those people.
Also, fun fact: Iowa by and far grows FEED, not food. Feed corn is corn that we feed to cows and such in feedlots. It's food we feed to our food so our food tastes a little better. Ok, a LOT better. America could raise their cattle purely on grazing, but it takes a lot of land, they don't get as much meat as fast, and ultimatly it's more expensive. Iowa doesn't feed the nation. It feeds the cattle that the nation eats. Because we like meat.
I think what you actually meant to say is that Iowa is strongly tied to agriculture industry. It impacted our code-shop when one of our engineers jumped ship to John Deer (they make tractors, btw). If the agriculture industry tanks, John Deer will have less sales and less R&D, and will let engineers go, who will seek employment at my job, and I'll face more competition and suffer for it. In theory. In truth we could probably use a few more coders.
You are indeed correct, I overlooked Nintendo's DS. I was lead astray by the topic being about the upcoming consoles.
The NeoGeo and SNES sales compared to the current consoles would be like comparing competing athletes to corpses. There may be a few people digging them up and trying to reanimate them, but that zombie isn't going to be doing any pole vaults any time soon.
I personally feel that, in terms of resilience, having multiple digital copies of the software across my various computers, storage-devices, and location is best. It doesn't matter that it's a SNES game, Starcraft 2, or Splunkey. They're also better in terms of portability, distribution, storage logistics, sorting and retrieval, and it allows for, you know, updates. The only downsides that I can see is that with updates the game maker is less incentive to release bug-free games, and that it makes it easier to share games without paying for them. That second point isn't really a downside for me, per se, but it is for some people. Digital copies are simply a better storage medium. I think you're living in the past. But hey, nostalgia is fun, so take it in stride. Just don't expect me to buy any cartridges.
console sales in the United States dropped 21 percent in 2012, and sales of new video-game cartridges haven't fared much better.
What the hell would be considered a "new video-game cartridge"?
I know jargon in certain industries gets weird. I mean, I deal with tables, floors, clouds, nets, webs, pipes, and none of those are physical objects. But whoever is using the term "cartridge", in the game industry, in this year, deserves to be ignored as they are obviously stuck in the last century. Seriously, while you're back there warn them about 9/11 and Bush.
Opinions over what is and is not constitutional by citizens in a democratic nation most certainly matter. Even "in terms of it's effects". Welcome to politics.
mmmmm I dunno about that. The cost of education is indeed getting higher, but that equally applies finance and more so to medical fields. I've heard woes from people with bachelors in chemistry and biology, but as a programmer, the pay is alright for myself. Generally speaking geeks get paid well. The career paths for geeks isn't bad at all. They need geeks doing at 50 what they did at 20, it's not the sort of thing where you must move into management or up in rank or get tenure, although management (and tenure) are certainly options. Hell, while many degrees view acedamia as the pinnical of the profession, a lot of geeks see it as a step down, something for those "who can't".
The working conditions aren't so bad. Office work is pretty cushy. And the boss might not understand what the hell you do in any field of work. Some IT people are on call. Some programmers get pushed into crunch-time.
I wasn't aware that ageism is rampant across all STEM industries. I thought that was a programmer thing. I thought even IT had it less bad. But yeah, there is sexism. Hence why two of these "winners" are trying to fix that.
Medicine is only an option if you can go to medical school for an extra 10 years. There's not too many jobs for someone who has half of a medical degree. And finance, while apparently very lucrative, means you have to work with assholes. Perhaps that's an aspect of it being lucrative, but in the current landscape and for the foreseeable future if you want to work finance, you need to check your soul at the door. And the quant-devs will probably eat your lunch anyway, which ARE in the STEM family.
Slashdot Mirror
profile of Civilization creator Sid Meier...
Wait.... what? This is a massive piece of gaming culture. An important fact to remember about history. How could you get this wrong?
Civilization is stolen IP. Straight up stolen. Sid Meiers took a board game, and made a video game out of it. He didn't credit it, weaseled around questions about it, and straight up lied about it. The game is fantastic, and honestly, better suited for a computer. But as far as "Sid Meir master game designer of Civilization" goes, that's bullshit. And this is an important lesson kiddies: STEAL. And if your field is new and hip and not yet quite mainstream and free of regulation, you can be famous for it.
Ok, I'll bite back, it's the first sentence. See above:
These are workshops but with a twist:
They ARE workshops. They don't have to be new and revolutionary to be worthy of praise. Indeed, Bill and Freddie and Donald and Danner sound like awesome guys. And even though their daddies didn't have power tools, radio, or autos to put upholstery in, it doesn't make them any less awesome.
And workshop collaborative have been around since before Bill and Freddie. The new batch simply has a twist that they're often have more programmers. Much like the last generations of geeks had radios. The whole "community run" thing adds a dash of free and open culture to the mix.
Oh, and those radios DID change the world. Call up Bill and tell him "thank you".
Better than the brain-dead consumers that go home and watch TV for 4 hours until bedtime.
There's actually a bit of a schism at our space. Most of them want to use the term "makerspace" simply to get away from the term "hackerspace". Not that there's supposed to be anything wrong with being a hacker... but there is. While the "maker movement" is kind of a push against the throw away consumer culture that has developed in the USA, some fights aren't worth it. "Hackerspaces" simply bring up too many awkward explanations.
Yeah yeah, 90% of everything is crap. Most of it is entry level beginner stuff. Most of it is LEDs blinking. Most of everything is crap.
But where the hell do you think those guys at Willow Robotics started?
The petulant child is usually the one that resorts to hyperboles and strawmen.
You keep making the distinction between bad DRM and good DRM. You seem to have a hard time accepting that Steam is an example of bad DRM. You're exactly right you know. Any time you encounter the DRM in a medium, it's a sign that the DRM is failing. That it's causing grief to the users. That it's "bad DRM".
And I'm letting you know that Steam has caused me grief.
And to that extent, anything wrapped in DRM (But let's call it "bad' DRM, so you don't have a conniption fit), simply won't be getting my money. I'll stick to the indie game developers, the humble-bundle, and the classics.
It's not fair or unfair. They're selling something I want with strings attached that I don't want. And so I don't buy. And if you really don't mind those strings, you can buy if you want.
PhxBlue, I am going to shoot you and eat your still-beating heart.
I'm going to do this is person, and I'm specifically threatening you which is more than what this teenager did. Since he had more of a blanket threat against a nebulous "school" and did it online over facebook.
But relax, I'm joking. It's just something to try and make a point.
And no, you can't have me arrested, you can complain to the cops who make a judgement call about whether or not they feel the need to arrest me or really do anything at all. Typically that's only if there's an immediate threat or fear that I'd run away. A citation seems more appropriate for the whole "call the cops and get justice" scenario. But really, lip-service to the importance of your complaint seems like the more probable outcome. Maybe someone would swing by and ask some questions and leave a warning.
manufacturers don't want to deal with 1 piece orders constantly - it's way too much overhead for them
Yes, traditionally that's the case. Manufacturers want to sell in large palettes of whateverthefuck.
But just to, you know, throw this out there... Why?
I mean, right now, someone else buys a pallet, turns around and sells the individual things for more than they bought it for. That mark up pays all their wages, bosses, and corporate profits. And yet it would be "too much over head" for the manufacturing companies to do all that.
What's keeping the manufacturing plants from doing everything the resellers do?
And the answer is that the resellers are more agile than the ancient manufacturers. The young ones can use the hip new technology that let's them deal with small orders without having to pay a small army of accountants to file paperwork. You know, a webpage with a shopping cart. The manufacturing plants are largely rooted in their old ways and if you want to buy 1 or 1 million widgets you have to literally fax them an ordering contract. It really is cheaper for the old manufacturing plant to sell in bulk.
But there's really nothing keeping the technology out of the hands of the manufacturing plant other than their reluctance to change and their investment in fax machines.
When you get a new manufacturer on the scene, like Tesla, why the hell would they buy fax machines?
You know, you could probably do that at a movie theater. If you bought all the tickets to the movies throughout the day, you could wave the ticket at whoever is tasked with clearing the place out and cleaning the floors. As if they cleaned the floors. But meatspace is amazingly easy to hack. With the right smile and reassuring tone, and having cleared it with their manager before-hand, trust me, people are willing to bend rules. Computers? not so much.
Also, your analogy is about 10-20 years out of date. "I should be able to sit at my couch getting a better view of the big screen, with better sound, in the comfort of my own home, and watch movies all day long. With cheaper popcorn." And that has already come to pass. There are A LOT of people with home theaters that rival movie theaters.
I think I'm entitled to what I pay for. I am a HUGE starcraft fan. It's a sizeable facet of my teenage years. When SCII was coming out, I was most certainly going to buy it. And then they announced there's no LAN play, and the thing has to phone home every time. What? Shenanigians! So I didn't buy it. Well, until a month or two ago. I got it for $1 in some promo deal. And you know what? THE DRM IS FUCKING BULLSHIT! In just two short months I've been shut out of multiplayer 3 times because their servers were down. I've got full Internet connectivity, but no, daddy-Blizzard doesn't want me to partake of their game. And there's this really weird thing where it routinely doesn't want me to play 1v1. I can play 2v2 just fine. I think their ladder system just chokes or something. Anyway, there's a bullshit work around where you attempt to log into the European servers, cancel, log back into the American ones, and bam, 1v1 is enabled again. It takes about 2 minutes. I like their match-making. I really do. But the DRM is enormously frustrating. I mean, the load-screen takes longer, but I know that's a limitation of my laptop. The time I have to waste because Blizzard sucks? It means I'm not shelling out real money for heart of the swarm.
And yeah, I know that's whining. It's just games. In an age where there are a lot bigger problems. But if you want to seperate me from my money you have to actually sell me something.
Also:
If you couldn't manage an internet connection every few months, you should have known better than to invest in steam games.
I'm connected the vast majority of the time. But I have to "manage" my steam games to let them know I want to play them offline. It's a thing in Steam you can do. It's just a hassle I don't put up with. You can be playing one day, lose the Internet (or walk somewhere with the laptop) and the games will not work the next. I'm not "managing to connect to the Internet", I'm "managing my gaming rights". Reading comprehension. Try it.
you don't get to dictate YOUR terms to Valve, or the movie theatre, or any other company.
Actually, I can perfectly dictate my abstinence. I tried it out in earnest early on, but most of the games I have on steam now are gifts from friends.
And to say DRM doesn't help you at all is VERY shortsighted
and saying that DRM helps the industry is short-sighted. There's a lot of culture out there that is simply going to be gone because it was locked up. When mommy-may-I servers shut down that game is DEAD. It's possible that crackers of tomorrow may find a solution and everyone can have a nice dose of nostalgia, but DRM works against that. And if you can't see that the digital era is working hard at eroding consumer rights, that you don't own anything anymore, that the nebulous "they" want you to be merely a resource to squeeze money out of, then you are a short-sighted fool that doesn't see the big picture.
Bullshit.
Digital Rights Management isn't necessarily a bad thing, and used properly can be very helpful.
To who? It certainly doesn't help me, the user, in any way, shape, or form. It serves absolutely zero purpose for me. It is, AT IT'S BEST, a constraint that I never bump into. To me.
To companies and IP owners, it can be helpful to stem the tide of piracy and fight back against their user-base. Squirrling away their property so that no-one may see it. Except maybe select users. As if that was a good thing.
And Steam is not DRM done right. Steam blows. It locks me out of my games on a regular basis. I know, I know, I'm supposed to go and set it up for offline mode once every x months for the games I want to play when our Internet drops, or we travel. But guess what? My interest in managing my gaming rights is approximately zilch and I want to play the games I bought because I god-damn own them. Oh, sorry, that's not quite right now is it. I only "licensed" them.
Steam has done fantastically well to turn Valve in to a game publishing company. They distribute games. They saw digital downloads on the horizon and they conquered it. They somehow got the beast which is their user base to swallow DRM and now those hooks have sunk deep. Now they hold those keys to the gate and they are making a ludicrous amount of money. But do they need the DRM? There's a lot of value in the ease of downloading, installing, and running steam games. They packed the original X-Com quite nicely with dosbox. If these games would play without the bloody mother-may-I from Valve corporate, I'd care a lot more about whatever sales they throw.
Yeah, I've only flown r/c planes for 40 years. They can NOT carry a big enough payload to do any substantial damage.
To what? A building? No, they really can't. A crowd? They could really fuck up a crowd. And if you had a particular person/car/window office that you wanted to take out, RC planes with a brick of C-4 strapped to it would certainly do the trick.
But the state? An RC controlled aircraft of any shape or size from less-than 1lbs toys, to gas-powered FOV enthusiast wet-dreams, to military grade UAV with hellfires will not be a threat to the state of Germany. Germany will prevail. A UAV might blow up a couple things which we would lament, but the state is not so fragile as to crumble at the loss of a building and a few people. Even 4 airliners full of fuel were not a threat to the state of the USA. They inflicted damage, and the unrestrained terror that everyone exhibited certainly steered the course over the next decade, but there was no threat of there not being a USA after the event. None.
It takes a handful of nukes for that.
So when you talk about what constitutes a "real threat" you have to clarify what it is that's being threatened.
Yeah, they're vital to the blagosphere.
Yes I have, and yet you can't run circles around the elementary school with your cock waving in the wind. What are you, some sorta brain-dead libertarian that wants to own a suitcase nuke, just for fun? Put on some fuckin pants and don't swear on the air-waves.
[what keeps spammers from mucking up the airwaves]
Because advertising is a commercial endeavor and illegal on HAM bands.
If they are being paid to advertise on the HAM bands, that's a violation and the FCC will cite them, fine them, ban them, and then take all their stuff after HAM operators report them for being spammers. Imagine that ads were illegal on the Inetnet, do you think users would report that annoying pop-up if they had the authority to get it shut down?
You can boast about how good product X is, but if others feel that you're a shill. That you're being paid to advertize, they will complain to the FCC, who will investiagate, there's a cat'n'mouse game, and then they bring out the hammer. If you're not a shill, then the FCC's investigation will, in theory, absolve you.
And just like in public, if someone doesn't like you swearing they can get the cops to give you a citation. You know, that "public disturbance" law? I think it's actually a city-by-city thing, but it's generally illegal to just start swearing in public.
Yes, it's exactly like that. Except you never know who is listening on a HAM band while you might have a better idea about who is around you in person.
it seems like a simple limit on how often one can use the resource would be far more valuable
HOLY BLOODY HELL! that is a BALLS TO THE WALLS bad idea. Seriously, how could you even THINK this is a good idea. You want HAM operators to be TIME LIMITED on how much they can talk on air!?!? Seriously? Whoa dude. WHOA.
Lemme.... lemme just think about this for a second. Let's just let that stew and see what comes out.
1) What are the limits? Obviously you've got the bare minimum idea that it's a public resource and commercial interests could come in and take all that resource, pushing out the hobbyists. And, for whatever reason, you think TIME LIMITS would keep the corporations in check. So what are those time limits? Everyone is allows half an hour each day to chat on air? 24-hours is divided evenly amoungst the local HAM licenses? Do you want a Pay-as-you-go plan curtosy of VerisonAir?
2) How is this time tracked? Right now all the regulations really just mean that if an operator reports you to the FCC, they can slap your wrists, and if you continue, you get fined or banned. Are you expecting the hobbyists to know how long KDPizzaHut54 operates?
3) What's to keep a Spammer from using a collection of callsigns (from real people, a pool of employees) to simply multiply their on-air time?
4) Does simply listening count against your time allotment? If the spammers come and give a 5 second ad every half hour, how much time have they used?
5) Have you even thought about this idea of yours or are you just taking the current limitations of the Internet that you apparently nuzzle up with at night and trying to shoe-horn it into a different medium where none of those limitations exist?
Because it's a limited resource. There's only so much bandwidth on the air. The equipment is made to work within a specific frequency, (because outside of that band, those frequencies are used for other things). Think of it like a river, it's owned by everyone or no-one, with lots of people wanting to use it. It's a natural monopoly. So it's regulated.
A lot of really good uses for the airwaves exist and have their sections defined. One of those sections was set aside for the hobbyists to do with as they please. But they still have to play by the rules, because it's still a public place, using a limited resource, with others' rights you have to respect.
Imagine if your internet connection stopped working whenever someone sent you a packet. You had a single channel for up and down communication, and you didn't have control over when people talked to you. Every time someone sent you an email, your downloads stop. Every time someone pings you, your wabpage stops loading. That's radio. If someone is an asshole, they can barge into your channel and talk over you. If they're malicious they could jam the entire band and DOS everyone.
And yes, officially you can't swear. Just like you can't pirate movies over the Internet. You also can't sing.
You all know there's a used bookstore in your town. Go give them some business.
I grew up in Omaha. Downtown there was a used bookstore with more character than was probably healthy. It had more books then it knew what to to do with, a healthy set of extraneous stairs, an honor system for coffee, and a set of couches in front with a constant crowd. I think the regulars manned the register when the workers were busy.
But it didn't make too much money and they couldn't make rent. They tried selling records in the basement and some sort of art gallary on the upper levels, but that didn't pan out. So it closed up. And Omaha lost something important that day.
Now, apparently, a small town about 20 minutes gained something eventually, because the owner bought a building, moved his books there, and is still doing business. I'll have to find out if it has the same magic.
But anyway, just a reminder to support your local church of the literate.
If you were a more avid reader perhaps you would have gotten the reference.
Um, yes, the industrial revolution is certainly waning. But we've experienced the digital revolution (computers) and the information revolution (the Internet) since then. The Renaissance before that and the agriculture revolution, and that thing where they invented tools from rocks were all similar "big changes" that are still having ramification but have more or less played themselves out. The rate of revolutions has increased so much that many don't see the difference between the digital one and the information one. All of them more or less depend on the technology of the one before it.
The change from horse'n'buggy to automobiles took a decade. Think of the cell phone today compared to the one in 2003. Everyone is walking around with a amazingly fast, ultra-connected computer in their pocket. Honestly, the biggest hold-up is the culture shock. Nobody is really using those computers as much as they could, and the guy that suggested "hey, how about we actually use these cameras that we carry around" gets labeled as a "glasshole".
So yeah, just sit there complaining that the industrial revolution is waning while you instantaneously communicate with a distributed crowd spread out across the world on a whim.
He hasn't unilaterally invaded any nations based on a lie... yet. But yeah, there's the same slippage into a police-state that we saw with Bush. And we got a taste of that DURING the election. Anyone remember him voting to grant immunity to the telcoms when the NSA was caught red-handed spying on everyone? Yeah... So Obama was our best choice. And a hell of a lot better than anything the republicans even considered.
Hi, I'm a software engineer living in Davenport Iowa. I was born in Omaha. I went to school in Ames, Iowa (ISU) and got my degree in computer engineering. I work on Avionics, OBOGS.
Just to inform the ignorant masses that live on the coast and think the world doesn't have electricity once you get past Jersey, we live in the same first world nation and have all the toys and advances that you do. We just don't sell hotdogs to wallstreet execs. We also do not have wooden sidewalks. We don't ride horses to our one-room school. We don't (all) love country music.
I know two people that work in food production. An uncle that inherited my grandfather's farm, and his son that will inherit from him. My father didn't get the farm, he moved off to the city. My 2 other cousins didn't get the farm. They also moved off to the city. And honestly, my farming relations are lucky. A lot of family farms have been bought up. Because farmland has been consolidated because a single person can farm a ludicrous amount of land these days because the machinery is so big. And my uncle likes round-up. It makes crops easier to farm. Monsanto, for all their evil shit, really does have a viable product that helps people. And actually, there's quite a lot of food production jobs in Davenport because we have a Kraft plant, but I don't know any of those people.
Also, fun fact: Iowa by and far grows FEED, not food. Feed corn is corn that we feed to cows and such in feedlots. It's food we feed to our food so our food tastes a little better. Ok, a LOT better. America could raise their cattle purely on grazing, but it takes a lot of land, they don't get as much meat as fast, and ultimatly it's more expensive. Iowa doesn't feed the nation. It feeds the cattle that the nation eats. Because we like meat.
I think what you actually meant to say is that Iowa is strongly tied to agriculture industry. It impacted our code-shop when one of our engineers jumped ship to John Deer (they make tractors, btw). If the agriculture industry tanks, John Deer will have less sales and less R&D, and will let engineers go, who will seek employment at my job, and I'll face more competition and suffer for it. In theory. In truth we could probably use a few more coders.
You are indeed correct, I overlooked Nintendo's DS. I was lead astray by the topic being about the upcoming consoles.
The NeoGeo and SNES sales compared to the current consoles would be like comparing competing athletes to corpses. There may be a few people digging them up and trying to reanimate them, but that zombie isn't going to be doing any pole vaults any time soon.
I personally feel that, in terms of resilience, having multiple digital copies of the software across my various computers, storage-devices, and location is best. It doesn't matter that it's a SNES game, Starcraft 2, or Splunkey. They're also better in terms of portability, distribution, storage logistics, sorting and retrieval, and it allows for, you know, updates. The only downsides that I can see is that with updates the game maker is less incentive to release bug-free games, and that it makes it easier to share games without paying for them. That second point isn't really a downside for me, per se, but it is for some people. Digital copies are simply a better storage medium. I think you're living in the past. But hey, nostalgia is fun, so take it in stride. Just don't expect me to buy any cartridges.
. And Monsanto has to innovate in order to compete with its own generic product.
Cue the blister-rust and weevils from the calorie men universe. Shit'll get bad if they pursue the more aggressive forms of competition.
console sales in the United States dropped 21 percent in 2012, and sales of new video-game cartridges haven't fared much better.
What the hell would be considered a "new video-game cartridge"?
I know jargon in certain industries gets weird. I mean, I deal with tables, floors, clouds, nets, webs, pipes, and none of those are physical objects. But whoever is using the term "cartridge", in the game industry, in this year, deserves to be ignored as they are obviously stuck in the last century. Seriously, while you're back there warn them about 9/11 and Bush.
Opinions over what is and is not constitutional by citizens in a democratic nation most certainly matter. Even "in terms of it's effects". Welcome to politics.
mmmmm I dunno about that. The cost of education is indeed getting higher, but that equally applies finance and more so to medical fields. I've heard woes from people with bachelors in chemistry and biology, but as a programmer, the pay is alright for myself. Generally speaking geeks get paid well. The career paths for geeks isn't bad at all. They need geeks doing at 50 what they did at 20, it's not the sort of thing where you must move into management or up in rank or get tenure, although management (and tenure) are certainly options. Hell, while many degrees view acedamia as the pinnical of the profession, a lot of geeks see it as a step down, something for those "who can't".
The working conditions aren't so bad. Office work is pretty cushy. And the boss might not understand what the hell you do in any field of work. Some IT people are on call. Some programmers get pushed into crunch-time.
I wasn't aware that ageism is rampant across all STEM industries. I thought that was a programmer thing. I thought even IT had it less bad. But yeah, there is sexism. Hence why two of these "winners" are trying to fix that.
Medicine is only an option if you can go to medical school for an extra 10 years. There's not too many jobs for someone who has half of a medical degree. And finance, while apparently very lucrative, means you have to work with assholes. Perhaps that's an aspect of it being lucrative, but in the current landscape and for the foreseeable future if you want to work finance, you need to check your soul at the door. And the quant-devs will probably eat your lunch anyway, which ARE in the STEM family.