As a developer, I agree. But don't get pissed off when my software somehow hinders your ability to do whatever you want with it. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Go find an "open" alternative.
If I encrypt half my executable and require authentication to my server to decrypt it, then that's you're problem and not mine. You bought it. You own it. Don't get mad because I control it.
That's fair. You're not beyond criticism, as people are still free to cite your crappy policies as the reason they don't buy your software. You then don't get to complain about low sales.
Additionally, you don't get to complain when people crack your DRM scheme. It is their copy of the software that they are modifying after all. If they redistribute the cracked copy, you do get to complain, I've got no problem with that. If they distribute the crack minus the software, you once again can't complain. They're not violating your copyright.
His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.
Wow, I'm not the only one!
When I first heard of Khan Academy, I thought it was a great concept. I visited the website, saw a great deal many subjects and thought this was probably the greatest thing ever. And then I tried watching the videos...
Very small amount of content, presented in the most uninteresting way possible, in an extremely repetitive way. I couldn't make it through a full video.
My property is mine and will do as I say. You are welcome to have your software on my property, but it isn't going to bow to your demands and fulfill your wishes.
I agree with your sentiment entirely, with one correction. He is not welcome to have his software on your property. He is welcome to sell his software for to install on your property. Once he has made the sale, that copy of the software is yours, not his.
There's a better argument. Open is the only morally correct way to have software and platform. So if you can't make money in an open platform, you can't make money selling software, and I have no more problem with that than saying that if the only way you can own an HDTV is by breaking into my house and stealing mine, then you don't get to have an HDTV.
the average person is really bad at self medication.
And why is it our job to protect them?
Boxing is extremely dangerous. If two people make the choice to get in the ring, we may think that's unwise, but it's their decision. If you make the decision to do something that will harm you, you may be an idiot, but I don't have the moral right to stop you through means other than making an argument to try to change your mind.
When you get into things that have the potential of harming others, then that's another story. You're free to drink alcohol and use whatever other drugs you want to. You're not free to drive on public roads under their influence.
If you make it expensive to patch, then there will be no patches... That doesn't mean games will actually be released any less buggy, just that there will never be any patches for them.
You're assuming buggy games don't have a significant effect on sales. If that were true, companies wouldn't pay developers to fix bugs period, since that costs money. They'd just move on to the next game.
I like that idea. Perhaps tempered with a hockey-stick curve for the little guys. $1k for your first two (or whatever, I'm being a bit arbitrary) then start ramping up sharply to make it seriously cost prohibitive?
Yeah, that sounds even better. I'd definitely be in favor of that.
I can't remember a game in the last ten years that didn't have something wrong with it
Right, that's my point. The past decade being when game studios could count on everyone having a fast internet connection to download patches. This is the problem that making it costly to patch can help solve.
(arguably, a near-impossibility with modern game complexity)
On the contrary. Game complexity may have gone up, but programming complexity has gone down, and it's far easier to write bug-free code than it used to be in the past. In the past, developers had to write extremely optimized code using difficult to debug obscure tricks and undocumented features of the OS and hardware, without advanced compilers that can warn you when you're using an uninitialized variable.
What actually happened is that patching is far cheaper than doing QA. You use your first users as your QA group, let them find the bugs, and then patch it. Well, as a developer in a startup without a proper QA team, the thing that I hate most about my job is debugging and QA work. I put up with it because I'm paid to do it. If I'm going to do it for your game, you need to pay me. If I'm paying you, I expect you to have made a good effort in QA. I don't expect bug-free code everywhere, because I do understand the costs go up exponentially as you get closer and closer to guaranteed bug-free, but I expect a much better effort than a guaranteed patch two days after the game is out.
So maybe something more suited to, "if you had to release a gajillion patches to make your crap functional, you dropped the ball and need to pay for our time" instead of, "first one is free, after that it's a five digit bill".
There's room for reason in there, somewhere.
Right, and I'm not advocating banning patches, so I think I am being reasonable. Your strategy encourages releasing a broken game, and then taking forever to release the first patch, as you let the users gather a large number of bugs that you can fix all at once. If you make every patch cost $50,000, for example, you know that as long as you're spending less than $50,000 on testing to avoid that patch, you come out ahead. If that's not enough to cut down the number of patches to a reasonable level, you up the price and make it cheaper to spend even more on QA.
And maybe you do graduate the cost based on developer size. Charge EA $200,000, charge indie groups $1,000. Make it a percentage of total game revenue or something.
It sounds more like he's blaming them for charging tens of thousands of dollars to certify and post the corrected patch.
The second article makes a good point though (and some stupid ones). He's floating on over a million dollars in sales. The crazy-high cost of certification is extortion, but it's also fair to say he has a certain obligation to the folks who bought his game. Meanwhile, the nasty little outbursts aren't going to win him a ton of fans.
Frankly, I'm all for a very high fee for patching. As high as possible.
The internet made it so that games are released broken, with the mentality that they'll just patch later. The way I see it, you should have the mentality that no patch will ever be released, and test the hell out of it. Patches should be a very rare thing. By increasing the cost of the patch, you cause people like this guy to not release the patch. That hurts the users, but it also hurts him, because as people find out his game is broken, his sales will decrease. So maybe in the future, he'll keep that in mind and do proper testing.
We've made it cheap to patch games anytime. We need to make it expensive to make the cost involved in thorough testing cheaper than patching later.
Does anyone here really believe Obama's going to risk appearing 'soft' on terrorism in an election year? Nothing is going to happen on this issue this year, no matter how many judgements, rulings, petitions, etc., are made -- the status quo very rarely changes during an election year. Every effort will be made to delay this until after November...
Honestly, I figure it would be beneficial for him to come out fully against the TSA. He's a democrat. The people who think that's equal to appearing soft on terrorism are the republicans, who are not going to vote for him anyway. He takes a stand against the TSA and he has most of the liberals, some of the republicans who see through the security theater, and a bunch of the libertarians. It's a win all around.
Not that I think he's going to do it, but it's not the election stopping him.
Have you considered an alternative explanation. Depending on how you are doing it, it might well not be the nerdyness that puts them off, but the apparent lack of interest in making even the slightest effort on a first date, or the implication that you are making an effort and the reality is much worse.
Well, what you said can be a valid point, but going out of my way to put my nerdyness out there doesn't mean wearing a starfleet uniform or anything. Also, half the time, it's not that I get turned down to a second date, it's that I don't ask them out on one, or turn it down myself.
What I mean is that when we're talking about our interests, when the books I like to read come up, I'll mention my fondness for Star Wars books, I'm not going to go and pick something I don't read as often, but less nerdy. When TV comes up, I won't hide the fact that I'm a trekkie. With what I like to do for fun, I'll say that I enjoy a game of D&D. That doesn't mean that I won't also mention my interests that are considered "cool" by society at large, so I'll probably talk about how I skydive regularly, but I won't try to emphasize the cool over the nerdy.
I talk about these things, because I'd like people I date to share in my activities. I'd like her to watch a Star Trek episode with me now and again, it'd be great if she were to try participating in a D&D campaign...I'd love to take her skydiving too. She doesn't have to be into all of it, she doesn't have to have tried those things before, but if she's actively against it, we don't have enough in common.
Similarly, sometimes I'm equally turned off by her likes and dislikes. I don't look down upon her for those, but I do believe I wouldn't enjoy spending time with her doing those activities, so I consider it not a match. I don't see a lack of a second date as a failure. I prefer to not pursue incompatible mates as early as possible.
Most men are intimidated by smart women, and so most women who are smart try to conceal it.
This doesn't apply to you because you say you're gay (and I assume other women wouldn't be intimidated by smart women), but those other women you're talking about are doing it wrong. You don't hide who you are, especially not your virtues, such as intelligence, in order to make a relationship last for longer. That only makes it harder to break up when you find out your partner has that inferiority complex. What intelligent woman wants to be in a relationship with a guy who needs to feel superior to her?
When I meet a new girl, I tend to go out of my way to put all my nerdiness out there. More often than not (much more often than not), there's no second date. I consider that a benefit. I'm not going to change who I am to fit a woman's model of what I should be like, so if she doesn't want to date a nerd, I don't want to date her. I don't want to suffer through a painful breakup later when she finally figures out who I really am and the personality I was hiding. Those relationships that did last were significantly more meaningful as a result, and I retained a friendship with a few exes because I truly enjoyed their company and personality. "We should still be friends" isn't an insult to me, and if I had I enjoyed their company while we were dating, I'm glad to take them up on that offer when they make it seriously.
Actually this makes 3D not suck. This is not at all like the 3D you've seen in your "games, movies and books/comics", this really is more like the 3D you see in real life.
That actually makes it suck more.
Don't get me wrong, the research is nice, and I'm sure there are tons of really good uses for such a thing. As a monitor for games and movies, it's a horrible idea. I don't want parallax. The last thing I want is to be sitting in a theater and missing part of the movie because of the location I chose to sit in. Or playing a game and having to constantly move my head to see things.
Ironically, I once worked for a company, developing cutting edge network technology and internet applications. I dropped the suggestion to a VP that what we were doing was all new terrain and we could patent some of the complex processes and end products we were developing. The VP simply stated, we're a development company, not an intellectual property company, so no patents were going to be considered, even defensively.
I envy the place you worked at, man. Sounds like they had their priorities straight, getting a good product out.
Sucks that the reward for hard work like that is typically to have a patent troll ruin your business.
And the reality of it is, any non-geek wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Just because you instantly recognize the difference since its something that you have have within your knowledge domain doesn't mean my mom or dad can.
Patent obviousness isn't decided by whether your mom or dad think its obvious. It's decided based on whether experts in the field think it's obvious.
There are plenty of examples which do not so closely resemble the iPad that not even Samsung's own lawyers could tell the difference in court.
Don't confuse the incompetence of a lawyer with actual similarities between the products. It's impossible to mistake a Galaxy for an iPad. And I don't mean because the iPad is "cooler"...they're not even the same size, nor do they have the same aspect ratio.
Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
He means wars between two or more "major countries" and he defines "major" as nuclear powers. Which is the author's point. No (direct) wars between two nuclear-armed powers. Therefore, he believes if everyone had nukes, we'd be at a stalemate, with nobody willing to risk attacking anybody else.
It's pretty simplistic and naive. I think complete disarmament is a bad idea, because it leaves you vulnerable. That said, if everyone had nukes, he doesn't consider the possibility of alliances. You could theoretically get a bunch of large nuclear powers to agree to completely eliminate a lesser common enemy. It's conceivable you'd make it impossible for them to respond, making the "war" pretty short, but still something we'd like to avoid.
Anyone who thinks nuclear weapons are a peacekeeping tool is an idiot. They are the ultimate ticking time bomb.
Being the ultimate ticking time bomb is what makes it such a good peacekeeping tool.
Frankly, if we as a species can't handle the responsibility, we don't deserve to survive. I see no benefit in preserving a species that doesn't have the self-control necessary to protect itself.
I tend to think we do have it, and I think we've proven that over the years, but if it turns out I'm wrong, it's a self-correcting problem.
I get tired of hearing this (rote) trite response as a way of dismissing such question.
Asking such questions, and then finding the answers, are part and parcel of both science and progress. Dismissing such questions isn't insightful, it's ignorance.
The reason such questions annoys me is that is because they tend to imply that's the only reason for research, whereas I believe learning about the universe we belong to is its own reward. Maybe there are other uses that advance our technology and makes life better for everyone, and that's fantastic, but it's just a much less significant bonus.
My mindset is that we create technology in order to find out about the world around us, not the other way around.
I suppose you also bitched that Final Fantasy XI didn't have single player because all of the first ten games did.
I probably would have, if I knew anything about Final Fantasy other than that, 'it exists'
The argument that D3 isn't a single-player game is sound. The previous iterations in the series are not relevant to the discussion.
The reason for making a sequel to a game, instead of a brand new one, is to get that built-in audience that liked the previous games. I liked Diablo 1 and 2, but Diablo 3 didn't have a single-player mode. Therefore, it never interested me, and they lost one of the customers in their demographic.
I'm not saying Blizzard doesn't have the right to create a non-single player game. This is why I'm blaming the people who bought it (at least those who bought it and complain about it. If you're happy with the game, more power to you). Based on the complaints I'm hearing, a lot of the people who bought the game were expecting the Diablo 2 experience, and claim their multiplayer economy is really adding nothing to the experience.
That wasn't unsound advice. His advice worked perfectly, as Diablo did indeed run under Wine.
There are only two people to blame here. The first is Blizzard (and all the other game companies for similar games) for making the game the way they did (they can ban whoever they want from their severs, but a single player game should be able to run single-player, and the multi-player aspect should allow any one person to host the game without ever talking to their servers). The second are the people who would buy a single-player game that requires connection to remote servers in order to work.
Queue the people who go, 'Diablo III isn't a single-player game.' Well, considering diablo 1 and 2 were, they should be blamed for that too.
Whoa easy killer, I didnt know they personally came in and saved you and your family from terrorist mere moments before being shot in the head. I just think its funny that a group that advocates software freedom always gets their panties in a big ole wad when someone does something they didnt like. Fuck them its none of their concern what Ubunutu uses as a bootloader, thats (gasp) freedom.
Freedom for whom?
That's really the question you have to ask, because anytime that you work to guarantee freedom for one group, you are restricting the freedom of another. For example, guaranteeing freedom of speech in the first amendment restricts the legislative freedom of the US government and prevents them from passing certain hate speech laws.
The FSF doesn't hide the fact they are for freedom for the users. In order to guarantee this freedom, they aim to restrict the freedom of developers, distributors, and, in some cases, hardware manufacturers. I agree with them. I think the freedom of the people is more important than the freedom of governments and the freedom of the users is more important than the freedoms of the developers. If the developer doesn't want other people to use his product in ways that were not intended by him, he is 100% free to do that: By not selling or otherwise distributing said product.
The liberals did take a good page out of 1984 by learning how to warp and manipulate language to fit their own agenda. For example, relabel the same old provably ineffective (or intentionally worse than ineffective) teaching techniques as "logic" or "critical thinking".
You're right, but the whole "against critical thinking" part isn't what outraged me. It's their own wording as to the reasons why they oppose those classes that do. They oppose classes which may change a student's "fixed beliefs" and "undermine parental authority."
By their own admission, what they are against is the proper definition of critical thinking. Forget the class and programs. Critical thinking is about putting aside your "fixed beliefs", challenging them, and dropping those beliefs when the evidence calls for it. It's about making your own decisions based on evidence and logic, not based on authority (which would be a logical fallacy), parental or otherwise. I don't give a shit if they're actually against the educational program, it's entirely possible it's ineffective at teaching critical thinking. The reasons they gave for their opposition should be enough to ensure such people never get elected.
See, this is the problem right here: why on earth would I keep the best speakers in my home anywhere *near* my tv? Watching TV and listening to music are completely different activities.
Right. And the best speakers are for movies, while music is listened to on the car speakers or on headphones while working out and at work. That said, when reading a book while sitting in the most comfortable chair, which is, of course, facing the TV, you might as well use those speakers to listen to music.
People have different use cases. I'm ok with the fact that you don't hook up your awesome speakers to your TV, but there are quite a few of us who do, and apparently we are the target audience.
I don't need to stream *everything* to one place, I need to stream *different* things to *different* places, and I'll gladly pay $250, but not $250 per room if I'm only going to use some of the functionality.
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As a developer, I agree. But don't get pissed off when my software somehow hinders your ability to do whatever you want with it. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Go find an "open" alternative.
If I encrypt half my executable and require authentication to my server to decrypt it, then that's you're problem and not mine. You bought it. You own it. Don't get mad because I control it.
That's fair. You're not beyond criticism, as people are still free to cite your crappy policies as the reason they don't buy your software. You then don't get to complain about low sales.
Additionally, you don't get to complain when people crack your DRM scheme. It is their copy of the software that they are modifying after all. If they redistribute the cracked copy, you do get to complain, I've got no problem with that. If they distribute the crack minus the software, you once again can't complain. They're not violating your copyright.
His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.
Wow, I'm not the only one!
When I first heard of Khan Academy, I thought it was a great concept. I visited the website, saw a great deal many subjects and thought this was probably the greatest thing ever. And then I tried watching the videos...
Very small amount of content, presented in the most uninteresting way possible, in an extremely repetitive way. I couldn't make it through a full video.
My property is mine and will do as I say. You are welcome to have your software on my property, but it isn't going to bow to your demands and fulfill your wishes.
I agree with your sentiment entirely, with one correction. He is not welcome to have his software on your property. He is welcome to sell his software for to install on your property. Once he has made the sale, that copy of the software is yours, not his.
So, the argument goes, you charged too much....
There's a better argument. Open is the only morally correct way to have software and platform. So if you can't make money in an open platform, you can't make money selling software, and I have no more problem with that than saying that if the only way you can own an HDTV is by breaking into my house and stealing mine, then you don't get to have an HDTV.
the average person is really bad at self medication.
And why is it our job to protect them?
Boxing is extremely dangerous. If two people make the choice to get in the ring, we may think that's unwise, but it's their decision. If you make the decision to do something that will harm you, you may be an idiot, but I don't have the moral right to stop you through means other than making an argument to try to change your mind.
When you get into things that have the potential of harming others, then that's another story. You're free to drink alcohol and use whatever other drugs you want to. You're not free to drive on public roads under their influence.
If you make it expensive to patch, then there will be no patches... That doesn't mean games will actually be released any less buggy, just that there will never be any patches for them.
You're assuming buggy games don't have a significant effect on sales. If that were true, companies wouldn't pay developers to fix bugs period, since that costs money. They'd just move on to the next game.
I like that idea. Perhaps tempered with a hockey-stick curve for the little guys. $1k for your first two (or whatever, I'm being a bit arbitrary) then start ramping up sharply to make it seriously cost prohibitive?
Yeah, that sounds even better. I'd definitely be in favor of that.
I can't remember a game in the last ten years that didn't have something wrong with it
Right, that's my point. The past decade being when game studios could count on everyone having a fast internet connection to download patches. This is the problem that making it costly to patch can help solve.
(arguably, a near-impossibility with modern game complexity)
On the contrary. Game complexity may have gone up, but programming complexity has gone down, and it's far easier to write bug-free code than it used to be in the past. In the past, developers had to write extremely optimized code using difficult to debug obscure tricks and undocumented features of the OS and hardware, without advanced compilers that can warn you when you're using an uninitialized variable.
What actually happened is that patching is far cheaper than doing QA. You use your first users as your QA group, let them find the bugs, and then patch it. Well, as a developer in a startup without a proper QA team, the thing that I hate most about my job is debugging and QA work. I put up with it because I'm paid to do it. If I'm going to do it for your game, you need to pay me. If I'm paying you, I expect you to have made a good effort in QA. I don't expect bug-free code everywhere, because I do understand the costs go up exponentially as you get closer and closer to guaranteed bug-free, but I expect a much better effort than a guaranteed patch two days after the game is out.
So maybe something more suited to, "if you had to release a gajillion patches to make your crap functional, you dropped the ball and need to pay for our time" instead of, "first one is free, after that it's a five digit bill".
There's room for reason in there, somewhere.
Right, and I'm not advocating banning patches, so I think I am being reasonable. Your strategy encourages releasing a broken game, and then taking forever to release the first patch, as you let the users gather a large number of bugs that you can fix all at once. If you make every patch cost $50,000, for example, you know that as long as you're spending less than $50,000 on testing to avoid that patch, you come out ahead. If that's not enough to cut down the number of patches to a reasonable level, you up the price and make it cheaper to spend even more on QA.
And maybe you do graduate the cost based on developer size. Charge EA $200,000, charge indie groups $1,000. Make it a percentage of total game revenue or something.
It sounds more like he's blaming them for charging tens of thousands of dollars to certify and post the corrected patch.
The second article makes a good point though (and some stupid ones). He's floating on over a million dollars in sales. The crazy-high cost of certification is extortion, but it's also fair to say he has a certain obligation to the folks who bought his game. Meanwhile, the nasty little outbursts aren't going to win him a ton of fans.
Frankly, I'm all for a very high fee for patching. As high as possible.
The internet made it so that games are released broken, with the mentality that they'll just patch later. The way I see it, you should have the mentality that no patch will ever be released, and test the hell out of it. Patches should be a very rare thing. By increasing the cost of the patch, you cause people like this guy to not release the patch. That hurts the users, but it also hurts him, because as people find out his game is broken, his sales will decrease. So maybe in the future, he'll keep that in mind and do proper testing.
We've made it cheap to patch games anytime. We need to make it expensive to make the cost involved in thorough testing cheaper than patching later.
Does anyone here really believe Obama's going to risk appearing 'soft' on terrorism in an election year? Nothing is going to happen on this issue this year, no matter how many judgements, rulings, petitions, etc., are made -- the status quo very rarely changes during an election year. Every effort will be made to delay this until after November...
Honestly, I figure it would be beneficial for him to come out fully against the TSA. He's a democrat. The people who think that's equal to appearing soft on terrorism are the republicans, who are not going to vote for him anyway. He takes a stand against the TSA and he has most of the liberals, some of the republicans who see through the security theater, and a bunch of the libertarians. It's a win all around.
Not that I think he's going to do it, but it's not the election stopping him.
Have you considered an alternative explanation. Depending on how you are doing it, it might well not be the nerdyness that puts them off, but the apparent lack of interest in making even the slightest effort on a first date, or the implication that you are making an effort and the reality is much worse.
Well, what you said can be a valid point, but going out of my way to put my nerdyness out there doesn't mean wearing a starfleet uniform or anything. Also, half the time, it's not that I get turned down to a second date, it's that I don't ask them out on one, or turn it down myself.
What I mean is that when we're talking about our interests, when the books I like to read come up, I'll mention my fondness for Star Wars books, I'm not going to go and pick something I don't read as often, but less nerdy. When TV comes up, I won't hide the fact that I'm a trekkie. With what I like to do for fun, I'll say that I enjoy a game of D&D. That doesn't mean that I won't also mention my interests that are considered "cool" by society at large, so I'll probably talk about how I skydive regularly, but I won't try to emphasize the cool over the nerdy.
I talk about these things, because I'd like people I date to share in my activities. I'd like her to watch a Star Trek episode with me now and again, it'd be great if she were to try participating in a D&D campaign...I'd love to take her skydiving too. She doesn't have to be into all of it, she doesn't have to have tried those things before, but if she's actively against it, we don't have enough in common.
Similarly, sometimes I'm equally turned off by her likes and dislikes. I don't look down upon her for those, but I do believe I wouldn't enjoy spending time with her doing those activities, so I consider it not a match. I don't see a lack of a second date as a failure. I prefer to not pursue incompatible mates as early as possible.
Most men are intimidated by smart women, and so most women who are smart try to conceal it.
This doesn't apply to you because you say you're gay (and I assume other women wouldn't be intimidated by smart women), but those other women you're talking about are doing it wrong. You don't hide who you are, especially not your virtues, such as intelligence, in order to make a relationship last for longer. That only makes it harder to break up when you find out your partner has that inferiority complex. What intelligent woman wants to be in a relationship with a guy who needs to feel superior to her?
When I meet a new girl, I tend to go out of my way to put all my nerdiness out there. More often than not (much more often than not), there's no second date. I consider that a benefit. I'm not going to change who I am to fit a woman's model of what I should be like, so if she doesn't want to date a nerd, I don't want to date her. I don't want to suffer through a painful breakup later when she finally figures out who I really am and the personality I was hiding. Those relationships that did last were significantly more meaningful as a result, and I retained a friendship with a few exes because I truly enjoyed their company and personality. "We should still be friends" isn't an insult to me, and if I had I enjoyed their company while we were dating, I'm glad to take them up on that offer when they make it seriously.
Actually this makes 3D not suck. This is not at all like the 3D you've seen in your "games, movies and books/comics", this really is more like the 3D you see in real life.
That actually makes it suck more.
Don't get me wrong, the research is nice, and I'm sure there are tons of really good uses for such a thing. As a monitor for games and movies, it's a horrible idea. I don't want parallax. The last thing I want is to be sitting in a theater and missing part of the movie because of the location I chose to sit in. Or playing a game and having to constantly move my head to see things.
Ironically, I once worked for a company, developing cutting edge network technology and internet applications. I dropped the suggestion to a VP that what we were doing was all new terrain and we could patent some of the complex processes and end products we were developing. The VP simply stated, we're a development company, not an intellectual property company, so no patents were going to be considered, even defensively.
I envy the place you worked at, man. Sounds like they had their priorities straight, getting a good product out.
Sucks that the reward for hard work like that is typically to have a patent troll ruin your business.
And the reality of it is, any non-geek wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Just because you instantly recognize the difference since its something that you have have within your knowledge domain doesn't mean my mom or dad can.
Patent obviousness isn't decided by whether your mom or dad think its obvious. It's decided based on whether experts in the field think it's obvious.
This isn't a trademark case.
There are plenty of examples which do not so closely resemble the iPad that not even Samsung's own lawyers could tell the difference in court.
Don't confuse the incompetence of a lawyer with actual similarities between the products. It's impossible to mistake a Galaxy for an iPad. And I don't mean because the iPad is "cooler"...they're not even the same size, nor do they have the same aspect ratio.
Some of them you can discard as "non-major countries", but too many of them had major, nuclear-armed powers on at least one side.
He means wars between two or more "major countries" and he defines "major" as nuclear powers. Which is the author's point. No (direct) wars between two nuclear-armed powers. Therefore, he believes if everyone had nukes, we'd be at a stalemate, with nobody willing to risk attacking anybody else.
It's pretty simplistic and naive. I think complete disarmament is a bad idea, because it leaves you vulnerable. That said, if everyone had nukes, he doesn't consider the possibility of alliances. You could theoretically get a bunch of large nuclear powers to agree to completely eliminate a lesser common enemy. It's conceivable you'd make it impossible for them to respond, making the "war" pretty short, but still something we'd like to avoid.
Anyone who thinks nuclear weapons are a peacekeeping tool is an idiot. They are the ultimate ticking time bomb.
Being the ultimate ticking time bomb is what makes it such a good peacekeeping tool.
Frankly, if we as a species can't handle the responsibility, we don't deserve to survive. I see no benefit in preserving a species that doesn't have the self-control necessary to protect itself.
I tend to think we do have it, and I think we've proven that over the years, but if it turns out I'm wrong, it's a self-correcting problem.
I get tired of hearing this (rote) trite response as a way of dismissing such question.
Asking such questions, and then finding the answers, are part and parcel of both science and progress. Dismissing such questions isn't insightful, it's ignorance.
The reason such questions annoys me is that is because they tend to imply that's the only reason for research, whereas I believe learning about the universe we belong to is its own reward. Maybe there are other uses that advance our technology and makes life better for everyone, and that's fantastic, but it's just a much less significant bonus.
My mindset is that we create technology in order to find out about the world around us, not the other way around.
I suppose you also bitched that Final Fantasy XI didn't have single player because all of the first ten games did.
I probably would have, if I knew anything about Final Fantasy other than that, 'it exists'
The argument that D3 isn't a single-player game is sound. The previous iterations in the series are not relevant to the discussion.
The reason for making a sequel to a game, instead of a brand new one, is to get that built-in audience that liked the previous games. I liked Diablo 1 and 2, but Diablo 3 didn't have a single-player mode. Therefore, it never interested me, and they lost one of the customers in their demographic.
I'm not saying Blizzard doesn't have the right to create a non-single player game. This is why I'm blaming the people who bought it (at least those who bought it and complain about it. If you're happy with the game, more power to you). Based on the complaints I'm hearing, a lot of the people who bought the game were expecting the Diablo 2 experience, and claim their multiplayer economy is really adding nothing to the experience.
And that, dear readers, is why Slashdot advice is sometimes unsound.
That wasn't unsound advice. His advice worked perfectly, as Diablo did indeed run under Wine.
There are only two people to blame here. The first is Blizzard (and all the other game companies for similar games) for making the game the way they did (they can ban whoever they want from their severs, but a single player game should be able to run single-player, and the multi-player aspect should allow any one person to host the game without ever talking to their servers). The second are the people who would buy a single-player game that requires connection to remote servers in order to work.
Queue the people who go, 'Diablo III isn't a single-player game.' Well, considering diablo 1 and 2 were, they should be blamed for that too.
Whoa easy killer, I didnt know they personally came in and saved you and your family from terrorist mere moments before being shot in the head. I just think its funny that a group that advocates software freedom always gets their panties in a big ole wad when someone does something they didnt like. Fuck them its none of their concern what Ubunutu uses as a bootloader, thats (gasp) freedom.
Freedom for whom?
That's really the question you have to ask, because anytime that you work to guarantee freedom for one group, you are restricting the freedom of another. For example, guaranteeing freedom of speech in the first amendment restricts the legislative freedom of the US government and prevents them from passing certain hate speech laws.
The FSF doesn't hide the fact they are for freedom for the users. In order to guarantee this freedom, they aim to restrict the freedom of developers, distributors, and, in some cases, hardware manufacturers. I agree with them. I think the freedom of the people is more important than the freedom of governments and the freedom of the users is more important than the freedoms of the developers. If the developer doesn't want other people to use his product in ways that were not intended by him, he is 100% free to do that: By not selling or otherwise distributing said product.
The liberals did take a good page out of 1984 by learning how to warp and manipulate language to fit their own agenda. For example, relabel the same old provably ineffective (or intentionally worse than ineffective) teaching techniques as "logic" or "critical thinking".
You're right, but the whole "against critical thinking" part isn't what outraged me. It's their own wording as to the reasons why they oppose those classes that do. They oppose classes which may change a student's "fixed beliefs" and "undermine parental authority."
By their own admission, what they are against is the proper definition of critical thinking. Forget the class and programs. Critical thinking is about putting aside your "fixed beliefs", challenging them, and dropping those beliefs when the evidence calls for it. It's about making your own decisions based on evidence and logic, not based on authority (which would be a logical fallacy), parental or otherwise. I don't give a shit if they're actually against the educational program, it's entirely possible it's ineffective at teaching critical thinking. The reasons they gave for their opposition should be enough to ensure such people never get elected.
See, this is the problem right here: why on earth would I keep the best speakers in my home anywhere *near* my tv? Watching TV and listening to music are completely different activities.
Right. And the best speakers are for movies, while music is listened to on the car speakers or on headphones while working out and at work. That said, when reading a book while sitting in the most comfortable chair, which is, of course, facing the TV, you might as well use those speakers to listen to music.
People have different use cases. I'm ok with the fact that you don't hook up your awesome speakers to your TV, but there are quite a few of us who do, and apparently we are the target audience.
I don't need to stream *everything* to one place, I need to stream *different* things to *different* places, and I'll gladly pay $250, but not $250 per room if I'm only going to use some of the functionality.
That's a pretty good point, though.
Okay, I watched the clips. I saw the before and after pictures.
And I didn't see the faintest hint of resemblance. Am I the only one?
Probably. Maybe it'd also fool Lois Lane, I'm not sure if hair makes more of a difference than glasses.