I read the interview and every answer seemed peppered with excitement about the industry he's in. Jeff doesn't just design the games, he plays D&D and enjoys it. When he writes his novels in an already established world, he looks at the existing lore and tries to see how it all fits together to re-imagine it, instead of the re-imagining version of so many other authors, which is essentially to do their own thing and slap the name of the characters and locations in there.
It's refreshing and it makes me want to check out his stuff. It feels like one of us, albeit with a lot more talent than most, is out there writing these stories and designing the games. It looks like he has a blast doing it, and cares about the end result, not just the paycheck.
The general public's response to the strategies of the music and film industries is enough to cause concern; a cover is fine every so often, but reboots are naked assaults on history. One can make a new story without redefining the past: it's called $TITLE, not Batman: Bet You Didn't Know He Was a Ninja!
First, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a reboot. It's the best way of having an artist give his own take to a story without actually ruining the other story. Since you're using Batman's example, it's easy to talk about Nolan's Batman vs. Burton's Batman, and it's easy to enjoy both of them in their own way.
More specific, as far as comic books are concerned, reboots happen so often in comic-book land that having them in the movies is just one more way in which you can be faithful. I'm just waiting for the Superman movie world to finally get to the John Byrne era, as I'm tired of seeing pre-crisis superman. He's just far too darn powerful.
Even more specific, "Batman: Bet You Didn't Know He Was a Ninja!" is a somewhat entertaining title, because I bet you didn't know he was a ninja:) The Batman Begins story of his training is actually the pretty consistent we have with the comic books. As long as we're talking post-crisis anyway. In general, one thing you can say about Christopher Nolan is that he definitely did his comic book research. The portrayal of the Joker was dead on with "Killing Joke" Joker, right down to telling people multiple inconsistent stories about his origins. Nolan certainly didn't decide to create whole new worlds and characters, and just call it a Batman movie...you can't accuse him of redefining the past, he's been extremely faithful to the comic books.
I'm all for more efficient devices that use less energy while still giving me everything the more power hungry devices give me. I'm not willing use less energy if it means that I lose anything by doing so.
I remember when I didn't have seven items in the same room needing an outlet - there was a TV, a lamp and maybe a small floor heater. Now I have a computer, with a monitor, a sound system and a laser printer, each with its own cord...
Yeah, yeah, yeah...let's assume every single person on the planet cuts their total energy usage by half (which is an insane and completely unrealistic goal). We had a population of 3 billion people in this planet in 1960. By 2000, we had doubled that to 6 billion. Basically, you've cut the standard of living of everyone and the only thing you've accomplished is gain us a few decades before we're right at the same place again, except now it's even harder to cut down on energy usage because there's less to cut. That's not counting the fact that as the developing countries catch up, their population will be using more energy.
Do you want to lower your carbon impact on this planet? Have less children. Contributing to negative population growth is the greenest thing you can do.
My wife is an excellent teacher who left a prestigious private school for gifted kids and went to a school in a very low socioeconomic area.
Meanwhile, a school near me spent a bunch of money buying iPads to all the students. If only they would spend that money on teacher salary, attracting and rewarding teachers like your wife, I know the positive impact on the school would be much greater.
It's great to hear of teachers out there who are still driven to make a difference in their students lives. I certainly appreciated those teachers back in my day, and I'm glad to know there are still people like your wife out there, literally building us a better future.
Even the people I know who are not CS / IT want more, for photo-editing / video-editing / audio-editing / games / media / etc. Take forever to list all the applications for a little more power.. The people I have in mind are the majority of computer users out there, not the exceptions who would be fine with a Commodore 64.
Dude, the majority of computer users out there don't do any video-editing, audio-editing, or games. The only thing they do with media and play it, and the only place they play it from is youtube.
You''ll always find some people who are happy with one car for the next three decades, but the national average is a new car every 3 or so years.
Try ten. Which is really my point. You have a biased sample. You're around well-educated people who can figure out how to turn their computer off without asking a geek (and can afford to buy a new car every 3 years). For your sample, your advice is pretty good, and you realize they might need a little bit more oomph with their machine. You're fooling yourself into thinking that's good advice for the general population, though. I knew someone who would turn her computer off by pulling the power cord, because pressing the power button left the computer still "on" (it went into sleep mode). That's the majority of computer users right there: they don't need a more powerful machine because they're never going to do anything with it other than reading e-mail (without exchange, from their browser on webmail) and browsing whatever links were sent to them via e-mail (some of which they'll visit regularly. Once they were sent a link to youtube, and now they visit youtube without the link). The browser is the only application they use.
Lies. We can never have enough CPUs, as long as you are speaking about cores or sockets on a motherboard. We could have CPUs with 10,000 cores on them, taking 512-bit words, and it still wouldn't be enough.
Please, do you have a quad-core right now? Have your non-video editing friends start up their most intensive computer use scenarios. Dude can even be a gamer. Look at the processor use. You'll find 2, maybe 3 cores pegged at 80-100%, and one core at 0%. Most applications don't scale that much, and although multi-tasking can certainly use the extra cores, you won't have 10,000 processor-intensive applications up.
Yes, there are applications that could always use more processing power. That doesn't mean you don't reach a point where it's enough for most people.
And Intel graphics are never sufficient. I have yet to encounter anyone who has gone 6 months with an actual machine with an integrated Intel graphics chip-set, and not have them hunger for something better.
Ooh, anecdotes. Meanwhile my parents are still using their computer from 2002 with integrated graphics and refuse to get a new one even though by this point they'd probably save money because of lower power utilization. It's more than good enough for them, and they'll never play WoW.
"Could you install Office on my Mac for me?"
There are lots of people who never use Office outside work. In fact, I know a tech person, who is an engineer. He uses two applications: firefox and pidgin. He is unusual...percentage-wise, most people just use one application, their browser. Nobody does instant-messaging anymore, they use their phones. Either way, I'm sure he'd never be able to work with the mac. After all, he'd have to switch to using firefox and adium.
Look, I don't doubt you encounter the problems you say you do. There are some people who honestly can't predict what their use case scenario for their computer is, and then as someone who understands the situation better, you need to convince them that's not the case. That said, forcing people who actually don't need a more powerful computer and video card (and there are plenty of those people around) to get one is just forcing them to spend money they don't need to, and you're not doing them a favor.
From what I understand censorship is only a First Amendment issue when the government is doing the censorship. Is this an appropriate viewpoint? At what point am I as an IT administrator, or the system I manage, infringing on the first amendment rights of a member of the college community? Does it only apply to state schools, or to any school which accepts government funding? Some college administrators are state employees.
It certainly applies to public universities. Government funding would probably also apply, but I can see it going either way and, most importantly, IANAL. At least I can't see how it would be legal for the government to fund an organization that performs any type of censorship.
From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?
Obviously, if it's a private university, IT's job is whatever they are told their job is. As far as my personal beliefs go, and as far as I think it *should* apply to public universities, IT's job is to protect their infrastructure from technical threats. If there's a virus in an e-mail, it's IT's job to filter it out. If there's a death threat in an e-mail, it's ITs job to deliver the e-mail, and the recipient can call the police who will start an investigation and go after the sender. IT stays out of that and just makes sure content is delivered, whether the content is harassment or not. So no, I don't think it was correct to block change.org.
I really hope the RIAA stops this bill. While it may not be all they want, it increases the reach of copyright law, which is the wrong way to go.
That's why I have the feeling they don't want to stop the bill. I think they're trying to use reverse psychology. "I wonder if everyone will rally up to support this bill similarly to how they rallied up to oppose ACTA if we point out that we don't like it. Maybe people won't realize that we're getting a lot of what we want if we keep the discussion focused on what we're NOT getting."
Can you erase a song from your mind after you're done listening to it? Can you be absolutely sure that no work you do after seeing a painting will be influenced by what you've seen? Once you've been exposed to somebody's work, you're changed by it, if only by containing the memories you now possess. In time, this results in a shared language by people who have seen the work. When you watch Toy Story and you see Mr. Potato Head exclaim, "Hey, Look! I'm a Picasso!" you only understand that joke because his surrealist paintings are now part of our culture.
I'm not saying I can walk in and steal your painting, your cds, or your blu-rays. The medium the art is on is most certainly property. The content is something that belongs to everyone who has seen it.
Artists work for a living.
So do I. I'm not guaranteed, nor do I have a right to make money off my career, though, I could be fired at any time, my skills could not be in demand. I may be forced to switch careers to make a living.
You seem to have this odd entitled notion that they are there for you. You are wrong. You are there for them.
If they don't need an audience, they're free to keep their work locked up in their house. Anyone breaking in and taking those will most certainly be stealing. If you want to disseminate your work, that's your choice, but the consequence is that you lose control of it.
We have no right to somebody else's property. An artist's contribution to culture isn't his property, it's a part of the culture they contributed to.
The fact is that we like to encourage this contribution by giving the artists certain rights to OUR property for a limited time. They're borrowing it from us, and we'd like it returned in a more reasonable time, please. If you don't like the rules, don't share your art with the world, keep it in your vault where only you can see it.
Way to be an asshole. I'm asking for data. Nobody is giving it to me, but they're sure willing to chastise me for questioning their groupthink.
The used game stores are full of used games, somebody had to buy it new and then sell it to game. I wasn't trying to be condescending, I was pointing out something obvious which I thought you missed. It is data, it indicates a healthy used-game market. I considered giving you anectodes (basically, I don't know very few people who keeps their games after they're done playing it), but I didn't, because that wouldn't be data.
And people sell games for other reasons than to get the next one.
That's not the point. The question you need to ask yourself is if these people have bought the game in the first place if they knew they wouldn't be able to sell it later? Or rather, what percentage of them wouldn't? I don't know the answer to that, you don't know the answer to that, but we both know it's not zero (and for claiming that the number of people who wouldn't buy games for $60 if they couldn't sell it isn't zero, my anecdote becomes actual data). If the game companies kill the used game market, they're gambling that this group of people isn't significant.
Mine was a tiny event. Very close friends, only family that talk to us. No grandparents, no uncles, no one who just likes a free day out.
35 people witnessing _our_ day was perfect.
Married at 12:00pm. All done by 4:00pm. The evening to ourselves. No one drunk. No one arguing. No tiredness. No excess. No shite music. No debt to pay off over the next ten years.
I'd recommend that type of wedding to everyone.
It's our 15th year of being together
Congratulations. You guys clearly know what's important: sharing that important day with close friends and family instead of making it something stressful for no reason at all, and emphasizing your 15 years of marriage instead of the single day of the wedding.
Basically, I'm not surprised you've been together for that long and I expect that number to keep growing.
Doing it online is all very well but just like email xmas cards , it really sends out a kind of "meh , whatever" message - that you couldn't really be bothered to make much effort and 1 minute in front of a PC is all your F & F are worth.
Depends on your group of people / friends / family. In my particular group, giving a real card is a sign that you're an outsider who hasn't been around us long enough to know that we all hate the damn things. When you do the effort the buy a real card and mail it, you're not just doing the effort to show your friends what they are worth: you're also now requiring them to spend their valuable time sending you a thank you note via a similar medium. That's pretty evil, and it sends the message you don't value their time.
Right, most people don't feel that way. My point is that, as always, be aware of your audience.
Clem has a fantastic mindset compared to many UI developers today, he knows what most users want, he actually reads user forums and responds with attitude of user experience being important. He'll make GNOME3 a useful base desktop
It still has this weird thing about UIs of late (not just in Linux, Windows is doing the same thing), where they fix the menu size regardless of how many entries you have, and then provide you with a scroll bar if you have entries over the menu size. I don't get it. Why is the menu going up to only 1/3 of my screen? If I have all that vertical screen space still available, USE IT.
Scrolling is a necessary evil. Whenever it can be avoided, it should be.
It was so great to see such a wide range of people involved too - young kids to the elderly. All having a blast making it. Awesome.
I think that was definitely what I enjoyed the most. It evoked a strange sense of community between people who have never met one another, spread across vast distances, sharing one piece of common culture in great fun. A collaboration of all skill levels, with some just having a bit of fun, while others are showing off their considerable talents, and yet all contributing equally to the whole.
Speaking of talent, the people who edited all of this together did a great job. It actually feels like one single whole, not just a bunch of pieces thrown together.
why it is so important that copyright is not further bastardised so that projects like this can not go ahead.
I think it's definitely a good example of why copyright shouldn't be treated as property. The creators of art can't really say to "own it". There is a Star Wars culture out there and the actual movies are a small part of it. When people incorporate what they watch, read, and listen to in their daily lives, it really becomes a part of them. This whole movie is about people expressing that.
I'm not really against copyright, but I'm definitely a big proponent of limited copyright. Limited time, and plenty of respect for fair use.
I realize you were joking, but to be honest, it's a really cool idea that produced something completely and totally unwatchable. I made it through less than five minutes, and that was extremely painful.
I personally had the exact opposite reaction. I thought it would be completely unwatchable, but once I started watching it, I couldn't stop, because it was awesome.
I purchased five launch PS3s, the hardware backwards compatible models, and they all died within three years.
Your experience is not typical. While the launch xbox 360 was well known for failing, I haven't seen that kind of talk online about the launch PS3's. You're the first one that I've heard with that complaint, and to counter your anecdote, I can offer my own. I purchased two PS3's at launch, and they're both still running fine.
There are a few possibilities that would explain your misfortune. There was a particularly bad batch of PS3's, and they happened to ship them to your area. Or you have power quality issues at home. Maybe you keep your consoles in a closed location, the launch PS3's put out a lot of heat (they're fine if they're left out in an open location, but I can imagine a problem if you stick them in a shelf that's clased everywhere but the front.
I have plenty of things to bitch about regarding the PS3. I actually used the Other OS feature, and had to choose whether I wanted to play games or keep using Other OS. Removing backwards compatibility from newer consoles is also ridiculous. If one of my PS3's happens to one day fail, I have no way of getting a true replacement. Poor reliability doesn't seem to be a real issue, though. I think you were just extraordinarily unlucky.
What bothers me most about the controversy over climate change, is even if it turns out human actions don't actually have a significant impact on climate, we damn well know we affect the environment. We also know fossil fuels won't last us forever and acquiring them is becoming increasingly volatile due to who does and does not have access to their source. So sure, we should be cautious and treat climate science as we would any other science where we need a critical eye, but we need to be taking the same actions regardless of the conclusions (due to our knowledge of other affects). How is reducing pollution and non-renewable resource consumption a bad thing? Who the hell honestly thinks unregulated energy consumption and dumping of various emissions is okay?
Bingo. Who the hell cares about climate change? We want to work towards more efficient use and production of energy, reducing pollution, and to lower our dependency on non-renewable resources so that we can deal with their increased price as we use them up. The fact that all those things happen to coincide with the goals of people trying to stop man-made climate change is a bonus.
They were aggressively harassed by a very vocal online minority. This vocal minority would trash the ladies name on a large swath of online forums while using different names and accounts. Two received multiple anonymous threats of violence. This went on for years, and the ladies in question finally left the open source community.
Thanks for pointing out an actual problem.
A lot of the comments up there are focusing on males making females feel uncomfortable by making sexist remarks and jokes like the gold-digger joke that started this forum. Frankly, If you don't have a sense of humor, and are either male or female, that's your problem not anybody else's. When everybody's complaints are just men acting like boys in high school, I tend to believe there's no actual problem.
When, on the other hand, I hear a story like yours, with actual hostile behavior toward women, then I agree with the need for something like this Ada initiative.
Linux is Unix, Apple (iOS, and OSX) is Unix, Android is Unix... All totally built around the command line...?
How many times do you use a command line (or even see one) on any of these in normal use...?...about the same as in Windows... i.e. never...
Unix was designed around the command line 40 years ago... but you don't need it anymore for everyday use, this is not stopping you using it, but you don't need it now unless you are customising the system....
How many times I use the command-line in those systems? Just about every time I'm on my linux box, I use the command-line. I have Terminal on the dock for my mac os x. I ssh into my iPad and my android phone. That is indeed about the same as in windows, as I often open the command prompt (and hell, there are some team foundation commands you cannot run from Visual Studio, so the command prompt it actually needed in Windows of all places).
I agree that for the most part we don't need it, but for many things it's still by far the most efficient way of doing things, even when there's a GUI way of doing it. I can go to Ubuntu Software Center and click around between search boxes and install buttons...or I can type apt-get install blah.
I disagree. I don't want my tax dollars supporting trauma operations on idiots who don't wear safety belts. Thus, let them just die or use the government to enforce seat belt laws.
Your tax dollars are being wasted on way or another. I would rather my tax dollars support saving the life of a moron who didn't wear a seatbelt than my tax dollars being wasted to enforce a law that infringes on people's freedom to take a stupid risk.
Not that my dollars are going to trauma operations anyway. The US doesn't have government health care, so you should more accurately say that you don't want your insurance premiums going up. Either way, the above paragraph applies.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the interview and every answer seemed peppered with excitement about the industry he's in. Jeff doesn't just design the games, he plays D&D and enjoys it. When he writes his novels in an already established world, he looks at the existing lore and tries to see how it all fits together to re-imagine it, instead of the re-imagining version of so many other authors, which is essentially to do their own thing and slap the name of the characters and locations in there.
It's refreshing and it makes me want to check out his stuff. It feels like one of us, albeit with a lot more talent than most, is out there writing these stories and designing the games. It looks like he has a blast doing it, and cares about the end result, not just the paycheck.
The general public's response to the strategies of the music and film industries is enough to cause concern; a cover is fine every so often, but reboots are naked assaults on history. One can make a new story without redefining the past: it's called $TITLE, not Batman: Bet You Didn't Know He Was a Ninja!
First, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with a reboot. It's the best way of having an artist give his own take to a story without actually ruining the other story. Since you're using Batman's example, it's easy to talk about Nolan's Batman vs. Burton's Batman, and it's easy to enjoy both of them in their own way.
More specific, as far as comic books are concerned, reboots happen so often in comic-book land that having them in the movies is just one more way in which you can be faithful. I'm just waiting for the Superman movie world to finally get to the John Byrne era, as I'm tired of seeing pre-crisis superman. He's just far too darn powerful.
Even more specific, "Batman: Bet You Didn't Know He Was a Ninja!" is a somewhat entertaining title, because I bet you didn't know he was a ninja :) The Batman Begins story of his training is actually the pretty consistent we have with the comic books. As long as we're talking post-crisis anyway. In general, one thing you can say about Christopher Nolan is that he definitely did his comic book research. The portrayal of the Joker was dead on with "Killing Joke" Joker, right down to telling people multiple inconsistent stories about his origins. Nolan certainly didn't decide to create whole new worlds and characters, and just call it a Batman movie...you can't accuse him of redefining the past, he's been extremely faithful to the comic books.
How about if we use less energy? Sound familiar?
I'm all for more efficient devices that use less energy while still giving me everything the more power hungry devices give me. I'm not willing use less energy if it means that I lose anything by doing so.
I remember when I didn't have seven items in the same room needing an outlet - there was a TV, a lamp and maybe a small floor heater. Now I have a computer, with a monitor, a sound system and a laser printer, each with its own cord...
Yeah, yeah, yeah...let's assume every single person on the planet cuts their total energy usage by half (which is an insane and completely unrealistic goal). We had a population of 3 billion people in this planet in 1960. By 2000, we had doubled that to 6 billion. Basically, you've cut the standard of living of everyone and the only thing you've accomplished is gain us a few decades before we're right at the same place again, except now it's even harder to cut down on energy usage because there's less to cut. That's not counting the fact that as the developing countries catch up, their population will be using more energy.
Do you want to lower your carbon impact on this planet? Have less children. Contributing to negative population growth is the greenest thing you can do.
My wife is an excellent teacher who left a prestigious private school for gifted kids and went to a school in a very low socioeconomic area.
Meanwhile, a school near me spent a bunch of money buying iPads to all the students. If only they would spend that money on teacher salary, attracting and rewarding teachers like your wife, I know the positive impact on the school would be much greater.
It's great to hear of teachers out there who are still driven to make a difference in their students lives. I certainly appreciated those teachers back in my day, and I'm glad to know there are still people like your wife out there, literally building us a better future.
Even the people I know who are not CS / IT want more, for photo-editing / video-editing / audio-editing / games / media / etc. Take forever to list all the applications for a little more power.. The people I have in mind are the majority of computer users out there, not the exceptions who would be fine with a Commodore 64.
Dude, the majority of computer users out there don't do any video-editing, audio-editing, or games. The only thing they do with media and play it, and the only place they play it from is youtube.
You''ll always find some people who are happy with one car for the next three decades, but the national average is a new car every 3 or so years.
Try ten. Which is really my point. You have a biased sample. You're around well-educated people who can figure out how to turn their computer off without asking a geek (and can afford to buy a new car every 3 years). For your sample, your advice is pretty good, and you realize they might need a little bit more oomph with their machine. You're fooling yourself into thinking that's good advice for the general population, though. I knew someone who would turn her computer off by pulling the power cord, because pressing the power button left the computer still "on" (it went into sleep mode). That's the majority of computer users right there: they don't need a more powerful machine because they're never going to do anything with it other than reading e-mail (without exchange, from their browser on webmail) and browsing whatever links were sent to them via e-mail (some of which they'll visit regularly. Once they were sent a link to youtube, and now they visit youtube without the link). The browser is the only application they use.
What is the story with slashdot personals?
I'm pretty sure that was an April Fools joke.
Lies. We can never have enough CPUs, as long as you are speaking about cores or sockets on a motherboard. We could have CPUs with 10,000 cores on them, taking 512-bit words, and it still wouldn't be enough.
Please, do you have a quad-core right now? Have your non-video editing friends start up their most intensive computer use scenarios. Dude can even be a gamer. Look at the processor use. You'll find 2, maybe 3 cores pegged at 80-100%, and one core at 0%. Most applications don't scale that much, and although multi-tasking can certainly use the extra cores, you won't have 10,000 processor-intensive applications up.
Yes, there are applications that could always use more processing power. That doesn't mean you don't reach a point where it's enough for most people.
And Intel graphics are never sufficient. I have yet to encounter anyone who has gone 6 months with an actual machine with an integrated Intel graphics chip-set, and not have them hunger for something better.
Ooh, anecdotes. Meanwhile my parents are still using their computer from 2002 with integrated graphics and refuse to get a new one even though by this point they'd probably save money because of lower power utilization. It's more than good enough for them, and they'll never play WoW.
"Could you install Office on my Mac for me?"
There are lots of people who never use Office outside work. In fact, I know a tech person, who is an engineer. He uses two applications: firefox and pidgin. He is unusual...percentage-wise, most people just use one application, their browser. Nobody does instant-messaging anymore, they use their phones. Either way, I'm sure he'd never be able to work with the mac. After all, he'd have to switch to using firefox and adium.
Look, I don't doubt you encounter the problems you say you do. There are some people who honestly can't predict what their use case scenario for their computer is, and then as someone who understands the situation better, you need to convince them that's not the case. That said, forcing people who actually don't need a more powerful computer and video card (and there are plenty of those people around) to get one is just forcing them to spend money they don't need to, and you're not doing them a favor.
From what I understand censorship is only a First Amendment issue when the government is doing the censorship. Is this an appropriate viewpoint? At what point am I as an IT administrator, or the system I manage, infringing on the first amendment rights of a member of the college community? Does it only apply to state schools, or to any school which accepts government funding? Some college administrators are state employees.
It certainly applies to public universities. Government funding would probably also apply, but I can see it going either way and, most importantly, IANAL. At least I can't see how it would be legal for the government to fund an organization that performs any type of censorship.
From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?
Obviously, if it's a private university, IT's job is whatever they are told their job is. As far as my personal beliefs go, and as far as I think it *should* apply to public universities, IT's job is to protect their infrastructure from technical threats. If there's a virus in an e-mail, it's IT's job to filter it out. If there's a death threat in an e-mail, it's ITs job to deliver the e-mail, and the recipient can call the police who will start an investigation and go after the sender. IT stays out of that and just makes sure content is delivered, whether the content is harassment or not. So no, I don't think it was correct to block change.org.
I really hope the RIAA stops this bill. While it may not be all they want, it increases the reach of copyright law, which is the wrong way to go.
That's why I have the feeling they don't want to stop the bill. I think they're trying to use reverse psychology. "I wonder if everyone will rally up to support this bill similarly to how they rallied up to oppose ACTA if we point out that we don't like it. Maybe people won't realize that we're getting a lot of what we want if we keep the discussion focused on what we're NOT getting."
Self defense by doing exactly what you criticize is moronic. It's the we need nukes because they have them mentality.
What's wrong with that mentality? MAD works and is, in fact, the only thing that does.
[citation needed]
Can you erase a song from your mind after you're done listening to it? Can you be absolutely sure that no work you do after seeing a painting will be influenced by what you've seen? Once you've been exposed to somebody's work, you're changed by it, if only by containing the memories you now possess. In time, this results in a shared language by people who have seen the work. When you watch Toy Story and you see Mr. Potato Head exclaim, "Hey, Look! I'm a Picasso!" you only understand that joke because his surrealist paintings are now part of our culture.
I'm not saying I can walk in and steal your painting, your cds, or your blu-rays. The medium the art is on is most certainly property. The content is something that belongs to everyone who has seen it.
Artists work for a living.
So do I. I'm not guaranteed, nor do I have a right to make money off my career, though, I could be fired at any time, my skills could not be in demand. I may be forced to switch careers to make a living.
You seem to have this odd entitled notion that they are there for you. You are wrong. You are there for them.
If they don't need an audience, they're free to keep their work locked up in their house. Anyone breaking in and taking those will most certainly be stealing. If you want to disseminate your work, that's your choice, but the consequence is that you lose control of it.
Because you have no right to someone else's work?
We have no right to somebody else's property. An artist's contribution to culture isn't his property, it's a part of the culture they contributed to.
The fact is that we like to encourage this contribution by giving the artists certain rights to OUR property for a limited time. They're borrowing it from us, and we'd like it returned in a more reasonable time, please. If you don't like the rules, don't share your art with the world, keep it in your vault where only you can see it.
Way to be an asshole. I'm asking for data. Nobody is giving it to me, but they're sure willing to chastise me for questioning their groupthink.
The used game stores are full of used games, somebody had to buy it new and then sell it to game. I wasn't trying to be condescending, I was pointing out something obvious which I thought you missed. It is data, it indicates a healthy used-game market. I considered giving you anectodes (basically, I don't know very few people who keeps their games after they're done playing it), but I didn't, because that wouldn't be data.
And people sell games for other reasons than to get the next one.
That's not the point. The question you need to ask yourself is if these people have bought the game in the first place if they knew they wouldn't be able to sell it later? Or rather, what percentage of them wouldn't? I don't know the answer to that, you don't know the answer to that, but we both know it's not zero (and for claiming that the number of people who wouldn't buy games for $60 if they couldn't sell it isn't zero, my anecdote becomes actual data). If the game companies kill the used game market, they're gambling that this group of people isn't significant.
Mine was a tiny event. Very close friends, only family that talk to us. No grandparents, no uncles, no one who just likes a free day out.
35 people witnessing _our_ day was perfect.
Married at 12:00pm. All done by 4:00pm. The evening to ourselves. No one drunk. No one arguing. No tiredness. No excess. No shite music. No debt to pay off over the next ten years.
I'd recommend that type of wedding to everyone.
It's our 15th year of being together
Congratulations. You guys clearly know what's important: sharing that important day with close friends and family instead of making it something stressful for no reason at all, and emphasizing your 15 years of marriage instead of the single day of the wedding.
Basically, I'm not surprised you've been together for that long and I expect that number to keep growing.
Doing it online is all very well but just like email xmas cards , it really sends out a kind of "meh , whatever" message - that you couldn't really be bothered to make much effort and 1 minute in front of a PC is all your F & F are worth.
Depends on your group of people / friends / family. In my particular group, giving a real card is a sign that you're an outsider who hasn't been around us long enough to know that we all hate the damn things. When you do the effort the buy a real card and mail it, you're not just doing the effort to show your friends what they are worth: you're also now requiring them to spend their valuable time sending you a thank you note via a similar medium. That's pretty evil, and it sends the message you don't value their time.
Right, most people don't feel that way. My point is that, as always, be aware of your audience.
I would like to see numbers on how true this is. I don't think a lot of people buy games with the intent of trading it in later.
Really? Where are the used game stores getting their used games from, then?
Clem has a fantastic mindset compared to many UI developers today, he knows what most users want, he actually reads user forums and responds with attitude of user experience being important. He'll make GNOME3 a useful base desktop
It still has this weird thing about UIs of late (not just in Linux, Windows is doing the same thing), where they fix the menu size regardless of how many entries you have, and then provide you with a scroll bar if you have entries over the menu size. I don't get it. Why is the menu going up to only 1/3 of my screen? If I have all that vertical screen space still available, USE IT.
Scrolling is a necessary evil. Whenever it can be avoided, it should be.
It was so great to see such a wide range of people involved too - young kids to the elderly. All having a blast making it. Awesome.
I think that was definitely what I enjoyed the most. It evoked a strange sense of community between people who have never met one another, spread across vast distances, sharing one piece of common culture in great fun. A collaboration of all skill levels, with some just having a bit of fun, while others are showing off their considerable talents, and yet all contributing equally to the whole.
Speaking of talent, the people who edited all of this together did a great job. It actually feels like one single whole, not just a bunch of pieces thrown together.
why it is so important that copyright is not further bastardised so that projects like this can not go ahead.
I think it's definitely a good example of why copyright shouldn't be treated as property. The creators of art can't really say to "own it". There is a Star Wars culture out there and the actual movies are a small part of it. When people incorporate what they watch, read, and listen to in their daily lives, it really becomes a part of them. This whole movie is about people expressing that.
I'm not really against copyright, but I'm definitely a big proponent of limited copyright. Limited time, and plenty of respect for fair use.
I realize you were joking, but to be honest, it's a really cool idea that produced something completely and totally unwatchable. I made it through less than five minutes, and that was extremely painful.
I personally had the exact opposite reaction. I thought it would be completely unwatchable, but once I started watching it, I couldn't stop, because it was awesome.
I plan to watch it again with a group of friends.
I purchased five launch PS3s, the hardware backwards compatible models, and they all died within three years.
Your experience is not typical. While the launch xbox 360 was well known for failing, I haven't seen that kind of talk online about the launch PS3's. You're the first one that I've heard with that complaint, and to counter your anecdote, I can offer my own. I purchased two PS3's at launch, and they're both still running fine.
There are a few possibilities that would explain your misfortune. There was a particularly bad batch of PS3's, and they happened to ship them to your area. Or you have power quality issues at home. Maybe you keep your consoles in a closed location, the launch PS3's put out a lot of heat (they're fine if they're left out in an open location, but I can imagine a problem if you stick them in a shelf that's clased everywhere but the front.
I have plenty of things to bitch about regarding the PS3. I actually used the Other OS feature, and had to choose whether I wanted to play games or keep using Other OS. Removing backwards compatibility from newer consoles is also ridiculous. If one of my PS3's happens to one day fail, I have no way of getting a true replacement. Poor reliability doesn't seem to be a real issue, though. I think you were just extraordinarily unlucky.
What bothers me most about the controversy over climate change, is even if it turns out human actions don't actually have a significant impact on climate, we damn well know we affect the environment. We also know fossil fuels won't last us forever and acquiring them is becoming increasingly volatile due to who does and does not have access to their source. So sure, we should be cautious and treat climate science as we would any other science where we need a critical eye, but we need to be taking the same actions regardless of the conclusions (due to our knowledge of other affects). How is reducing pollution and non-renewable resource consumption a bad thing? Who the hell honestly thinks unregulated energy consumption and dumping of various emissions is okay?
Bingo. Who the hell cares about climate change? We want to work towards more efficient use and production of energy, reducing pollution, and to lower our dependency on non-renewable resources so that we can deal with their increased price as we use them up. The fact that all those things happen to coincide with the goals of people trying to stop man-made climate change is a bonus.
They were aggressively harassed by a very vocal online minority. This vocal minority would trash the ladies name on a large swath of online forums while using different names and accounts. Two received multiple anonymous threats of violence. This went on for years, and the ladies in question finally left the open source community.
Thanks for pointing out an actual problem.
A lot of the comments up there are focusing on males making females feel uncomfortable by making sexist remarks and jokes like the gold-digger joke that started this forum. Frankly, If you don't have a sense of humor, and are either male or female, that's your problem not anybody else's. When everybody's complaints are just men acting like boys in high school, I tend to believe there's no actual problem.
When, on the other hand, I hear a story like yours, with actual hostile behavior toward women, then I agree with the need for something like this Ada initiative.
I've seen logo used a lot in multi-agent systems research. It just lends itself well to that, with every turtle being an agent.
Linux is Unix, Apple (iOS, and OSX) is Unix, Android is Unix ... All totally built around the command line ...?
How many times do you use a command line (or even see one) on any of these in normal use ...? ...about the same as in Windows ... i.e. never ...
Unix was designed around the command line 40 years ago ... but you don't need it anymore for everyday use, this is not stopping you using it, but you don't need it now unless you are customising the system ....
How many times I use the command-line in those systems? Just about every time I'm on my linux box, I use the command-line. I have Terminal on the dock for my mac os x. I ssh into my iPad and my android phone. That is indeed about the same as in windows, as I often open the command prompt (and hell, there are some team foundation commands you cannot run from Visual Studio, so the command prompt it actually needed in Windows of all places).
I agree that for the most part we don't need it, but for many things it's still by far the most efficient way of doing things, even when there's a GUI way of doing it. I can go to Ubuntu Software Center and click around between search boxes and install buttons...or I can type apt-get install blah.
I disagree. I don't want my tax dollars supporting trauma operations on idiots who don't wear safety belts. Thus, let them just die or use the government to enforce seat belt laws.
Your tax dollars are being wasted on way or another. I would rather my tax dollars support saving the life of a moron who didn't wear a seatbelt than my tax dollars being wasted to enforce a law that infringes on people's freedom to take a stupid risk.
Not that my dollars are going to trauma operations anyway. The US doesn't have government health care, so you should more accurately say that you don't want your insurance premiums going up. Either way, the above paragraph applies.