So you didn't even read my post? My whole point was that crimes are different, but people have different points beyond which crimes stop being acceptable to them. Some won't event do 31mph in a 30 zone, while others are happy to steal from peoples' houses and beat people up in the street. But don't worry, you keep right on branding people stupid...
You enable Chinese keyboard layout (dunno what's it called), and type it.
You forgot the part where you strap on around 40,000 extra keys to cover all the different pictograms. Typing Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese dialects (or at least one way a colleague showed me) involves using latin characters to spell the start of the pictogram sound, then selecting from sub-menus the actual word or part word you want.
If you follow the link provided about the airport scanners you find that they are passive devices meaning they don't emit terahertz waves they only recieve the waves coming off of everything around us.
There are some devices out there that using terahertz radiation to inspect packages much like x-ray today.
Thankyou. The summary implies that scanning using T-waves in airports might cause you to have your DNA scrambled, which is just plain wrong. Passive scanning (which we are told is what the airport scanners are) don't expose you to any more radiation than you get in a normal day.
OK, so change his analogy from murder to rape. Still too much? How about just aggravated assault? No? How about just one punch in the face? Still too real? Alright, what if we go with just printing fake money? Physically copying DVD's to sell in the pub?
Where do we draw the line? That's the question. You might draw it in one place but other people feel differently.
Of course thanks to the genius of Holywood we all know the Enigma machine was really stolen by a bunch of Americans (U-571) and not by Poles....
I'm undoing a few moderations here but I'm afraid I just have to point out your horrific factual innacuracy. You slam Hollywood for saying American's captured the first complete Enigma machine, then you make up some nonsense that it was actually Poles? If you bothered to check your facts before criticising the facts of others you'd know it was the British, HMS Bulldog to be precise, that captured the Enigma machine in 1941.
I can only hope that you were making some cryptic comment on the whole historical innacuracies situation, but even if that's the case; too subtle.
Would have given more if I thought everybody was going to stiff them. Come on, average price of $2.03?
I do take your point, but even though most people are giving very low amounts, I'll bet that it's all extra sales that wouldn't have happened if the price was $20. I'm not ashamed to admit that I donated $5, and some people might think that's cheap (but apparently not as cheap as the average customer) but I would never have paid anything over that amount for World of Goo. So yeah, people are being cheap about it, but it's all extra money in the developers' pockets which probably wouldn't have been there otherwise.
I was thinking along similar lines, but I'm more inclined to attribute it to the fact that they're first-time Internet users, and that learning how to use a search engine and formulate a good search for the first time is bound to show brain development and "enhanced neural stimulation". Replace "Internet searching" with anything else and introduce it to people who have never done it before and I bet you'll find new brain development and enhanced neural stimulation. It's called "learning" and, shockingly, when people learn new things their brain structure changes.
Sorry, I'm not going to read what you wrote in your reply. I'll assume it was something pro-Microsoft, so I'll simply call you an MS fanboi and put some exclamation marks aftewards!!!
Well yes, that's technically true. However you might have noticed I was going for a joke towards the end so you can forgive me a slight linguistic innacuracy? No?
So the minimum is 1 cent? No minimum would imply I can offer them zero cents, which though making me a cheapskate, lowlife, unnappreciative scumbag, would make a difference to my finances. If 1000 publishers let me save 1 cent I'd soon have enought to buy a bag of cheetos, some kool-aid and more blinds to block the sunlight coming through my parent's basement window...
Oh I totally agree. I have no sympathy for patent trolls, or bullshit companies created simply to find existing or likely future technologies that aren't patented, patent them without any intention of actually doing anything productive and sit back planning their lawsuits. They're the ones ruining the system for real people. However, some of the idiotic masses here on/. have the rather dim-witted opinion that any and all patents are evil, and that we should live in some communist utopia where all ideas belong to the people, and anyone trying to rise above their peers and secure an opportunity to contribute something to mankind, without fear that someone will simply come along and steal it, is evil.
Perhaps I should have made myself clearer. I believe that if you actually invent and make a working version you should be allowed to profit from your ideas without fear that a big corporation with manufacturing capabilities way, way beyond your own can simple steal your idea and make money from it. I don't believe that you should be able to sit down, patent the concept of breathing or some ridiculous software concept and sue anyone who comes close to your unimplemented, general ideas.
Totally agree. If I come up with a great idea why the hell should I give it away for free? This bullshit opinion that all patents are evil needs to end. If somebody spends time and money develoing an idea and inventing something new they deserve some bloody reward for it, and something more substantial than the warm fuzzy feeling that they gave it to the world for free.
The only difference between Britain and the rest of the Western World is that our government just suck at hiding their Orwellian monitoring of the general population. You think other governments aren't monitoring, spying and tracking their own citizens? They've just learned from our mistakes about how to keep it quiet...
That would at least let parents know what's going on in the game. It's a lot more informative than a simple: "Online interactions not Rated"
Slightly off your point but relevant anyway: I think the sort of parents that pay attention to these ratings are smart enough to realise that online interaction has the potential to offend. It's the ones that buy an 18+ game for their 8 year old, then scream blue murder to the media/government when they walk in and see him screwing a hooker in a car that are the problem...
Exactly. They talk about how the ESRB can make these ratings based on censor technology, moderation schemes etc. but at the end of the day any game where you can interact with other players will go one of two ways:
1) Chat and interaction will be free enough that people can be offensive, obscene or agressive
2) Chat and interaction will be severely limited to avoid any potentially upset parents, so communication and interaction are likely to feel unnatural and clunky
Generally speaking there will always be idiots out there who will go to great lengths to upset and offend others. How can the ESRB make a rating for online interactions with that in mind?
why would they be creating "innovation in either the creation or distribution of works"?
Perhaps because they're fighting a losing battle against copyright infringement, and might be able to make more money for themselves and their clients by looking at new approaches to copyright enforcement, digital distribution and generation of revenue? Just a crazy thought. Much like those crazy blacksmiths that, upon the invention of the car, didn't try to lobby the government to get cars banned but instead thought "Hey I have metal working skills, perhaps I have something to contribute to a rishing car production industry".
"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries.
By definition, a "copyright industry" would be an industry that produces copyrighted works. Such industries would not necessarily be creating "innovation in either the creation or distribution of works" and to suggest so is disingenuous.
You base your whole argument on a deliberate misinterpretation of his words. We both know that he's talking about the various legal departments and bureaucratic machines that exist solely to manage the copyrights of artists and performers, not the wider music and film industry as a whole, or particular companies that it is comprised of. I'm not championing his point, though I do happen to agree with it. I'm merely pointing out that if your best response is to pedantically point out that companies spearheading copyright campaigns also do other stuff, you need to think a little harder about the case you're trying to make.
Thankyou. Someone who feels the same way I do but is able to express themselves without poor analogies or stretched metaphors. I really believe that if the music and film industries devoted as much time and money to innovating the digital distribution market as they do to lobbying various governments and devloping restrictive DRM formats that are easily cracked, they'd have come up with a workable business model by now that meant more profits for them and better content and delivery for us. Pipe dream.....I know.
Exactly. These snappy one-liners are annoying and almost always innacurate. I dabble in Data Mining and while signifcant breakthroughs can be made by trawling through large amounts of mostly useless data, the most pertinent discoveries usually relate to just a few significant data features. More time and effort should be devoted to managing how much data gets produced and ensuring that what you do store is highly likely to be useful.
Money is just a way of counting resources. Space flight is very expensive however you count it.
Well, yes, and I suppose the unwillingness to allocate the kinds of resources we need to truely step out into space is just a reflection of the low-priority that our beloved leaders give it. However, I can still dream of my perfect utopian society where everyone works for the greater good and no-one lacks for food, shelter and erotic massages.
Anybody else find it sort of depressing that our "Voyage to the Stars" is hindered by our invention of currency? Yes, I know that whoever digs materials out of the ground needs paying, and whoever processes them into components needs paying, but it's all very depressing when you thik that we might already have a lunar base and be exploring Mars if it weren't for those damn dollars and pounds holding us back.
Well fair enough. I take your point and concede that other's might find it useful. I have more problems with motor control while drunk than math so I'd be much less confident about my ability to push little phone buttons than do a percentage, but as you pointed out there are many different people in the world. Nonetheless I will continue to bash tip calculators at every opprotunity. When they grow out of control and take over the computers of the world you'll see I was right.
My personal feeling about tipping culture in various parts of the world aside, you seem to have some resentment towards Europe. You should see a therapist about that. And who say's I'm from Europe anyway?
If you're so drunk that you can't work out what one-tenth of a number is, then double it, I suspect you'll have problems operating your phone and entering the correct figures into a Tip Calculator. You get a decimal point wrong and the phone tells you to leave a $25 tip...
Hmm, well I rarely drink so much that I can't do basic maths like moving a decimal point. Plus I don't live in America and am spared from the ridiculous expectation of leaving tips for drinks. Wow, you took the cap off my bottle of beer, here's a bonus. Oh My God he did a little flick and it went in his pocket! He's so clever! Double his tip! Seriously, if tips are such a significant part of bartender wages just put drinks prices up and incrase their wages...
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So you didn't even read my post? My whole point was that crimes are different, but people have different points beyond which crimes stop being acceptable to them. Some won't event do 31mph in a 30 zone, while others are happy to steal from peoples' houses and beat people up in the street. But don't worry, you keep right on branding people stupid...
You enable Chinese keyboard layout (dunno what's it called), and type it.
You forgot the part where you strap on around 40,000 extra keys to cover all the different pictograms. Typing Mandarin, Cantonese and other Chinese dialects (or at least one way a colleague showed me) involves using latin characters to spell the start of the pictogram sound, then selecting from sub-menus the actual word or part word you want.
If you follow the link provided about the airport scanners you find that they are passive devices meaning they don't emit terahertz waves they only recieve the waves coming off of everything around us. There are some devices out there that using terahertz radiation to inspect packages much like x-ray today.
Thankyou. The summary implies that scanning using T-waves in airports might cause you to have your DNA scrambled, which is just plain wrong. Passive scanning (which we are told is what the airport scanners are) don't expose you to any more radiation than you get in a normal day.
OK, so change his analogy from murder to rape. Still too much? How about just aggravated assault? No? How about just one punch in the face? Still too real? Alright, what if we go with just printing fake money? Physically copying DVD's to sell in the pub?
Where do we draw the line? That's the question. You might draw it in one place but other people feel differently.
Of course thanks to the genius of Holywood we all know the Enigma machine was really stolen by a bunch of Americans (U-571) and not by Poles....
I'm undoing a few moderations here but I'm afraid I just have to point out your horrific factual innacuracy. You slam Hollywood for saying American's captured the first complete Enigma machine, then you make up some nonsense that it was actually Poles? If you bothered to check your facts before criticising the facts of others you'd know it was the British, HMS Bulldog to be precise, that captured the Enigma machine in 1941.
I can only hope that you were making some cryptic comment on the whole historical innacuracies situation, but even if that's the case; too subtle.
Would have given more if I thought everybody was going to stiff them. Come on, average price of $2.03?
I do take your point, but even though most people are giving very low amounts, I'll bet that it's all extra sales that wouldn't have happened if the price was $20. I'm not ashamed to admit that I donated $5, and some people might think that's cheap (but apparently not as cheap as the average customer) but I would never have paid anything over that amount for World of Goo. So yeah, people are being cheap about it, but it's all extra money in the developers' pockets which probably wouldn't have been there otherwise.
I was thinking along similar lines, but I'm more inclined to attribute it to the fact that they're first-time Internet users, and that learning how to use a search engine and formulate a good search for the first time is bound to show brain development and "enhanced neural stimulation". Replace "Internet searching" with anything else and introduce it to people who have never done it before and I bet you'll find new brain development and enhanced neural stimulation. It's called "learning" and, shockingly, when people learn new things their brain structure changes.
Sorry, I'm not going to read what you wrote in your reply. I'll assume it was something pro-Microsoft, so I'll simply call you an MS fanboi and put some exclamation marks aftewards!!!
Long-live /.
Well yes, that's technically true. However you might have noticed I was going for a joke towards the end so you can forgive me a slight linguistic innacuracy? No?
You can pay $0.01. There's no minimum.
So the minimum is 1 cent? No minimum would imply I can offer them zero cents, which though making me a cheapskate, lowlife, unnappreciative scumbag, would make a difference to my finances. If 1000 publishers let me save 1 cent I'd soon have enought to buy a bag of cheetos, some kool-aid and more blinds to block the sunlight coming through my parent's basement window...
Oh I totally agree. I have no sympathy for patent trolls, or bullshit companies created simply to find existing or likely future technologies that aren't patented, patent them without any intention of actually doing anything productive and sit back planning their lawsuits. They're the ones ruining the system for real people. However, some of the idiotic masses here on /. have the rather dim-witted opinion that any and all patents are evil, and that we should live in some communist utopia where all ideas belong to the people, and anyone trying to rise above their peers and secure an opportunity to contribute something to mankind, without fear that someone will simply come along and steal it, is evil.
Perhaps I should have made myself clearer. I believe that if you actually invent and make a working version you should be allowed to profit from your ideas without fear that a big corporation with manufacturing capabilities way, way beyond your own can simple steal your idea and make money from it. I don't believe that you should be able to sit down, patent the concept of breathing or some ridiculous software concept and sue anyone who comes close to your unimplemented, general ideas.
Totally agree. If I come up with a great idea why the hell should I give it away for free? This bullshit opinion that all patents are evil needs to end. If somebody spends time and money develoing an idea and inventing something new they deserve some bloody reward for it, and something more substantial than the warm fuzzy feeling that they gave it to the world for free.
The only difference between Britain and the rest of the Western World is that our government just suck at hiding their Orwellian monitoring of the general population. You think other governments aren't monitoring, spying and tracking their own citizens? They've just learned from our mistakes about how to keep it quiet...
That would at least let parents know what's going on in the game. It's a lot more informative than a simple: "Online interactions not Rated"
Slightly off your point but relevant anyway: I think the sort of parents that pay attention to these ratings are smart enough to realise that online interaction has the potential to offend. It's the ones that buy an 18+ game for their 8 year old, then scream blue murder to the media/government when they walk in and see him screwing a hooker in a car that are the problem...
Exactly. They talk about how the ESRB can make these ratings based on censor technology, moderation schemes etc. but at the end of the day any game where you can interact with other players will go one of two ways:
1) Chat and interaction will be free enough that people can be offensive, obscene or agressive
2) Chat and interaction will be severely limited to avoid any potentially upset parents, so communication and interaction are likely to feel unnatural and clunky
Generally speaking there will always be idiots out there who will go to great lengths to upset and offend others. How can the ESRB make a rating for online interactions with that in mind?
why would they be creating "innovation in either the creation or distribution of works"?
Perhaps because they're fighting a losing battle against copyright infringement, and might be able to make more money for themselves and their clients by looking at new approaches to copyright enforcement, digital distribution and generation of revenue? Just a crazy thought. Much like those crazy blacksmiths that, upon the invention of the car, didn't try to lobby the government to get cars banned but instead thought "Hey I have metal working skills, perhaps I have something to contribute to a rishing car production industry".
That's right....a car analogy.
By definition, a "copyright industry" would be an industry that produces copyrighted works. Such industries would not necessarily be creating "innovation in either the creation or distribution of works" and to suggest so is disingenuous.
You base your whole argument on a deliberate misinterpretation of his words. We both know that he's talking about the various legal departments and bureaucratic machines that exist solely to manage the copyrights of artists and performers, not the wider music and film industry as a whole, or particular companies that it is comprised of. I'm not championing his point, though I do happen to agree with it. I'm merely pointing out that if your best response is to pedantically point out that companies spearheading copyright campaigns also do other stuff, you need to think a little harder about the case you're trying to make.
Thankyou. Someone who feels the same way I do but is able to express themselves without poor analogies or stretched metaphors. I really believe that if the music and film industries devoted as much time and money to innovating the digital distribution market as they do to lobbying various governments and devloping restrictive DRM formats that are easily cracked, they'd have come up with a workable business model by now that meant more profits for them and better content and delivery for us. Pipe dream.....I know.
Exactly. These snappy one-liners are annoying and almost always innacurate. I dabble in Data Mining and while signifcant breakthroughs can be made by trawling through large amounts of mostly useless data, the most pertinent discoveries usually relate to just a few significant data features. More time and effort should be devoted to managing how much data gets produced and ensuring that what you do store is highly likely to be useful.
Money is just a way of counting resources. Space flight is very expensive however you count it.
Well, yes, and I suppose the unwillingness to allocate the kinds of resources we need to truely step out into space is just a reflection of the low-priority that our beloved leaders give it. However, I can still dream of my perfect utopian society where everyone works for the greater good and no-one lacks for food, shelter and erotic massages.
Anybody else find it sort of depressing that our "Voyage to the Stars" is hindered by our invention of currency? Yes, I know that whoever digs materials out of the ground needs paying, and whoever processes them into components needs paying, but it's all very depressing when you thik that we might already have a lunar base and be exploring Mars if it weren't for those damn dollars and pounds holding us back.
Well fair enough. I take your point and concede that other's might find it useful. I have more problems with motor control while drunk than math so I'd be much less confident about my ability to push little phone buttons than do a percentage, but as you pointed out there are many different people in the world. Nonetheless I will continue to bash tip calculators at every opprotunity. When they grow out of control and take over the computers of the world you'll see I was right.
My personal feeling about tipping culture in various parts of the world aside, you seem to have some resentment towards Europe. You should see a therapist about that. And who say's I'm from Europe anyway?
If you're so drunk that you can't work out what one-tenth of a number is, then double it, I suspect you'll have problems operating your phone and entering the correct figures into a Tip Calculator. You get a decimal point wrong and the phone tells you to leave a $25 tip...
Hmm, well I rarely drink so much that I can't do basic maths like moving a decimal point. Plus I don't live in America and am spared from the ridiculous expectation of leaving tips for drinks. Wow, you took the cap off my bottle of beer, here's a bonus. Oh My God he did a little flick and it went in his pocket! He's so clever! Double his tip! Seriously, if tips are such a significant part of bartender wages just put drinks prices up and incrase their wages...