Interesting that it would produce a black page rather than simply do nothing, or print an error message. Of course your main concern should be the copier phoning a special hotline informing your local constabulary of your actions. You can expect the boys in blue, or men with excessive amounts of firearms if you're American, to be knocking on your door any minute.
Yes, they look for the EURion constellation and refuse to copy anything with it in. Modern scanners also block attempts to reproduce anything with the pattern. Obviously there are ways round this, but it probably puts off casual attempts at counterfeiting by morons and curious kids.
Nah, they're clearly being impartial and delivering on their commitments: providing a mechanism that ensures that infecting peoples' Macs "Just Works"!
Really fascinating to see some of the designs games companies considered. The Ultravision Video Arcade System in particular has that amazing retro look to it (yes I'm aware that it's nearly 30 years old and is actually retro). It looks like something you'd discover in Fallout 3, lost in the back rooms of an abandoned factory.
Nonsense. Even a benevolent dictatorship violates the right of the people to self-determination.
Nonsense. I live in a country with a democratically elected government, and we've had three different parties involved in leading the country over the last decade and beyond. Nothing changes. That's not self-determination through democracy, that's giving people the illusion of being able to detemrine their destiny through democracy. I'm sure in many dictatorships the people on the street have just as much ability to decide their own fate as I do - they can change careers, can get married, can have kids, can buy a new car or choose to use public transport, and so on.
Democracy vs. Dictatorship is not as black and white as you're making out.
While I agree with the sentiment of your post, it's preaching to the converted here I think. The problem is all the people out there who buy games without really giving a crap about the important issues. Fallout 3 and New Vegas for example. Horribly buggy on the PC upon release, still crashing to desktop regularly despite a swathe of patches and no-one is really that up in arms about it (probably because it's still a good game despite the bugs). Similar case, and something on British news today - Black Ops. Released with what seems like a hastily cobbled together multiplayer framework that left a significant proportion of the player base unable to use the multiplayer aspect of the game at all, and it's still like that today. The publisher gives assurances about working with gamers to fix it, but what they'd really like is for everyone to just shut up and swallow the pill. As long as there are people out there willing to for out £40-50 on a game that's broken at release, or has intrusive DRM stuffed everywhere, this kind of behaviour and this approach to selling games will continue.
This is why is adamantly defend Valve and their "it'll be late but by God it'll work" approach to releasing games, arguments over Steam as DRM aside.
Ah yes I see what you mean - you say tomato, I say tomato (you have to do the different pronunciation in your head there). One wonders how long we'll be plagued by competing measurement systems.
In the UK, ISPs rarely run phone (or even TV) services, so this problem doesn't exist here.
Actually most of the major ISPs do run phone and media services. BT, Virgin, Talk Talk (who own more ISPs than you think and are quietly changing the names to Talk Talk) to name a few.
I'm gutted about this post for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to make that joke, and secondly I think you might have buggered it up. Kilometers are metric so woudln't they have to use an imperial flux capacitor? Pedantic I know, but that's what I get like when someone beats me to a punchline!
I'll show them how to destroy it for half the price.
I'll do it for a quarter! Seriously, just give me all the paper files and the hard disks of any computers and I'll stick them in a skip and set the whole mess on fire. Could turn it into a street party celebrating the end of a sinister Orwellian initiative!
The processing overheads of a ping versus encoding, sending, receiving and decoding a video stream are probably fairly different. I'd be very, very surprised if the wireless grpahics card only added a 1ms lag to the whole affair, particularly when you read their information on how this all works.
So the summary talks about annoying fan noise and how this card is the answer, but with the wireless keyboard and mouse that it suggests I could just put my PC at the other end of the room, wired to my TV or monitor, without an expensive and display-lag-inducing wireless graphics card. Don't get me wrong, the card probably has some benefits, but reducing the annoyance of GPU cooling fans is a bit of a stretch.
Or perhaps ask if that infamous pizzeria at/b/ might be interested in dropping some snacks off?
They already went after ACS:Law who were doing the same thing, so I'm sure their brightest and best (almost an oxymoron given the context) are firing up their harassment engines as we speak.
Don't hold your breath, I highly doubt that the entire legal profession will disappear overnight. Even less likely that the profession will stop attracting assholes who are ready to do anything at all for money, including victimising innocent people like these two and their compatriots at ACS:Law.
Indeed, not to mention the limitation that you need a surface off of which you bounce the intitial laser pulse. This "looking round corners" idea/phrase someone has put forward is total crap. Sure, you can look around a corner as long as it's (e.g.) a doorframe and the door opens outwards in the right direction for your camera to use as a reflector. Want to look round the corner of a building? Into a room where the door opens inwards? Over a wall? Then you're shit out of luck.
Once again the media takes a story and dumbs it down to the point where most people get entirely the wrong idea.
If you're talking to morons who can't help but drivel on endlessly then perhaps the problem is not with the phone or the means of communication.
I honestly can't believe that you could be so close-minded that you can't accept that some people don't care about SMS messaging. Stop being deliberately obtuse and realise that not everyone in the world is just like you.
Either it's a setup, or somehow the neurons in your brain have become quantumly entangled with the neurons of the guy who posted just above you. Spooky.
That just shows how focused you are on defending your precious TV show
I stopped reading here. You're an angry human being and I can't be arsed trying to discuss this with you any further. If you come here for enjoyment and to learn as well as to talk then I suggest you calm down. If, as I suspect, you're here because you're bored or simply trolling then kindly direct your vitriol elsewhere in the future.
You assume a great deal here, such as who was and wasn't a fan of the show, and their attitude towards the previous series in the franchise. Sorry, but I seriously doubt you're in a position to make that sort of statement, unless you've met the majority of the world's people in person, or have managed to cut through the trolling, geekism, elitism and general mish-mash of opinions that appear on Internet forums.. The rest of your text becomes less relevant based on that fact. An MMO of Knightrider would be stupid of course, and one of Friends even stupider. If you can't see why those are bad ideas and why an MMO based on DS9 has the potential to be good then I think you have a problem with reasoning. Something set in space, with an epic Universe and a massive diversity of races and worlds already established can make a great MMO if it's done well. You're simply assuming that it'll be done badly. You mght be right but you might be wrong. Unless you're psychic then we'll just have to wait and see.
Outer space MMOGs only work if they are mostly about combat or offer a lot of systems and areas to explore. A single station space MMOG by design cannot really do either. So that means it's going to be reduced to the play mechanics of Pokemon or similar and maybe a lot of chat rooms. Stuff like buying your own store on The Promenade. Joy.
You seem to have an obsession with combat, and offer up the lack of combat (even though there was plenty) in the DS9 TV show as a reason for it sucking in your opinion. Combat obviously forms an integral part of many MMOs and the designers woudl be stupid to leave it out of this effort, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all of an MMO. As for your assumption that the game would focus entirely around DS9 and people wouldn't be able to board a ship and fly elsewhere is just that: an assumption. You might be right and in that case the game could potentially suck hard. I highly doubt though that the studio in question would be stupid/brave enough to make an MMO set on a single station when they have the entire Star Trek Universe to utilise. We shall see. Until then I suggest you put aside your hatred (or at least dislike) of the show and wait and see what the game is like. I love the franchise but have hated several crappy games set within the same Universe. The reverse could be true in your case.
Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough.
What about the ones that are lost sales though? Should they be ignored? What about the ethics of it? Should people enjoy the fruits of your labour for free when you've made it clear that you want to be paid for them?
I'm sorry but you're spouting your opinion like it's fact. I'm well under 40 now and was obviously much younger when DS9 came out. I enjoyed the show and so did many of my friends that were Star Trek fans. The first series was admittedly a little slow, but got better as time went on. Towards the end of the DS9 run the Dominion storyline was excellent and truely gripping.
Just because it wasn't all flying round space blowing the shit out of people doesn't mean it was a bad show. You may feel that way but there are more than a few that would disagree. I could go on to make a point by point rebuttal of your list but I can't be bothered. I'll leave it to the readers to think how a game set around a single space station could still be made interesting. Here's a hint: you might be able to leave the area of space around Deep Space Nine and fly to other places.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting that it would produce a black page rather than simply do nothing, or print an error message. Of course your main concern should be the copier phoning a special hotline informing your local constabulary of your actions. You can expect the boys in blue, or men with excessive amounts of firearms if you're American, to be knocking on your door any minute.
Yes, they look for the EURion constellation and refuse to copy anything with it in. Modern scanners also block attempts to reproduce anything with the pattern. Obviously there are ways round this, but it probably puts off casual attempts at counterfeiting by morons and curious kids.
Nah, they're clearly being impartial and delivering on their commitments: providing a mechanism that ensures that infecting peoples' Macs "Just Works"!
Really fascinating to see some of the designs games companies considered. The Ultravision Video Arcade System in particular has that amazing retro look to it (yes I'm aware that it's nearly 30 years old and is actually retro). It looks like something you'd discover in Fallout 3, lost in the back rooms of an abandoned factory.
You have that the wrong way round entirely. If they both have the same resolution then the smaller one will have more pixels per inch.
But using just his first name would be equivalent to referring to the ... Prime Minister of the UK as "Gordon":
That'd be even worse since his name is David.
Nonsense. Even a benevolent dictatorship violates the right of the people to self-determination.
Nonsense. I live in a country with a democratically elected government, and we've had three different parties involved in leading the country over the last decade and beyond. Nothing changes. That's not self-determination through democracy, that's giving people the illusion of being able to detemrine their destiny through democracy. I'm sure in many dictatorships the people on the street have just as much ability to decide their own fate as I do - they can change careers, can get married, can have kids, can buy a new car or choose to use public transport, and so on.
Democracy vs. Dictatorship is not as black and white as you're making out.
While I agree with the sentiment of your post, it's preaching to the converted here I think. The problem is all the people out there who buy games without really giving a crap about the important issues. Fallout 3 and New Vegas for example. Horribly buggy on the PC upon release, still crashing to desktop regularly despite a swathe of patches and no-one is really that up in arms about it (probably because it's still a good game despite the bugs). Similar case, and something on British news today - Black Ops. Released with what seems like a hastily cobbled together multiplayer framework that left a significant proportion of the player base unable to use the multiplayer aspect of the game at all, and it's still like that today. The publisher gives assurances about working with gamers to fix it, but what they'd really like is for everyone to just shut up and swallow the pill. As long as there are people out there willing to for out £40-50 on a game that's broken at release, or has intrusive DRM stuffed everywhere, this kind of behaviour and this approach to selling games will continue.
This is why is adamantly defend Valve and their "it'll be late but by God it'll work" approach to releasing games, arguments over Steam as DRM aside.
Ah yes I see what you mean - you say tomato, I say tomato (you have to do the different pronunciation in your head there). One wonders how long we'll be plagued by competing measurement systems.
In the UK, ISPs rarely run phone (or even TV) services, so this problem doesn't exist here.
Actually most of the major ISPs do run phone and media services. BT, Virgin, Talk Talk (who own more ISPs than you think and are quietly changing the names to Talk Talk) to name a few.
I'm gutted about this post for two reasons. Firstly I wanted to make that joke, and secondly I think you might have buggered it up. Kilometers are metric so woudln't they have to use an imperial flux capacitor? Pedantic I know, but that's what I get like when someone beats me to a punchline!
I'll show them how to destroy it for half the price.
I'll do it for a quarter! Seriously, just give me all the paper files and the hard disks of any computers and I'll stick them in a skip and set the whole mess on fire. Could turn it into a street party celebrating the end of a sinister Orwellian initiative!
The processing overheads of a ping versus encoding, sending, receiving and decoding a video stream are probably fairly different. I'd be very, very surprised if the wireless grpahics card only added a 1ms lag to the whole affair, particularly when you read their information on how this all works.
So the summary talks about annoying fan noise and how this card is the answer, but with the wireless keyboard and mouse that it suggests I could just put my PC at the other end of the room, wired to my TV or monitor, without an expensive and display-lag-inducing wireless graphics card. Don't get me wrong, the card probably has some benefits, but reducing the annoyance of GPU cooling fans is a bit of a stretch.
You'd like to be able to play with his graphs you say? Here you go.
Or perhaps ask if that infamous pizzeria at /b/ might be interested in dropping some snacks off?
They already went after ACS:Law who were doing the same thing, so I'm sure their brightest and best (almost an oxymoron given the context) are firing up their harassment engines as we speak.
Don't hold your breath, I highly doubt that the entire legal profession will disappear overnight. Even less likely that the profession will stop attracting assholes who are ready to do anything at all for money, including victimising innocent people like these two and their compatriots at ACS:Law.
Indeed, not to mention the limitation that you need a surface off of which you bounce the intitial laser pulse. This "looking round corners" idea/phrase someone has put forward is total crap. Sure, you can look around a corner as long as it's (e.g.) a doorframe and the door opens outwards in the right direction for your camera to use as a reflector. Want to look round the corner of a building? Into a room where the door opens inwards? Over a wall? Then you're shit out of luck.
Once again the media takes a story and dumbs it down to the point where most people get entirely the wrong idea.
If you're talking to morons who can't help but drivel on endlessly then perhaps the problem is not with the phone or the means of communication.
I honestly can't believe that you could be so close-minded that you can't accept that some people don't care about SMS messaging. Stop being deliberately obtuse and realise that not everyone in the world is just like you.
Either it's a setup, or somehow the neurons in your brain have become quantumly entangled with the neurons of the guy who posted just above you. Spooky.
your post getting a "+5, Insightful" amazes and bewilders me.
You've been here longer than me - these things should no longer surprise you.
That just shows how focused you are on defending your precious TV show
I stopped reading here. You're an angry human being and I can't be arsed trying to discuss this with you any further. If you come here for enjoyment and to learn as well as to talk then I suggest you calm down. If, as I suspect, you're here because you're bored or simply trolling then kindly direct your vitriol elsewhere in the future.
snip
You assume a great deal here, such as who was and wasn't a fan of the show, and their attitude towards the previous series in the franchise. Sorry, but I seriously doubt you're in a position to make that sort of statement, unless you've met the majority of the world's people in person, or have managed to cut through the trolling, geekism, elitism and general mish-mash of opinions that appear on Internet forums.. The rest of your text becomes less relevant based on that fact. An MMO of Knightrider would be stupid of course, and one of Friends even stupider. If you can't see why those are bad ideas and why an MMO based on DS9 has the potential to be good then I think you have a problem with reasoning. Something set in space, with an epic Universe and a massive diversity of races and worlds already established can make a great MMO if it's done well. You're simply assuming that it'll be done badly. You mght be right but you might be wrong. Unless you're psychic then we'll just have to wait and see.
Outer space MMOGs only work if they are mostly about combat or offer a lot of systems and areas to explore. A single station space MMOG by design cannot really do either. So that means it's going to be reduced to the play mechanics of Pokemon or similar and maybe a lot of chat rooms. Stuff like buying your own store on The Promenade. Joy.
You seem to have an obsession with combat, and offer up the lack of combat (even though there was plenty) in the DS9 TV show as a reason for it sucking in your opinion. Combat obviously forms an integral part of many MMOs and the designers woudl be stupid to leave it out of this effort, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all of an MMO. As for your assumption that the game would focus entirely around DS9 and people wouldn't be able to board a ship and fly elsewhere is just that: an assumption. You might be right and in that case the game could potentially suck hard. I highly doubt though that the studio in question would be stupid/brave enough to make an MMO set on a single station when they have the entire Star Trek Universe to utilise. We shall see. Until then I suggest you put aside your hatred (or at least dislike) of the show and wait and see what the game is like. I love the franchise but have hated several crappy games set within the same Universe. The reverse could be true in your case.
Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough.
What about the ones that are lost sales though? Should they be ignored? What about the ethics of it? Should people enjoy the fruits of your labour for free when you've made it clear that you want to be paid for them?
I'm sorry but you're spouting your opinion like it's fact. I'm well under 40 now and was obviously much younger when DS9 came out. I enjoyed the show and so did many of my friends that were Star Trek fans. The first series was admittedly a little slow, but got better as time went on. Towards the end of the DS9 run the Dominion storyline was excellent and truely gripping.
Just because it wasn't all flying round space blowing the shit out of people doesn't mean it was a bad show. You may feel that way but there are more than a few that would disagree. I could go on to make a point by point rebuttal of your list but I can't be bothered. I'll leave it to the readers to think how a game set around a single space station could still be made interesting. Here's a hint: you might be able to leave the area of space around Deep Space Nine and fly to other places.