First of all, while I don't have any firsthand experience, everything I've ever heard is that freelancing can be, at least somewhat, more profitable than working as an employee but you have the headache of handling your own insurance, taxes, unstable income, etc. Of course, it always depends on how good you are at selling yourself and, as the poster pointed out, the economy isn't good right now.
Secondly, his statement "the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability" suggests to me that he is working for a non-profit, not-for-profit, or similar organization. This I have some personal knowledge of and have family members in the same situation. They can be stable, but they also tend to be all the things he listed and, most importantly, they usually pay well below market value for their employees.
In the end, I would agree with your sentiment of "get a vacation" mainly because this isn't the kind of economy to risk your family's well being with a jump into a field as unstable as freelance software development. My suggestion would be to file this away in his head for a few years. When the economy, finally, turns around (web 3.0?), then take another look at the idea. Until then, just be happy you, and everyone else, aren't standing in a 30's era style soup kitchen line hoping to get you once daily meal.
That's easy. The "Collision-Proof" car will always be a prototype. It will never be a production model available for purchase. They will use it to get good PR for their brand while allowing a healthy distance from the idea that their production models are guaranteed to be collision proof. However, that doesn't mean that this is all useless hot air. Ideally, the more effective/economical technology developed for this prototype will trickle down to the production line. Once the more effective features have been in production with higher end companies, like Volvo, for a while they will work their way down to lower end cars. This is the way it's always worked in the car industry. Features we take for granted in modern cars (power windows, ABS breaks, airbags, etc.) can often be found on prototype cars from many decades before the first publicly sold car carried them.
Of course, as has been mentioned by other posters here, SpaceX (like all the other companies in the industry) has only been able to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time because they have had 50+ years of government funded rocket/space reasearch at their disposal (not just NASA or US reasearch, but also German reasearch funded during WWII as well as Russian research released after the end of the Cold War). Nothing ever stopped private companies from developing spacecraft. The reason they didn't was that the cost-benefit analysis said that even if they could afford to develop the tech it would have a pay-off to make the capital investment worth while or that pay-off was to far off in the future to sell the idea to investors. Thats one of the things government funding of research is good for. Governments can think in the long-term and do the unprofitable early research that make the technology more profitable for later private enterprise. They also do things for national defense reasons that serve the same effect, trickling down to non-military applications once the tech is cheaper to produce.
You say that all NASA is good for, these days, is burning money but you ignore all the incredible things they've achieved such as the reacent Mars explorers that not only succeeded in their mission but ran for far far longer than their planned operational lives. What you aren't accounting for is the fact that, even with those 50+ years of research, space exploration is still extremely expensive because of the extreme nature of the environment. Try looking up the total cost of the Apollo program and converting that number to 2008 dollars. The price was astronomical. Compared to what it took to put people on the moon, what NASA has today is nothing.
Now is the time for private companies to start looking at exploiting space, but we aren't ready yet to just get rid of NASA. Maybe, when one or two of these companies has a fully operational spacecraft capable of intra-solarsystem travel we could concider it. Right now we have nothing that could even come close to taking the place of NASA.
Just because you've never heard it before in common usage doesn't mean it's not a, virulently, racist statement. Someone in a communications position like Tony Snow should have been familiar with the term and known enough not to use it. The reason you've never heard the term used much is that it is, relatively, archaic. It's kind of like the phrase "rule of thumb" which originally referred to the practice of being legally allowed to beat your wife with a stick no thicker than your thumb. The important difference is that "rule of thumb" was a term that lost its original meaning hundreds of years ago in England while "tar baby" is a term that was in general use, in this country, up to a few decades ago and still is used in some places. Yes, that is an important distinction. Should Snow, or you, be ran out of town on a rail for using the phrase? No, but someone that uses it should be willing to apologize for, inadvertently, using the term without knowing the meaning (assuming they aren't, intentionally, contrarian and don't mind being considered a racist). As for niggardly, assuming the usage isn't in a context where the user is making a sideways slur, I agree with you that the issue is more on the part of an ignorant person being offended and that the person who should be apologizing is the one who first yelled racism.
As for your comment further down about PETA, hypothetically, deciding to use "meat" as a swear word, I don't find the comparison valid. "tar baby" has always had racist connotations to it, since the original stories were written. The original writer may not have intended to insult anyone, but the tone of the stories was, in fact, paternalistically racist much like Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden" attitude. You can try to excuse it by saying "oh, that was just the way things were back then" but, then again, slavery was "the way things were back then" too and that doesn't make it any less wrong. The best comparison I can make (and the first thing I thought about when I read your post) is a scene from the movie Clerks 2 where the stupid one from the main character duo decides he needs to take the term "porch monkey" "back for the white man". His grandma had called him as a child so he doesn't see it as a racist statement. The absurdity of the scene; what his co-workers can't convince him of; and what matches with your comment is that his grandmother was racist and there never was a non-racist meaning of the term. What this means for you is that every time you've heard someone use that term in your life they are, most likely without knowing it, making racists statements just like the comment you replied to suggested.
The problem is, most people I've seen wouldn't buy that argument for the same reason most people don't give serious thought to hard-core Libertarianism. The "for the children" argument holds a serious amount of sway in this country because we have been brainwashed into a country of cowards that spit on Benjamin Franklin's grave every time someone brings up his famous quote about people who give up basic freedoms for temporary security deserving neither. Most of the soccer moms and dads has been cowed by years of Lifetime network style made-for-TV movies and exaggerated 24-hour news network coverage of events like the Columbine massacre into thinking that there's a pedophile/psycho-gunman/terrorist around every corner looking to kill/abuse their precious little bundle of joy. All the while, crime is at historic lows compared to "the good old days". The more secure society becomes, the more hyper-sensitive we become to each, individual, event and this hyper-sensitivity is spurred on by mass media. Convincing all the hysterical and ignorant parents out there that there isn't really a "problem of epidemic proportions" and that there isn't a need for the government to step in and do everything it can to "save the children" is a loosing battle.
I think the only way to win is to, repeatedly, drag out the numbers on the, historically, low rate of crime and the lack of evidence connecting games to violence (note, I said violence not just "aggressive behavior" which, again, has never been connected with actual violent behavior). Beyond that, we should, literally, laugh in the face of anyone that says anything resembling "well we should do it anyway, just in case..." and treat them like the crazy, anti-American, cowards they are. We need to be reminded, as a society, that the cost of living in a free country is that this will never be a violence/crime free society. By the time you even come close to that point, you've given so much power to the government that it is inevitable that they will, eventually, devolve into a totalitarian state and commit monstrous acts.
Where are you from? I'd love to see streets with full-length railings as opposed to the present system here in the Chicago area, which is to install speed bumps so that anyone who dares to drive anything close to the speed limit is guaranteed to destroy the underside of their car. Sure, I could drive in more main travel routes but, then again, horrible traffic congestion if the reason I'm driving on the back-roads in the first place. Of course, speed bumps aren't uncommon in other parts of the country, but around here they don't like those pesky large yellow diamond signs or the yellow stripes on the bump itself (I'm assuming that they're scared it'll drop property values). Instead they don't bother with the sign and use white paint to draw the stripes on the bump. So, when you're driving down a residential street with the light streaming between the leaves, the white lines on the speed bumps turns into a pseudo-camouflage and, again, you end up driving over the speed bump at (heaven forbid) the speed limit.
Basically, parents are, almost by definition, selfish. They think that everyone else around them should make concessions because they decided to procreate and don't want to have to be responsible for parenting or, in the case of parents taking screaming babies to movies, restaurants, etc., miss out on things they got to do when they didn't have kids. Heaven forbid you tell them that roads exist for cars to drive on and, if they want a place for little Jimmy and Janey to play then they need to get off their asses and take them to a park (in a city, in the suburbs/country they have larger lawns). We're dealing with people who, because of choices they made are likely to be suffering from lack of sleep and exhaustion so they are, by the nature of their position, less likely to be competent to make decisions regarding public policy.
This attitude flows into the world of retail as well. Not only don't parents want to be responsible for controlling their children's' access to money (then they'd have to listen to the kids whine and, right now, they can use the money to shut them up for a bit), but they don't even want to be bothered researching what kinds of items they directly buy for their kids. If parents were, in any way, reasonable about this issue, then there wouldn't be a problem anymore as we already have a clearly designed labeling system for the maturity of content in games.
"Sure, this stuff probably does have an effect on children's psychological development - what doesn't?"
The problem is, as far as everything I've ever seen, there is no evidence that strongly supports this. Everything is hearsay and garbage studies. Why does it "probably have an effect"? I think that almost everyone who thinks that way does so because society tells him or her so. It's a self-serving cycle with no, actual, evidence to support it. We've been fed this false premise for decades or longer and most people believe it, to some extent, because it is a form of group-think. Before we do anything that impedes the rights of the game developers or retailers we should require hard evidence. Anything less from people like lazy parents, politicians, or conservative activists should be met with a healthy STFU.
On the one hand, I'd like to agree with you. On the other hand, you are talking about police that were to lazy/stupid/incompetent to bother getting an, easily justified, search warrant before performing a search on private property. The problem is, there are plenty of cases where incompetent police/DAs continue to push a case against someone (and, consequently, destroy that person's life) long after it has become obvious to almost anyone that their evidence is garbage or the situation is absurd. I have to assume that this happens because someone is trying to avoid losing face. Some examples are that teacher that was tried because the school district didn't bother to keep their porn blocker license up-to-date and the kids saw some explicit pop-up ads; the, top of his class black, highschooler who was sentenced to 10 years in jail because he had consensual oral sex with a girl a year or two younger than himself at a party and didn't want to appease the ego of the DA by making a plea bargain that branded him as a sexual predator for the rest of his life; and of course the college Lacrosse team that was tried by a DA even though it became clear almost immediately that the evidence and testimony against them was trash.
While he isn't the only one responsible for the situation (much of that can be attriuted to people like Phil Gramm and his supporter John McCain for incompetently deregulating the market with midnight, before Christmas break, additions to, unrelated, vital legislation), he guaranteed it would happen by directing his administration to not enforce many of the regulations that were actually in place for the financial industry.
Lest we forget, the Democrats have only "controlled" congress for two out of his eight years in office. I say "controlled" because having a 50.0000000000000000001% majority isn't enough to actually have any meaningful form of control especially when you don't vote as a brain-dead block like the Republicans. This doesn't even consider the fact that you have to count Lieberman in order to say the Democrats have a majority at all and he isn't a Democrat. He just chose to caucus with them, allowing him to maintain his seniority privileges and to allow the Democrats to claim the leadership positions with a technical majority.
Don't get me wrong, I don't trust the Democrats either but to say that they've had a, meaningful, majority in congress and should have been able to change things is disingenuous at best. Their present situation has only made it possible for them to put an end to the blank check Bush had for his first six years.
On the other hand, count the number of times each line of code has been re-written and all the lines of code from previous versions of Red-Hat/Fedora that have been removed for one reason or another. No OS can be written without going though a process of continuous revision and improvement so that would be a legitimate part of the development process to be consider towards the cost.
Just as a follow-up, I wanted to make the observation that Yahoo is in a position where they have to please two different customers for every dollar of revenue (actually more than two as many customer views are needed for every dollar of ad space sold but the general point is still the same). This puts them in a difficult position, but it is a position they chose to put themselves in.
Also, I too am not a fan of Yahoo and don't use their service.
The only reason these "free" services make money on their advertising is because they can claim that they have a large number of users viewing those adds on a regular basis. So, all those people who use Yahoo are paying for it every time they look at one of those adds. That's the business model. Of course, most businesses that don't deal with life-and-death issues are completely free to shoot themselves in the foot and turn their popular services into crap if they want to. On the other hand, it is completely reasonable for those customers using the service to react with outrage, let their anger be known to the company, and, if not responded to, leave the service completely thus depriving Yahoo of the ability to charge a decent sum for their advertising space. To say that it is unreasonable for users to expect high levels of reliability is to not recognize that while these particular customers may not be providing monetary payment, this company is relying on a different style of business model and those customers are the only thing that makes it possible for Yahoo to get any money as they entirely rely on advertisers to get payed.
False assumption number 1: Your power plant is hydrocarbon based.
I'll ignore the Slashdot summary as they do tend to be, especially, poorly worded, but if you actually read the article you'll realize that that's what they are advocating. They refer directly to it by talking about the "carbon loop". If they were planning on developing all the power from renewables, then it wouldn't be a loop anymore and your see a net decrease in total CO2 in the atmosphere. They make the point again when they talk about then running the fuel produced in cars. They acknowledge that there is no way to capture the secondary CO2 produced by those cars. They reference it a 3rd time in their first diagram when they list "Fossil Fuel Power Plants" as one of the primary sources for the feed CO2. Your assumption about the use of renewable energy sources is beyond the scope of the plan referenced in the article.
The problem is that the project to implement this DRM is his (and other EA executives') brainchild so they're not going to lose face by axing the campaign unless there is overwhelming evidence showing that they are wrong (in which case they might end up losing their jobs anyway so they'll probably just fight to the end). Not just ineffective, but wrong. That means that while most people aren't "thrilled", as you put it, it won't affect their efforts unless almost all of those people take an active role in denouncing it. Even if those people buy fewer EA games because of the DRM, unless they can be proven to be motivated by the DRM douchebags like this guy will, probably, just blame the drop in sales on piracy. Not only does it allow them to save face, it actually serves to re-enforce their argument for DRM.
The only real solution to things like this is some form of consumer protection law. We need to make it illegal to implement software that impedes fair use right as well as anything that even remotely acts as a root kit like the way this DRM refuses to let you uninstall it. I'm actually surprised that the way SecuROM works isn't already illegal under existing law.
No matter how they couch it, this can never help the environment. As other have mentioned, the laws of physics say you can never get more hydrocarbon fuel out of this process than you put in to run the power plant running the process. In fact, you can never make a 100% efficient process so you will always end up with extra CO2.
What this would allow is, in the event of Oil becoming truly uneconomical to excavate, the continued use of hydrocarbons for vital situation where nothing else has been shown to be anywhere near as effective, such as the creation of plastic, medicine, and fertilizer. It would also allow the continued use of modern cars and trucks without needing a radical re-design to support Hydrogen, Ethanol, etc. Of course, whether you think this is a good thing is a different story.
Nah, they've had the GPS tracking in cell phones since E911 (or whatever you call it in your country) was implemented. This is the stick (as in carrot and stick) they can threaten them with to get them to implement that nifty sonar system from the Dark Knight.;-)
I'm, normally, a strong supporter of what you're advocating. It drives me crazy to hear people call software piracy "stealing" or "theft", as a way to trump of the seriousness. However, in this case it's, at least a little, more applicable. Through the use of our intellectual property laws (in this case the patent system) Apple will be denying the original owner/creator the right to market his invention. Of course, from a strictly literal standpoint, it still isn't concidered theft.
The obvious lawyer solution would be a simple, brightly colored, warning label on the outside of the glasses saying to remain seated at all times while using them followed by a similar warning at the beginning of all games.
Because the technology requires them to isolate the individual eyes so that one eye can't see the lense the other eye is supposed to see. This is true for, virtually, all traditional 3d display techologies (shutter glasses, red/green glasses, polarized glasses, VR goggles, etc.) Please put the tinfoil hat down on the ground and step away slowly...
And, I would argue that even that part of his statement is absurd. Most game developers don't even want to have to write their own game engines much less do it from scratch. Even the ones that do write engines (id, Epic, etc.) will, for the most part, never give up their graphics APIs. APIs don't just give programmers access to specialized hardware, they also provide the developer with a raft of low level tools that he/she has no, reasonable, justification or wanting to spend the time re-developing. What will happen, is that APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL will change (as they have been all along) and simplify, as they won't have to handle all the quirky hardware anymore. The idea that engine writers will completely throw out APIs and will go back to writing everything from scratch in C/C++ is almost as absurd as suggesting that they'll go back to writing everything in Assembly language.
I don't understand it either. For whatever reason, they have always been horrible about online distribution. When I went to buy my copy (Original game and Burning Legion expansion by the time I got around to joining) I first went online to find out if I could save a little money by downloading without a box. Not only was the available download the same exact price as the retail box but they didn't even have one of the two packages available for download (I think it was the expansion). Why should I pay full price for a game you didn't have to print manuals/boxes for or pay a retailer for shelf space?
Usually, I'm not a fan of buying games by download. I want a physical copy of the game so I can still play it long after the company has gone under or stopped selling the title. The only game I've ever gotten online was Half-Life 2 because I got it for free with one of my video cards and they made it as difficult as possible to request a physical copy. In my opinion, the one place where online distribution makes sense without a company trying to take undue control of how I play the game I paid for (ala. Spore) is in the case of MMOs. If the company goes out of business or stops supporting the game, the servers wont be available for use even if I do have a physical CD/DVD. It also means that I should pay less for it with the company keeping their margins the same (as long as they don't get greedy).
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First of all, while I don't have any firsthand experience, everything I've ever heard is that freelancing can be, at least somewhat, more profitable than working as an employee but you have the headache of handling your own insurance, taxes, unstable income, etc. Of course, it always depends on how good you are at selling yourself and, as the poster pointed out, the economy isn't good right now.
Secondly, his statement "the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability" suggests to me that he is working for a non-profit, not-for-profit, or similar organization. This I have some personal knowledge of and have family members in the same situation. They can be stable, but they also tend to be all the things he listed and, most importantly, they usually pay well below market value for their employees.
In the end, I would agree with your sentiment of "get a vacation" mainly because this isn't the kind of economy to risk your family's well being with a jump into a field as unstable as freelance software development. My suggestion would be to file this away in his head for a few years. When the economy, finally, turns around (web 3.0?), then take another look at the idea. Until then, just be happy you, and everyone else, aren't standing in a 30's era style soup kitchen line hoping to get you once daily meal.
That's easy. The "Collision-Proof" car will always be a prototype. It will never be a production model available for purchase. They will use it to get good PR for their brand while allowing a healthy distance from the idea that their production models are guaranteed to be collision proof. However, that doesn't mean that this is all useless hot air. Ideally, the more effective/economical technology developed for this prototype will trickle down to the production line. Once the more effective features have been in production with higher end companies, like Volvo, for a while they will work their way down to lower end cars. This is the way it's always worked in the car industry. Features we take for granted in modern cars (power windows, ABS breaks, airbags, etc.) can often be found on prototype cars from many decades before the first publicly sold car carried them.
Ah, antifreeze. Sinfully delicious...
Of course, as has been mentioned by other posters here, SpaceX (like all the other companies in the industry) has only been able to accomplish so much in such a short amount of time because they have had 50+ years of government funded rocket/space reasearch at their disposal (not just NASA or US reasearch, but also German reasearch funded during WWII as well as Russian research released after the end of the Cold War). Nothing ever stopped private companies from developing spacecraft. The reason they didn't was that the cost-benefit analysis said that even if they could afford to develop the tech it would have a pay-off to make the capital investment worth while or that pay-off was to far off in the future to sell the idea to investors. Thats one of the things government funding of research is good for. Governments can think in the long-term and do the unprofitable early research that make the technology more profitable for later private enterprise. They also do things for national defense reasons that serve the same effect, trickling down to non-military applications once the tech is cheaper to produce.
You say that all NASA is good for, these days, is burning money but you ignore all the incredible things they've achieved such as the reacent Mars explorers that not only succeeded in their mission but ran for far far longer than their planned operational lives. What you aren't accounting for is the fact that, even with those 50+ years of research, space exploration is still extremely expensive because of the extreme nature of the environment. Try looking up the total cost of the Apollo program and converting that number to 2008 dollars. The price was astronomical. Compared to what it took to put people on the moon, what NASA has today is nothing.
Now is the time for private companies to start looking at exploiting space, but we aren't ready yet to just get rid of NASA. Maybe, when one or two of these companies has a fully operational spacecraft capable of intra-solarsystem travel we could concider it. Right now we have nothing that could even come close to taking the place of NASA.
Just because you've never heard it before in common usage doesn't mean it's not a, virulently, racist statement. Someone in a communications position like Tony Snow should have been familiar with the term and known enough not to use it. The reason you've never heard the term used much is that it is, relatively, archaic. It's kind of like the phrase "rule of thumb" which originally referred to the practice of being legally allowed to beat your wife with a stick no thicker than your thumb. The important difference is that "rule of thumb" was a term that lost its original meaning hundreds of years ago in England while "tar baby" is a term that was in general use, in this country, up to a few decades ago and still is used in some places. Yes, that is an important distinction. Should Snow, or you, be ran out of town on a rail for using the phrase? No, but someone that uses it should be willing to apologize for, inadvertently, using the term without knowing the meaning (assuming they aren't, intentionally, contrarian and don't mind being considered a racist). As for niggardly, assuming the usage isn't in a context where the user is making a sideways slur, I agree with you that the issue is more on the part of an ignorant person being offended and that the person who should be apologizing is the one who first yelled racism.
As for your comment further down about PETA, hypothetically, deciding to use "meat" as a swear word, I don't find the comparison valid. "tar baby" has always had racist connotations to it, since the original stories were written. The original writer may not have intended to insult anyone, but the tone of the stories was, in fact, paternalistically racist much like Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden" attitude. You can try to excuse it by saying "oh, that was just the way things were back then" but, then again, slavery was "the way things were back then" too and that doesn't make it any less wrong. The best comparison I can make (and the first thing I thought about when I read your post) is a scene from the movie Clerks 2 where the stupid one from the main character duo decides he needs to take the term "porch monkey" "back for the white man". His grandma had called him as a child so he doesn't see it as a racist statement. The absurdity of the scene; what his co-workers can't convince him of; and what matches with your comment is that his grandmother was racist and there never was a non-racist meaning of the term. What this means for you is that every time you've heard someone use that term in your life they are, most likely without knowing it, making racists statements just like the comment you replied to suggested.
Maybe a bunch of them got together and pooled their resources? This is Web 2.0 after all.
If they're looking for back child support, they'll have to get in line behind half the alpha quandrant.
It's in Chicago, at the very least. I had to deal with the same mess. At least it wasn't a touch screen machine though.
The problem is, most people I've seen wouldn't buy that argument for the same reason most people don't give serious thought to hard-core Libertarianism. The "for the children" argument holds a serious amount of sway in this country because we have been brainwashed into a country of cowards that spit on Benjamin Franklin's grave every time someone brings up his famous quote about people who give up basic freedoms for temporary security deserving neither. Most of the soccer moms and dads has been cowed by years of Lifetime network style made-for-TV movies and exaggerated 24-hour news network coverage of events like the Columbine massacre into thinking that there's a pedophile/psycho-gunman/terrorist around every corner looking to kill/abuse their precious little bundle of joy. All the while, crime is at historic lows compared to "the good old days". The more secure society becomes, the more hyper-sensitive we become to each, individual, event and this hyper-sensitivity is spurred on by mass media. Convincing all the hysterical and ignorant parents out there that there isn't really a "problem of epidemic proportions" and that there isn't a need for the government to step in and do everything it can to "save the children" is a loosing battle.
I think the only way to win is to, repeatedly, drag out the numbers on the, historically, low rate of crime and the lack of evidence connecting games to violence (note, I said violence not just "aggressive behavior" which, again, has never been connected with actual violent behavior). Beyond that, we should, literally, laugh in the face of anyone that says anything resembling "well we should do it anyway, just in case..." and treat them like the crazy, anti-American, cowards they are. We need to be reminded, as a society, that the cost of living in a free country is that this will never be a violence/crime free society. By the time you even come close to that point, you've given so much power to the government that it is inevitable that they will, eventually, devolve into a totalitarian state and commit monstrous acts.
Where are you from? I'd love to see streets with full-length railings as opposed to the present system here in the Chicago area, which is to install speed bumps so that anyone who dares to drive anything close to the speed limit is guaranteed to destroy the underside of their car. Sure, I could drive in more main travel routes but, then again, horrible traffic congestion if the reason I'm driving on the back-roads in the first place. Of course, speed bumps aren't uncommon in other parts of the country, but around here they don't like those pesky large yellow diamond signs or the yellow stripes on the bump itself (I'm assuming that they're scared it'll drop property values). Instead they don't bother with the sign and use white paint to draw the stripes on the bump. So, when you're driving down a residential street with the light streaming between the leaves, the white lines on the speed bumps turns into a pseudo-camouflage and, again, you end up driving over the speed bump at (heaven forbid) the speed limit.
Basically, parents are, almost by definition, selfish. They think that everyone else around them should make concessions because they decided to procreate and don't want to have to be responsible for parenting or, in the case of parents taking screaming babies to movies, restaurants, etc., miss out on things they got to do when they didn't have kids. Heaven forbid you tell them that roads exist for cars to drive on and, if they want a place for little Jimmy and Janey to play then they need to get off their asses and take them to a park (in a city, in the suburbs/country they have larger lawns). We're dealing with people who, because of choices they made are likely to be suffering from lack of sleep and exhaustion so they are, by the nature of their position, less likely to be competent to make decisions regarding public policy.
This attitude flows into the world of retail as well. Not only don't parents want to be responsible for controlling their children's' access to money (then they'd have to listen to the kids whine and, right now, they can use the money to shut them up for a bit), but they don't even want to be bothered researching what kinds of items they directly buy for their kids. If parents were, in any way, reasonable about this issue, then there wouldn't be a problem anymore as we already have a clearly designed labeling system for the maturity of content in games.
The problem is, as far as everything I've ever seen, there is no evidence that strongly supports this. Everything is hearsay and garbage studies. Why does it "probably have an effect"? I think that almost everyone who thinks that way does so because society tells him or her so. It's a self-serving cycle with no, actual, evidence to support it. We've been fed this false premise for decades or longer and most people believe it, to some extent, because it is a form of group-think. Before we do anything that impedes the rights of the game developers or retailers we should require hard evidence. Anything less from people like lazy parents, politicians, or conservative activists should be met with a healthy STFU.
On the one hand, I'd like to agree with you. On the other hand, you are talking about police that were to lazy/stupid/incompetent to bother getting an, easily justified, search warrant before performing a search on private property. The problem is, there are plenty of cases where incompetent police/DAs continue to push a case against someone (and, consequently, destroy that person's life) long after it has become obvious to almost anyone that their evidence is garbage or the situation is absurd. I have to assume that this happens because someone is trying to avoid losing face. Some examples are that teacher that was tried because the school district didn't bother to keep their porn blocker license up-to-date and the kids saw some explicit pop-up ads; the, top of his class black, highschooler who was sentenced to 10 years in jail because he had consensual oral sex with a girl a year or two younger than himself at a party and didn't want to appease the ego of the DA by making a plea bargain that branded him as a sexual predator for the rest of his life; and of course the college Lacrosse team that was tried by a DA even though it became clear almost immediately that the evidence and testimony against them was trash.
According to a post higher up, the court addressed that issue and found that he had not abandoned his property.
While he isn't the only one responsible for the situation (much of that can be attriuted to people like Phil Gramm and his supporter John McCain for incompetently deregulating the market with midnight, before Christmas break, additions to, unrelated, vital legislation), he guaranteed it would happen by directing his administration to not enforce many of the regulations that were actually in place for the financial industry.
Lest we forget, the Democrats have only "controlled" congress for two out of his eight years in office. I say "controlled" because having a 50.0000000000000000001% majority isn't enough to actually have any meaningful form of control especially when you don't vote as a brain-dead block like the Republicans. This doesn't even consider the fact that you have to count Lieberman in order to say the Democrats have a majority at all and he isn't a Democrat. He just chose to caucus with them, allowing him to maintain his seniority privileges and to allow the Democrats to claim the leadership positions with a technical majority.
Don't get me wrong, I don't trust the Democrats either but to say that they've had a, meaningful, majority in congress and should have been able to change things is disingenuous at best. Their present situation has only made it possible for them to put an end to the blank check Bush had for his first six years.
On the other hand, count the number of times each line of code has been re-written and all the lines of code from previous versions of Red-Hat/Fedora that have been removed for one reason or another. No OS can be written without going though a process of continuous revision and improvement so that would be a legitimate part of the development process to be consider towards the cost.
Just as a follow-up, I wanted to make the observation that Yahoo is in a position where they have to please two different customers for every dollar of revenue (actually more than two as many customer views are needed for every dollar of ad space sold but the general point is still the same). This puts them in a difficult position, but it is a position they chose to put themselves in.
Also, I too am not a fan of Yahoo and don't use their service.
The only reason these "free" services make money on their advertising is because they can claim that they have a large number of users viewing those adds on a regular basis. So, all those people who use Yahoo are paying for it every time they look at one of those adds. That's the business model. Of course, most businesses that don't deal with life-and-death issues are completely free to shoot themselves in the foot and turn their popular services into crap if they want to. On the other hand, it is completely reasonable for those customers using the service to react with outrage, let their anger be known to the company, and, if not responded to, leave the service completely thus depriving Yahoo of the ability to charge a decent sum for their advertising space. To say that it is unreasonable for users to expect high levels of reliability is to not recognize that while these particular customers may not be providing monetary payment, this company is relying on a different style of business model and those customers are the only thing that makes it possible for Yahoo to get any money as they entirely rely on advertisers to get payed.
I'll ignore the Slashdot summary as they do tend to be, especially, poorly worded, but if you actually read the article you'll realize that that's what they are advocating. They refer directly to it by talking about the "carbon loop". If they were planning on developing all the power from renewables, then it wouldn't be a loop anymore and your see a net decrease in total CO2 in the atmosphere. They make the point again when they talk about then running the fuel produced in cars. They acknowledge that there is no way to capture the secondary CO2 produced by those cars. They reference it a 3rd time in their first diagram when they list "Fossil Fuel Power Plants" as one of the primary sources for the feed CO2. Your assumption about the use of renewable energy sources is beyond the scope of the plan referenced in the article.
The problem is that the project to implement this DRM is his (and other EA executives') brainchild so they're not going to lose face by axing the campaign unless there is overwhelming evidence showing that they are wrong (in which case they might end up losing their jobs anyway so they'll probably just fight to the end). Not just ineffective, but wrong. That means that while most people aren't "thrilled", as you put it, it won't affect their efforts unless almost all of those people take an active role in denouncing it. Even if those people buy fewer EA games because of the DRM, unless they can be proven to be motivated by the DRM douchebags like this guy will, probably, just blame the drop in sales on piracy. Not only does it allow them to save face, it actually serves to re-enforce their argument for DRM.
The only real solution to things like this is some form of consumer protection law. We need to make it illegal to implement software that impedes fair use right as well as anything that even remotely acts as a root kit like the way this DRM refuses to let you uninstall it. I'm actually surprised that the way SecuROM works isn't already illegal under existing law.
No matter how they couch it, this can never help the environment. As other have mentioned, the laws of physics say you can never get more hydrocarbon fuel out of this process than you put in to run the power plant running the process. In fact, you can never make a 100% efficient process so you will always end up with extra CO2.
What this would allow is, in the event of Oil becoming truly uneconomical to excavate, the continued use of hydrocarbons for vital situation where nothing else has been shown to be anywhere near as effective, such as the creation of plastic, medicine, and fertilizer. It would also allow the continued use of modern cars and trucks without needing a radical re-design to support Hydrogen, Ethanol, etc. Of course, whether you think this is a good thing is a different story.
Nah, they've had the GPS tracking in cell phones since E911 (or whatever you call it in your country) was implemented. This is the stick (as in carrot and stick) they can threaten them with to get them to implement that nifty sonar system from the Dark Knight. ;-)
I'm, normally, a strong supporter of what you're advocating. It drives me crazy to hear people call software piracy "stealing" or "theft", as a way to trump of the seriousness. However, in this case it's, at least a little, more applicable. Through the use of our intellectual property laws (in this case the patent system) Apple will be denying the original owner/creator the right to market his invention. Of course, from a strictly literal standpoint, it still isn't concidered theft.
The obvious lawyer solution would be a simple, brightly colored, warning label on the outside of the glasses saying to remain seated at all times while using them followed by a similar warning at the beginning of all games.
Because the technology requires them to isolate the individual eyes so that one eye can't see the lense the other eye is supposed to see. This is true for, virtually, all traditional 3d display techologies (shutter glasses, red/green glasses, polarized glasses, VR goggles, etc.) Please put the tinfoil hat down on the ground and step away slowly...
And, I would argue that even that part of his statement is absurd. Most game developers don't even want to have to write their own game engines much less do it from scratch. Even the ones that do write engines (id, Epic, etc.) will, for the most part, never give up their graphics APIs. APIs don't just give programmers access to specialized hardware, they also provide the developer with a raft of low level tools that he/she has no, reasonable, justification or wanting to spend the time re-developing. What will happen, is that APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL will change (as they have been all along) and simplify, as they won't have to handle all the quirky hardware anymore. The idea that engine writers will completely throw out APIs and will go back to writing everything from scratch in C/C++ is almost as absurd as suggesting that they'll go back to writing everything in Assembly language.
I don't understand it either. For whatever reason, they have always been horrible about online distribution. When I went to buy my copy (Original game and Burning Legion expansion by the time I got around to joining) I first went online to find out if I could save a little money by downloading without a box. Not only was the available download the same exact price as the retail box but they didn't even have one of the two packages available for download (I think it was the expansion). Why should I pay full price for a game you didn't have to print manuals/boxes for or pay a retailer for shelf space?
Usually, I'm not a fan of buying games by download. I want a physical copy of the game so I can still play it long after the company has gone under or stopped selling the title. The only game I've ever gotten online was Half-Life 2 because I got it for free with one of my video cards and they made it as difficult as possible to request a physical copy. In my opinion, the one place where online distribution makes sense without a company trying to take undue control of how I play the game I paid for (ala. Spore) is in the case of MMOs. If the company goes out of business or stops supporting the game, the servers wont be available for use even if I do have a physical CD/DVD. It also means that I should pay less for it with the company keeping their margins the same (as long as they don't get greedy).