I agree with piracy in some respects, I think it's a great tool to get what you want while protesting some aspects such as DRMs, aggressive pricing, inconvenience, etc...
And this is why we have no effective protests anymore. If you're protesting, it's really only effective if you sacrifice something to do so. Otherwise it's shallow, and the corporation/government/whoever you protest against knows you can be pushed around because you don't really care. If your principles aren't important enough to you to sacrifice while fighting for them, why should they take them seriously? You obviously don't.
Imagine if the Civil Rights movement had its members get up and leave as soon as they were threatened with arrest? What if they got up from the seats they were occupying in a whites-only cafe because they were hungry? What if they picketted, but only until they were threatened with fire hoses? What if they continued to use public transit during the boycotts, just because it was a long walk? Do you really think anything would have changed?
By pirating, you let the game publishers know that you can't do without their game, so all they need to do is hold the line, increase the DRM, and eventually they can get you (or others like you) to buy it without giving into your 'demands'. Look at Modern Warfare 2. There was a 'boybott' group on Steam filled with players in MW2 on launch day. It's no wonder IW didn't care that people were upset, they still got paid!
So don't blow a bunch of smoke up my ass about piracy being a useful protest tool. It likely does more harm to protests than good. Using the word 'protest' is just a convenient justification for "I don't want to pay for this, but I also don't want to feel like I'm doing anything wrong".
Well, the point of pack-in DLC is to continue to make money from the secondary market. The publishers only dislike the secondary market because they don't get paid. If they can make $10-20 in DLC guaranteed from used game sales, then their opposition to resale disappears.
You're also right about the 'this quest is on the game disc, but we wanted you to pay us more for it' DLC. Of course, there's lots of other DLC that's totally reasonable from a consumer perspective, too. Most notable would be songs for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. The alternative is terrible full-disc releases (GH:80s for example) where you need to pay for 30 songs in order to get the 5 you actually want. They also aren't developed until well after the time where they could be included disk, they aren't necessary patches or intentionally removed from the game, and they have a definite non-zero cost to produce (licensing). That's a perfect example of DLC that's good for the company and the consumer. Other examples are car packs for racing games (also requiring licensing and adding to the gameplay) or, to a lesser extent, map packs in a shooter or any other game.
No sense throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hate the instrusive and offensive DLC (included on the disk, Dragon Age character that prompts you in-game to purchase), but it's really not all bad.
If you don't want people calling you, why have an incoming number to dial? Otherwise, you must think everyone is violating ethics by 'using your time without compensation'. More specifically, do you claim all other forms of advertising are equally unethical? They all use your stuff (internet, TV, newspaper, magazine, etc) for their own purposes without compensation.
Like I said, simply tell them you aren't interested and hang up. The ethics violation occurs after you inform them that you do not want them to call you (through the Do Not Call list or verbally) and they do so anyway.
If an article is deleted, big deal. The student will most likely retain their own copy when they submit it to the professor.
Personally, I would think this could affect your grade. As a journalism student, a valuable skill to have is picking the notable stories from those that are non-notable. Your future employer will want you to write about stuff people care about (particularly your publication's target audience), so you better be able to accurately judge that for yourself.
I like the idea of being able to produce something useful out of what seems like an inane exercise and to allow students the pleasure of disseminating knowledge responsibly.
Agreed, if you're going to go through that much effort to colelct the information you might as well publish it somewhere it could be read.
And just because you think harassing people isn't unethical doesn't make it so.
I'd like to hear your reasoning for thinking simply cold-calling someone is unethical. I'd like to know how you find it to be harassment, even.
It's only unethical when you start sidestepping the law, collect the phone number by illicit means, or continue to harass the person by calling repeatedly.
I put this in the same category as people who work for telemarketers. They know they are pissing people off left and right because people tell them so on a daily basis. That doesn't stop them, though. They all use the same excuses: "I have to work somewhere." and "Someone else would do it anyway."
This guy just takes it a step further and ignores criminal actions as well as unethical ones.
But, telemarketing isn't unethical, just annoying. As long as they follow the law (Do Not Call List, etc) in both letter and intent, they aren't doing anything either illegal or unethical. You can hang up on their asses any time you like, so do it. Just because they can exploit your kindness to keep you on the line doesn't make them unethical, it just makes you a sucker.
That said, I have a friend who spent some time telemarketing. He would bring a book with him and hope that someone would put him on hold as a way to 'get back' at him for interrupting their dinner or whatever. He couldn't hang up, so he would just read the book until they did. He made only pennies less, so he didn't particularly care
This is not a win for DRM, its a loss for the consumer.
It's both. The DRM still wins for preventing piracy. The consumer also loses because their product is less functional. But, since people are still buying the game, guess which one the suits care more about?
That's because engineers hate leaving things up to chance. Also, when projects are funded by the gov't, they usually have more requirements than just 'take some cool pictures'. And when they did it, they didn't have nice cheap off-the-shelf digital cameras.
In other words, if they didn't have a bunch of engineers working for a beaurocracy and there was cheap COTS hardware to use, they very well might have done it just as cheaply.
Re:Gosh, I wonder what THAT will be used for....
on
ISS To Get Man Cave
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Reminds me of the best line to end a Bond movie, ever. From Moonraker:
M: What's Bond doing?
Q: I think he's attempting re-entry, sir!
Same deal as when Best Buy offers to take your money so the Geek Squad can install your new XBox 360 game... and this was before it was possible to install to HDD.
Hence the penalty for being uninsured (even though it's relatively small). I'm also not sure if there's a cap placed on such coverage. For example, if you have a preexisting condition that requires on average 20x the average yearly medical expenses, I don't think there's anything to stop them from offering you a new plan in a high-risk pool with 20x the premiums. By the same token, though, the ban on dropping your coverage for new medical conditions (you were seemingly healthy, now you are revealed to have a rare condition) is a very good thing (again, assuming the penalties were high enough to actually dissuade the insurance providers).
You're absolutely right that the whole state-by-state thing needs to go. We didn't fix the broken system, we just got more people who were in the even more broken system (uninsured) into the slightly-less-broken system (insured).
Ah, I fail at reading comprehension. It's a distributed computing measure, meaning that yes, the laptops are already in the field doing someone else's work, they just happen to be earthquake sensors as well.
The balance board uses strain guages, which can't detect earthquakes to my knowledge. Similarly, motionplus is gyroscopes, which in this case are not accurate enough to determine the very small displacements from an earthquake.
However, I'm very surprised they're not just going for a bulk purchase of unlocked smartphones, it must be cheaper and just as accurate as laptop accelerometers. Laptops seem very roundabout...
So we're looking at at least $4000 for a typical MacBook that isn't complete shit.
You said entry-level, not 'cheapest decent'. An entry-level MacBook is $1k, end of story. Similarly, a new entry-level video card costs about $100. It's not determined by whether it runs Crysis or is suitable for a power-user, entry-level is meant to be lowest cost that meets some minimum requirement to be a part of the group (ie, it's a laptop and not a netbook).
Anyone else thinking stereograms? You know, two screens and cross your eyes a bit and bits of the image pop. It's got actual 3D, and it doesn't require glasses. Of course, it would likely get INCREDIBLY tiring after a while, unless they did something interesting to trick your eyes into not thinking they're focusing weird.
Depending on the integration between the system and their database of city addresses, it was probably non-trivial to test the entire system with a non-existent address. Do you skip testing the address verification, or do you add fake addresses to the database?
Most people can't appreciate the quality and faithful sound reproduction of a good audio system, which is a shame because if more people could, then more people would buy better equipment, and consequently, the really expensive stuff wouldn't be as expensive as it is.
But still more expensive than the average person could afford. The cost of high-end audio equipment isn't due to high manufacturing costs that would be reduced with scale, it's due to using high quality and accurate components. Transformers, headphone driver coils, etc are pretty much a fixed cost, and they're damn expensive. Particularly when your'e talking about balanced audio paths, you need to screen your parts so you have nearly identical high quality parts within each system, which is difficult in mass production.
Sure, the cost would come down, but not to consumer-range for daily use on the subway or at the gym. I use $5 Sony earbuds because they were cheap, comfortable, and stay on my ears. I don't have enough times where the desire for high-fidelity audio outweighs the risk of damage to a component that costs as much as my MP3 player. Particularly since I would notice the digital compression artifacts anyway, so the price of the headphones would be a waste on the limited quality increase.
Sure, give me a collection of vinyl (before compression forced the signal headroom down to about 3dB), a hi-fi turntable, low harmonic distortion amp, and $2k reference headphones and I'd be in heaven. However, until somebody gives me that cash and I don't have a better use for it, I can get by just fine with what I have.
The software was fine, the fault was with the government.
The first rule of programming is to never trust user inputs, your user is probably an idiot. This is a system meant for government use, so doubly so.
The flaw is that the poor classification was not only allowed, but overrode other conditions and downgraded the call, rather than simply not upgrading the call.
How does Occam's Razor apply here? Neither of our explanations seem particularly more complex. Sure, if income were the only determining factor you would be right, though.
The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime. Source
Oops, looks like it's not.
As for some 'magical quality', look around. Men and women think different, they act different, they are different. To expect that one parent can perform as well across all parenting tasks as well as two parents of different genders is laughable. I'm not saying there aren't men who are terrible leader/mentors, or that all women can provide infinite amounts of TLC, but we're talking generalized averages. It's the mental equivalent of why we have different mens and womens leagues in most sports, men and women perform well at different tasks. Why is it wrong to say that men and women need each other as complementary parents to raise children well, when it's so obviously the case?
The only sexist part comes when you assume that women can't provide strong leadership or that men can't provide nurturing.
You're right that there's nothing excluding a man from being nurturing or a woman a leader.
No, the issue comes when you assume that a woman can provide the same kind and quality of leadership as a man, or a man the same kind and quality of nurturing as a woman. There's a reason why single-parent households are more likely to fail in raising children, and this is it.
But most of the tools to raise children correctly are considered 'old fashioned' or even unacceptable. Martial punishment when young, strong leadership from the father and a nurturing mother (which is, of course, 'sexist' because men and women are the same), and actually following through with punishments (the horror!). The only proper method of parenting is found in an after-school program.
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I agree with piracy in some respects, I think it's a great tool to get what you want while protesting some aspects such as DRMs, aggressive pricing, inconvenience, etc...
And this is why we have no effective protests anymore. If you're protesting, it's really only effective if you sacrifice something to do so. Otherwise it's shallow, and the corporation/government/whoever you protest against knows you can be pushed around because you don't really care. If your principles aren't important enough to you to sacrifice while fighting for them, why should they take them seriously? You obviously don't.
Imagine if the Civil Rights movement had its members get up and leave as soon as they were threatened with arrest? What if they got up from the seats they were occupying in a whites-only cafe because they were hungry? What if they picketted, but only until they were threatened with fire hoses? What if they continued to use public transit during the boycotts, just because it was a long walk? Do you really think anything would have changed?
By pirating, you let the game publishers know that you can't do without their game, so all they need to do is hold the line, increase the DRM, and eventually they can get you (or others like you) to buy it without giving into your 'demands'. Look at Modern Warfare 2. There was a 'boybott' group on Steam filled with players in MW2 on launch day. It's no wonder IW didn't care that people were upset, they still got paid!
So don't blow a bunch of smoke up my ass about piracy being a useful protest tool. It likely does more harm to protests than good. Using the word 'protest' is just a convenient justification for "I don't want to pay for this, but I also don't want to feel like I'm doing anything wrong".
Plants vs. Zombies was also recently released for iPhone.
Well, the point of pack-in DLC is to continue to make money from the secondary market. The publishers only dislike the secondary market because they don't get paid. If they can make $10-20 in DLC guaranteed from used game sales, then their opposition to resale disappears.
You're also right about the 'this quest is on the game disc, but we wanted you to pay us more for it' DLC. Of course, there's lots of other DLC that's totally reasonable from a consumer perspective, too. Most notable would be songs for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. The alternative is terrible full-disc releases (GH:80s for example) where you need to pay for 30 songs in order to get the 5 you actually want. They also aren't developed until well after the time where they could be included disk, they aren't necessary patches or intentionally removed from the game, and they have a definite non-zero cost to produce (licensing). That's a perfect example of DLC that's good for the company and the consumer. Other examples are car packs for racing games (also requiring licensing and adding to the gameplay) or, to a lesser extent, map packs in a shooter or any other game.
No sense throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Hate the instrusive and offensive DLC (included on the disk, Dragon Age character that prompts you in-game to purchase), but it's really not all bad.
Exactly, it's either a useful skill or a harsh life lesson. Either way, it's worthwhile to learn while still in college.
If you don't want people calling you, why have an incoming number to dial? Otherwise, you must think everyone is violating ethics by 'using your time without compensation'. More specifically, do you claim all other forms of advertising are equally unethical? They all use your stuff (internet, TV, newspaper, magazine, etc) for their own purposes without compensation.
Like I said, simply tell them you aren't interested and hang up. The ethics violation occurs after you inform them that you do not want them to call you (through the Do Not Call list or verbally) and they do so anyway.
If an article is deleted, big deal. The student will most likely retain their own copy when they submit it to the professor.
Personally, I would think this could affect your grade. As a journalism student, a valuable skill to have is picking the notable stories from those that are non-notable. Your future employer will want you to write about stuff people care about (particularly your publication's target audience), so you better be able to accurately judge that for yourself.
I like the idea of being able to produce something useful out of what seems like an inane exercise and to allow students the pleasure of disseminating knowledge responsibly.
Agreed, if you're going to go through that much effort to colelct the information you might as well publish it somewhere it could be read.
And just because you think harassing people isn't unethical doesn't make it so.
I'd like to hear your reasoning for thinking simply cold-calling someone is unethical. I'd like to know how you find it to be harassment, even.
It's only unethical when you start sidestepping the law, collect the phone number by illicit means, or continue to harass the person by calling repeatedly.
I put this in the same category as people who work for telemarketers. They know they are pissing people off left and right because people tell them so on a daily basis. That doesn't stop them, though. They all use the same excuses: "I have to work somewhere." and "Someone else would do it anyway."
This guy just takes it a step further and ignores criminal actions as well as unethical ones.
But, telemarketing isn't unethical, just annoying. As long as they follow the law (Do Not Call List, etc) in both letter and intent, they aren't doing anything either illegal or unethical. You can hang up on their asses any time you like, so do it. Just because they can exploit your kindness to keep you on the line doesn't make them unethical, it just makes you a sucker.
That said, I have a friend who spent some time telemarketing. He would bring a book with him and hope that someone would put him on hold as a way to 'get back' at him for interrupting their dinner or whatever. He couldn't hang up, so he would just read the book until they did. He made only pennies less, so he didn't particularly care
This is not a win for DRM, its a loss for the consumer.
It's both. The DRM still wins for preventing piracy. The consumer also loses because their product is less functional. But, since people are still buying the game, guess which one the suits care more about?
For example you still cant download Assassins Creed II and it has been out for almost an month already.
On the other hand, C&C4 is already cracked and readily available.
Well, guess that means EA will be building an even more draconian DRM next time...
That's because engineers hate leaving things up to chance. Also, when projects are funded by the gov't, they usually have more requirements than just 'take some cool pictures'. And when they did it, they didn't have nice cheap off-the-shelf digital cameras.
In other words, if they didn't have a bunch of engineers working for a beaurocracy and there was cheap COTS hardware to use, they very well might have done it just as cheaply.
Reminds me of the best line to end a Bond movie, ever. From Moonraker:
M: What's Bond doing?
Q: I think he's attempting re-entry, sir!
Same deal as when Best Buy offers to take your money so the Geek Squad can install your new XBox 360 game... and this was before it was possible to install to HDD.
Hence the penalty for being uninsured (even though it's relatively small). I'm also not sure if there's a cap placed on such coverage. For example, if you have a preexisting condition that requires on average 20x the average yearly medical expenses, I don't think there's anything to stop them from offering you a new plan in a high-risk pool with 20x the premiums. By the same token, though, the ban on dropping your coverage for new medical conditions (you were seemingly healthy, now you are revealed to have a rare condition) is a very good thing (again, assuming the penalties were high enough to actually dissuade the insurance providers).
You're absolutely right that the whole state-by-state thing needs to go. We didn't fix the broken system, we just got more people who were in the even more broken system (uninsured) into the slightly-less-broken system (insured).
Ah, I fail at reading comprehension. It's a distributed computing measure, meaning that yes, the laptops are already in the field doing someone else's work, they just happen to be earthquake sensors as well.
The balance board uses strain guages, which can't detect earthquakes to my knowledge. Similarly, motionplus is gyroscopes, which in this case are not accurate enough to determine the very small displacements from an earthquake.
However, I'm very surprised they're not just going for a bulk purchase of unlocked smartphones, it must be cheaper and just as accurate as laptop accelerometers. Laptops seem very roundabout...
So we're looking at at least $4000 for a typical MacBook that isn't complete shit.
You said entry-level, not 'cheapest decent'. An entry-level MacBook is $1k, end of story. Similarly, a new entry-level video card costs about $100. It's not determined by whether it runs Crysis or is suitable for a power-user, entry-level is meant to be lowest cost that meets some minimum requirement to be a part of the group (ie, it's a laptop and not a netbook).
Anyone else thinking stereograms? You know, two screens and cross your eyes a bit and bits of the image pop. It's got actual 3D, and it doesn't require glasses. Of course, it would likely get INCREDIBLY tiring after a while, unless they did something interesting to trick your eyes into not thinking they're focusing weird.
Depending on the integration between the system and their database of city addresses, it was probably non-trivial to test the entire system with a non-existent address. Do you skip testing the address verification, or do you add fake addresses to the database?
Most people can't appreciate the quality and faithful sound reproduction of a good audio system, which is a shame because if more people could, then more people would buy better equipment, and consequently, the really expensive stuff wouldn't be as expensive as it is.
But still more expensive than the average person could afford. The cost of high-end audio equipment isn't due to high manufacturing costs that would be reduced with scale, it's due to using high quality and accurate components. Transformers, headphone driver coils, etc are pretty much a fixed cost, and they're damn expensive. Particularly when your'e talking about balanced audio paths, you need to screen your parts so you have nearly identical high quality parts within each system, which is difficult in mass production.
Sure, the cost would come down, but not to consumer-range for daily use on the subway or at the gym. I use $5 Sony earbuds because they were cheap, comfortable, and stay on my ears. I don't have enough times where the desire for high-fidelity audio outweighs the risk of damage to a component that costs as much as my MP3 player. Particularly since I would notice the digital compression artifacts anyway, so the price of the headphones would be a waste on the limited quality increase.
Sure, give me a collection of vinyl (before compression forced the signal headroom down to about 3dB), a hi-fi turntable, low harmonic distortion amp, and $2k reference headphones and I'd be in heaven. However, until somebody gives me that cash and I don't have a better use for it, I can get by just fine with what I have.
The software was fine, the fault was with the government.
The first rule of programming is to never trust user inputs, your user is probably an idiot. This is a system meant for government use, so doubly so.
The flaw is that the poor classification was not only allowed, but overrode other conditions and downgraded the call, rather than simply not upgrading the call.
How does Occam's Razor apply here? Neither of our explanations seem particularly more complex. Sure, if income were the only determining factor you would be right, though.
The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime. Source
Oops, looks like it's not.
As for some 'magical quality', look around. Men and women think different, they act different, they are different. To expect that one parent can perform as well across all parenting tasks as well as two parents of different genders is laughable. I'm not saying there aren't men who are terrible leader/mentors, or that all women can provide infinite amounts of TLC, but we're talking generalized averages. It's the mental equivalent of why we have different mens and womens leagues in most sports, men and women perform well at different tasks. Why is it wrong to say that men and women need each other as complementary parents to raise children well, when it's so obviously the case?
Nope, martial as in martial law. I call in the army and use sandbags and razor wire to prevent them from leaving the house.
Yes, corporal punishment ;)
The only sexist part comes when you assume that women can't provide strong leadership or that men can't provide nurturing.
You're right that there's nothing excluding a man from being nurturing or a woman a leader.
No, the issue comes when you assume that a woman can provide the same kind and quality of leadership as a man, or a man the same kind and quality of nurturing as a woman. There's a reason why single-parent households are more likely to fail in raising children, and this is it.
But most of the tools to raise children correctly are considered 'old fashioned' or even unacceptable. Martial punishment when young, strong leadership from the father and a nurturing mother (which is, of course, 'sexist' because men and women are the same), and actually following through with punishments (the horror!). The only proper method of parenting is found in an after-school program.