I'm not looking forward to technology giving us 'safer wars'. Safer for the technologically superior one, that is (as it's already 'safer' for the one nation that isn't fighting on their own soil).
What we need from technology, existing technology, is complete and total audio-visual coverage of every war, ever battle, every death, every innocent family left in ruins. We need to get closer to the reality of war, not further away.
What I was surprised by, was how both caller and reciever pay. When I started US cell phones over Skype, that it mattered how many "minutes" the recipient had left, when I was already paying for the conversation through Skype.
I'm calling you, I pay. Now if you run out of battery, I can see it shutting off. Otherwise, I'm ALREADY PAYING, so...
And yes, tired of the population density argument. Several countries in Europe have a smaller density, and almost a 100 countries around the world to too. In addition, several of the world's largest cities are in the states. If you can't cover everything, cover those, and cover a whole lot of people cheaply.
What I hate, is when they require me to do a little bit of everything, assuming that I'm an idiot who can't make a good password otherwise, when I'm perfectly capable of making a relatively secure password, e.g without using _ or %.
8jjash3dtripleTarget is more secure than qwerty_1 (I really hate it when they have those awkward rules, yet limit your password length to a low number).
Length is always important, though. Even passwordpassword is better than password. Then a minimum of complexity. Maybe require at least 2 different types of characters, e.g. two of the following: Lower case, upper case, numbers, special characters. Never require all, because that makes for a harder password to remember, and even type (not good for a password you have to use often, for example to logon to your work account).
All money that's not spent on what is supposedly downloaded instead (rather than in addition to), is still there to be spent on other things. Other media, even.
Just because you feel like speaking for an entire generation, I felt I had to reply, as I assume I'm the right age for that generation.
And I still have a sense of privacy (not so much of freedom because of all the rules and laws that don't make any sense, but that's a different topic). Not that it's any trouble having privacy online, just don't give out your info. I've probably got 20 different names I go by online, none of them close to my real name, or eachother. Which actually lets me bring up personal stuff when I feel it's relevant, without creating a public profile of myself online.
I don't have a need to have dirt on anyone, or for anyone to have dirt on me, to be nice with people, though. That's on a person by person basis, nice until proven jerk. Unfortunately there are a lot of jerks.
No. If you want me to elaborate; I pay only for the music I really like, because I don't have a big budget to spend on music. Much less a budget that would allow me to pay for all the music that I otherwise download, and as such I couldn't possibly be losing them much money at all, because I don't have that kind of money to spend in the first place.
Yet I download a lot of music, and that's my point. I download it. Somehow that damages them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per song. I'm gonna ruin them. Apparently.
That's all I can get from a case like this. 24 songs, a few hundred MB at most, and you're screwed for life. There's no connection between violation and verdict. I download that much when I hear a song I like on the radio, figure out which album it's on, and download the entire album to check out the other songs too. I've easily got more than a thousand albums downloaded (and that's not bragging in any way, I know it's not much compared to others yet). Have I robbed the music industry of billions of dollars?
Cases like these are exactly why I don't care about most people in the music industry. There's no sanity involved. Just "You don't obey us, we fuck you up". By most, I mean that I still want my favorite artists to stay in business. But people like those in the RIAA, who apparently solely exist to sue people, can be run over by a series of busses for all I care.
Seriously, the vast majority of people honest? You at least have a better view of humanity than I have.
Me, I consider myself a good person (which probably is more common to do than how many good people we have). But laws don't matter to me, if they don't make sense. Actually laws don't matter to me at all, only what's right and wrong. The only laws that matter to me beyond that, are the ones that actually get enforced. Someone tore off all the wind shield wipers on my car a while ago. I reported the vandalism to the police, but as I was expecting, they didn't have the ability to do anything about it, and I got a letter saying the case was closed not long after. We've got worse crimes than that running unchecked, because the police have yet worse things to deal with, and limited resources. It's not like we have a crime spree here, but still. The law enforcement has to choose which laws to enforce.
Filesharing is harmless, a very minor economic crime at best. I've never seen a trustworthy study showing harmful effects on a large scale. I've seen just as much proof of it being positive as being negative, with extra advertisement and what not. And it's called filesharing, beucase it's sharing of files. Simple as that. No one needs to give up anything, because of the wonders of bits and bytes. They're made for nothing but being copied, multiplied and spread. All it takes is electricity.
The economy certainly doesn't lose out on money from filesharing. The people still have whatever money they didn't spend. Now bootleggers, those I hate. They give filesharing a bad name. Like piracy. Pirates. I don't call myself a pirate, I don't hijack ships or stab people in the eye all that often. I duplicate bits, that's all I do. I would probably spend more money on movies and stuff if I had more money. I've got more important things to spend them on, though. When I get a pay raise and aren't still settling in in this house I've just moved to, with the woman I'm about to marry, maybe I'll be able to spend more money on media.
But I won't give any money unless I actually know that it will go to the people that made the stuff I'm paying for. I'm not interested in supporting middlemen, when ALL media can be shared on the Internet, cheaply or free through filesharing, eliminating the cost of distribution almost entirely. Of course there still needs to be people to manage this, more than just actors, artists and system developers. But the people who just sit on top thinking they're gods, with the right to make profit off of any movie or musical album, just because they are who they are, no matter how crappy or unoriginal the product, they can find themselves another job.
Anyone who complains about the effects of filesharing, better be right out there on the case of the majority of people on Wall Street, who almost killed our economy entirely. People like Madoff. The banker and car company exectuives. People who trade stocks for nothing but making profit, not actually considering what the stocks are for. Not investing in something considering how it will benefit society, just themselves. And for some reason the US government wanted to keep those people running the economy for us, throwing more money at them.
I realize that there are people like you and me in the media and entertainment industry, but they're not suffering because whatever I decide to instruct my computer to do. I have no power over their finances. I have a hard enough time managing my own. Now if you ask me to give a small amount of my money to someone more in need, who will actually benefit much more from that small amount of money than I will myself, I'll probably give it (provided it's that one or few more times. Multiply that small amount and it gets too much eventually). But whatever amount of money I spend on media and entertainment, it will rarely be well spent by those who receive it.
But how about an official categorization of porn? I'm not much into the rape and other violence stuff, or the, well, crap. Apparently these guys know what kind of porn is what, so how about we get a government run porn search engine, with each image, video, story, and whatever else, clearly labeled? Then we can all search for the stuff we want to see, and not risk being offended by what we don't want to see.
"with only one man and two women choosing to wear underwear. Sam Jackson, 23, the house manager, was the only woman to go fully naked."
So there were 3 women total, only one of which went "full monty"... And that "Nearly everyone went the full monty", means that the vast majority were men?
Yeah, slightly off-topic, but I really hate all the checked-to-install-by-default crap that comes with so many programs. MSN toolbar, Google toolbar, search engines, Quicktime, firefox addons, and on with adware, as well as registry changes I never asked for, and can't seem to revert (no, I don't want every single program I have installed, to launch on startup). There should be a way to force all of it to be opt-in, not opt-out, if that.
Requiring an Internet connection is plenty restrictive. Requiring an Internet connection for an offline game is idiotic. LAN can be as simple as finding an empty building with electricity in it, then set up the computers there. No Internet. And ISPs, or even Blizzard, can have downtime and the authentication will be unavailable. Not being able to play online when at some point your access to the servers is down, makes sense. Offline, no.
I get a bit annoyed with people saying that something "is not a big deal", as if it is the case for everyone, when clearly it's not. Even just reading the comments to this article. Then check out the official forums. Then consider that the people participating on forums are only a minority of people actually interested in the topic.
Personally I've played only 2 games online, and one of them is an MMO. The other an FPS game. RTS I've always played with or against people in a local network. Even the MMO was most fun when I was in the same room as someone else playing it with me.
Scrapping LAN is taking away an option from paying customers. Not a way to combat piracy. It's a way to encourage piracy, for people to hack their way around the dumb restrictions, or to get people to lose interest in the game all together, because the one big joy they had with the former game, was the exact option that they're now taking away.
Not saying that games shouldn't be challenging, or that we should always have access to everything. But whatever effort I'm making has to be entertaining too, I'm not gonna sit and spend 5 hours doing something I don't want to do, to be able to do something I do want to do (for games, if I have to specify that).
Especially repeating exactly the same task many times for 5 hours, there's no challenge in that. That IS a waste of time.
Games should never be about "hard", "work", "having to do" or "being allowed to not do". They're all about fun and etertainment. If I can't have fun with a game the first evening I'm playing it, and every evening or other time of day that I play it, it's not a good game.
Yeah, that's honestly what I read it as at first, "Useless Space Mission Finally Coming To An End". I skimmed through while still on that thought, and reading "but through clever engineering, experts managed to squeeze out another year" made me wonder if these were a bunch of people doing all they could to waste time.
Prize freedom? By allowing your rights to be taken away, as well starting wars?
And how come that wonderful 2nd amendment didn't allow you to dethrone Bush and Cheney the instant it was clear that they violated both your constitution, as well as international law?
And we're back to torrents. I'm one of the potential viewers. I go for convenience. I guess good for them if they actually make money off of local stations, but I'm not watching them.
So if Hulu actually profits by number of viewers, what's the point of blocking non-US users?
Sure, I can always get the episodes from torrents almost right after regular broadcasting, but that way there's no profit in it for the makers of show. And unless someone offers it online "in my country" (I rather despise the concept of country borders on the Internet), that it's being broadcast at some point in time way later, at a time of day I probably won't be able to watch it, and certainly on a channel not available to me, there isn't a good reason to make the episodes already online from a US service, unavailable to me.
Slashdot Mirror
We must not allow ourselves to be wowed by new technology and forget about the plight of our soldiers.
Or, you know, the people it kills.
Then what's this?
I'm not looking forward to technology giving us 'safer wars'. Safer for the technologically superior one, that is (as it's already 'safer' for the one nation that isn't fighting on their own soil).
What we need from technology, existing technology, is complete and total audio-visual coverage of every war, ever battle, every death, every innocent family left in ruins. We need to get closer to the reality of war, not further away.
What I was surprised by, was how both caller and reciever pay. When I started US cell phones over Skype, that it mattered how many "minutes" the recipient had left, when I was already paying for the conversation through Skype.
I'm calling you, I pay. Now if you run out of battery, I can see it shutting off. Otherwise, I'm ALREADY PAYING, so...
And yes, tired of the population density argument. Several countries in Europe have a smaller density, and almost a 100 countries around the world to too. In addition, several of the world's largest cities are in the states. If you can't cover everything, cover those, and cover a whole lot of people cheaply.
What I hate, is when they require me to do a little bit of everything, assuming that I'm an idiot who can't make a good password otherwise, when I'm perfectly capable of making a relatively secure password, e.g without using _ or %.
8jjash3dtripleTarget is more secure than qwerty_1 (I really hate it when they have those awkward rules, yet limit your password length to a low number).
Length is always important, though. Even passwordpassword is better than password. Then a minimum of complexity. Maybe require at least 2 different types of characters, e.g. two of the following: Lower case, upper case, numbers, special characters. Never require all, because that makes for a harder password to remember, and even type (not good for a password you have to use often, for example to logon to your work account).
All money that's not spent on what is supposedly downloaded instead (rather than in addition to), is still there to be spent on other things. Other media, even.
Just because you feel like speaking for an entire generation, I felt I had to reply, as I assume I'm the right age for that generation.
And I still have a sense of privacy (not so much of freedom because of all the rules and laws that don't make any sense, but that's a different topic). Not that it's any trouble having privacy online, just don't give out your info. I've probably got 20 different names I go by online, none of them close to my real name, or eachother. Which actually lets me bring up personal stuff when I feel it's relevant, without creating a public profile of myself online.
I don't have a need to have dirt on anyone, or for anyone to have dirt on me, to be nice with people, though. That's on a person by person basis, nice until proven jerk. Unfortunately there are a lot of jerks.
No. If you want me to elaborate; I pay only for the music I really like, because I don't have a big budget to spend on music. Much less a budget that would allow me to pay for all the music that I otherwise download, and as such I couldn't possibly be losing them much money at all, because I don't have that kind of money to spend in the first place.
Yet I download a lot of music, and that's my point. I download it. Somehow that damages them. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per song. I'm gonna ruin them. Apparently.
That's all I can get from a case like this. 24 songs, a few hundred MB at most, and you're screwed for life. There's no connection between violation and verdict. I download that much when I hear a song I like on the radio, figure out which album it's on, and download the entire album to check out the other songs too. I've easily got more than a thousand albums downloaded (and that's not bragging in any way, I know it's not much compared to others yet). Have I robbed the music industry of billions of dollars?
Cases like these are exactly why I don't care about most people in the music industry. There's no sanity involved. Just "You don't obey us, we fuck you up". By most, I mean that I still want my favorite artists to stay in business. But people like those in the RIAA, who apparently solely exist to sue people, can be run over by a series of busses for all I care.
Seriously, the vast majority of people honest? You at least have a better view of humanity than I have.
Me, I consider myself a good person (which probably is more common to do than how many good people we have). But laws don't matter to me, if they don't make sense. Actually laws don't matter to me at all, only what's right and wrong. The only laws that matter to me beyond that, are the ones that actually get enforced. Someone tore off all the wind shield wipers on my car a while ago. I reported the vandalism to the police, but as I was expecting, they didn't have the ability to do anything about it, and I got a letter saying the case was closed not long after. We've got worse crimes than that running unchecked, because the police have yet worse things to deal with, and limited resources. It's not like we have a crime spree here, but still. The law enforcement has to choose which laws to enforce.
Filesharing is harmless, a very minor economic crime at best. I've never seen a trustworthy study showing harmful effects on a large scale. I've seen just as much proof of it being positive as being negative, with extra advertisement and what not. And it's called filesharing, beucase it's sharing of files. Simple as that. No one needs to give up anything, because of the wonders of bits and bytes. They're made for nothing but being copied, multiplied and spread. All it takes is electricity.
The economy certainly doesn't lose out on money from filesharing. The people still have whatever money they didn't spend. Now bootleggers, those I hate. They give filesharing a bad name. Like piracy. Pirates. I don't call myself a pirate, I don't hijack ships or stab people in the eye all that often. I duplicate bits, that's all I do. I would probably spend more money on movies and stuff if I had more money. I've got more important things to spend them on, though. When I get a pay raise and aren't still settling in in this house I've just moved to, with the woman I'm about to marry, maybe I'll be able to spend more money on media.
But I won't give any money unless I actually know that it will go to the people that made the stuff I'm paying for. I'm not interested in supporting middlemen, when ALL media can be shared on the Internet, cheaply or free through filesharing, eliminating the cost of distribution almost entirely. Of course there still needs to be people to manage this, more than just actors, artists and system developers. But the people who just sit on top thinking they're gods, with the right to make profit off of any movie or musical album, just because they are who they are, no matter how crappy or unoriginal the product, they can find themselves another job.
Anyone who complains about the effects of filesharing, better be right out there on the case of the majority of people on Wall Street, who almost killed our economy entirely. People like Madoff. The banker and car company exectuives. People who trade stocks for nothing but making profit, not actually considering what the stocks are for. Not investing in something considering how it will benefit society, just themselves. And for some reason the US government wanted to keep those people running the economy for us, throwing more money at them.
I realize that there are people like you and me in the media and entertainment industry, but they're not suffering because whatever I decide to instruct my computer to do. I have no power over their finances. I have a hard enough time managing my own. Now if you ask me to give a small amount of my money to someone more in need, who will actually benefit much more from that small amount of money than I will myself, I'll probably give it (provided it's that one or few more times. Multiply that small amount and it gets too much eventually). But whatever amount of money I spend on media and entertainment, it will rarely be well spent by those who receive it.
But how about an official categorization of porn? I'm not much into the rape and other violence stuff, or the, well, crap. Apparently these guys know what kind of porn is what, so how about we get a government run porn search engine, with each image, video, story, and whatever else, clearly labeled? Then we can all search for the stuff we want to see, and not risk being offended by what we don't want to see.
Yeah, I don't think you even read the summary for this, or have a clue what the story is about.
"with only one man and two women choosing to wear underwear. Sam Jackson, 23, the house manager, was the only woman to go fully naked." So there were 3 women total, only one of which went "full monty"... And that "Nearly everyone went the full monty", means that the vast majority were men?
Yeah, slightly off-topic, but I really hate all the checked-to-install-by-default crap that comes with so many programs. MSN toolbar, Google toolbar, search engines, Quicktime, firefox addons, and on with adware, as well as registry changes I never asked for, and can't seem to revert (no, I don't want every single program I have installed, to launch on startup). There should be a way to force all of it to be opt-in, not opt-out, if that.
Requiring an Internet connection is plenty restrictive. Requiring an Internet connection for an offline game is idiotic. LAN can be as simple as finding an empty building with electricity in it, then set up the computers there. No Internet. And ISPs, or even Blizzard, can have downtime and the authentication will be unavailable. Not being able to play online when at some point your access to the servers is down, makes sense. Offline, no.
I get a bit annoyed with people saying that something "is not a big deal", as if it is the case for everyone, when clearly it's not. Even just reading the comments to this article. Then check out the official forums. Then consider that the people participating on forums are only a minority of people actually interested in the topic.
Personally I've played only 2 games online, and one of them is an MMO. The other an FPS game. RTS I've always played with or against people in a local network. Even the MMO was most fun when I was in the same room as someone else playing it with me.
Scrapping LAN is taking away an option from paying customers. Not a way to combat piracy. It's a way to encourage piracy, for people to hack their way around the dumb restrictions, or to get people to lose interest in the game all together, because the one big joy they had with the former game, was the exact option that they're now taking away.
Not saying that games shouldn't be challenging, or that we should always have access to everything. But whatever effort I'm making has to be entertaining too, I'm not gonna sit and spend 5 hours doing something I don't want to do, to be able to do something I do want to do (for games, if I have to specify that).
Especially repeating exactly the same task many times for 5 hours, there's no challenge in that. That IS a waste of time.
Games should never be about "hard", "work", "having to do" or "being allowed to not do". They're all about fun and etertainment. If I can't have fun with a game the first evening I'm playing it, and every evening or other time of day that I play it, it's not a good game.
Ah, the RL argument. Excuse me while I resurrect for the 6th time today, and begin again with shooting fire from my hands.
Yeah, that's honestly what I read it as at first, "Useless Space Mission Finally Coming To An End". I skimmed through while still on that thought, and reading "but through clever engineering, experts managed to squeeze out another year" made me wonder if these were a bunch of people doing all they could to waste time.
Prize freedom? By allowing your rights to be taken away, as well starting wars? And how come that wonderful 2nd amendment didn't allow you to dethrone Bush and Cheney the instant it was clear that they violated both your constitution, as well as international law?
Yeah, proxies, those are fun. When they work right off, or at least keep working for a while once you've set them up.
And we're back to torrents. I'm one of the potential viewers. I go for convenience. I guess good for them if they actually make money off of local stations, but I'm not watching them.
So if Hulu actually profits by number of viewers, what's the point of blocking non-US users?
Sure, I can always get the episodes from torrents almost right after regular broadcasting, but that way there's no profit in it for the makers of show. And unless someone offers it online "in my country" (I rather despise the concept of country borders on the Internet), that it's being broadcast at some point in time way later, at a time of day I probably won't be able to watch it, and certainly on a channel not available to me, there isn't a good reason to make the episodes already online from a US service, unavailable to me.
Well, it's "Your rights" online. Not necessarily your "online rights".
So was I the only one thinking "Would Kindles make a parrot able to tell me the news"?