No, another user who is aware that other people are also real, and that there's an exchange between the app developer and the app writer.
I have an app up which is free, but requests donations. It's on Apple's app store and also on Google Play. The Apple users sometimes donate. One Google user has. Now, in this particular case, I don't care much, because the app is intentionally pro bono work. But even so... The disparity is quite noticeable. If I were primarily acting to make money, there is no way I would bother with an Android port.
This is a fascinating collection of random half-baked sound bites, but it's not any kind of an argument on any topic. The world is full of theologians who also do science. Nothing unusual about that, really. It's just that they don't portray support for the basic premises of modern biology as "crusading", because it's not. The only reason there's any way for it to look like "crusading" is the ongoing flood of ever stupider attacks on basic biology by people who are not yet ready to admit that, fifty to a hundred years ago, a bunch of people who knew nothing about science and not much more about Christianity made a really stupid guess, and they're too proud to admit that they guessed wrong.
It's been over for a long time. There's nothing to "crusade" for. There's no real room for meaningful doubt about the hunks of science that are actually referred to by scientists as "the theory of evolution". Sure, there's room for learning lots more about it, but alternative theories to explain how life diversifies on this planet over time are substantially less likely than new theories of how gravity works at this point.
When I see them demanding that schools investigate alternative theories for how gravity works, and arguing that we should include "intelligent falling" as an alternative, I'll believe they're not just liars.... well, no, I'd just believe they'd at least gotten smart enough to lie consistently.
You're forgetting that the thing the author cares about is something that can be easily measured: Sales they actually do get.
If one course of action results in 100 sales and 100 downloads which aren't sales, and one results in 1,000 sales and 10,000 downloads which aren't sales, the effect on the author is that the second course of action resulted in 10 times as many sales. The alleged "losses" don't matter; all that matters is whether total sales are higher or lower. Sales up? Author has won.
And what authors, musicians, and everyone else have consistently found is: People downloading stuff without paying for it increase sales.
Yes, we could totally kill our large universities, abandon whatever role we still have in research, and send people a clear message that we're xenophobes. That would be one of our options.
I am pretty sure, though, that "let's encourage people to come live here and be brilliant" is a better option.
I have had a G+ account at least two or three times. I have deleted them every time, because they won't let me use the only name I am willing to use for social networking. "seebs" is my Real Name; it is not the name on my driver's license, but it is the name I commonly use in everyday life. According to their stated policies, I should be able to use it. But they don't do that, and a casual read of their forums reveals that a non-trivial number of people are having issues with the names thing...
So when they decided to sit on a name appeal for four months rather than commenting, was I "active" during that time? Am I "active" now? Am I three different active accounts? Heck if I know.
Similarly, I know at least one person who was very confused to get a threatening letter about how her name wasn't plausible enough and they were going to delete her G+ account and cancel associated services. She'd never signed up for G+ that she knew of, she had no idea what they were talking about... That's probably an "active user", in their counting.
So... I dunno. I could believe they have a ridiculous number of people who have accounts that they haven't yet cancelled, or don't know they have, or which they posted to once. I have a hard time believing that there's anywhere near that many "active" accounts in any meaningful sense. That said, my sample space is highly atypical (a statistical majority of my friends are trans, for instance, and thus have a tendency to have problems with policies that push for "real" names and won't let you use a name you haven't got matching ID for). So maybe there's a ton of people using it, and I'd know about this except that there's no way for me to use the service for social networking, so it's not very useful to me.
I am told that the real issue isn't that they care whether the name is your "real name", but that they found that some users become uncomfortable when they see people whose "names" don't look like Real Names. I've had at least one Google person claim that the system is looking for names which "look like a name to a human". I did ask whether the implication that people like me who think many of the names they reject look like names are not humans was intentional, but I don't think I ever got an answer.
tl;dr: G+ names policy is a lie, the staff don't follow the stated procedures, and I don't believe for a minute that more than a tiny fraction of the listed number of users are people who actually use G+ for social networking in any meaningful way.
Ahh, yes. "All have done unethical acts." And since you don't go into any details, there's no differences. That works, right? I mean, there's no real difference between Stalin and Mr. Rogers, because Fred Rogers almost certainly did something unethical at some point in his life, right? So basically the same. Sound fair?
No? Then maybe you should consider distinctions like "are the unethical acts officially endorsed by the organization and a matter of their policy, or are they things which the higher-ups condemn and try to stop?" Or "is this universal within the organization or only found occasionally?"
I would also point out that we not only have the records of the creation of this organization, but the explicit statements by those people that it was not a religion, or intended to be one; the "religion" thing is purely a tax dodge.
On Linux systems, I don't have to spend money to get a vaguely usable UI back. On Windows, the new UI might rise to the level of "vaguely" usable, without quite making it to "tolerably".
The Gnome stuff is, so far as I can tell, genuinely awful, not merely disappointing and annoying. Windows 8 isn't that bad -- but it's harder to swap out the UI if you don't like it.
The only remotely similar case I know of involves someone who wrote an unauthorized Rocky script, then sued because an actual script was similar to it; the court ruling was that since it was purely an infringing work, it never got rights in the first place.
Could you explain the exact basis for your claim that there's no protection for a cover? Specifically:
1. Are you distinguishing covers specifically authorized by the original copyright holder, from covers performed under the general compulsory license? 2. Are you distinguishing between "the person who did the cover has no protection" and "the person whose work was covered has no protection"? It would be pretty awesome if the existence of a cover gave everyone in the world unlimited right to sell copies of the cover without paying the original artist! 3. Sources and citations?
Well, Coulton at least says that he specifically did purchase such a license, and I'm inclined to believe him. It's not at all unheard of for such deals to be made.
If you are in treatment and it's not working, CHANGE DOCTORS.
Here's the thing. The most anti-treatment results available, obtained through careful cherry-picking, come only as far as "one particular class of drugs does not show consistent evidence of improvement except in the subset of patients they're supposed to be targeted for". There are many, many, kinds of treatment. There's multiple families of drugs. There's multiple kinds of therapy. And many of them have shown visible improvement for a lot of patients.
One of the problems people face in trying to treat depression is that depressed people often conclude that it's hopeless, so they don't do the things that you would take for granted for treating just about anything else. Like, say. If you are unhappy with your doctor, normally you'd try to get assigned to a different doctor.
Honestly, that's pretty much badly oversimplified bull. Depression is totally and completely unrelated to some kind of deep insight about the nature of the world, and it's fairly treatable. Yeah, not everything can magically be solved by happy pills, but that doesn't mean that actually treating depression isn't useful.
Well, you know, that is a damn good question. And I know a number of people who have been kicked from a guild or clan or whatever after months to years of getting along fine with everyone, because someone heard them refer to a "boyfriend". And it seems to me that they would really, really, like an answer to that question.
But we don't have one.
So people who have gotten sick of thinking they found a social group to game with, and then getting kicked out of it or treated in really crappy ways, have started pre-identifying so they can find groups that will treat them basically like normal human beings.
Usually, the next response is the "erasure" response -- "people should just not talk about their sex lives, then it won't be an issue." That's bullshit. It's bullshit because it's only gay people who are told not to talk about their sexual or romantic lives. No one thinks anything of it when a guy mentions a wife or a girlfriend in a game, or when a girl mentions a husband or boyfriend. But if someone mentions hating mammogram machines, and six months later mentions going out for dinner with a girlfriend, bam, she's in trouble for "shoving her sex life in everyone's face".
The reality is, social interaction involves some talking about personal lives, and that's part of what makes people engage in social gaming activities to begin with. And the reality is, video game communities are visibly prone to treating people really badly if those personal lives are in some way gay. And as long as that's true, there'll be people using words like "gaymer", or creating "LGBT-friendly" guilds.
When the day comes that you can confidently join a random guild in an MMO and expect not to get harassed about being a "fag", I doubt you'll see any real interest in "LGBT-friendly" guilds. But that day is not today.
And also a very good explanation. How on earth did they produce such a hopelessly stupid system? It was designed by people who are unready for engineering systems to be used.
I am a big fan of not blaming the victim, as a matter of moral principle. That's a great policy. But it's really crappy engineering design; building something that is designed to rely on the assumption that society can reliably provide perfect enforcement is stupid.
There's another layer of difficulty, which is that it is not always obvious whether something is a security hole or a permissive feature...
Some people do, and speak highly of them. I used to use a DataHand, and it's not really chording, though closer than most -- and honestly, if they'd make a slightly modernized one with native standard USB that didn't require a special high-amperage USB to PS/2 adapter, and was a bit easier to clean, I might well still be using it. It was a very pleasant typing experience.
DDO is really very different from most other MMOs, and yes, it really does reflect D&D's feel a lot more than the other MMOs do. It's not perfect, but it's got some very nice implementation choices.
I don't think I buy that "analysis" (using the term loosely). I mean, ultimately, the point of the gift is to be of use to people. If your gift isn't useful to people, you need to know that -- so you need those complaints.
Which is to say: The complaints are a contribution, and in this case, one desperately needed.
I reported a bug, which was accepted, in NeXTStep 0.8 or so. Last I checked, it's still in OS X. (LoginWindow won't let you enter control characters as part of a password.)
This would be a heck of a lot more effective at communicating your point, except that my spouse got all excited about knitting and has been nudging me to try it, and...
Slashdot Mirror
No, another user who is aware that other people are also real, and that there's an exchange between the app developer and the app writer.
I have an app up which is free, but requests donations. It's on Apple's app store and also on Google Play. The Apple users sometimes donate. One Google user has. Now, in this particular case, I don't care much, because the app is intentionally pro bono work. But even so... The disparity is quite noticeable. If I were primarily acting to make money, there is no way I would bother with an Android port.
This is pretty much why I don't port things to Android if I want to get paid for my time.
This is a fascinating collection of random half-baked sound bites, but it's not any kind of an argument on any topic. The world is full of theologians who also do science. Nothing unusual about that, really. It's just that they don't portray support for the basic premises of modern biology as "crusading", because it's not. The only reason there's any way for it to look like "crusading" is the ongoing flood of ever stupider attacks on basic biology by people who are not yet ready to admit that, fifty to a hundred years ago, a bunch of people who knew nothing about science and not much more about Christianity made a really stupid guess, and they're too proud to admit that they guessed wrong.
It's been over for a long time. There's nothing to "crusade" for. There's no real room for meaningful doubt about the hunks of science that are actually referred to by scientists as "the theory of evolution". Sure, there's room for learning lots more about it, but alternative theories to explain how life diversifies on this planet over time are substantially less likely than new theories of how gravity works at this point.
When I see them demanding that schools investigate alternative theories for how gravity works, and arguing that we should include "intelligent falling" as an alternative, I'll believe they're not just liars. ... well, no, I'd just believe they'd at least gotten smart enough to lie consistently.
What you have right now is a layman's understanding of the situation. Congratulations!
You're forgetting that the thing the author cares about is something that can be easily measured: Sales they actually do get.
If one course of action results in 100 sales and 100 downloads which aren't sales, and one results in 1,000 sales and 10,000 downloads which aren't sales, the effect on the author is that the second course of action resulted in 10 times as many sales. The alleged "losses" don't matter; all that matters is whether total sales are higher or lower. Sales up? Author has won.
And what authors, musicians, and everyone else have consistently found is: People downloading stuff without paying for it increase sales.
Yes, we could totally kill our large universities, abandon whatever role we still have in research, and send people a clear message that we're xenophobes. That would be one of our options.
I am pretty sure, though, that "let's encourage people to come live here and be brilliant" is a better option.
I have had a G+ account at least two or three times. I have deleted them every time, because they won't let me use the only name I am willing to use for social networking. "seebs" is my Real Name; it is not the name on my driver's license, but it is the name I commonly use in everyday life. According to their stated policies, I should be able to use it. But they don't do that, and a casual read of their forums reveals that a non-trivial number of people are having issues with the names thing...
So when they decided to sit on a name appeal for four months rather than commenting, was I "active" during that time? Am I "active" now? Am I three different active accounts? Heck if I know.
Similarly, I know at least one person who was very confused to get a threatening letter about how her name wasn't plausible enough and they were going to delete her G+ account and cancel associated services. She'd never signed up for G+ that she knew of, she had no idea what they were talking about... That's probably an "active user", in their counting.
So... I dunno. I could believe they have a ridiculous number of people who have accounts that they haven't yet cancelled, or don't know they have, or which they posted to once. I have a hard time believing that there's anywhere near that many "active" accounts in any meaningful sense. That said, my sample space is highly atypical (a statistical majority of my friends are trans, for instance, and thus have a tendency to have problems with policies that push for "real" names and won't let you use a name you haven't got matching ID for). So maybe there's a ton of people using it, and I'd know about this except that there's no way for me to use the service for social networking, so it's not very useful to me.
I am told that the real issue isn't that they care whether the name is your "real name", but that they found that some users become uncomfortable when they see people whose "names" don't look like Real Names. I've had at least one Google person claim that the system is looking for names which "look like a name to a human". I did ask whether the implication that people like me who think many of the names they reject look like names are not humans was intentional, but I don't think I ever got an answer.
tl;dr: G+ names policy is a lie, the staff don't follow the stated procedures, and I don't believe for a minute that more than a tiny fraction of the listed number of users are people who actually use G+ for social networking in any meaningful way.
Ahh, yes. "All have done unethical acts." And since you don't go into any details, there's no differences. That works, right? I mean, there's no real difference between Stalin and Mr. Rogers, because Fred Rogers almost certainly did something unethical at some point in his life, right? So basically the same. Sound fair?
No? Then maybe you should consider distinctions like "are the unethical acts officially endorsed by the organization and a matter of their policy, or are they things which the higher-ups condemn and try to stop?" Or "is this universal within the organization or only found occasionally?"
I would also point out that we not only have the records of the creation of this organization, but the explicit statements by those people that it was not a religion, or intended to be one; the "religion" thing is purely a tax dodge.
The big difference:
On Linux systems, I don't have to spend money to get a vaguely usable UI back.
On Windows, the new UI might rise to the level of "vaguely" usable, without quite making it to "tolerably".
The Gnome stuff is, so far as I can tell, genuinely awful, not merely disappointing and annoying. Windows 8 isn't that bad -- but it's harder to swap out the UI if you don't like it.
Here's what happens when an enthusiastic adopter of new technology tries to use Windows 8.
Basically: The new interface sucks. So people are avoiding it. Makes sense to me.
The only remotely similar case I know of involves someone who wrote an unauthorized Rocky script, then sued because an actual script was similar to it; the court ruling was that since it was purely an infringing work, it never got rights in the first place.
Could you explain the exact basis for your claim that there's no protection for a cover? Specifically:
1. Are you distinguishing covers specifically authorized by the original copyright holder, from covers performed under the general compulsory license?
2. Are you distinguishing between "the person who did the cover has no protection" and "the person whose work was covered has no protection"? It would be pretty awesome if the existence of a cover gave everyone in the world unlimited right to sell copies of the cover without paying the original artist!
3. Sources and citations?
It does appear to be his actual audio. Someone went after it with EQ, but it's not a new performance, it's his audio track, apparently.
So, Coulton's famous enough that we hear about it -- and also famous enough that someone who heard the recording recognized his work and told him.
What about their other arrangements? Are those ever original, or do they merely normally steal from people we haven't heard of?
Well, Coulton at least says that he specifically did purchase such a license, and I'm inclined to believe him. It's not at all unheard of for such deals to be made.
If you are in treatment and it's not working, CHANGE DOCTORS.
Here's the thing. The most anti-treatment results available, obtained through careful cherry-picking, come only as far as "one particular class of drugs does not show consistent evidence of improvement except in the subset of patients they're supposed to be targeted for". There are many, many, kinds of treatment. There's multiple families of drugs. There's multiple kinds of therapy. And many of them have shown visible improvement for a lot of patients.
One of the problems people face in trying to treat depression is that depressed people often conclude that it's hopeless, so they don't do the things that you would take for granted for treating just about anything else. Like, say. If you are unhappy with your doctor, normally you'd try to get assigned to a different doctor.
That is a spectacularly stupid interpretation of the data.
Hint: "Kleptomania" does not mean "anyone who steals at all, ever, for any reason".
Honestly, that's pretty much badly oversimplified bull. Depression is totally and completely unrelated to some kind of deep insight about the nature of the world, and it's fairly treatable. Yeah, not everything can magically be solved by happy pills, but that doesn't mean that actually treating depression isn't useful.
Well, you know, that is a damn good question. And I know a number of people who have been kicked from a guild or clan or whatever after months to years of getting along fine with everyone, because someone heard them refer to a "boyfriend". And it seems to me that they would really, really, like an answer to that question.
But we don't have one.
So people who have gotten sick of thinking they found a social group to game with, and then getting kicked out of it or treated in really crappy ways, have started pre-identifying so they can find groups that will treat them basically like normal human beings.
Usually, the next response is the "erasure" response -- "people should just not talk about their sex lives, then it won't be an issue." That's bullshit. It's bullshit because it's only gay people who are told not to talk about their sexual or romantic lives. No one thinks anything of it when a guy mentions a wife or a girlfriend in a game, or when a girl mentions a husband or boyfriend. But if someone mentions hating mammogram machines, and six months later mentions going out for dinner with a girlfriend, bam, she's in trouble for "shoving her sex life in everyone's face".
The reality is, social interaction involves some talking about personal lives, and that's part of what makes people engage in social gaming activities to begin with. And the reality is, video game communities are visibly prone to treating people really badly if those personal lives are in some way gay. And as long as that's true, there'll be people using words like "gaymer", or creating "LGBT-friendly" guilds.
When the day comes that you can confidently join a random guild in an MMO and expect not to get harassed about being a "fag", I doubt you'll see any real interest in "LGBT-friendly" guilds. But that day is not today.
And also a very good explanation. How on earth did they produce such a hopelessly stupid system? It was designed by people who are unready for engineering systems to be used.
I am a big fan of not blaming the victim, as a matter of moral principle. That's a great policy. But it's really crappy engineering design; building something that is designed to rely on the assumption that society can reliably provide perfect enforcement is stupid.
There's another layer of difficulty, which is that it is not always obvious whether something is a security hole or a permissive feature...
Some people do, and speak highly of them. I used to use a DataHand, and it's not really chording, though closer than most -- and honestly, if they'd make a slightly modernized one with native standard USB that didn't require a special high-amperage USB to PS/2 adapter, and was a bit easier to clean, I might well still be using it. It was a very pleasant typing experience.
DDO is really very different from most other MMOs, and yes, it really does reflect D&D's feel a lot more than the other MMOs do. It's not perfect, but it's got some very nice implementation choices.
I don't think I buy that "analysis" (using the term loosely). I mean, ultimately, the point of the gift is to be of use to people. If your gift isn't useful to people, you need to know that -- so you need those complaints.
Which is to say: The complaints are a contribution, and in this case, one desperately needed.
I reported a bug, which was accepted, in NeXTStep 0.8 or so. Last I checked, it's still in OS X. (LoginWindow won't let you enter control characters as part of a password.)
Well, you know.
This would be a heck of a lot more effective at communicating your point, except that my spouse got all excited about knitting and has been nudging me to try it, and...
Actually it's sorta cool.