About all games on Windows already could be pirated, practically speaking - but fans WANT to fund their favourite artists, plain and simple.
And this is not mainly because of the laws, its just human nature. See, Switzerland for instance already allows anyone to record or otherwise obtain and possess and enjoy any music for free, as long as it is for private use (yourself, family, close friends). Okay, it's not entirely free since there's also some legal arrangement with fixed fees that apply to empty media that partly reimburses artists. But that's besides the actual point I want to make: The important but is that people still actively buy music in Switzerland. They also pay street artists despite not being forced to.
Setup times are far less time-consuming than Linux.
Eh? The Enterprise Linux distros (which you can also buy pre-installed on hardware if you want) do far more work for you in most cases. Even just on a single setup, but much, much more if you have more than just one server.
Ask them... probably it would actually outlast a nuke or two. Well, we know the existing nuclear powers are capable of sending many nukes, cutting cables and underwater cables, destroying microwave dishes, some also can shoot down any satellites they don't like. But the fact that they can do ALL of that AND kill most of the world's population due to starting a nuclear war by attacking the center of Europe is what puts more than a few nails into the coffin of specifically nuke-blast protection. Somehow I get the feeling even just that last little bit might make whatever data or other goods you put there rather un-valuable anyhow, as there won't be quite so many people in need of it for a while.
By the way, it also definitely won't last against some much less Apocalyptic event, such as the Swiss criminal justice, the legislative, or the Swiss people deciding that your goods need to be handed over.
Even so, I think it's decent hosting, rather safe against theft or sabotage, and a good reason for your executive staff or chief sysadmin will get a one or more days of skiing holidays in Switzerland every few years.
You are right to be suspicious, but it boils down to this: Diebold and friends ignorantly or willfully manufacture bad machines. Properly being able to state voting intents and/or having an computer assisted (or -based) vote is not an innately unachievable thing - in fact we already knew how to do better than Diebold and friends for 25+ years now. That is because there has been a lot of published academic research into that specific problem...
We also know paper-based voting is not very good anymore in terms of anonymity / privacy, protection against injection or miscounting of votes, protection against the forging or issuing of false/additional eligibility tokens etc.
Basically, what we need is an open source e-voting system that is up to par with the 25+ years of serious academic research that has been going on internationally, then we will most definitely have a system that is better than paper-based voting. We cannot, however, accept anything less than that, it will indeed be less secure than paper-based voting.
The mandatory achievement system is just a piss-poor pretense to try and force online-drm, market segmentation (buy one copy of SC2 for each geographical area, because blizzard says it is entitled to get paid to record achievements on each realm?) and such random marketing "SC2 is so elite, you cannot cheat" restrictions on people, besides forced updates and mandatory participation in a huge marketing data gathering effort (with as many achievements, you know exactly what people played, how much, etc... so you can make predictions about what the smallest possible addition and the highest possible price will be, amongst many other things)
Bittorrent indeed has something called "Local peer discovery". I guess the beauty of it would be precisely that you wouldn't have to have a master.
The other case with a clean master->slave arrangement is already quite well possible on any OS I know of. Yes, even on Windows (look up "WSUS", though there are other tools as well).
Your immigration and non-work immigration procedures are overly complex and should be simplified.
That you have insufficient legislation in the ways of income equality within society and/or insufficient controls on the employer's side (they are the ones that benefit from paying low wages to foreign, unregistered workers). They're the ones that rip society off, not the immigrants.
That you probably should force insurances to reasonably and properly insure anyone. The immigrants aren't different from you and I, they'd get insurance if they reasonably could.
Wealth for a society is the amount of work that goes above what's needed to fulfill someone's basic needs as long as it does not all end up in the same individual's hands (even fair exchange to equal perceived value has great benefits). Right now, this criterion is easily very much exceeded by the average illegal immigrant, wanting to kick them out is just plain stupid.
Here is the thing. A mock movie while great is not getting the voice of the paying public. As one individual says. Giving away software is a good feeling. But getting people to part with their money and give it to you is an even better feeling.
Maybe you missed the fact that Sintel had quite a lot of sponsors and donations? So they did get paid for it. It is a viable business model and has been around way longer than modern capitalism or even the legal intellectual property.
Computer games loosing "core gameplay concepts" is, I think, due to market demand. No complex games really do well on the market. Probably because the average gamer is, well, average nowadays, and quite probably mainly plays games when he or she is already tired and unwilling to learn.
I'd say the same thing is true for Office and iTunes to some extent. They tried to make them even more, uh, applicable for some audiences who would not be willing or capable of learning more efficient ways to use software. (That they did not necessarily succeed is besides the point, btw).
I think we're seeing lots of companies making trade-off from efficiency during use and features to low learning barriers - it helps companies hire more and cheaper staff without training and it helps gamers "win" even when intellectually inert. The actually added features still are often quite useful, but the dumbing-down is an obstacle to, uh, "enthusiast" users, no matter if it is a computer game or a piece of software meant for work.
And who decided it was "undue"? Please prohibit all TV shows that feature weapons, aggressive behaviour, army staff or bearded men, 'cause it is not only the label "Taliban" that may remember people of the war. Besides, SOME of us had their beloved ones murdered, raped, killed in accidents etc. recently...
If I read the articles related to this right, the MEAA says the percentage of the movie profits shared with the actors is not high enough. The citizen does not get "squashed" in the middle, just actors want their share of the movie's profits. If you don't try to achieve a more fair distribution of profits, that is what will hurt citizens.
And "World of Goo" made more profit, "Minecraft" also has done it, "Dwarf Fortress" enjoys at least enough success to keep its creator working full-time on it on entirely voluntary donations alone, and larger productions like "GTA" and "World of Warcraft" can be extreme cash cows like nothing else in the entertainment industry. Applying the same reasoning, you actually should instead develop in C++ or Java for PC (and maybe consoles).
Just how will the existence of "many distros" be a problem for application developers? For now, both the standard libraries and the package format are not likely to get removed in any of those (thus entirely avoiding any problems for android developers so far), and even IF it happened, the situation would not be any more complex than the situation on Linux - which a great many Distributions can deal with.
Swing is not a legacy addition, it is a still actively maintained GUI lib with fairly standard design. But if you don't like it, that is obviously okay, since Android does not even have Swing.
There actually are more viable language choices. Android can not just support Java, but JVM languages - which is an important distinction. Want something like Lisp? try Clojure. Want something like Haskell or Java? Try Scala. Also, it supports C/C++. There is also fairly good support for scripting languages (Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell) at the moment, though the scripting languages cannot currently do everything and run more slowly. Even more languages are supported through experimental implementations...
Apple so far has ObjC, C, Cpp and intends to allow more, like Squeak.
Even apart from this, programmer freedom & choice is more on Android's side - not just because of the programming languages, but also because the OS is free & open source - which even leaves you the choice of not using Google's store or create a tailored version of it all, right down to the OS. No such luck on Apple's side. They intend to press you into their App Store monopoly, and I'd say that might be enough of a reason to not pick IOS up at all, despite the larger user base. Besides, Android has nicer phone hardware (especially the high-end HTC ones)... which should also matter a little to an enthusiast user / developer.
In the legal game, a subtraction for someone is an addition for another. Since laws are created with the motivation of the addition, not subtraction in mind (and that's even the case for the RIAA if it wants ACTA, they want the benefit for themselves - not the damage to others) we call them "rights".
If the next guy really sees no alternative other than to migrate everything back to Windows 7 again and pay Microsoft forever, that person is even more incompetent. The point was to save money, and now that the system is ready the other guy wants to ramp up costs again? What a joke.
It is by far not the only and first project with ~medium difficulty that failed. Swiss IT admins and computer scientists working for the administration are not rarely incompetent AND working with an extremely bad waterfall model. That thing alone is the reason why we lost some millions and some billions in failed projects. I wouldn't be surprised if they used it, again.
Also think of the context in which this was granted. It was mainly meant against profiteering publishers with larger outreach than the artists themselves. Well, that did not really work out - because copyright is transferable they very often ensure they can buy it... or if not, they'll use the fact that they're the only ones that can "provide" many stores to get the lion's share of profits anyhow.
Instead -as the intent of copyright law as it was granted- the law serving to help artists against publishers, it is now more of a law used against the very people which grant it, in general.
I disagree. 30 year old design approaches are often far more simple, and additionally often misguided and deficient with regards to various desirable properties. They are only really good as a study of things we already did and found to be flawed or insufficiently sophisticated, and that's a topic most useful to teach while the actual state-of-the art is also taught, but overall TOO simple. As an analogy 30 year old computers are very much the equivalent of 2000 year old toolboxes. We still essentially have all the same old tools, but more modern, more specialized ones that are particularly good for some purpose that you ought to know about as well in order to be considered "good" or "well trained".
Applying these anywhere near to the state-of-the-art is more complex than ever, not trivial as you make it out to be. Really the only reason to exclusively focus on such old boxes is because you couldn't find a teacher or couldn't reserve enough time to teach either the modern low-level stuff well enough. I guess it's easier and cheaper to find what possibly are older staff to work with much simpler, comparatively unchallenging machines.
Until the phone's applications actually work the same way on the Linux desktop... no. People can easily be put off by UI differences in not entirely trivial applications, and will want to go back to whatever they think they "know well". Only entirely trivial applications don't seem to suffer this problem -those that make reading a ten-point list in natural language text seem rather complicated in comparison-, but the Linux desktop environments don't have such users in mind.
It is not that these desktop environments are really too complex. But most people want to operate computers while not exerting more mental / cognitive effort than a 2 year old kid... so only the things already learned or really, really simple seem to get adapted.
Your boss taking months to "get used" to the sound is important here, and the fact that he was using it to diagnose problems, not for learning how the machine works conceptually.
Sure, anyone can probably very easily tell a badly broken engine (no sound, heavy thumps, clacking, croaking etc) from a working one - even after experiencing a working one only once. But that is all - you do not learn at all how an engine works from hearing it, nor can you omit the prior learning.
We use our spatially accurate senses (sight, touch) and communication in abstract terms -language- to learn about things conceptually, not hearing or taste or heat perception. The spatially inaccurate senses however are very good at detecting irregularities and so on - but that is all based on experience not learned or conceptualized with these senses.
I do not think the sound adds anything, myself. The visuals could be helpful if played more slowly, but the sound? It does not help me, and as used in TFA, it is even an annoying noise.
Actual code and performance analysis shouldn't be boring or "dry" to someone who aspires to be a computer scientist or specifically a programmer, especially not the first time they learn about it...
Slashdot Mirror
About all games on Windows already could be pirated, practically speaking - but fans WANT to fund their favourite artists, plain and simple.
And this is not mainly because of the laws, its just human nature. See, Switzerland for instance already allows anyone to record or otherwise obtain and possess and enjoy any music for free, as long as it is for private use (yourself, family, close friends).
Okay, it's not entirely free since there's also some legal arrangement with fixed fees that apply to empty media that partly reimburses artists. But that's besides the actual point I want to make: The important but is that people still actively buy music in Switzerland. They also pay street artists despite not being forced to.
Setup times are far less time-consuming than Linux.
Eh? The Enterprise Linux distros (which you can also buy pre-installed on hardware if you want) do far more work for you in most cases. Even just on a single setup, but much, much more if you have more than just one server.
Ask them... probably it would actually outlast a nuke or two. Well, we know the existing nuclear powers are capable of sending many nukes, cutting cables and underwater cables, destroying microwave dishes, some also can shoot down any satellites they don't like. But the fact that they can do ALL of that AND kill most of the world's population due to starting a nuclear war by attacking the center of Europe is what puts more than a few nails into the coffin of specifically nuke-blast protection.
Somehow I get the feeling even just that last little bit might make whatever data or other goods you put there rather un-valuable anyhow, as there won't be quite so many people in need of it for a while.
By the way, it also definitely won't last against some much less Apocalyptic event, such as the Swiss criminal justice, the legislative, or the Swiss people deciding that your goods need to be handed over.
Even so, I think it's decent hosting, rather safe against theft or sabotage, and a good reason for your executive staff or chief sysadmin will get a one or more days of skiing holidays in Switzerland every few years.
You are right to be suspicious, but it boils down to this: Diebold and friends ignorantly or willfully manufacture bad machines. Properly being able to state voting intents and/or having an computer assisted (or -based) vote is not an innately unachievable thing - in fact we already knew how to do better than Diebold and friends for 25+ years now. That is because there has been a lot of published academic research into that specific problem...
We also know paper-based voting is not very good anymore in terms of anonymity / privacy, protection against injection or miscounting of votes, protection against the forging or issuing of false/additional eligibility tokens etc.
Basically, what we need is an open source e-voting system that is up to par with the 25+ years of serious academic research that has been going on internationally, then we will most definitely have a system that is better than paper-based voting. We cannot, however, accept anything less than that, it will indeed be less secure than paper-based voting.
And you will believe your vote was counted correctly, rather than just you having gotten a hash anyone can produce as long as they have your ballot?
I think it will require more if done this way. Multiple counting instances, multiple instances that verify voter eligibility.
The mandatory achievement system is just a piss-poor pretense to try and force online-drm, market segmentation (buy one copy of SC2 for each geographical area, because blizzard says it is entitled to get paid to record achievements on each realm?) and such random marketing "SC2 is so elite, you cannot cheat" restrictions on people, besides forced updates and mandatory participation in a huge marketing data gathering effort (with as many achievements, you know exactly what people played, how much, etc... so you can make predictions about what the smallest possible addition and the highest possible price will be, amongst many other things)
Bittorrent indeed has something called "Local peer discovery". I guess the beauty of it would be precisely that you wouldn't have to have a master.
The other case with a clean master->slave arrangement is already quite well possible on any OS I know of. Yes, even on Windows (look up "WSUS", though there are other tools as well).
Wealth for a society is the amount of work that goes above what's needed to fulfill someone's basic needs as long as it does not all end up in the same individual's hands (even fair exchange to equal perceived value has great benefits). Right now, this criterion is easily very much exceeded by the average illegal immigrant, wanting to kick them out is just plain stupid.
Here is the thing. A mock movie while great is not getting the voice of the paying public. As one individual says. Giving away software is a good feeling. But getting people to part with their money and give it to you is an even better feeling.
Maybe you missed the fact that Sintel had quite a lot of sponsors and donations? So they did get paid for it. It is a viable business model and has been around way longer than modern capitalism or even the legal intellectual property.
Computer games loosing "core gameplay concepts" is, I think, due to market demand. No complex games really do well on the market. Probably because the average gamer is, well, average nowadays, and quite probably mainly plays games when he or she is already tired and unwilling to learn.
I'd say the same thing is true for Office and iTunes to some extent. They tried to make them even more, uh, applicable for some audiences who would not be willing or capable of learning more efficient ways to use software. (That they did not necessarily succeed is besides the point, btw).
I think we're seeing lots of companies making trade-off from efficiency during use and features to low learning barriers - it helps companies hire more and cheaper staff without training and it helps gamers "win" even when intellectually inert. The actually added features still are often quite useful, but the dumbing-down is an obstacle to, uh, "enthusiast" users, no matter if it is a computer game or a piece of software meant for work.
And who decided it was "undue"? Please prohibit all TV shows that feature weapons, aggressive behaviour, army staff or bearded men, 'cause it is not only the label "Taliban" that may remember people of the war. Besides, SOME of us had their beloved ones murdered, raped, killed in accidents etc. recently...
If I read the articles related to this right, the MEAA says the percentage of the movie profits shared with the actors is not high enough. The citizen does not get "squashed" in the middle, just actors want their share of the movie's profits. If you don't try to achieve a more fair distribution of profits, that is what will hurt citizens.
And "World of Goo" made more profit, "Minecraft" also has done it, "Dwarf Fortress" enjoys at least enough success to keep its creator working full-time on it on entirely voluntary donations alone, and larger productions like "GTA" and "World of Warcraft" can be extreme cash cows like nothing else in the entertainment industry. Applying the same reasoning, you actually should instead develop in C++ or Java for PC (and maybe consoles).
Just how will the existence of "many distros" be a problem for application developers? For now, both the standard libraries and the package format are not likely to get removed in any of those (thus entirely avoiding any problems for android developers so far), and even IF it happened, the situation would not be any more complex than the situation on Linux - which a great many Distributions can deal with.
Swing is not a legacy addition, it is a still actively maintained GUI lib with fairly standard design. But if you don't like it, that is obviously okay, since Android does not even have Swing.
There actually are more viable language choices. Android can not just support Java, but JVM languages - which is an important distinction. Want something like Lisp? try Clojure. Want something like Haskell or Java? Try Scala. Also, it supports C/C++. There is also fairly good support for scripting languages (Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell) at the moment, though the scripting languages cannot currently do everything and run more slowly. Even more languages are supported through experimental implementations...
Apple so far has ObjC, C, Cpp and intends to allow more, like Squeak.
Even apart from this, programmer freedom & choice is more on Android's side - not just because of the programming languages, but also because the OS is free & open source - which even leaves you the choice of not using Google's store or create a tailored version of it all, right down to the OS. No such luck on Apple's side. They intend to press you into their App Store monopoly, and I'd say that might be enough of a reason to not pick IOS up at all, despite the larger user base. Besides, Android has nicer phone hardware (especially the high-end HTC ones)... which should also matter a little to an enthusiast user / developer.
In the legal game, a subtraction for someone is an addition for another. Since laws are created with the motivation of the addition, not subtraction in mind (and that's even the case for the RIAA if it wants ACTA, they want the benefit for themselves - not the damage to others) we call them "rights".
If the next guy really sees no alternative other than to migrate everything back to Windows 7 again and pay Microsoft forever, that person is even more incompetent. The point was to save money, and now that the system is ready the other guy wants to ramp up costs again? What a joke.
It is by far not the only and first project with ~medium difficulty that failed. Swiss IT admins and computer scientists working for the administration are not rarely incompetent AND working with an extremely bad waterfall model. That thing alone is the reason why we lost some millions and some billions in failed projects. I wouldn't be surprised if they used it, again.
Also think of the context in which this was granted. It was mainly meant against profiteering publishers with larger outreach than the artists themselves. Well, that did not really work out - because copyright is transferable they very often ensure they can buy it... or if not, they'll use the fact that they're the only ones that can "provide" many stores to get the lion's share of profits anyhow.
Instead -as the intent of copyright law as it was granted- the law serving to help artists against publishers, it is now more of a law used against the very people which grant it, in general.
I disagree. 30 year old design approaches are often far more simple, and additionally often misguided and deficient with regards to various desirable properties. They are only really good as a study of things we already did and found to be flawed or insufficiently sophisticated, and that's a topic most useful to teach while the actual state-of-the art is also taught, but overall TOO simple. As an analogy 30 year old computers are very much the equivalent of 2000 year old toolboxes. We still essentially have all the same old tools, but more modern, more specialized ones that are particularly good for some purpose that you ought to know about as well in order to be considered "good" or "well trained".
Applying these anywhere near to the state-of-the-art is more complex than ever, not trivial as you make it out to be. Really the only reason to exclusively focus on such old boxes is because you couldn't find a teacher or couldn't reserve enough time to teach either the modern low-level stuff well enough. I guess it's easier and cheaper to find what possibly are older staff to work with much simpler, comparatively unchallenging machines.
Until the phone's applications actually work the same way on the Linux desktop... no. People can easily be put off by UI differences in not entirely trivial applications, and will want to go back to whatever they think they "know well". Only entirely trivial applications don't seem to suffer this problem -those that make reading a ten-point list in natural language text seem rather complicated in comparison-, but the Linux desktop environments don't have such users in mind.
It is not that these desktop environments are really too complex. But most people want to operate computers while not exerting more mental / cognitive effort than a 2 year old kid... so only the things already learned or really, really simple seem to get adapted.
Your boss taking months to "get used" to the sound is important here, and the fact that he was using it to diagnose problems, not for learning how the machine works conceptually.
Sure, anyone can probably very easily tell a badly broken engine (no sound, heavy thumps, clacking, croaking etc) from a working one - even after experiencing a working one only once. But that is all - you do not learn at all how an engine works from hearing it, nor can you omit the prior learning.
We use our spatially accurate senses (sight, touch) and communication in abstract terms -language- to learn about things conceptually, not hearing or taste or heat perception. The spatially inaccurate senses however are very good at detecting irregularities and so on - but that is all based on experience not learned or conceptualized with these senses.
Aptly named? No sir, it should be "Dink" Smallwood for maximum effect.
Actual code and performance analysis shouldn't be boring or "dry" to someone who aspires to be a computer scientist or specifically a programmer, especially not the first time they learn about it...