That makes the assumption that all rural-area dwellers are farmers and the like. I live in a rather rural area, and only a handful of the families actually run productive farms. The people who staff it are kids with summer jobs who go into the city on days off to blow their money at the mall. The closest thing I've ever done to 'creating food' is tried eating lawn grass as a child.
348 to 23, huh? Glad to hear the entire House is around to vote on things, and hasn't ditched out to campaign and fund-raise. I'd hate to think that they're off, desperately trying to keep their job, rather than doing the job they were elected to do in the first place.
Can someone tell me why the Australasian Performing Rights Association has any reason to order the takedown of a video containing a song performed by American Gloria Gaynor, written by Freddie Perren, American, and released on Polydor Records, British?
We're still as creative as ever! Anytime we don't have enough rainfall for our crops, we were creative enough to realize that we could just spray them with Brawndo. Brawndo has what plants crave!
Of course we all know Britney Spears, she has a whole team of publicists, and the mutually-dependent parasites called 'tabloid journalists' whose job it is to make sure we don't forget her!
Of course, her star will fade soon... just in time for VH1 to do a "We Love The 00's" and FOX to do "Celebrity Boxing 19", pitting her against Christina Aguilera.
So now rather than having a case for your phone be an accessory, they... are indirectly making you go and purchase one. I mean, not exactly as strong as wording as that, but... if that's how you hold your phone, especially if you're a lefty or something, you kinda need one. Yay accessory sales.
It just occurs to me, though, that if buying a case for it is the way to go about fixing the problem, couldn't they have just... buried the antenna inside the device's actual case? Or put more body around it? Oh, of course not, then the device wouldn't look as lovely. I guess form truly no longer follows function.
Nope, I just went to the Newsweek website and can't get it to work. Apparently the head of their web team must read Slashdot, and put a stop to it already.
What a painful way to segue between the two stories, especially since the second is rather non-sequitur, let alone how the mention of the second story is worded to draw poor conclusions.
Actually, funny enough, they played that song on BBC 6Music about a week or two ago. Oh wait, they're probably closing that station too... Be right back, I have some weeping to do.
Aside from the obvious problem of people sending lame pictures to your printer all the time, or spamlists getting a hold of your email address, the thing that bothers me the most is:
"rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer."
Am I the only one who sees this as an almost-desperate bid to get people to print more out in an increasingly printless world? Think about all the people you know, and all the random images that you link back and forth. And now imagine if you spent the ink of a full-colour 5x7" on every LOLcats that came to you. And now imagine how much ink you'll be burning through.
Either I missed a major news release and this was a bad article or... this is all merely speculation. Sure, I could see Apple rolling out an advertising system, it's already been mentioned vaguely before, especially since they could lock your system for the ads if they wanted to, it's just... unless it was specifically tied to certain sources of content, forcing adverts on everyone's devices could really start a slow backlash towards Apple on their level of control on the devices.
At least... I think this sort of thing until I look at the control they already have on the devices, and see the possibility of adverts as just another step down the road that everyone will unthinkingly take.
Radar guns are not the most difficult pieces of equipment to use. Even if you've never been 'certified' in the use of one, you can still wield it to some degree of accuracy. Sure, it could be an inaccurate reading, but in this case, it'd have to be what? Over twenty miles an hour high in order to prove this guy was innocent. Besides, this guy became a cop way back in the 90s. Odds are his 'failure to produce a certificate' could just be... he misplaced the bloody piece of paper. If you've been a state trooper for that long and you don't know how to laser someone's speed, then... something is dramatically wrong.
Besides, this is a veteran cop, who has been trained in accurately taking a visual. If we're questioning a police officer's judgement on something like this (and trust me, who hasn't seen someone driving down the road and just known they're speeding), then what are police qualified to judge?
If I had some points, I'd mod you up here. The legal side of this argument just puts you into an infinite loop, but the sense of accomplishment behind making a clone of a game? Good point. Granted, I'm not saying that making game clones still doesn't require a lot of work, and I know that a lot of developers often get in some good experience making a couple clones, especially on a new platform. And to those that put their clones up for free, that's good, because while downloads from you spell less purchases from the original makers, at least you aren't trying to make a quick buck out of it. But there are many who do game clones only, across many platforms, for profit, with barely an attempt to make things unique, and it just smacks of laziness and desperation. Then again, there are many people out there that are quite skilled at finding holes in their pride, and plugging them with bankrolls of $20s.
If I'm not mistaken, that's an article about board games. Not sure how video games translate into that, and how that interacts with the DMCA, which covers... Digital... Media... Copyrights... Still found it interesting, as a wannabe board game designer. Thanks, nonetheless.
I have a few points to make. I would post directly to the relevant comments, but that would take too long.
A) A history of letting you not need the disc in the drive anymore after a patch is NOT really a friendly way of stripping away DRM once the "hype" dies down. Besides, people are getting the dates wrong here, Starcraft removed needing the disc with patch 1.15, which was released almost ten years after the game debuted. Requiring online activation of a unique code is apples-to-oranges with keeping a disc in the drive.
B) People still do have LAN parties, especially Starcraft enthusiasts! It's a classic of the LAN party, and was by far the most-played at the last one I went to. Now, I'm not sure how much data is actually launched up and down the tubes when you're playing online, but if you have a lousy ISP, or not the highest-speed service, having eight people all stacked up on one connection playing that game might be a bit much, especially if you have an ISP that throttles, or imposes other crappy limits, or, in my case, one that likes to disconnect for random periods of time, especially during the night.
B2) The above point, either way, shouldn't be a matter of if it is or isn't a hassle, it should be a matter of, just because you can, doesn't mean you should have to.
C) This whole discussion is instantly destroyed by the level of fanboyism for Blizzard, and the level of anti-fanboyism as well. I'm probably going to get modded down to comment hell for this post, for example. This is becoming a matter of "Awh, shucks, Blizzard are such great guys! I bet they'd buy me a new computer if my current one couldn't run Starcraft II" versus "DRM IS COCKS!!! GO DIE!!!"
D) That being said, I really see no reason for anyone who loves SC1 to get SC2. I played the beta, it's pretty much just feels like a modded, or expansion-packed, or remastered SC1, with some bits from Relic's RTSes pasted on. I think the best way to avoid the alleged hassle of SC2 is to just... keep playing SC1.
E) I think my biggest issue here, and the one I will leave off with (leaving out comments about stat tracking and achievement farming and whatnot), is just that Blizzard here is stating, and their fanboys in the room are happily restating, is that, put simply, they are awesome because they aren't doing what Ubisoft is doing. Even though they aren't as bad as Ubi, they're just as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the market in this matter. They're still being 'bad', they just aren't the 'worst'. But they're still being bad.
Slashdot Mirror
The greeting card sections at Wal-Mart probably contain 30% of the world's helium supply, inside of Spongebob and Dora the Explorer mylar balloons.
That makes the assumption that all rural-area dwellers are farmers and the like. I live in a rather rural area, and only a handful of the families actually run productive farms. The people who staff it are kids with summer jobs who go into the city on days off to blow their money at the mall. The closest thing I've ever done to 'creating food' is tried eating lawn grass as a child.
348 to 23, huh? Glad to hear the entire House is around to vote on things, and hasn't ditched out to campaign and fund-raise. I'd hate to think that they're off, desperately trying to keep their job, rather than doing the job they were elected to do in the first place.
Purity of essence, peace on earth, P-O-E, O-P-E, it's some variation of this.
Listen, Major... Bat Guano, if that's even your real name...
Can someone tell me why the Australasian Performing Rights Association has any reason to order the takedown of a video containing a song performed by American Gloria Gaynor, written by Freddie Perren, American, and released on Polydor Records, British?
We're still as creative as ever! Anytime we don't have enough rainfall for our crops, we were creative enough to realize that we could just spray them with Brawndo. Brawndo has what plants crave!
It takes creativity to figure that out.
Of course we all know Britney Spears, she has a whole team of publicists, and the mutually-dependent parasites called 'tabloid journalists' whose job it is to make sure we don't forget her!
Of course, her star will fade soon... just in time for VH1 to do a "We Love The 00's" and FOX to do "Celebrity Boxing 19", pitting her against Christina Aguilera.
Don't forget "The Final Countdown" either!!!
They told everyone to just go get a case. They didn't know everyone would come back with a court case.
So now rather than having a case for your phone be an accessory, they... are indirectly making you go and purchase one. I mean, not exactly as strong as wording as that, but... if that's how you hold your phone, especially if you're a lefty or something, you kinda need one. Yay accessory sales.
It just occurs to me, though, that if buying a case for it is the way to go about fixing the problem, couldn't they have just... buried the antenna inside the device's actual case? Or put more body around it? Oh, of course not, then the device wouldn't look as lovely. I guess form truly no longer follows function.
Not really, at least not in the sense I mean. Copy-paste had been around well before it.
Come on, don't start coming down on them for no copy-paste yet. It took the iPhone long enough to get it, and we gave them a chance.
Nope, I just went to the Newsweek website and can't get it to work. Apparently the head of their web team must read Slashdot, and put a stop to it already.
What a painful way to segue between the two stories, especially since the second is rather non-sequitur, let alone how the mention of the second story is worded to draw poor conclusions.
"The new game is called Empire & State, and it will be in alpha release by the fourth quarter of this year,"
I would hardly call this "about to launch".
Actually, funny enough, they played that song on BBC 6Music about a week or two ago. Oh wait, they're probably closing that station too... Be right back, I have some weeping to do.
Aside from the obvious problem of people sending lame pictures to your printer all the time, or spamlists getting a hold of your email address, the thing that bothers me the most is:
"rather than merely emailing links around, users can email a photo to a friend's printer."
Am I the only one who sees this as an almost-desperate bid to get people to print more out in an increasingly printless world? Think about all the people you know, and all the random images that you link back and forth. And now imagine if you spent the ink of a full-colour 5x7" on every LOLcats that came to you. And now imagine how much ink you'll be burning through.
The Sheikh would already have returned to his home country, but Cathcart raised the number of years of exile to 55.
Either I missed a major news release and this was a bad article or... this is all merely speculation. Sure, I could see Apple rolling out an advertising system, it's already been mentioned vaguely before, especially since they could lock your system for the ads if they wanted to, it's just... unless it was specifically tied to certain sources of content, forcing adverts on everyone's devices could really start a slow backlash towards Apple on their level of control on the devices.
At least... I think this sort of thing until I look at the control they already have on the devices, and see the possibility of adverts as just another step down the road that everyone will unthinkingly take.
Radar guns are not the most difficult pieces of equipment to use. Even if you've never been 'certified' in the use of one, you can still wield it to some degree of accuracy. Sure, it could be an inaccurate reading, but in this case, it'd have to be what? Over twenty miles an hour high in order to prove this guy was innocent. Besides, this guy became a cop way back in the 90s. Odds are his 'failure to produce a certificate' could just be... he misplaced the bloody piece of paper. If you've been a state trooper for that long and you don't know how to laser someone's speed, then... something is dramatically wrong.
Besides, this is a veteran cop, who has been trained in accurately taking a visual. If we're questioning a police officer's judgement on something like this (and trust me, who hasn't seen someone driving down the road and just known they're speeding), then what are police qualified to judge?
Oh, hey, I didn't realize that. Good catch, and makes a lot more sense now.
Bullocks, yeah, the M means Millennium. It seemed proper to go with Media. I dunno. No sleep and no food make Bill somethin' somethin'...
If I had some points, I'd mod you up here. The legal side of this argument just puts you into an infinite loop, but the sense of accomplishment behind making a clone of a game? Good point. Granted, I'm not saying that making game clones still doesn't require a lot of work, and I know that a lot of developers often get in some good experience making a couple clones, especially on a new platform. And to those that put their clones up for free, that's good, because while downloads from you spell less purchases from the original makers, at least you aren't trying to make a quick buck out of it. But there are many who do game clones only, across many platforms, for profit, with barely an attempt to make things unique, and it just smacks of laziness and desperation. Then again, there are many people out there that are quite skilled at finding holes in their pride, and plugging them with bankrolls of $20s.
If I'm not mistaken, that's an article about board games. Not sure how video games translate into that, and how that interacts with the DMCA, which covers... Digital... Media... Copyrights... Still found it interesting, as a wannabe board game designer. Thanks, nonetheless.
I have a few points to make. I would post directly to the relevant comments, but that would take too long.
A) A history of letting you not need the disc in the drive anymore after a patch is NOT really a friendly way of stripping away DRM once the "hype" dies down. Besides, people are getting the dates wrong here, Starcraft removed needing the disc with patch 1.15, which was released almost ten years after the game debuted. Requiring online activation of a unique code is apples-to-oranges with keeping a disc in the drive.
B) People still do have LAN parties, especially Starcraft enthusiasts! It's a classic of the LAN party, and was by far the most-played at the last one I went to. Now, I'm not sure how much data is actually launched up and down the tubes when you're playing online, but if you have a lousy ISP, or not the highest-speed service, having eight people all stacked up on one connection playing that game might be a bit much, especially if you have an ISP that throttles, or imposes other crappy limits, or, in my case, one that likes to disconnect for random periods of time, especially during the night.
B2) The above point, either way, shouldn't be a matter of if it is or isn't a hassle, it should be a matter of, just because you can, doesn't mean you should have to.
C) This whole discussion is instantly destroyed by the level of fanboyism for Blizzard, and the level of anti-fanboyism as well. I'm probably going to get modded down to comment hell for this post, for example. This is becoming a matter of "Awh, shucks, Blizzard are such great guys! I bet they'd buy me a new computer if my current one couldn't run Starcraft II" versus "DRM IS COCKS!!! GO DIE!!!"
D) That being said, I really see no reason for anyone who loves SC1 to get SC2. I played the beta, it's pretty much just feels like a modded, or expansion-packed, or remastered SC1, with some bits from Relic's RTSes pasted on. I think the best way to avoid the alleged hassle of SC2 is to just... keep playing SC1.
E) I think my biggest issue here, and the one I will leave off with (leaving out comments about stat tracking and achievement farming and whatnot), is just that Blizzard here is stating, and their fanboys in the room are happily restating, is that, put simply, they are awesome because they aren't doing what Ubisoft is doing. Even though they aren't as bad as Ubi, they're just as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the market in this matter. They're still being 'bad', they just aren't the 'worst'. But they're still being bad.