There aren't enough details here to determine if the white list idea is flawed or not. The article says they are working with representatives from the blocked countries to help compile the list. That seems to suggest some level of testing at least, and that just blindly adding numbers that are requested isn't likely to be the case.
I feel that adults' minds are very similar to that description, it's just no longer cute, so instead of fascinating, it's frustrating.
A guy I know keeps falling for crap like "You are a great poet! Be immortalized in the hall of fame! ** $50 plz", and virtually all multilevel marketing schemes that he happens to encounter. He must be on the "World's Greatest Suckers" mailing list. I just utterly cannot comprehend whatsoever, he simply does not want to listen to reason, there is some kind of fantasy to it all that is so much more enjoyable.
The most amazing aspect of it all is that absolutely every single last one of these weird things all lead up to one massively predictable point "Aaaand, lemme guess, they want some money from you?" Somehow or another he can just instantly believe the rationalizations created by slick marketting.
Maybe the only way I can hope to fight back is to create some cool pamphlet describing all the similarities? He has been mildly scammed so many times, and have had so many people tell him way ahead of time that these things are scams that I have to wonder if he lets himself be scammed as a kind of rebellion against what he might see as oppression from his peers? It's really strange.
Well as far as decisions go, dropping out of college was totally worth it for me as I was able to establish good experience while jobs were easy to get. Had I stayed in, I'd be getting out right into the middle of the bust, which happened to quite a few friends of mine.
But I'm wondering now that I'm established if I should seek a degree, something besides CS, something to set me apart. I don't really know if I can even handle going back to school, I was so immensely happy to be out of that stifling environment. I wonder what the ideal education situation for me would be.
So far my half-glass full perspective has been that if a company is absolutely inflexible about hiring people without degrees, totally ignoring their experience/character then they would probably mirror everything I disliked about college in the first place and therefore they filter themselves out for me.
I wonder how holding a single (relevant) job for 4+ years with no college education compares to having a college education but no significant amount of experience at any one place.
I can remember quite clearly that up until I was 10 or so, I thought anything written in a nonfiction style to be 100% fact. I didn't question informational authorities until I was able to start really questioning and tracking down inconsistencies from various sources myself.
There may not be a good way to teach kids to be critical along those lines because if you overdo it, they might miss the point entirely and no longer believe anything they read. I don't know if that'd be useful at a young age. The consequences for having bits and pieces of information incorrect back then are pretty minimal, the consequences of being stunted in sheer information gathering ability are profound.
Well, one of the greatest things (well, probably the only good thing) about being so totally decieved is that it's the only way to become critical and suspect of new information.
My sister went to a school where they had a very unusual song that they'd occasionally sing. It was something along the lines of "Don't trust the weatherman" and had little anecdotes about how the weatherman was wrong on various occasions. Apparently the teacher and the kids came up with it themselves after a field trip went bad because they were rained on after a sunny forecast.
It's the only example I can think of in elementary school education of trying to teach kids to be critical of information they get from a supposed authority. I don't know if the song had any broader implication for any of them, but I do know they never trusted the weatherman.
It was fairly common when I was kid to go on field trips to various workplaces, or have people come in and tell us what they do.. You see that kind of thing on sesame street. I remember when I was a kid checking that kind of stuff out was very interesting to me because I had a curiosity of how everything worked.
You're just exposing them to things, you aren't shoving it down their throats and forcing them to become IT slaves. Not all education is some kind of indoctrination plot. Simply giving them a little exposure to something isn't really the same as drilling it into their brains. A think that a wide exposure to many things is really healthy for kids, if they don't know what a wide world it is where knowledge is valuable, they can't see any point to their education.
Interesting side note, one field trip that virtually every kid in the city went on at some point was to tour the tidy didee diaper company, a cloth diaper cleaning service, which was probably the largest volume of foul smell I've ever been exposed it, even to this day. I think that was some kind of weird scare tactic trying to teach us that if we weren't capable of skilled work thats where we'd end up, they didn't present it that way though, they took it all very seriously and the operation was quite complex.
They track players who play together too much. They most likely key off of credit card info.
You'd probably need to get a lot of real people in on it, and play decoy games away from each other and try to maintain a churn of new people.
Those online poker places could totally run a googleesque challenge by taking their logs, anonymizing the names/info and running a contest to see who can come up with the best method of flagging suspicious behavior. I wonder just how good the people they have doing it now are. I wonder how the various sites compare to each other along those lines.
Well, the most important factor is how long do you think they'll continue making GBA games? I honestly think that quality GBA games will continue to come out another 3 or 4 years.
I wouldn't be surprised if considerable amounts of GBA games end up with DS enhancements, to lure people over to the DS with their existing library of games. Nintendo pulled that off with 'Gameboy Color'.
Especially at first the DS is going to seemingly beat the crap out of the PSP, but Sony is taking the PSP in the same direction they took the original playstation. Instead of trying to win over nintendo handheld customers, they are looking for a totally new untapped market of young adults that previously wouldn't be associated with videogames.
By marketting the PSP as being like a 21st century walkman, they intend to crack upon a whole new set of consumers. Being Sony, they can start it off at the really high end market, people who see the gaming industry as being a closed set of consumers will call it a failure initially and as Sony brings the price down and people who've always been jealous of the early adoptors start to be able to justify it, the market will take off.
Mod parent up, but one thing to consider, $150 seems totally cheap compared to PSP's suspected retail launch price of $300. But the price hasn't been officially announced yet so maybe Sony will knock our socks off with some xbox-esque strategy of losing money on the platform in order to get units out there.
And it seems that Nintendo builds significant price reduction strategy into -everything- they release. Most likely the DS will see the $100 mark eventually, something that seems massively unlikely for the PSP given it's specs.
I honestly just think it's been their price point, every competitor that tried to touch them came in with an overpriced platform that was vastly superior in nearly everyway but was totally impractically priced. Sony is going to pull the same thing with the PSP, but being Sony, they'll be able to keep the thing alive indefinitely (like minidisc) until it finally comes down in price enough to actually get people to buy it.
It will be interesting if the PSP is finally able to infilitrate the ranks of people too embarassed to buy a gameboy the way the playstation one hooked huge amounts of new customers. By making it more of a gadget, capable of playing movies and such, they stand a good chance to get those kinds of customers to rationalize the purchase..
It's fairly common around here to see 20-30 year olds playing gameboys on various forms of public transportation. It's about the only time I ever get a chance to play it.
"E. Free Subscriptions. In some cases, Valve may offer a free Subscription to certain services, software and content. As with all Subscriptions, You are always responsible for any Internet service provider, telephone, and other connection fees that you may incur when using Steam, even when Valve offers a free Subscription."
This kind of thing is common in virtually -all- EULAs.
"In court filings, Sierra/VUG says that the current distribution of Half-Life 2 via Steam exceeds the scope of the current software publishing agreement between the two parties. It is apparently seeking the court's assistance in compelling Valve not to use Steam as an avenue of distribution."
It really boils down to the preloading, the fastest and easiest way to get the game is going to have massive sales. Even if you can get it just -1- day in advance, it'll have a noticable bottomline impact.
This kind of happened with the game City of Heroes. There was a big distribution error, and next to no stores got it in time, which was a real blunder because people who preordered the game had a 3 day headstart on the game. To play the 3 day headstart, you could use the beta install, but after release, you had to have a retail installation. Since whoever was supposed to ship those boxes messed up, tons of people just went for the online distribution channel and before you knew it, there were tons of city of heroes boxes getting dusty on shelves.
The online distribution channel mysteriously disappeared a few days later never to be seen again, I can only assume that retailers freaked out and threatened to send all the boxes back or something along those lines.
so err uhh. I originally posted this using w3m, a text only browser, anyways, I was unable to see the fact the original poster used italics as a form of quotation of the original material.
"Quotes are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that the word is not being used in its (currently) accepted sense ("in the fifteenth century, we 'knew' that blah blah..."), or to emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself, rather than its associated concept."
It's irony that a person pointing out bad use of apostrophes would exhibit it themselves.
2. a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
You'd expect him to use apostrophes correctly having said he may be the only left that knows how to use them. It's a bit of a remarkable incongruity when he's able to use them incorrectly in so few sentences, while speaking on said topic. Even the example given in the dictionary is highly similar to the situation at hand, a persony exhibiting the specific behavior they are criticizing.
Given all of that, in your opinion, when do you think you -can- use the word? For some reason "irony" is this amazing word that people will just knee jerk react to and are always saying that it's being used incorrectly, often without proof or argument.
"It's official", as in "It is official", is actually a complete sentence. I don't know if those commas of mine belong inside or outside those quotes though.
Unfortunately, virtually any form of copy protection is an added nuissance. A large percentage of the time, people who pirate software have fundamentally fewer annoyances then people who acquired it legally. Thats really backasswards.
Everytime I buy a game, I immediately go out and look for a crack for it because having to throw in it's CD everytime, and sit there and wait while it churns around looking for flawed sectors or what have you is really annoying. Used to be one of the things that made games on the PC so great is that you didn't have those kinds of load times and you didn't have to hunt for a disk. By going out to look for cracks, it exposes me to all kinds of extra piracy potential that normally I wouldn't even be remotely close to.
Same thing with operating systems even, I legitimately own a copy of windows XP pro, but I have a second sort of experiment on computer that I went and got a cracked copy for because I didn't want to have to constantly be dealing with some microsoft hotline each time I changed the hardware. It's over the top and more or less useless. When it finally becomes totally impossible to bypass all this junk, when they've finally totally bolted it down to their ultimate hapiness, guys like us will stay on the old platform for as long as possible and eventually just move off forever.
As for expensive office apps, I just can't justify spending $400 so that I can familiarize myself with them. My workplace totally will pay that amount for their computers, and it's totally advantagous to Microsoft in general if I'm familiar with a product enough to justify spending work's money on it. But if I can't *cough* evaluate it on my own terms, I'll never get to that point.
I think it's in that particular arena overall that open source stands to gain the most from ridiculously overpowered DRM. There are a lot of problem spaces in productivity applications where opensource flounders around because people can play with the commericial stuff for free with piracy, they learn it, head to work with it and buy it there. Forced away from that, those commercial products are going to have significant brain drain slowly over time, leading to less sales at work, and nobody will pay those high prices at home. I think they'll really shoot themselves in the foot here, unless, for example, Office XP Professional becomes $50. If those kinds of high end apps actually had reasonable pricing for the home enthusiast, I'd probably own like 6 major apps as opposed to zero.
It doesn't change the fact that severely effective copy protection is a good thing for opensource because thats still some N number of people that are forced by economy to seek out open source alternatives, whereas now they are just pirating.
The operating system isn't the only thing that eventually will be bolted down like %@#%, every other open source project will receive a boost and every commercial piece of software that goes the route of insanely invasive copy protection will receive some amount of brain drain to that.
But anyways, yea, bring on the INSANE DRM, drive us away from your popculture, your pop-OS, your pop everything. You -do- have the right to make money off your intellectual property, so just go nuts with it. You don't know about the kind of grassroots support you actually get through piracy anyways, so screw it! Opensource deserves -those- kinds of people. Make it as proprietary, isolated and obscure as you can, people will just put up with it forever right? Nobody ever falls from #1.
Slashdot Mirror
There aren't enough details here to determine if the white list idea is flawed or not. The article says they are working with representatives from the blocked countries to help compile the list. That seems to suggest some level of testing at least, and that just blindly adding numbers that are requested isn't likely to be the case.
I feel that adults' minds are very similar to that description, it's just no longer cute, so instead of fascinating, it's frustrating.
A guy I know keeps falling for crap like "You are a great poet! Be immortalized in the hall of fame! ** $50 plz", and virtually all multilevel marketing schemes that he happens to encounter. He must be on the "World's Greatest Suckers" mailing list. I just utterly cannot comprehend whatsoever, he simply does not want to listen to reason, there is some kind of fantasy to it all that is so much more enjoyable.
The most amazing aspect of it all is that absolutely every single last one of these weird things all lead up to one massively predictable point "Aaaand, lemme guess, they want some money from you?" Somehow or another he can just instantly believe the rationalizations created by slick marketting.
Maybe the only way I can hope to fight back is to create some cool pamphlet describing all the similarities? He has been mildly scammed so many times, and have had so many people tell him way ahead of time that these things are scams that I have to wonder if he lets himself be scammed as a kind of rebellion against what he might see as oppression from his peers? It's really strange.
Well as far as decisions go, dropping out of college was totally worth it for me as I was able to establish good experience while jobs were easy to get. Had I stayed in, I'd be getting out right into the middle of the bust, which happened to quite a few friends of mine.
But I'm wondering now that I'm established if I should seek a degree, something besides CS, something to set me apart. I don't really know if I can even handle going back to school, I was so immensely happy to be out of that stifling environment. I wonder what the ideal education situation for me would be.
So far my half-glass full perspective has been that if a company is absolutely inflexible about hiring people without degrees, totally ignoring their experience/character then they would probably mirror everything I disliked about college in the first place and therefore they filter themselves out for me.
I wonder how holding a single (relevant) job for 4+ years with no college education compares to having a college education but no significant amount of experience at any one place.
Everything is easier to learn with basketball analogies!
I can remember quite clearly that up until I was 10 or so, I thought anything written in a nonfiction style to be 100% fact. I didn't question informational authorities until I was able to start really questioning and tracking down inconsistencies from various sources myself.
There may not be a good way to teach kids to be critical along those lines because if you overdo it, they might miss the point entirely and no longer believe anything they read. I don't know if that'd be useful at a young age. The consequences for having bits and pieces of information incorrect back then are pretty minimal, the consequences of being stunted in sheer information gathering ability are profound.
Well, one of the greatest things (well, probably the only good thing) about being so totally decieved is that it's the only way to become critical and suspect of new information.
My sister went to a school where they had a very unusual song that they'd occasionally sing. It was something along the lines of "Don't trust the weatherman" and had little anecdotes about how the weatherman was wrong on various occasions. Apparently the teacher and the kids came up with it themselves after a field trip went bad because they were rained on after a sunny forecast.
It's the only example I can think of in elementary school education of trying to teach kids to be critical of information they get from a supposed authority. I don't know if the song had any broader implication for any of them, but I do know they never trusted the weatherman.
It was fairly common when I was kid to go on field trips to various workplaces, or have people come in and tell us what they do.. You see that kind of thing on sesame street. I remember when I was a kid checking that kind of stuff out was very interesting to me because I had a curiosity of how everything worked.
You're just exposing them to things, you aren't shoving it down their throats and forcing them to become IT slaves. Not all education is some kind of indoctrination plot. Simply giving them a little exposure to something isn't really the same as drilling it into their brains. A think that a wide exposure to many things is really healthy for kids, if they don't know what a wide world it is where knowledge is valuable, they can't see any point to their education.
Interesting side note, one field trip that virtually every kid in the city went on at some point was to tour the tidy didee diaper company, a cloth diaper cleaning service, which was probably the largest volume of foul smell I've ever been exposed it, even to this day. I think that was some kind of weird scare tactic trying to teach us that if we weren't capable of skilled work thats where we'd end up, they didn't present it that way though, they took it all very seriously and the operation was quite complex.
You'd have to take it quite a few steps further.
They track players who play together too much.
They most likely key off of credit card info.
You'd probably need to get a lot of real people in on it, and play decoy games away from each other and try to maintain a churn of new people.
Those online poker places could totally run a googleesque challenge by taking their logs, anonymizing the names/info and running a contest to see who can come up with the best method of flagging suspicious behavior. I wonder just how good the people they have doing it now are. I wonder how the various sites compare to each other along those lines.
Well, the most important factor is how long do you think they'll continue making GBA games? I honestly think that quality GBA games will continue to come out another 3 or 4 years.
I wouldn't be surprised if considerable amounts of GBA games end up with DS enhancements, to lure people over to the DS with their existing library of games. Nintendo pulled that off with 'Gameboy Color'.
Especially at first the DS is going to seemingly beat the crap out of the PSP, but Sony is taking the PSP in the same direction they took the original playstation. Instead of trying to win over nintendo handheld customers, they are looking for a totally new untapped market of young adults that previously wouldn't be associated with videogames.
By marketting the PSP as being like a 21st century walkman, they intend to crack upon a whole new set of consumers. Being Sony, they can start it off at the really high end market, people who see the gaming industry as being a closed set of consumers will call it a failure initially and as Sony brings the price down and people who've always been jealous of the early adoptors start to be able to justify it, the market will take off.
Mod parent up, but one thing to consider, $150 seems totally cheap compared to PSP's suspected retail launch price of $300. But the price hasn't been officially announced yet so maybe Sony will knock our socks off with some xbox-esque strategy of losing money on the platform in order to get units out there.
And it seems that Nintendo builds significant price reduction strategy into -everything- they release. Most likely the DS will see the $100 mark eventually, something that seems massively unlikely for the PSP given it's specs.
I honestly just think it's been their price point, every competitor that tried to touch them came in with an overpriced platform that was vastly superior in nearly everyway but was totally impractically priced. Sony is going to pull the same thing with the PSP, but being Sony, they'll be able to keep the thing alive indefinitely (like minidisc) until it finally comes down in price enough to actually get people to buy it.
It will be interesting if the PSP is finally able to infilitrate the ranks of people too embarassed to buy a gameboy the way the playstation one hooked huge amounts of new customers. By making it more of a gadget, capable of playing movies and such, they stand a good chance to get those kinds of customers to rationalize the purchase..
It's fairly common around here to see 20-30 year olds playing gameboys on various forms of public transportation. It's about the only time I ever get a chance to play it.
:P
Then.. theres also the bathroom..
From the Steam Subscriber Aggrement:
"E. Free Subscriptions.
In some cases, Valve may offer a free Subscription to certain services, software and content. As with all Subscriptions, You are always responsible for any Internet service provider, telephone, and other connection fees that you may incur when using Steam, even when Valve offers a free Subscription."
This kind of thing is common in virtually -all- EULAs.
From the article:
"In court filings, Sierra/VUG says that the current distribution of Half-Life 2 via Steam exceeds the scope of the current software publishing agreement between the two parties. It is apparently seeking the court's assistance in compelling Valve not to use Steam as an avenue of distribution."
"Compelling" + "court assistance" == Blocking
It really boils down to the preloading, the fastest and easiest way to get the game is going to have massive sales. Even if you can get it just -1- day in advance, it'll have a noticable bottomline impact.
This kind of happened with the game City of Heroes. There was a big distribution error, and next to no stores got it in time, which was a real blunder because people who preordered the game had a 3 day headstart on the game. To play the 3 day headstart, you could use the beta install, but after release, you had to have a retail installation. Since whoever was supposed to ship those boxes messed up, tons of people just went for the online distribution channel and before you knew it, there were tons of city of heroes boxes getting dusty on shelves.
The online distribution channel mysteriously disappeared a few days later never to be seen again, I can only assume that retailers freaked out and threatened to send all the boxes back or something along those lines.
so err uhh. I originally posted this using w3m, a text only browser, anyways, I was unable to see the fact the original poster used italics as a form of quotation of the original material.
D'oh!
The definition of "quote" doesn't dictate all the uses of quotation marks.
From: Wikipedia
"Quotes are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that the word is not being used in its (currently) accepted sense ("in the fifteenth century, we 'knew' that blah blah..."), or to emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself, rather than its associated concept."
s/the only left/the only one left/
s/persony/person/
It's irony that a person pointing out bad use of apostrophes would exhibit it themselves.
2. a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
You'd expect him to use apostrophes correctly having said he may be the only left that knows how to use them. It's a bit of a remarkable incongruity when he's able to use them incorrectly in so few sentences, while speaking on said topic. Even the example given in the dictionary is highly similar to the situation at hand, a persony exhibiting the specific behavior they are criticizing.
Given all of that, in your opinion, when do you think you -can- use the word? For some reason "irony" is this amazing word that people will just knee jerk react to and are always saying that it's being used incorrectly, often without proof or argument.
"It's official", as in "It is official", is actually a complete sentence. I don't know if those commas of mine belong inside or outside those quotes though.
"AnandTech has completed it's second review"
Ironically, the possessive form of "it" is actually "its", no apostrophe.
Unfortunately, virtually any form of copy protection is an added nuissance. A large percentage of the time, people who pirate software have fundamentally fewer annoyances then people who acquired it legally. Thats really backasswards.
Everytime I buy a game, I immediately go out and look for a crack for it because having to throw in it's CD everytime, and sit there and wait while it churns around looking for flawed sectors or what have you is really annoying. Used to be one of the things that made games on the PC so great is that you didn't have those kinds of load times and you didn't have to hunt for a disk. By going out to look for cracks, it exposes me to all kinds of extra piracy potential that normally I wouldn't even be remotely close to.
Same thing with operating systems even, I legitimately own a copy of windows XP pro, but I have a second sort of experiment on computer that I went and got a cracked copy for because I didn't want to have to constantly be dealing with some microsoft hotline each time I changed the hardware. It's over the top and more or less useless. When it finally becomes totally impossible to bypass all this junk, when they've finally totally bolted it down to their ultimate hapiness, guys like us will stay on the old platform for as long as possible and eventually just move off forever.
As for expensive office apps, I just can't justify spending $400 so that I can familiarize myself with them. My workplace totally will pay that amount for their computers, and it's totally advantagous to Microsoft in general if I'm familiar with a product enough to justify spending work's money on it. But if I can't *cough* evaluate it on my own terms, I'll never get to that point.
I think it's in that particular arena overall that open source stands to gain the most from ridiculously overpowered DRM. There are a lot of problem spaces in productivity applications where opensource flounders around because people can play with the commericial stuff for free with piracy, they learn it, head to work with it and buy it there. Forced away from that, those commercial products are going to have significant brain drain slowly over time, leading to less sales at work, and nobody will pay those high prices at home. I think they'll really shoot themselves in the foot here, unless, for example, Office XP Professional becomes $50. If those kinds of high end apps actually had reasonable pricing for the home enthusiast, I'd probably own like 6 major apps as opposed to zero.
It doesn't change the fact that severely effective copy protection is a good thing for opensource because thats still some N number of people that are forced by economy to seek out open source alternatives, whereas now they are just pirating.
The operating system isn't the only thing that eventually will be bolted down like %@#%, every other open source project will receive a boost and every commercial piece of software that goes the route of insanely invasive copy protection will receive some amount of brain drain to that.
But anyways, yea, bring on the INSANE DRM, drive us away from your popculture, your pop-OS, your pop everything. You -do- have the right to make money off your intellectual property, so just go nuts with it. You don't know about the kind of grassroots support you actually get through piracy anyways, so screw it! Opensource deserves -those- kinds of people. Make it as proprietary, isolated and obscure as you can, people will just put up with it forever right? Nobody ever falls from #1.