Computer Science 395 (Software Engineering): Remember how back in Programming 101 we told you how to perform testing on your code? Turns out we grossly oversimplified our discussion of how to go about doing that for pedagogical reasons. While it's nearly trivial to perform the test/debug cycle on code that you wrote for a class project that does one well-defined thing and will only ever be seen by you and your grader/professor, the scope of testing and debugging transforms radically when you attempt to scale this up to more general applications. Now, let's talk a bit about how real-world testing is done when you're debugging a giant project, with a substantial user base, spread over dozens of programmers, with code that contains elements that originated over a decade ago, some from programmers who left the company long before you finished Programming 101...
And people still ask why I refuse to buy a console... I just will not buy hardware I am not allowed to own.
I hope you don't run Windows, buy any titles off of Steam, or really even any games made in the past few years as all of them require connecting to a service you don't own just to use it
What does this have to do with hardware that he's not allowed to own?
If you run Windows on your PC, Microsoft doesn't do things that make it impossible for you to boot another OS on the same hardware. Wanting to run Steam doesn't mean that you can't dual boot into BSD.
Microsoft may be a "villain" in a lot of ways but one thing that they've always been fairly supportive of is the open hardware platform for PCs. In fact they're one of the few old-school software companies out there that has always been supportive of an open system platform. Yeah they want to lock in on the Operating System side, but they've been happy to allow you to do whatever you want with your hardware (unlike a lot of other tech companies - not just Sony).
The Xbox is admittedly a different beast and is an example of Microsoft trying to get in on some of the same action as their competitors. But as far as the PC side goes this is comparing apples and gorillas - Sony has a hardware platform that they control even after you've bought it. A windows PC is fully capable of doing other things and STILL acting as a windows PC, and other than finding new ways to make it a bit annoying to dual boot, Microsoft has done very little to actively try to muck with that.
(I'm openly critical of Microsoft in a lot of ways, but comparing a PS3 to a Windows PC and claiming that Microsoft is doing the same thing as Sony is just dumb. They're doing exactly the opposite of Sony on the PC side, which is why a lot of people are kind of appalled at the move back toward vendor-lock-in on the consumer electronics side of the computer business.)
Are there issues where the public at large should trust their elected officials to make the decisions which best suit the needs of a populace as a whole? Are there perhaps situations where the populace as a whole knowing might lead to worse decisions being made?
In a perfect system, where politicians have only the best interest of the country at heart I'd agree with you.
We don't get perfection, unfortunately.
The handful of areas where better decisions might be reached by keeping things secret from the public are dwarfed by the massive number of areas where worse decisions will ultimately be reached by keeping things secret. Without knowing what's being discussed, we can't know which category it falls into.
So you're forced into either trusting the politicians to be good gatekeepers and trust their judgment to know which ones should rightly be kept secret and which ones should be openly debated, or you choose not to trust them at all and realize that some bad decisions are going to be made in a handful of cases to have the transparency you need to have a government run by the people, for the people.
Given that the selection process for politicians is not, in any country that I know of, actually done on the basis of their merit as intelligent decision makers who are able to navigate those kinds of ethical/moral quandaries (and is more often based on their aptitude at running a political campaign or what political party they belong to, neither of which really selects well for "governing qualities"), it seems like it would be better to err on the side of transparency, and allow that we're going to occasionally get some sub-optimal decisions in exchange for knowing what the hell our government is actually doing in our name. Since it's our government we really have the duty to watch it. And, frankly, whenever we stop watching it and trust it that's usually when the REALLY GODDAMN BAD decisions seem to get made in secret...
Don't forget, though, that patent protection is a government intervention into the free market for a specific social purpose that society has deemed to be important (i.e. spurring innovation by rewarding innovators with a guarantee of return on investment). They are not natural outcomes of a free market system, they are in fact a specific counter to a problem that the free market creates (i.e. tragedy of the commons). As a government-granted construct they need to be watchdogged very carefully because they are ripe for exploitation by individuals and corporations who would subvert their intent (spurring innovation) to maximize their own profits (as the market model insists that they should).
That's what this article alleges - that companies (and this company in particular) are subverting the implementation of the patent system in the US to maximize their own profits. This isn't a natural outcome of the free market, this is the exploitation of a particular social-engineering tool historically used by governments to manipulate markets in a way that is seen as beneficial to society as a whole.
You saw a report on the tee-vee news that outlined how the Nintendo 3DS is going to function, and there's no reporting about it on any tech blog or gamer site that even says "OMFG - CNN/Fox/MSNBC/Local TV station reports on how the new DS will handle 3D graphics?" When every tech blog, gamer site and newspaper that shows up on Google News suggests that Nintendo isn't releasing any hard information about how it's going to work until E3?
Conversely, defend Apple sarcastically in an Apple thread.
Either is probably sufficient.
(You can sub out for Google in either case. You can also sub in Microsoft for the second one, but mocking Microsoft in a Microsoft thread will probably only get you modded as "Insightful". Or ignored.)
The part of the patent process that stimulates innovation is the part where people sink money into research in exchange for a short-term government-granted monopoly on the device that they spent money researching. It's the promise that your R&D money will receive a return on investment if you're successful that makes the patent process something that stimulates innovation.
That said, the patent model is incredibly old and wasn't designed with the kind of hyper-corporations that we have these days in mind. It certainly wasn't designed with the idea that people would find a way to patent algorithms or ideas. And from an idealistic perspective it should be rewarding people who sink money into R&D to build something, not people who come up with a minor variant of something that already exists (we'll foo the bar ON THE INTERNET! Patent pending) that didn't really require them to sink money into research to get it. The point of the patent system is to encourage people to spend money on research, not to create barriers to entry for competitors.
Most adults are not subscribing to the ridiculous, and more importantly, misleading offers that make money by nailing you with subscription fees through the text messaging system.
CITATION NEEDED.
Show me the data then I'll believe it. My own personal experience indicates that the "kids" are no more and no less savvy when it comes to stuff like this and its their elders who keep getting conned by scams. Like "legitimate" credit card companies that charge usurious rates, banks that offer mortgage deals that really are too good to be true, and other misleading things like that. Or, in the worst cases, the folks who continue to believe that there's some ex-prince in Nigeria who really needs to get a lot of money out of the country quickly and is willing to give you a cut if you just help him out...
Hm. While I'm no fan of DRM, that's not a great comparison. To start with, most of those games are old enough that the developers are dead, so there aren't any development costs to be repaid (or royalties for that matter).
Of the games on that list that are being sold for money (rather than just rules for an existing deck of cards), for most of them you're actually paying for the physical materials to play the game. You can download a copy of the rules for Go but unless you already own a Go board and stones you can't play it with just the rules. You can go ahead and make your own board, and some folks do, but that's more of a hobbyist decision. It's usually cheaper in time/money to just pay the $10 for the game at Target and move on. Same for most of the rest of those games.
D&D - D&D is the odd one out. You need a set of dice to play D&D, but that's really the only physical material you need once you have the rules. There are all kinds of optional materials but it's the one on that list that is most like a software title. They're still actively paying people for development, and if you download a copy of it you effectively have the entire game - no additional money or time needs to exchange hands for you to sit down and start playing it. And not surprisingly, D&D is the only game on that list that has had "piracy" issues. A while back they stopped selling their books as PDF downloads specifically because the books were showing up on torrents before the physical copies hit the stores.
One of the things that I hate about the DRM arguments is that I can actually understand the publisher's point of view - they've sunk money into developing this game and they want to reap that maximum profit possible from it. That's how the system is supposed to work after all - they take a measure of risk and in exchange, if their product is popular, they supposed to reap the rewards (and suffer the losses if it turns out that they bet on a dog). Piracy circumvents this process and it's illegal. So I can understand their anger at it. But they're doing it all wrong. They're doing it in a way that irritates and angers their legitimate customers while not really doing much of anything to stop the free-riders. Worse they're doing things now that break their own games to the point that their legit customers are turning into free-riders. It's stupid, and I thought that the game industry had figured this problem out about 15 years ago. Apparently this is one of those lessons that needs to be re-learned every few decades. (I have far, far less sympathy for game publishers who are using DRM as a means to break the secondary market for games. Right of first sale is important and even if you are losing money to the secondary market you need to deal with it. Book publishers have been dealing with it for centuries - suck it up.)
'Recent reports, including public statements from the director of national intelligence, indicate that US citizens have been placed on the list of targets who can be hunted and killed with drones.'
That's part of the reason why the ACLU would be involved.
Another part is that they're a watchdog group. When the government is keeping secrets from its citizens, watchdog groups make noise. That's what they do. I'm glad for it - too much gets shoved under the label of "national security" and the press is useless if you can't provide them a decent "some say... while others claim..." narrative to wrap facts in.
There's nothing wrong with it at all, it's just that the technology and money didn't exist before to do it so now it's a sparkly thing that all the big games think they need to have. Some games actually do need to have it, and others would be better off just dropping it and putting in subtitles instead. But hopefully we're reaching a point where that can be a design choice (or, probably more realistically, a marketing choice) rather than something "new and shiny" or something that you "need" to have to have your game be taken seriously.
This is feeding into the ongoing narrative about the "social web" being the future of the web. "Passively" using the web to research things on your own is out - it's all about building social networks to get status updates on family members you don't like talking to in real life and, I don't know, playing Farmville. Note that the CNN link is in the "CNN Money" area of their website - meaning that they're already viewing the narrative as "business vs. business." Google's business model is out, Facebook's business model is in. Throw your money at Facebook and Facebook clones because search is dead, social networking is the new hotness. Nobody - and I mean nobody - ever got rich following the advice of CNN Money. They're mandate seems to be to spin out easily digestible narratives with slightly sensational headlines to grab advertising eyeballs.
Most people are bad at math and logical reasoning. The sooner you accept that, the sooner the world will suddenly make sense.
Meh. Many people are greedy fools who think they're smarter than average and can't be easily tricked. Con artists have time-tested, good methods to exploit these attributes. Pyramid schemes are actually a great tool for exploiting people who think they're smarter than average - after all they only have to con X other people into the scam and then they're set. Clearly they're going to be able to find X other people who are dumber than they are that they can exploit and get money out of. And the X other people they con into the scam? Who cares - they're idiots and shouldn't have let themselves get conned into a pyramid scheme...
Nobody in a pyramid scheme thinks they're going to be left holding the bag at the end. That's how pyramid schemes work. They work great even if all of the participants are fully aware of the fact that they're in a pyramid scheme because everyone at every level is convinced that it's only the suckers below them who are going to lose their shirts and that their own risk is minimal. Even if everyone has awesome logical reasoning skills if they start from a faulty premise (i.e. I'm too smart to be left holding the bag at the end of this scam) they're going to reach a faulty conclusion.
For example, advising users to actually read warnings about SSL -- after 5 words, they are bored and go back to ignoring SSL warnings (and in some cases, falling victim to MITM attacks). We are not talking about costly solutions here, just basic, unintrusive guidelines that people are ignoring.
This is actually one of the examples from TFA. The contention is that the statistics show that a majority of the certificate errors that users run across are false positives and ignoring them is perfectly harmless. And the TFA goes on to point out that a phisher would be pretty damn stupid to go to all the trouble to setup a fake domain and then put a broken certificate on it to throw up a warning and cause a potential victim to take a second look at the site and make sure it isn't something suspicious.
And IT people need to remember that what sounds like a "basic, unintrusive guideline" to us often sounds like babble, pointless rigmarole to make their jobs harder, or an IT person pulling an ego trip to the end users. The last one is especially bad because many users can't tell the difference between "arbitrary rule handed down by IT that makes their jobs easier while making my life harder" and "good solid advice handed down by IT for a very good reason." When they can't tell the difference, they'll just assume it's in the first camp and ignore it. If you're going to make their lives harder, you better have a damn good reason for it.
Contemplate for a moment the howls of outrage that would occur all across the Internets if a company released a game that you could play split screen on single disc with a single console, but both players playing it needed to own their own copies of the game to be able to do it. Despite the fact that one of the games never needs to leave its box. Better to not include spit-screen at all rather than face the rabid howling of potential fans of the game who would be convinced that you're just trying to rip them off for functionality that they have already paid for.
That said - "loss of a potential sale" is a stupid reason not to include spit-screen in the game. If the game is good, having someone over to play it may convince them to buy the game for themselves anyway. I'd imagine the real reason for "no split screen" is a simple "cost/time for development vs. demand for this feature" calculation and they decided that the feature wasn't in such a high demand that they needed to spend time/money coding for it. They might be wrong on that calculation or they might be right, but I doubt it's anything more nefarious than that.
The same can be said for books. Book collectors spend much, much more on rare first editions of various tomes than anyone has spent on individual rare comic book issues. Even with the recent "record setting" Batman and Superman sales of over a million dollars at auction, the book market sees collectors spending well over that on rare books every year, and records for the most money spent on a single book are more in the tens-of-millions of dollars range rather than in the one million dollar range.
The difference between normal books and comic books is that the (superhero) comic book publishers have run their market into the ground so that there are only about a 100,000 dedicated monthly readers left in the US at this point (with similar numbers abroad). So the collectors have an outsized influence on the market as a whole (not even getting into the fact that almost every comics retailer out there is himself a collector and lets that influence his purchasing decisions). It doesn't have to be that way - a cheap distribution platform with instant world-wide access could be just the thing to get some mainstream appeal for comics again - but for now the major comics companies are sitting tight and seem to be content to just milk their existing collector-heavy readership base until the market finally shrinks to the point where it isn't profitable to print and distribute books anymore.
And when they're $125-150, you'll sit there demanding that they be $100 instead. Some people can never be pleased, and you very clearly seem to be one of them.
You mock, but this idea is one of the basic foundations of economics.
Here's a link to the answer given by Robert Kaiser - who I believe is probably the same Robert Kaiser that is the Seamonkey project coordinator.
Quoted in full:
"I repeatedly get questions why SeaMonkey is not on the browser ballot, and of course I keep telling those people that only one browser per vendor is allowed and Firefox and SeaMonkey are regarded to be from the same vendor, Mozilla."
It amazes me that people even bother reselling games. It's called disposable income for a reason. If you can't afford to dispose of it then don't spend it.
And then throw the game away when you're done with it! No one else could ever possibly have a use for it! Also burn all of your books when you're done reading them, shred your DVDs when you're done watching them, and drive your car off a cliff when you're ready to get a new one.
Meanwhile, in the real world, some of us would like our disposable income to stretch farther and are willing to wait a few months for new releases. If you don't want a game anymore and there's someone else who does what's wrong with selling it to them? You get a bit more money to buy your next new game and they get a perfectly usable game rather than seeing it hit a landfill. I'm not seeing the down side.
Slashdot Mirror
When they were kicking IBM around in the 80s.
Computer Science 395 (Software Engineering): Remember how back in Programming 101 we told you how to perform testing on your code? Turns out we grossly oversimplified our discussion of how to go about doing that for pedagogical reasons. While it's nearly trivial to perform the test/debug cycle on code that you wrote for a class project that does one well-defined thing and will only ever be seen by you and your grader/professor, the scope of testing and debugging transforms radically when you attempt to scale this up to more general applications. Now, let's talk a bit about how real-world testing is done when you're debugging a giant project, with a substantial user base, spread over dozens of programmers, with code that contains elements that originated over a decade ago, some from programmers who left the company long before you finished Programming 101...
And people still ask why I refuse to buy a console... I just will not buy hardware I am not allowed to own.
I hope you don't run Windows, buy any titles off of Steam, or really even any games made in the past few years as all of them require connecting to a service you don't own just to use it
What does this have to do with hardware that he's not allowed to own?
If you run Windows on your PC, Microsoft doesn't do things that make it impossible for you to boot another OS on the same hardware. Wanting to run Steam doesn't mean that you can't dual boot into BSD.
Microsoft may be a "villain" in a lot of ways but one thing that they've always been fairly supportive of is the open hardware platform for PCs. In fact they're one of the few old-school software companies out there that has always been supportive of an open system platform. Yeah they want to lock in on the Operating System side, but they've been happy to allow you to do whatever you want with your hardware (unlike a lot of other tech companies - not just Sony).
The Xbox is admittedly a different beast and is an example of Microsoft trying to get in on some of the same action as their competitors. But as far as the PC side goes this is comparing apples and gorillas - Sony has a hardware platform that they control even after you've bought it. A windows PC is fully capable of doing other things and STILL acting as a windows PC, and other than finding new ways to make it a bit annoying to dual boot, Microsoft has done very little to actively try to muck with that.
(I'm openly critical of Microsoft in a lot of ways, but comparing a PS3 to a Windows PC and claiming that Microsoft is doing the same thing as Sony is just dumb. They're doing exactly the opposite of Sony on the PC side, which is why a lot of people are kind of appalled at the move back toward vendor-lock-in on the consumer electronics side of the computer business.)
Are there issues where the public at large should trust their elected officials to make the decisions which best suit the needs of a populace as a whole? Are there perhaps situations where the populace as a whole knowing might lead to worse decisions being made?
In a perfect system, where politicians have only the best interest of the country at heart I'd agree with you.
We don't get perfection, unfortunately.
The handful of areas where better decisions might be reached by keeping things secret from the public are dwarfed by the massive number of areas where worse decisions will ultimately be reached by keeping things secret. Without knowing what's being discussed, we can't know which category it falls into.
So you're forced into either trusting the politicians to be good gatekeepers and trust their judgment to know which ones should rightly be kept secret and which ones should be openly debated, or you choose not to trust them at all and realize that some bad decisions are going to be made in a handful of cases to have the transparency you need to have a government run by the people, for the people.
Given that the selection process for politicians is not, in any country that I know of, actually done on the basis of their merit as intelligent decision makers who are able to navigate those kinds of ethical/moral quandaries (and is more often based on their aptitude at running a political campaign or what political party they belong to, neither of which really selects well for "governing qualities"), it seems like it would be better to err on the side of transparency, and allow that we're going to occasionally get some sub-optimal decisions in exchange for knowing what the hell our government is actually doing in our name. Since it's our government we really have the duty to watch it. And, frankly, whenever we stop watching it and trust it that's usually when the REALLY GODDAMN BAD decisions seem to get made in secret...
Don't forget, though, that patent protection is a government intervention into the free market for a specific social purpose that society has deemed to be important (i.e. spurring innovation by rewarding innovators with a guarantee of return on investment). They are not natural outcomes of a free market system, they are in fact a specific counter to a problem that the free market creates (i.e. tragedy of the commons). As a government-granted construct they need to be watchdogged very carefully because they are ripe for exploitation by individuals and corporations who would subvert their intent (spurring innovation) to maximize their own profits (as the market model insists that they should).
That's what this article alleges - that companies (and this company in particular) are subverting the implementation of the patent system in the US to maximize their own profits. This isn't a natural outcome of the free market, this is the exploitation of a particular social-engineering tool historically used by governments to manipulate markets in a way that is seen as beneficial to society as a whole.
You saw a report on the tee-vee news that outlined how the Nintendo 3DS is going to function, and there's no reporting about it on any tech blog or gamer site that even says "OMFG - CNN/Fox/MSNBC/Local TV station reports on how the new DS will handle 3D graphics?" When every tech blog, gamer site and newspaper that shows up on Google News suggests that Nintendo isn't releasing any hard information about how it's going to work until E3?
Link? The only news I've seen is that Nintendo is going to be demoing them at E3 this year.
Mock Apple sarcastically in an Apple thread.
Conversely, defend Apple sarcastically in an Apple thread.
Either is probably sufficient.
(You can sub out for Google in either case. You can also sub in Microsoft for the second one, but mocking Microsoft in a Microsoft thread will probably only get you modded as "Insightful". Or ignored.)
The part of the patent process that stimulates innovation is the part where people sink money into research in exchange for a short-term government-granted monopoly on the device that they spent money researching. It's the promise that your R&D money will receive a return on investment if you're successful that makes the patent process something that stimulates innovation.
That said, the patent model is incredibly old and wasn't designed with the kind of hyper-corporations that we have these days in mind. It certainly wasn't designed with the idea that people would find a way to patent algorithms or ideas. And from an idealistic perspective it should be rewarding people who sink money into R&D to build something, not people who come up with a minor variant of something that already exists (we'll foo the bar ON THE INTERNET! Patent pending) that didn't really require them to sink money into research to get it. The point of the patent system is to encourage people to spend money on research, not to create barriers to entry for competitors.
Most adults are not subscribing to the ridiculous, and more importantly, misleading offers that make money by nailing you with subscription fees through the text messaging system.
CITATION NEEDED.
Show me the data then I'll believe it. My own personal experience indicates that the "kids" are no more and no less savvy when it comes to stuff like this and its their elders who keep getting conned by scams. Like "legitimate" credit card companies that charge usurious rates, banks that offer mortgage deals that really are too good to be true, and other misleading things like that. Or, in the worst cases, the folks who continue to believe that there's some ex-prince in Nigeria who really needs to get a lot of money out of the country quickly and is willing to give you a cut if you just help him out...
Speaking of businesses being threatened, I don't see the "as a record store owner, my business faces ruin" troll yet.
There are still record stores?
Outside of college towns I thought that business model had been pretty much destroyed by a combination of big box chains and the Internet.
By the OP's suggestion I should ditch all my books and scan/torrent/rebuy them in PDF.
You make it sound like that's a ridiculous suggestion, when in fact there are a lot of people who want to do exactly that.
Well, maybe not PDF. But something like that.
Hm. While I'm no fan of DRM, that's not a great comparison. To start with, most of those games are old enough that the developers are dead, so there aren't any development costs to be repaid (or royalties for that matter).
Of the games on that list that are being sold for money (rather than just rules for an existing deck of cards), for most of them you're actually paying for the physical materials to play the game. You can download a copy of the rules for Go but unless you already own a Go board and stones you can't play it with just the rules. You can go ahead and make your own board, and some folks do, but that's more of a hobbyist decision. It's usually cheaper in time/money to just pay the $10 for the game at Target and move on. Same for most of the rest of those games.
D&D - D&D is the odd one out. You need a set of dice to play D&D, but that's really the only physical material you need once you have the rules. There are all kinds of optional materials but it's the one on that list that is most like a software title. They're still actively paying people for development, and if you download a copy of it you effectively have the entire game - no additional money or time needs to exchange hands for you to sit down and start playing it. And not surprisingly, D&D is the only game on that list that has had "piracy" issues. A while back they stopped selling their books as PDF downloads specifically because the books were showing up on torrents before the physical copies hit the stores.
One of the things that I hate about the DRM arguments is that I can actually understand the publisher's point of view - they've sunk money into developing this game and they want to reap that maximum profit possible from it. That's how the system is supposed to work after all - they take a measure of risk and in exchange, if their product is popular, they supposed to reap the rewards (and suffer the losses if it turns out that they bet on a dog). Piracy circumvents this process and it's illegal. So I can understand their anger at it. But they're doing it all wrong. They're doing it in a way that irritates and angers their legitimate customers while not really doing much of anything to stop the free-riders. Worse they're doing things now that break their own games to the point that their legit customers are turning into free-riders. It's stupid, and I thought that the game industry had figured this problem out about 15 years ago. Apparently this is one of those lessons that needs to be re-learned every few decades. (I have far, far less sympathy for game publishers who are using DRM as a means to break the secondary market for games. Right of first sale is important and even if you are losing money to the secondary market you need to deal with it. Book publishers have been dealing with it for centuries - suck it up.)
From the summary:
'Recent reports, including public statements from the director of national intelligence, indicate that US citizens have been placed on the list of targets who can be hunted and killed with drones.'
That's part of the reason why the ACLU would be involved.
Another part is that they're a watchdog group. When the government is keeping secrets from its citizens, watchdog groups make noise. That's what they do. I'm glad for it - too much gets shoved under the label of "national security" and the press is useless if you can't provide them a decent "some say ... while others claim ..." narrative to wrap facts in.
There's nothing wrong with it at all, it's just that the technology and money didn't exist before to do it so now it's a sparkly thing that all the big games think they need to have. Some games actually do need to have it, and others would be better off just dropping it and putting in subtitles instead. But hopefully we're reaching a point where that can be a design choice (or, probably more realistically, a marketing choice) rather than something "new and shiny" or something that you "need" to have to have your game be taken seriously.
This is feeding into the ongoing narrative about the "social web" being the future of the web. "Passively" using the web to research things on your own is out - it's all about building social networks to get status updates on family members you don't like talking to in real life and, I don't know, playing Farmville. Note that the CNN link is in the "CNN Money" area of their website - meaning that they're already viewing the narrative as "business vs. business." Google's business model is out, Facebook's business model is in. Throw your money at Facebook and Facebook clones because search is dead, social networking is the new hotness. Nobody - and I mean nobody - ever got rich following the advice of CNN Money. They're mandate seems to be to spin out easily digestible narratives with slightly sensational headlines to grab advertising eyeballs.
Most people are bad at math and logical reasoning. The sooner you accept that, the sooner the world will suddenly make sense.
Meh. Many people are greedy fools who think they're smarter than average and can't be easily tricked. Con artists have time-tested, good methods to exploit these attributes. Pyramid schemes are actually a great tool for exploiting people who think they're smarter than average - after all they only have to con X other people into the scam and then they're set. Clearly they're going to be able to find X other people who are dumber than they are that they can exploit and get money out of. And the X other people they con into the scam? Who cares - they're idiots and shouldn't have let themselves get conned into a pyramid scheme...
Nobody in a pyramid scheme thinks they're going to be left holding the bag at the end. That's how pyramid schemes work. They work great even if all of the participants are fully aware of the fact that they're in a pyramid scheme because everyone at every level is convinced that it's only the suckers below them who are going to lose their shirts and that their own risk is minimal. Even if everyone has awesome logical reasoning skills if they start from a faulty premise (i.e. I'm too smart to be left holding the bag at the end of this scam) they're going to reach a faulty conclusion.
That's because TeX is awesome.[*]
[*]If you're writing a conference paper or a journal article or a thesis. For other uses, YMMV.
For example, advising users to actually read warnings about SSL -- after 5 words, they are bored and go back to ignoring SSL warnings (and in some cases, falling victim to MITM attacks). We are not talking about costly solutions here, just basic, unintrusive guidelines that people are ignoring.
This is actually one of the examples from TFA. The contention is that the statistics show that a majority of the certificate errors that users run across are false positives and ignoring them is perfectly harmless. And the TFA goes on to point out that a phisher would be pretty damn stupid to go to all the trouble to setup a fake domain and then put a broken certificate on it to throw up a warning and cause a potential victim to take a second look at the site and make sure it isn't something suspicious.
And IT people need to remember that what sounds like a "basic, unintrusive guideline" to us often sounds like babble, pointless rigmarole to make their jobs harder, or an IT person pulling an ego trip to the end users. The last one is especially bad because many users can't tell the difference between "arbitrary rule handed down by IT that makes their jobs easier while making my life harder" and "good solid advice handed down by IT for a very good reason." When they can't tell the difference, they'll just assume it's in the first camp and ignore it. If you're going to make their lives harder, you better have a damn good reason for it.
Contemplate for a moment the howls of outrage that would occur all across the Internets if a company released a game that you could play split screen on single disc with a single console, but both players playing it needed to own their own copies of the game to be able to do it. Despite the fact that one of the games never needs to leave its box. Better to not include spit-screen at all rather than face the rabid howling of potential fans of the game who would be convinced that you're just trying to rip them off for functionality that they have already paid for.
That said - "loss of a potential sale" is a stupid reason not to include spit-screen in the game. If the game is good, having someone over to play it may convince them to buy the game for themselves anyway. I'd imagine the real reason for "no split screen" is a simple "cost/time for development vs. demand for this feature" calculation and they decided that the feature wasn't in such a high demand that they needed to spend time/money coding for it. They might be wrong on that calculation or they might be right, but I doubt it's anything more nefarious than that.
The same can be said for books. Book collectors spend much, much more on rare first editions of various tomes than anyone has spent on individual rare comic book issues. Even with the recent "record setting" Batman and Superman sales of over a million dollars at auction, the book market sees collectors spending well over that on rare books every year, and records for the most money spent on a single book are more in the tens-of-millions of dollars range rather than in the one million dollar range.
The difference between normal books and comic books is that the (superhero) comic book publishers have run their market into the ground so that there are only about a 100,000 dedicated monthly readers left in the US at this point (with similar numbers abroad). So the collectors have an outsized influence on the market as a whole (not even getting into the fact that almost every comics retailer out there is himself a collector and lets that influence his purchasing decisions). It doesn't have to be that way - a cheap distribution platform with instant world-wide access could be just the thing to get some mainstream appeal for comics again - but for now the major comics companies are sitting tight and seem to be content to just milk their existing collector-heavy readership base until the market finally shrinks to the point where it isn't profitable to print and distribute books anymore.
And when they're $125-150, you'll sit there demanding that they be $100 instead. Some people can never be pleased, and you very clearly seem to be one of them.
You mock, but this idea is one of the basic foundations of economics.
Here's a link to the answer given by Robert Kaiser - who I believe is probably the same Robert Kaiser that is the Seamonkey project coordinator.
Quoted in full:
"I repeatedly get questions why SeaMonkey is not on the browser ballot, and of course I keep telling those people that only one browser per vendor is allowed and Firefox and SeaMonkey are regarded to be from the same vendor, Mozilla."
There you go.
It amazes me that people even bother reselling games. It's called disposable income for a reason. If you can't afford to dispose of it then don't spend it.
And then throw the game away when you're done with it! No one else could ever possibly have a use for it! Also burn all of your books when you're done reading them, shred your DVDs when you're done watching them, and drive your car off a cliff when you're ready to get a new one.
Meanwhile, in the real world, some of us would like our disposable income to stretch farther and are willing to wait a few months for new releases. If you don't want a game anymore and there's someone else who does what's wrong with selling it to them? You get a bit more money to buy your next new game and they get a perfectly usable game rather than seeing it hit a landfill. I'm not seeing the down side.
Check the ingredients list on your Cheez-its. Odds are the low-fat ones contain MSG and the regular ones don't.