I would think it depends. Someone who buys enough to budget a chunk of money just for games is probably considering resale value when determining the total cost of the game. Someone who isn't that dedicated to it may not, but is less likely to buy the game anyway (unless it is the New Hotness, which every game wants to be but so few achieve).
The upshot, then, would be that the person most likely to buy the game even if it's not the flavor of the month is the one most likely to figure in resale value. So the best games won't notice, but the midlist will lose sales.
I figured the prevalance of +5 over +3 was just that if it's good, more than 4 people are going to like it enough to mod. To get only a +3, you have to walk a very fine line between being good enough for 5 people to like and being bad enough to get downmodded.
Well, all ways to "battle online piracy" aim to make it unprofitable on average. The draconian methods try to make the odds of getting caught high and the fines high to pull down the expected return on investment. Other methods could involve luring away the customer base by putting out a better product or offering a better price. Price is hard to compete on, though, so better product is probably the way to go, and since the raw content has been shown to be so easy to copy, they pretty much need to target convenience of use. Make it easy to get to, pleasant to work with, and inexpensive enough to be below most folks' "noise" threshold, and folks will use it. Netflix streaming is one example of this. iTunes is another. The Kindle store is probably another*. I know people in person and have seen people on Slashdot who have stated that they used to copy stuff but now they don't because it's so easy to get legitimately. Continue on that path and piracy levels will drop. But it needs to happen soon; if the "pirates" reach that level of convenience first, well...
* Kindle is quite convenient in many ways but the pricing is up at the not-noise level in a lot of cases. Sure, some stuff is cheap, but some stuff costs about as much electronically as paper would. If you're charging the same, you're hoping the convenience of reading on a tablet outweighs the conveniences of reading on paper, such as use without electricity, lending to friends, and selling to used bookstores. For some folks it is, for some it's not.
I think SarbOx may be a better comparison (or perhaps just a more widely known comparison)... I remember lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the expense of adjusting to Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, but not so many for DCMA.
I suspect that in truth it's not actually patriots you dislike, but nationalists who use the term to justify extremism and supremacist behavior. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
I'm assuming they're not injecting anyone with HIV, just monitoring to see what fraction of picks it up and whether that fraction is what would be expected in the absence of vaccine. Deliberately injecting someone with live HIV seems unethical (or at least very questionable) to me, even if the subject is a volunteer.
A hollow planet solid enough to land/stand/build/live on would indeed be awesome... but it seems improbable that one could form naturally. An artificial one would be even more awesome, but has its own questions (is it available? If so, what happened to whoever built it?)
Is it ethical to shoot a person sitting in an armchair reading a newspaper?
Is it ethical to shoot a person who's holding a gun on a dozen hostages in a bank and has promised to shoot one in five minutes unless a vehicle and a pile of money are handed over?
If the answers are not the same, what is causing the means (shooting a person) ethical (justified) in one case but not the other, if not the end goal?
An action (means), to be justified, would seem to need to be beneficial... but what makes it beneficial is the results (the ends).
The impression I got is that they're trying to use "all the people who we're not giving the trial vaccine to" as the control group. If we ignore the placebo effect, there's no difference between a guy who never got an injection and a guy who got injected with saline, and we have a goodly amount of data on people who never got an injection, so just observing a difference in infection rate between the test group and what would be expected without the vaccine may be sufficient.
(note I'm not saying all means are justified by the ends, or even that all means to a good end are justified. But saying the ends never justify the means seems to me to be just as inaccurate as saying they always do.)
Unfortunately, the only way to get that size and earthlike surface gravity is to have such a low density that there's no solid surface. Saturn is already less dense than water and it still has too much surface gravity. We need rocky planets, and for a rocky planet to have earthlike gravity it's going to have to have a roughly earthlike size.
Another reason software is different is that it's math. You don't really need to have a computer to do what software does, you just need to have it to do it fast. Semiconductor fabrication methods and the chemical compositions of medicines (to say nothing of the method of producing said medicines) aren't just math; a guy at a table with a lot of paper and pencils cannot make an aspirin. A guy at a table with a lot of pencils and paper (some of which contains the bitsequence for a BMP format picture of a flower) could, after some (okay, a heck of a lot of) time generate the bitsequence for a JPEG representation of that picture.
I would say the invention of the quicksort algorithm was sufficiently innovative to be worth a patent (if anything in software is.. I am deliberately ignoring the 'it's really just math' and 'a human with a pencil could do the same thing, it just takes longer' lines of thought)... but I don't think that patent should last 18 years; that's too many 'generations' in the software world.
The issues hit software harder (or seem to) for two reasons: first, software tends to have a very short cycle time, which means an 18 year patent lasts for many more 'generations' of product than, say, a semiconductor fabrication process, which will take 4 years to build and last for a decade. Second, software has a much lower initial investment requirement; you can buy a system for development for a couple of thousand dollars and start banging out your killer video game. Other fields require more expensive equipment, more materials to produce products, or both. You can't build a semiconductor fabrication plant for less than millions, possibly billions. The result is that software's 'small businesses' are quite often much smaller than other fields' 'small businesses', magnifying the disparity of power.
For this to be relevant, the larger group has to be willing to do something; at the very least they have to be willing to actually look for and at the information.
Number of calls back after initial call (measuring, in theory, how often the initial call resolved the issue)
Number and duration of system outages (if you're doing sysadmin stuff as well as support stuff)
The 19-year old did indeed cause the accident where the pickup rear-ended the truck. The bus driver(s) caused the accident(s) where the bus(es) hit the immobile object in front of them. Brake lights on the vehicle in front of you are a luxury, not something you're supposed to assume when determining how close you can be and still stop safely.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think it depends. Someone who buys enough to budget a chunk of money just for games is probably considering resale value when determining the total cost of the game. Someone who isn't that dedicated to it may not, but is less likely to buy the game anyway (unless it is the New Hotness, which every game wants to be but so few achieve).
The upshot, then, would be that the person most likely to buy the game even if it's not the flavor of the month is the one most likely to figure in resale value. So the best games won't notice, but the midlist will lose sales.
I figured the prevalance of +5 over +3 was just that if it's good, more than 4 people are going to like it enough to mod. To get only a +3, you have to walk a very fine line between being good enough for 5 people to like and being bad enough to get downmodded.
Well, all ways to "battle online piracy" aim to make it unprofitable on average. The draconian methods try to make the odds of getting caught high and the fines high to pull down the expected return on investment. Other methods could involve luring away the customer base by putting out a better product or offering a better price. Price is hard to compete on, though, so better product is probably the way to go, and since the raw content has been shown to be so easy to copy, they pretty much need to target convenience of use. Make it easy to get to, pleasant to work with, and inexpensive enough to be below most folks' "noise" threshold, and folks will use it. Netflix streaming is one example of this. iTunes is another. The Kindle store is probably another*. I know people in person and have seen people on Slashdot who have stated that they used to copy stuff but now they don't because it's so easy to get legitimately. Continue on that path and piracy levels will drop. But it needs to happen soon; if the "pirates" reach that level of convenience first, well...
* Kindle is quite convenient in many ways but the pricing is up at the not-noise level in a lot of cases. Sure, some stuff is cheap, but some stuff costs about as much electronically as paper would. If you're charging the same, you're hoping the convenience of reading on a tablet outweighs the conveniences of reading on paper, such as use without electricity, lending to friends, and selling to used bookstores. For some folks it is, for some it's not.
Not seeing how this helps, unless Comcast has a way of increasing the cap by spending more money that I haven't found?
yeah, but that was a long tiem ago. They've improved somewhat. We just need an R20 unit to reverse engineer... :)
I think SarbOx may be a better comparison (or perhaps just a more widely known comparison)... I remember lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the expense of adjusting to Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, but not so many for DCMA.
no, he's saying that unpaid hobbyist coders aren't a viable labor pool for every task. Nothing whatsoever about open vs closed.
I suspect that in truth it's not actually patriots you dislike, but nationalists who use the term to justify extremism and supremacist behavior. Feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken.
so as long as the US doesn't start killing its citizens in large groups, all is well? "1920s Germany" hadn't killed anybody yet either.
I'm assuming they're not injecting anyone with HIV, just monitoring to see what fraction of picks it up and whether that fraction is what would be expected in the absence of vaccine. Deliberately injecting someone with live HIV seems unethical (or at least very questionable) to me, even if the subject is a volunteer.
A hollow planet solid enough to land/stand/build/live on would indeed be awesome... but it seems improbable that one could form naturally. An artificial one would be even more awesome, but has its own questions (is it available? If so, what happened to whoever built it?)
An action (means), to be justified, would seem to need to be beneficial... but what makes it beneficial is the results (the ends).
The impression I got is that they're trying to use "all the people who we're not giving the trial vaccine to" as the control group. If we ignore the placebo effect, there's no difference between a guy who never got an injection and a guy who got injected with saline, and we have a goodly amount of data on people who never got an injection, so just observing a difference in infection rate between the test group and what would be expected without the vaccine may be sufficient.
(note I'm not saying all means are justified by the ends, or even that all means to a good end are justified. But saying the ends never justify the means seems to me to be just as inaccurate as saying they always do.)
Unfortunately, the only way to get that size and earthlike surface gravity is to have such a low density that there's no solid surface. Saturn is already less dense than water and it still has too much surface gravity. We need rocky planets, and for a rocky planet to have earthlike gravity it's going to have to have a roughly earthlike size.
Another reason software is different is that it's math. You don't really need to have a computer to do what software does, you just need to have it to do it fast. Semiconductor fabrication methods and the chemical compositions of medicines (to say nothing of the method of producing said medicines) aren't just math; a guy at a table with a lot of paper and pencils cannot make an aspirin. A guy at a table with a lot of pencils and paper (some of which contains the bitsequence for a BMP format picture of a flower) could, after some (okay, a heck of a lot of) time generate the bitsequence for a JPEG representation of that picture.
I would say the invention of the quicksort algorithm was sufficiently innovative to be worth a patent (if anything in software is.. I am deliberately ignoring the 'it's really just math' and 'a human with a pencil could do the same thing, it just takes longer' lines of thought)... but I don't think that patent should last 18 years; that's too many 'generations' in the software world.
The issues hit software harder (or seem to) for two reasons: first, software tends to have a very short cycle time, which means an 18 year patent lasts for many more 'generations' of product than, say, a semiconductor fabrication process, which will take 4 years to build and last for a decade. Second, software has a much lower initial investment requirement; you can buy a system for development for a couple of thousand dollars and start banging out your killer video game. Other fields require more expensive equipment, more materials to produce products, or both. You can't build a semiconductor fabrication plant for less than millions, possibly billions. The result is that software's 'small businesses' are quite often much smaller than other fields' 'small businesses', magnifying the disparity of power.
For this to be relevant, the larger group has to be willing to do something; at the very least they have to be willing to actually look for and at the information.
Number of calls back after initial call (measuring, in theory, how often the initial call resolved the issue) Number and duration of system outages (if you're doing sysadmin stuff as well as support stuff)
I'd love that, but for the typical politician it would be suicide. The folks who lose their licenses would become very motivated voters.
The problem is that after you hit, you now have an immobile flaming pile of wreckage in front of you, and you need to change lanes.
The 19-year old did indeed cause the accident where the pickup rear-ended the truck. The bus driver(s) caused the accident(s) where the bus(es) hit the immobile object in front of them. Brake lights on the vehicle in front of you are a luxury, not something you're supposed to assume when determining how close you can be and still stop safely.
unfortunately, as it's a civil case, it's "preponderance of evidence", which leaves that one IP address woefully unbalanced.
always has, since the 1st covers freedom of assembly as well. Hard to assemble with your friends while you're in a cell.