it's hard to argue with the fact that the law as written was limited to e-mail, and did not cover the instant messages that Simmons sent.
No, it's not hard at all.
ScuttleMonkey, if you're going to argue that the term "electronic mail" has an accepted legal definition and that instant messaging does not fall within it, you're going to have to do better than vague hand-waving. What are the definining characteristics of "electronic mail"?
"Messages transmitted using the SMTP protocol"? No, that can't be right, because it would exclude (among many others) site-specific mail systems, like those used on MySpace or Facebook. Obviously not the intent of the law's authors.
We can assume that "electronic mail" must be electronic and must be mail. We know what "electronic" means. But what does it mean to be "mail"?
Dictionary definitions vary, but a common theme is that mail is a system for sending messages, or the messages themselves, often with a specific intended recipient. Under that sort of definition, we would find that both email and IMs meet the definition, while non-targeted broadcasts -- such as posting to a newsgroup, serving a webpage, or talking to an open IRC channel -- would not. It makes sense to me.
The job of the courts is to interpret the laws as written by legislators. They did so in this case, and their interpretation is by all means a reasonable one. Where is the problem here?
"XHTML is not taking off, because it tries to do everything badly."
I'm not sure what you think XHTML is, but I'm pretty sure it's not what you think.
XHTML is nothing more than HTML with the syntax normalized enough to make documents XML-conformant. If you like HTML, there's nothing about XHTML not to like -- unless you have an irrational aversion to lowercase, self-closing tags, or required quote-enclosed values for attributes.
WHO FUCKING CARES how they make money, thats their problem.
If they don't make money on the console, then the console dies prematurely, and your return on investment suffers. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of gamers who bought a Dreamcast in 1999 and 2000, only to watch support for the console dry up in 2001 and 2002 as Sega's losses compounded.
Three of the five suggestions you make for future improvements to the PS3 experience are items that the Xbox 360 has today. Plus, if the "best" games typically come out for a console 6-9 months after launch, then some of the best 360 games are already available for purchase now. No waiting.
So I'm not sure why your recommendation ends up being "if you are looking for an HD experience look no further than PS3." Why not look at the 360?
Since Wii probably does native emulation of Gamecube games, it's probably a PPC architecture.
It's been confirmed for months that the Wii's architecture is an enhanced version of that of the Gamecube. Forget emulation; the Wii does native EXECUTION of GameCube games, probably using a downclocked CPU mode.
It's fast enough to run all the older games from the virtual arcade thing in emulation, though.
That shouldn't be too much of a challenge, though, given that the SNES is the most complex system being emulated so far. Desktop computers were doing 98% accurate emulation of 16-bit consoles circa 2000; today, even portables like the PSP and DS can do a passable job emulating most of those titles.
Aaand that's where we disagree. The whole point of copyright is control: the right of a creator to determine the conditions under which his or her work is distributed.
Yes, most of the copyright enforcement cases we hear about these days are situations where the creator has sold away that right to another party in exchange for money. But that's a side effect of the copyright system, not an intrinsic part of it.
It's a case against a woman with Multiple Sclerosis who's never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came after her. She just uses her computer to communicate with people by email. The RIAA knows this, but doesn't care.
Again, why does it matter, from a legal perspective, that she suffers from Multiple Sclerosis?
A masters will most often than not be relatively narrow, so why not narrow toward something you want to do ?
It's not a bad idea, but don't narrow it down so much that you end up with a graduate degree that only helps you get work in one single small, cutthroat industry.
Many universities allow matriculants to design their own course of study. Take courses and do research projects involving graphics, artificial intelligence, and distributed multi-user systems, but don't call it "Game Programming" -- call it "Interactive Multimedia Design" or something.
"Why does everyone have this obsession with X being the best or Y being the winner?"
Because the console that is "the winner" will always be the one for which the most game titles will be released, therefore improving the odds that it will be the one for which the best game titles will be released.
Microsoft need to be specific; what are the patent numbers, which countries are they valid in, and what is the licence fee that Microsoft would like from an individual user ?
No, they would need to be specific if they intended to file suit against anyone associated with the development of Linux in court.
If they're just going to make public statements with the intent of spreading FUD about Linux, it's in their interest to be as NON-specific as possible.
"But consumers are demanding change, and change will happen fast."
I disagree on both counts.
Customers (on the whole) are content with the quality and convenience of the DVD distribution model, and will be for another couple technological generations at least.
So what were the launch issues and bugs with [...] the NES (remember, their big issue came well after launch)
In North America/Europe, yes, the issues with the ZIF bridge on the cartridge connector didn't arise until later, when they started weakening. But the first release of the Famicom in Japan had motherboard problems so severe that Nintendo of Japan had to issue a recall for all consoles sold, spending millions of dollars to repair them.
"Stale" meaning that they may have been drawn as long as 0.0333 seconds ago. This is where Persistence of Vision comes in handy.
Why do we bother with interlaced formats nowadays? Progressive's nicer/more sensible/easier for us to work with in the cutting room!
Interlaced video allows the perceived framerate to be doubled without requiring an increase the bandwidth of the signal. Given the choice between 1080i @ 60fps and 1080p @ 30fps, I suspect the average person would find the former to seem more fluid.
That is the proof that marketing is the most important thing in computers. If having the best product wins then the PC would have died the death that DOS deserved back then.
Where was the marketing for the IBM PC, then?
I hazily remember a TV commercial touting the PCjr, and the "How ya gonna do it? / Gonna PS/2 it!" jingle is still a brainworm fifteen years later -- but both of those models were failures.
IBM PC's didn't sell well because of good marketing; they sold well despite a lack of marketing, because they were IBM's.
What ever happened to sane usage of cookies where they'd only be set if you did something on the site that initiated a cookie transfer (e.g. logging in, starting a shopping cart, storing your preferences)?
That was before the bean-counters discovered that if you pass a cookie on every page request, you can track a single user's movement through the site with far greater accuracy than based off of IP address.
how can you really learn Java in a lecture theatre? It just doesn't work. Just get a good reference book, find some good code to copy the syntax from, and work it out as you go along.
Why go to school at all? Just find some textbooks to read, and work it out as you go along. Oh, you'll have to work out "how to read a book" as you go along as well.
Education's greatest strength is to prevent the student from making stupid mistakes made by others in the past. No, a lecture hall is not the best place to learn Java syntax, but it could be a very good place to learn about common object-oriented design patterns.
Your work needs to be checked in to our tracking software by 8. If not, the compile will break. If you break a compile, your quality factor score goes down.
Oh, yuck.
What happens when it's 7:55 and the component I'm working on is nowhere ready for compiling? Under your system, there seem to be two options: check my broken code in and ruin the compile, or fail to check my broken code in and receive demerits AND ruin the compile.
The obvious third option -- run the compile but use yesterday's working version of my component instead of my currently-broken one -- seems to be absent.
One thing that really needs to be understood by all you "best practice" guys is that test code is not a shippable product.
Neither are design documents or sourcecode comments, but I hope you're not suggesting that work done on those portions of a project are an unnecessary waste of time.
You need developer buy-in to make a largescale standards effort work.
I'm pretty sure the submitter understands that, which is why the question being asked is HOW to foster developer buy-in. Your answer to that question seems to be "get rid of anyone who doesn't buy-in and replace them with coders who do", which in a lot of real-world cases translates to "lose your smartest programmers, and substitute in their place a bunch of PFYs". That's not a realistic solution.
What I always found amusing is that when I worked for Toys R Us back when the Sega CD was out, I had to explain to a LOT of customers that they needed a Sega Genesis in order for the Sega CD to work. They just could not wrap their heads around the idea that it was purely an add-on and not a console in its own right.:-)
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it's hard to argue with the fact that the law as written was limited to e-mail, and did not cover the instant messages that Simmons sent.
No, it's not hard at all.
ScuttleMonkey, if you're going to argue that the term "electronic mail" has an accepted legal definition and that instant messaging does not fall within it, you're going to have to do better than vague hand-waving. What are the definining characteristics of "electronic mail"?
"Messages transmitted using the SMTP protocol"? No, that can't be right, because it would exclude (among many others) site-specific mail systems, like those used on MySpace or Facebook. Obviously not the intent of the law's authors.
We can assume that "electronic mail" must be electronic and must be mail. We know what "electronic" means. But what does it mean to be "mail"?
Dictionary definitions vary, but a common theme is that mail is a system for sending messages, or the messages themselves, often with a specific intended recipient. Under that sort of definition, we would find that both email and IMs meet the definition, while non-targeted broadcasts -- such as posting to a newsgroup, serving a webpage, or talking to an open IRC channel -- would not. It makes sense to me.
The job of the courts is to interpret the laws as written by legislators. They did so in this case, and their interpretation is by all means a reasonable one. Where is the problem here?
People who intentionally violate laws need to understand that being arrested wont be a pleasant experience if you resist.
Are you fucking kidding me.
"Being handcuffed, escorted to the station, and placed in a holding cell for a few hours" is an unpleasant experience.
"Being handcuffed and tasered five times" is beyond that. It is ASSAULT. It is ABUSE.
I hope these "officers" go to jail.
I hope they go to hell. There clearly isn't much humanity left in them.
"XHTML is not taking off, because it tries to do everything badly."
I'm not sure what you think XHTML is, but I'm pretty sure it's not what you think.
XHTML is nothing more than HTML with the syntax normalized enough to make documents XML-conformant. If you like HTML, there's nothing about XHTML not to like -- unless you have an irrational aversion to lowercase, self-closing tags, or required quote-enclosed values for attributes.
WHO FUCKING CARES how they make money, thats their problem.
If they don't make money on the console, then the console dies prematurely, and your return on investment suffers. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of gamers who bought a Dreamcast in 1999 and 2000, only to watch support for the console dry up in 2001 and 2002 as Sega's losses compounded.
Three of the five suggestions you make for future improvements to the PS3 experience are items that the Xbox 360 has today. Plus, if the "best" games typically come out for a console 6-9 months after launch, then some of the best 360 games are already available for purchase now. No waiting.
So I'm not sure why your recommendation ends up being "if you are looking for an HD experience look no further than PS3." Why not look at the 360?
Since Wii probably does native emulation of Gamecube games, it's probably a PPC architecture.
It's been confirmed for months that the Wii's architecture is an enhanced version of that of the Gamecube. Forget emulation; the Wii does native EXECUTION of GameCube games, probably using a downclocked CPU mode.
It's fast enough to run all the older games from the virtual arcade thing in emulation, though.
That shouldn't be too much of a challenge, though, given that the SNES is the most complex system being emulated so far. Desktop computers were doing 98% accurate emulation of 16-bit consoles circa 2000; today, even portables like the PSP and DS can do a passable job emulating most of those titles.
The whole point of copyright is money.
Aaand that's where we disagree. The whole point of copyright is control: the right of a creator to determine the conditions under which his or her work is distributed.
Yes, most of the copyright enforcement cases we hear about these days are situations where the creator has sold away that right to another party in exchange for money. But that's a side effect of the copyright system, not an intrinsic part of it.
It's a case against a woman with Multiple Sclerosis who's never even heard of file sharing until the RIAA came after her. She just uses her computer to communicate with people by email. The RIAA knows this, but doesn't care.
Again, why does it matter, from a legal perspective, that she suffers from Multiple Sclerosis?
they don't want to learn about algorithms, they want to learn C++
If you don't know about algorithms, you can't know C++.
The closest you might be able to come is to excel at WTF++. Sadly, some employers can't tell the difference.
A masters will most often than not be relatively narrow, so why not narrow toward something you want to do ?
It's not a bad idea, but don't narrow it down so much that you end up with a graduate degree that only helps you get work in one single small, cutthroat industry.
Many universities allow matriculants to design their own course of study. Take courses and do research projects involving graphics, artificial intelligence, and distributed multi-user systems, but don't call it "Game Programming" -- call it "Interactive Multimedia Design" or something.
"Why does everyone have this obsession with X being the best or Y being the winner?"
Because the console that is "the winner" will always be the one for which the most game titles will be released, therefore improving the odds that it will be the one for which the best game titles will be released.
Microsoft need to be specific; what are the patent numbers, which countries are they valid in, and what is the licence fee that Microsoft would like from an individual user ?
No, they would need to be specific if they intended to file suit against anyone associated with the development of Linux in court.
If they're just going to make public statements with the intent of spreading FUD about Linux, it's in their interest to be as NON-specific as possible.
Why, Bomberman, of course.
I'll leave it to you guys to argue over which particular release in the Bomberman franchise is the best of them.
one person playing, the other one telling him/her what to do!
XG -- Xtreme Gameplaying!
In other words, a used computer?
Your computer has a VCR deck built into it?
I don't think even the Amiga had one of those.
"But consumers are demanding change, and change will happen fast."
I disagree on both counts.
Customers (on the whole) are content with the quality and convenience of the DVD distribution model, and will be for another couple technological generations at least.
So what were the launch issues and bugs with [...] the NES (remember, their big issue came well after launch)
In North America/Europe, yes, the issues with the ZIF bridge on the cartridge connector didn't arise until later, when they started weakening. But the first release of the Famicom in Japan had motherboard problems so severe that Nintendo of Japan had to issue a recall for all consoles sold, spending millions of dollars to repair them.
Well yes, but 540 of those lines are stale.
"Stale" meaning that they may have been drawn as long as 0.0333 seconds ago. This is where Persistence of Vision comes in handy.
Why do we bother with interlaced formats nowadays? Progressive's nicer/more sensible/easier for us to work with in the cutting room!
Interlaced video allows the perceived framerate to be doubled without requiring an increase the bandwidth of the signal. Given the choice between 1080i @ 60fps and 1080p @ 30fps, I suspect the average person would find the former to seem more fluid.
That is the proof that marketing is the most important thing in computers. If having the best product wins then the PC would have died the death that DOS deserved back then.
Where was the marketing for the IBM PC, then?
I hazily remember a TV commercial touting the PCjr, and the "How ya gonna do it? / Gonna PS/2 it!" jingle is still a brainworm fifteen years later -- but both of those models were failures.
IBM PC's didn't sell well because of good marketing; they sold well despite a lack of marketing, because they were IBM's.
What ever happened to sane usage of cookies where they'd only be set if you did something on the site that initiated a cookie transfer (e.g. logging in, starting a shopping cart, storing your preferences)?
That was before the bean-counters discovered that if you pass a cookie on every page request, you can track a single user's movement through the site with far greater accuracy than based off of IP address.
how can you really learn Java in a lecture theatre? It just doesn't work. Just get a good reference book, find some good code to copy the syntax from, and work it out as you go along.
Why go to school at all? Just find some textbooks to read, and work it out as you go along. Oh, you'll have to work out "how to read a book" as you go along as well.
Education's greatest strength is to prevent the student from making stupid mistakes made by others in the past. No, a lecture hall is not the best place to learn Java syntax, but it could be a very good place to learn about common object-oriented design patterns.
Your work needs to be checked in to our tracking software by 8. If not, the compile will break. If you break a compile, your quality factor score goes down.
Oh, yuck.
What happens when it's 7:55 and the component I'm working on is nowhere ready for compiling? Under your system, there seem to be two options: check my broken code in and ruin the compile, or fail to check my broken code in and receive demerits AND ruin the compile.
The obvious third option -- run the compile but use yesterday's working version of my component instead of my currently-broken one -- seems to be absent.
One thing that really needs to be understood by all you "best practice" guys is that test code is not a shippable product.
Neither are design documents or sourcecode comments, but I hope you're not suggesting that work done on those portions of a project are an unnecessary waste of time.
You need developer buy-in to make a largescale standards effort work.
I'm pretty sure the submitter understands that, which is why the question being asked is HOW to foster developer buy-in. Your answer to that question seems to be "get rid of anyone who doesn't buy-in and replace them with coders who do", which in a lot of real-world cases translates to "lose your smartest programmers, and substitute in their place a bunch of PFYs". That's not a realistic solution.
What I always found amusing is that when I worked for Toys R Us back when the Sega CD was out, I had to explain to a LOT of customers that they needed a Sega Genesis in order for the Sega CD to work. They just could not wrap their heads around the idea that it was purely an add-on and not a console in its own right. :-)
Your name wouldn't happen to be Jonathan Brandstetter, would it?