In addition to the points raised by others, may I point you to the Baen Publishing Company's Free Library? The front page includes an insightful essay with hard data as to why authors especially should be looking for ways to spread the word about their works.
Look, most games are not especially suited to storytelling. You're leaving out whole subgenres here. What about, oh, say, Sid Meier's Civilization series, especially Alpha Centauri? Or Sim City? Black and White? (A flawed game from what I've heard but still. Great concept.)
When you think in terms of their artistic impact that some games have had or might have, you need to consider Spore, Descent, Doom and Doom ][, Homeworld, the Operation Flashpoint series, etc.
If he seriously thought that working for a foreign government meant that he was immune to standard security checks, and reacted badly to the suggestion that they look in his bag, then that's all the more reason to check him. I mean, if there were 500 people in an airport lounge of various colours and religious persuasions, and you could only check one of them for possible terrorist devices or components, then it'd be him, wouldn't it?
Odd. I would have thought that as a senior member of the British government, he could claim diplomatic immunity?
Odd. It seems that Webster disagrees with you. I know, I know, it's not Oxford. Oxford doesn't have a free interface, and my copy is 30 years old. Still, Webster is generally considered to be a reasonable source for the English language as spoken in the U.S.
Wow. I pay that price for far better service than you seem to expect, yet I expect nothing less. Incremental backups done nightly is NOT that tough an admin task to set up and manage. If a company can't manage that minimal sysadmin task, they have no business pretending that they're an ISP in the first place.
Really. Then please explain to me why I need to use OpenOffice today to read documents that I wrote using MS Word back in '98? So far as I can tell, my current version of MS Office is explicitly designed to NOT open those documents. Yet some off the wall FOSS program can.
When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.
...
And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to, either by a prince or a republic, then the prince ought to go in person and perform the duty of captain; the republic has to send its citizens, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by the laws so that he does not leave the command. And experience has shown princes and republics, single-handed, making the greatest progress, and mercenaries doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms. Rome and Sparta stood for many ages armed and free. The Switzers are completely armed and quite free.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
Machiavelli understood that true security comes not from relying upon a small cadre of professional soldiers, but through the direct participation of the citizenry in all forms of military service. Too bad most politicians never learn that lesson.
'75 they were still pretending that minicomputers weren't going to develop a serious market, even though by then there were a lot of them out there. I think that's what the OP was referring to.
Each new years my folks use to let me and my brothers have a sip of wine and made us eat sour kraut for luck. It was a tradition. (I haven't eaten kraut since. My luck has been fine.) My wife is Italian enough that we eat spaghetti with the secret family meatball recipe at Christmas. Her family makes all sort of other Italian dishes and also finds a glass of wine to be obligatory. The school would tell me my kids can't go to the Christmas dinner at Great Grandma's? That would be another impact that the school has no right to impose.
Thanks to MADD, that is now illegal in Minnesota, and has been for a few years. Another one of those stupid, stupid laws forced upon us by those who think they know how everyone else should live.:(
Almost forgot. If she's from the Deep South, she'll be the one flirting first. I swear, there must be something in the water down there./Every/ woman I've ever met from south of the Mason-Dixon line seems to flirt as naturally as breathing. I love Southern women.:)
Forget dealing with traffic. I'm far more concerned about how data corruption in the navigational system. A couple of examples:
First, what will GM use for their original data load? How will they reconcile the inevitable bad data on the first load? How will they keep the system up to date as new roads are created and old ones close?
Second, I live in Minnesota, where we joke the four seasons are winter, winter, winter, and road repair. How on earth will GM's system be able to deal with detours? Unexpected lane closures while a local municipality fills potholes? Collapsed bridges on interstate highways?
Tell me how they'll deal with all that before you start worrying about how they'll dodge the minivan being piloted by a soccer mom with a cell phone glued to her ear.:)
The fact of the matter is that, currently, NATs are here and they have to be dealt with. Protocols developed long ago, such as FTP, which used embedded IP addresses and separate control connections have been enormous challenges in the networking industry.
All true. However, I think you're missing the GP's point. For IPv6 connections, the fundamental reason that NATs came into being (preservation of IPv4 space) goes away.
That has zero effect on the problem that you are referring to, obviously. I would argue that for IPv6 connections that those problems simply don't matter any longer. Have an issue with an old protocol using braindead techniques? Then just don't support it in the new environment.
That should not prevent anyone from adopting IPv6 for anything else. After all, nobody with half a clue is suggesting that any network of any size should do a flash cut to a pure IPv6 network right now.
To me, the truly tragically funny thing that all this opposition to IPv6 boils down to a bunch of network geeks who don't want to support a second protocol on their networks. Please. Anyone who has been doing network design and administration for more than 10 years should have been involved in at least one project that had three or four protocols running on it. It certainly complicates your network design, but it's not the end of the world.
IMNSHO, there is no reason that enterprise networks can't support IPv6 in parallel with IPv4 today. The real question should be, is there a functional or business requirement to do so? If the answer is yes, (even if it's for just a handful of sites) then just get it done. If the answer is not yet, then wait.:)
But I'm at the age where I can be a member of the 'Grumpy Old Men' club (Excellent BBC TV Series).
I don't know if this series you're referring to is a spinoff of the movie with the same name or not. However, you forcibly reminded me of a Usenet post that I saw on mn.general (Minnesota General interest, obviously) years ago. It was patterned after comic Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a Redneck if.." bit that he still does as part of his standup routine.
Naturally, it was titled "You might be a Minnesotan if...". Among other gems, it included this line:
-the first time you saw "Grumpy Old Men" you thought it was a documentary.
It's a much funnier line when you read it in the context of the whole post. A quick Google of the phrase turned up several archived copies of it online. One can be found here. Here's a sampling taken at random:
-you consider it a sport to gather your food by drilling through 18 inches of ice and sitting there all day hoping the food will swim by.
-you keep the snow tires on your truck all year because it ain't worth taking them off for only two months.
-someone in a store offers you assistance, and they don't work there.
-your Dad's sun tan stops at a line curving around the middle of his forehead.
-you have ever worn shorts and a parka at the same time.
-you never had to rewind any part of "Fargo" because you missed some of the dialogue.
Who says Americans can't poke fun at themselves?:)
Sigh. I wish to keep this civil, if at all possible.
First, you act as if they were "convicted" of being a monopoly. Of course, they weren't. It's not like being a convict where suddenly you have this special "monopoly" status. All it means is the next whiny ass competitor to come to court can claim they have a monopoly and refer to the finding of "fact".
No, Microsoft was not "convicted" of being a monopoly. I chose my words very carefully. However, you make a leap that is just not based on the law. The reason why the next "whiny ass competitor" can come to court and point at that finding of fact is because the law allows them to. The law and legal precedent covering the special status that a company holding a monopoly are well established, in part because of what happened under Standard Oil and U.S. Steel.
In addition, there is other case law covering similar activities. AT&T's refusal to allow the connection of 3rd party phones, for example, until their monopoly was taken away from them. IBM's refusal to honor warranties when 3rd party peripherals were connected to their mainframes, or when people ran IBM code on mainframe clones is another. Both faced the U.S. courts and were forced to back down. You may remember that AT&T was also broken up, at least partly due to the fact they continued to stonewall the court instead of accepting defeat gracefully.
IBM's case is closer to the conditions that Microsoft finds itself faced with. Unlike AT&T, IBM chose to negotiate a settlement with the courts that essentially acknowledged their competitors' right to compete. Since then, IBM has operated strictly within a set of moral and legal constraints that are well within what most people would find both legal and acceptable. That's why they don't find themselves facing constant legal battles and court supervision the way that Microsoft is at this time. (The sometimes questionable competence of said supervision notwithstanding.)
As to your contention that Microsoft has no pricing power outside of their own OS? Well, what do you think happens when someone goes to buy a new PC? Microsoft can clearly arbitrarily change pricing to force purchasing behavior for items other than the OS.
That's what I was illustrating by pointing out that the retail cost of Microsoft's OS is so much higher than what the top tier OEMs are allowed to charge. Microsoft holds a HUGE club over their heads. Those vendors either bury alternatives as deeply as possible/and/ prominently display that "XXX Vendor recommends..." tagline, or they'll be forced to pay the retail cost for XP, Vista, MS Office, and all of Microsoft's other products.
Do you really think any of these vendors can afford to do that? As has been repeatedly demonstrated, the margins on PC hardware is razor thin. No single top tier vendor can afford to compete by breaking ranks with the rest. The fact that all of the big vendors now have at least some form of Linux desktop available is only possible because the U.S. court found that Microsoft had engaged in restraint of trade.
So fall back on "law" if you must, but law is often irrational and capricious. In fact, it seems the dweebs love it when the law goes against MS, but then lament how silly the "law" is when they seem to find things Microsoft's way. Microsoft simply isn't a monopoly in any rational, meaningful way and no finding of anything by anybody will change that.
Sigh again. I doubt anyone is still reading this thread besides the two of us, so I'll probably just drop this after one final observation: If you find the law irrational, capricious, and silly, by all means work to change it. However, when multiple courts and most commentators in this thread (and elsewhere, I might add) all take a view that opposes yours, maybe it's time for you to reflect on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you are the one who is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
This might be the most insightful (or worst) set of answers from a interviewee that I've ever (not) seen! :)
Updated hourly. The Nokia 800 and the Asus eee have both been in the Top 10 for computers for months.
In addition to the points raised by others, may I point you to the Baen Publishing Company's Free Library? The front page includes an insightful essay with hard data as to why authors especially should be looking for ways to spread the word about their works.
Well, I suppose it's still possible that you're actually a Minnesotan but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. :)
Look, most games are not especially suited to storytelling. You're leaving out whole subgenres here. What about, oh, say, Sid Meier's Civilization series, especially Alpha Centauri? Or Sim City? Black and White? (A flawed game from what I've heard but still. Great concept.)
When you think in terms of their artistic impact that some games have had or might have, you need to consider Spore, Descent, Doom and Doom ][, Homeworld, the Operation Flashpoint series, etc.
Odd. It seems that Webster disagrees with you. I know, I know, it's not Oxford. Oxford doesn't have a free interface, and my copy is 30 years old. Still, Webster is generally considered to be a reasonable source for the English language as spoken in the U.S.
Wow. I pay that price for far better service than you seem to expect, yet I expect nothing less. Incremental backups done nightly is NOT that tough an admin task to set up and manage. If a company can't manage that minimal sysadmin task, they have no business pretending that they're an ISP in the first place.
Really. Then please explain to me why I need to use OpenOffice today to read documents that I wrote using MS Word back in '98? So far as I can tell, my current version of MS Office is explicitly designed to NOT open those documents. Yet some off the wall FOSS program can.
Huh. Who'da thunk?
You know, I wondered the same thing.
Machiavelli understood that true security comes not from relying upon a small cadre of professional soldiers, but through the direct participation of the citizenry in all forms of military service. Too bad most politicians never learn that lesson.
You forgot to complete the quote:
/forever/.'' :)
"...We are now qualified to anything, with nothing,
Bought a USB key lately? It's getting tough to find one without that marketing crap on it.
'75 they were still pretending that minicomputers weren't going to develop a serious market, even though by then there were a lot of them out there. I think that's what the OP was referring to.
Thanks to MADD, that is now illegal in Minnesota, and has been for a few years. Another one of those stupid, stupid laws forced upon us by those who think they know how everyone else should live. :(
Almost forgot. If she's from the Deep South, she'll be the one flirting first. I swear, there must be something in the water down there. /Every/ woman I've ever met from south of the Mason-Dixon line seems to flirt as naturally as breathing. I love Southern women. :)
This is a Good Thing. If she thinks you're cute, she'll flirt back. It's kinda how we're wired. :)
Forget dealing with traffic. I'm far more concerned about how data corruption in the navigational system. A couple of examples:
:)
First, what will GM use for their original data load? How will they reconcile the inevitable bad data on the first load? How will they keep the system up to date as new roads are created and old ones close?
Second, I live in Minnesota, where we joke the four seasons are winter, winter, winter, and road repair. How on earth will GM's system be able to deal with detours? Unexpected lane closures while a local municipality fills potholes? Collapsed bridges on interstate highways?
Tell me how they'll deal with all that before you start worrying about how they'll dodge the minivan being piloted by a soccer mom with a cell phone glued to her ear.
That's the most succinct, insightful reasoning that I've ever seen on Stallman's current place in the FOSS world. :)
All true. However, I think you're missing the GP's point. For IPv6 connections, the fundamental reason that NATs came into being (preservation of IPv4 space) goes away.
That has zero effect on the problem that you are referring to, obviously. I would argue that for IPv6 connections that those problems simply don't matter any longer. Have an issue with an old protocol using braindead techniques? Then just don't support it in the new environment.
That should not prevent anyone from adopting IPv6 for anything else. After all, nobody with half a clue is suggesting that any network of any size should do a flash cut to a pure IPv6 network right now.
To me, the truly tragically funny thing that all this opposition to IPv6 boils down to a bunch of network geeks who don't want to support a second protocol on their networks. Please. Anyone who has been doing network design and administration for more than 10 years should have been involved in at least one project that had three or four protocols running on it. It certainly complicates your network design, but it's not the end of the world.
IMNSHO, there is no reason that enterprise networks can't support IPv6 in parallel with IPv4 today. The real question should be, is there a functional or business requirement to do so? If the answer is yes, (even if it's for just a handful of sites) then just get it done. If the answer is not yet, then wait. :)
Lifelines
BitTorrent-curses
:)
I don't know if this series you're referring to is a spinoff of the movie with the same name or not. However, you forcibly reminded me of a Usenet post that I saw on mn.general (Minnesota General interest, obviously) years ago. It was patterned after comic Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a Redneck if.." bit that he still does as part of his standup routine.
Naturally, it was titled "You might be a Minnesotan if...". Among other gems, it included this line:
It's a much funnier line when you read it in the context of the whole post. A quick Google of the phrase turned up several archived copies of it online. One can be found here. Here's a sampling taken at random:
Who says Americans can't poke fun at themselves? :)
Heck, I'd be satisfied with a nice, simple curses interface! Why does everyone assume that if it's not CLI, it has to be a full blown GUI app?
Let me guess...
;)
You work for Gartner, right?
No, Microsoft was not "convicted" of being a monopoly. I chose my words very carefully. However, you make a leap that is just not based on the law. The reason why the next "whiny ass competitor" can come to court and point at that finding of fact is because the law allows them to. The law and legal precedent covering the special status that a company holding a monopoly are well established, in part because of what happened under Standard Oil and U.S. Steel.
In addition, there is other case law covering similar activities. AT&T's refusal to allow the connection of 3rd party phones, for example, until their monopoly was taken away from them. IBM's refusal to honor warranties when 3rd party peripherals were connected to their mainframes, or when people ran IBM code on mainframe clones is another. Both faced the U.S. courts and were forced to back down. You may remember that AT&T was also broken up, at least partly due to the fact they continued to stonewall the court instead of accepting defeat gracefully.
IBM's case is closer to the conditions that Microsoft finds itself faced with. Unlike AT&T, IBM chose to negotiate a settlement with the courts that essentially acknowledged their competitors' right to compete. Since then, IBM has operated strictly within a set of moral and legal constraints that are well within what most people would find both legal and acceptable. That's why they don't find themselves facing constant legal battles and court supervision the way that Microsoft is at this time. (The sometimes questionable competence of said supervision notwithstanding.)
As to your contention that Microsoft has no pricing power outside of their own OS? Well, what do you think happens when someone goes to buy a new PC? Microsoft can clearly arbitrarily change pricing to force purchasing behavior for items other than the OS.
That's what I was illustrating by pointing out that the retail cost of Microsoft's OS is so much higher than what the top tier OEMs are allowed to charge. Microsoft holds a HUGE club over their heads. Those vendors either bury alternatives as deeply as possible /and/ prominently display that "XXX Vendor recommends..." tagline, or they'll be forced to pay the retail cost for XP, Vista, MS Office, and all of Microsoft's other products.
Do you really think any of these vendors can afford to do that? As has been repeatedly demonstrated, the margins on PC hardware is razor thin. No single top tier vendor can afford to compete by breaking ranks with the rest. The fact that all of the big vendors now have at least some form of Linux desktop available is only possible because the U.S. court found that Microsoft had engaged in restraint of trade.
Sigh again. I doubt anyone is still reading this thread besides the two of us, so I'll probably just drop this after one final observation: If you find the law irrational, capricious, and silly, by all means work to change it. However, when multiple courts and most commentators in this thread (and elsewhere, I might add) all take a view that opposes yours, maybe it's time for you to reflect on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you are the one who is wrong.