It is quite possible to develop games that the whole world can enjoy
Yes, I suppose, if your definition of "enjoy" is "spend a week trying to make progress on the huge experience gaps between levels only to have your work wiped out by a freak monster spawn behind you".
Given that the site is located in Russia, it is (or at least was originally) probably intended mainly for Russian users. I doubt any of the service administrators speak native English. Think how you'd feel if you had a site in English and Russian, and Russian users called it "shady" because your Russian was bad. Then think again on your comment.
I have no problem with taking steps to resolve issues. What I do have a problem with is this kind of thinking:
This procedure you're talking about, where a bad law gets passed because a worse one was proposed is in my opinion simply called "compromise" and hence something very important in politics.
That's exactly the way the politicians want you to think. By considering the "better" bad law on XYZ as a compromise, you've (perhaps unconsciously) accepted their argument that XYZ is something that needs to be implemented/changed/whatever--when this may not be the case at all! Consider this analogy: a police officer stops you at a roadblock and tells you to hand over your wallet because the police department is running low on money and it's the citizens' responsibility to help. When you argue, the officer reluctantly gives way and lets you go after taking "only" $20. Would you consider that a reasonable compromise? Especially if you'd just heard a news story about a raise in police officer salaries?
There are times when compromise is an appropriate first step, and times when it isn't. If the content companies are willing to work in good faith to find a solution that's appropriate to modern society (read: information sharing--it's not going to go away), then I'm all for that. If they're going to keep on suing their customer base and squeezing their artists, I don't see why I should cooperate with them.
By saying Apple's DRM is good, you're falling right into the content companies' "trap" (scare quotes because I'm not convinced it was intentional, though the result is still the same). This is the same way many bad laws get passed: proponents of the bad law propose a law that's several times worse, wait for the backlash, then "fall back" to what they wanted to push through in the first place--and most people will agree that it's an improvement and let it go.
Distribution of copyrighted material is already illegal. DRM can always be circumvented. People will probably be willing to pay reasonable prices for songs online if they're guaranteed quality and the freedom to do what they want with the file, though I'll grant that payment methods are still a mostly unresolved issue. Hence there's no need for DRM, and even DRM as "fair" as Apple's is an improper infringement on users' rights. (Unless you believe content really belongs to the creators rather than to the culture--but that's not the stance the Framers took.)
I'm reminded of an old saying I heard about negotiation tactics: "If you want Australia, ask for the world and give away five continents."
According to the Copyright Board of Canada, downloading copyright files from P2P networks is completely legal, provided that the copying is done for private and noncommercial use.
Out of curiosity, does that extend to the people making the files available on P2P as well? Or is it just a "we won't go after you unless you upload" sort of thing?
Incidentally, Japan has a similar clause in its copyright law--"a user of copyrighted material is permitted to make copies for personal, family, or similarly limited use". A couple of people were arrested recently for sharing some movie or other, though.
Every time you re-encode you lose quality. This can be viewed as analogous to the quality loss when copying audio information between analog storage media. Barring the use of FLAC which generates large files, you're going to lose information when you re-encode. So this is really a non-problem.
If scanning like this ever takes off, I bet people will discover really quickly that they don't mind quality loss that much after all.
That's probably because CD writers use CAV (constant angular velocity) for writing speeds above 12x. CDs were originally developed to use CLV (constant linear velocity), meaning that the rotation speed slows down as the head goes toward the outer edge of the disc--if you have an older CD player that lets you see the spindle or CD while it's spinning you can verify this (it's easiest to see when the head is seeking from one edge to the other). I'm not an expert in CD technology, but I've had similar results using discs burned at 12x vs. 24x on a 24x writer--the 12x discs work better in older players and CD-ROM drives--and I suspect it's because of differences in the way the disc is written between CAV and CLV.
If I'm talking out of my ass, I'm sure someone will correct me . . .
Two-thirds of the unclaimed money will go to California public schools in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants...
The catch, of course, is that the "cash" is really vouchers that can only be used for computer-related expenses (see pp.32-34 of the Settlement Agreement), so either:
The school buys half Microsoft products and half non-Microsoft products, and has to deal with the attendant hassles; or
The school buys Microsoft products and uses the vouchers for training, hardware, etc., in which case the software side is 100% Microsoft; or
Somewhere in-between.
And in any of those cases, Microsoft ends up benefitting from student/staff exposure to Microsoft software. So the fact that the schools are allowed to purchase non-Microsoft products doesn't necessarily mitigate that Microsoft managed to craft themselves a pretty sweet deal.
The department says it is merely listing well-known choices available to employers, even under current law. "We're not saying anybody should do any of this," said Labor Department spokesman Ed Frank.
Um, right. Just like the/. posts that say "you know, everybody could call up the RIAA toll-free line and charge them tons of money--not that I'm actually suggesting anyone should do this."
This will force the US based companies to pay more, making them even less competative on the global marketplace.
This argument is made frequently, and I've always wondered: why is this a bad thing? Like the parent, I also feel efforts should be made to maintain standards of living; and it seems to me that tariffs in both directions--both on paying wages etc. to foreign workers or companies, and on importing goods/services made by foreign workers or companies--would be a reasonable way to do this. Taxing imports as well seems (to my naive? mind, anyway) like it should keep the playing field level, in that foreign companies would not be able to profit off standard-of-living or currency differences--they'd only be able to retain the same amount as they would have been able to sell for locally. Given that, domestic companies ought to have the edge over foreign ones due to native/local support and reduced transportation costs (FedEx vs. customs + air transport), at least. As long as that state of affairs held, it would render the issue of "global competitiveness" mostly irrelevant--if one company moved offshore, another one would spring up to take its place. Yes, domestic companies would have more difficulty selling to less-well-off countries, but since it's not the job of any country to look out for everyone else, this still seems like a reasonable state of affairs.
So why am I wrong? (Not trolling, simply seeking to lessen my degree of ignorance . ..)
So where did you pull that definition of "reasonable" from? Has it occurred to you that to some people "shit for everyone" might be perfectly reasonable, and no worse than their current situation?
Well, though I haven't read the book myself, I'd rather doubt that good retention and poor pattern matching are necessarily related; I don't do too badly in either area. On the other hand, I can't say I particularly enjoy recalling the number of times I haven't been able to get a date, so maybe you have a point . . .
Actually it was to encourage creativity by allowing the creators (working with/through the publishers) to become rich.
That's exactly what the parent was saying--"not simply to make publishers rich". I don't think anyone will argue that the reason for the monopoly was to generate income for the author/publisher (well, arguments can be made about which one should get the income, but that's a different issue). The point is that the income was not intended as the final goal of copyright, but merely as a means to an end, that end being "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I think it's pretty clear that that goal has for all intents and purposes disappeared from modern copyright law.
And that's the reason it will always play second fiddle to commercial consumer software.
And that's my point. The authors of such software don't care that it will always "play second fiddle"; unlike some people, they're not out to take over the world. I don't see any problem with that.
For years and years, we've been saying that in the end, we're all the same no matter where we come from, we're all human beings. When it comes to space exploration, it can only be more true. We are not americans or canadians or french or japanese, we are earthlings.
Yes! Even just living in a different country (as I've done in moving to Japan from the US) really brings this point home. People, cultures are different--and that's good! variety is the spice of life and all that--but everybody shares the same basic needs and desires, if only people would realize it. We need more people in the world thinking like you.
Just one thing--I think "Terran" works better in English. "Earthling" reminds me of too many bad SF flicks . . .
Developers didn't bother doing this, didn't bother doing that, blablabla. You didn't bother doing much yourself, did you?
Why should I?
Because that's the way most open source software works. The developers have put together something they like, and are offering it to anyone else who wants to use it--that's all. They're not demanding that users gain a certain amount of technical knowledge; in many cases they're not even trying to entice users to use their software at all. It's a lot like a bazaar, say, or a swap-meet; if you find something interesting, feel free to try it out, but nobody will be upset if you don't like it. To each their own, after all.
Now, there are developers out there who respond to legitimate complaints such as yours with "leave me alone you stupid n00b" or the like. I find this unfortunate, since it reflects poorly on all open source developers. At the same time, there are developers who make efforts to ensure that their software can be used as easily as proprietary software. But on the whole, open source software is much more a "peer-to-peer" relationship than a "developer-user" one, and you should keep this in mind when trying such software out.
A good password isn't that hard. You don't need lots of symbols or numbers to make it hard. In fact making a good password is a lot like the devices used to recall information from memory.
Agreed, and I use my own mnemonic devices to make easy-to-remember, hard-to-guess passwords. (The only time I had a password cracked was back when I was a naive telnet-using kid at university . . . argh, that's too many years ago.) But I'm willing to bet that many, many people out there either don't have that insight or simply don't want to be bothered coming up such--else why would we have the persistent "postit-on-monitor" joke?
I've always been against this, or at least the more anal implementations of it, in that forcing people to choose hard-to-remember passwords typically leads to writing the passwords down--often in obvious places--which makes the problem worse instead of better. Good encryption (e.g. ssh instead of telnet) and good security measures (e.g. shadow passwords) are much more effective than draconian policies that don't achieve their ends anyway.
(And as for numbers and symbols making passwords less crackable--admit it, how many of you use 1337speak to make up the number/symbol quota?)
I'm not anywhere even close to a biology major, but curiosity killed . . . err, maybe I shouldn't use that one. Anyway:
Some Googling on the subject says that light from Proxima Centauri reaches the human eye at about 100 photons per second. Proxima is about 4.2 ly ~= 4e16 m away from us, so we're on a sphere of surface area 2e34 m^2. I don't have a mirror handy, but let's say the human eye (pupil) has a surface area of 20 mm^2 = 2e-5 m^2. So Proxima is putting out 1e2 * (2e34/2e-5) = 1e41 photons per second.
Proxima is a red dwarf, so let's say for the sake of argument that it's spitting out 700nm photons, with E = hc/l = 6.6e-34*3e8/7e-7 = 2.8e-19 J; that gives is 2.8e22 J/s of output. Einstein says E=mc^2, so m = E/c^2 = 2.8e22/9e16 = 3e5 kg/s.
If you actually use these numbers for anything, you're insane, and I refuse to furnish you with two million hamburgers a second.
But to prevent, by patents, some person from writing, in a clean room environment, never having seen your commercial code, a program that runs as well, or better than yours, is downright immoral.
So is it also "downright immoral" to prevent, by patents, some person from designing, in a clean room environment, never having seen your commercial mousetrap, a mousetrap that traps as well as, or better than, yours?
An effctive alternative is a traffic light that is red and turn green a fixed amount of time after an approaching car has come to a certain distance. Those who were going too fast have to stop, others can drive on smoothly.
As long as they set the distance right. The light on the entrance intersection to my folks' neighborhood is (or at least used to be) set to turn red when you were right in front of the intersection. It was a long light, too, so this pretty much guaranteed a 2-minute wait whenever we went anywhere.
Maybe it's a relic from when people lived the slow life . . .
Slashdot Mirror
It is quite possible to develop games that the whole world can enjoy
Yes, I suppose, if your definition of "enjoy" is "spend a week trying to make progress on the huge experience gaps between levels only to have your work wiped out by a freak monster spawn behind you".
No, I'm not bitter. Whyever do you ask?
Given that the site is located in Russia, it is (or at least was originally) probably intended mainly for Russian users. I doubt any of the service administrators speak native English. Think how you'd feel if you had a site in English and Russian, and Russian users called it "shady" because your Russian was bad. Then think again on your comment.
These look like typos--the third octet will get zeroed out by the netmask. Are you sure you entered them correctly?
I have no problem with taking steps to resolve issues. What I do have a problem with is this kind of thinking:
This procedure you're talking about, where a bad law gets passed because a worse one was proposed is in my opinion simply called "compromise" and hence something very important in politics.
That's exactly the way the politicians want you to think. By considering the "better" bad law on XYZ as a compromise, you've (perhaps unconsciously) accepted their argument that XYZ is something that needs to be implemented/changed/whatever--when this may not be the case at all! Consider this analogy: a police officer stops you at a roadblock and tells you to hand over your wallet because the police department is running low on money and it's the citizens' responsibility to help. When you argue, the officer reluctantly gives way and lets you go after taking "only" $20. Would you consider that a reasonable compromise? Especially if you'd just heard a news story about a raise in police officer salaries?
There are times when compromise is an appropriate first step, and times when it isn't. If the content companies are willing to work in good faith to find a solution that's appropriate to modern society (read: information sharing--it's not going to go away), then I'm all for that. If they're going to keep on suing their customer base and squeezing their artists, I don't see why I should cooperate with them.
By saying Apple's DRM is good, you're falling right into the content companies' "trap" (scare quotes because I'm not convinced it was intentional, though the result is still the same). This is the same way many bad laws get passed: proponents of the bad law propose a law that's several times worse, wait for the backlash, then "fall back" to what they wanted to push through in the first place--and most people will agree that it's an improvement and let it go.
Distribution of copyrighted material is already illegal. DRM can always be circumvented. People will probably be willing to pay reasonable prices for songs online if they're guaranteed quality and the freedom to do what they want with the file, though I'll grant that payment methods are still a mostly unresolved issue. Hence there's no need for DRM, and even DRM as "fair" as Apple's is an improper infringement on users' rights. (Unless you believe content really belongs to the creators rather than to the culture--but that's not the stance the Framers took.)
I'm reminded of an old saying I heard about negotiation tactics: "If you want Australia, ask for the world and give away five continents."
Nicknames use SW-ASCII, yes that's right, the swedish variant of 7-bit ascii. That's the reason [ and { are equivalent, as is | and \.
This actually isn't true anymore for many IRC servers (Dreamforge/Bahamut, Unreal, and all their derivatives); these treat [\] and {|} as distinct.
According to the Copyright Board of Canada, downloading copyright files from P2P networks is completely legal, provided that the copying is done for private and noncommercial use.
Out of curiosity, does that extend to the people making the files available on P2P as well? Or is it just a "we won't go after you unless you upload" sort of thing?
Incidentally, Japan has a similar clause in its copyright law--"a user of copyrighted material is permitted to make copies for personal, family, or similarly limited use". A couple of people were arrested recently for sharing some movie or other, though.
Every time you re-encode you lose quality. This can be viewed as analogous to the quality loss when copying audio information between analog storage media. Barring the use of FLAC which generates large files, you're going to lose information when you re-encode. So this is really a non-problem.
If scanning like this ever takes off, I bet people will discover really quickly that they don't mind quality loss that much after all.
That's probably because CD writers use CAV (constant angular velocity) for writing speeds above 12x. CDs were originally developed to use CLV (constant linear velocity), meaning that the rotation speed slows down as the head goes toward the outer edge of the disc--if you have an older CD player that lets you see the spindle or CD while it's spinning you can verify this (it's easiest to see when the head is seeking from one edge to the other). I'm not an expert in CD technology, but I've had similar results using discs burned at 12x vs. 24x on a 24x writer--the 12x discs work better in older players and CD-ROM drives--and I suspect it's because of differences in the way the disc is written between CAV and CLV.
If I'm talking out of my ass, I'm sure someone will correct me . . .
Two-thirds of the unclaimed money will go to California public schools in a mix of donated Microsoft software and cash grants ...
The catch, of course, is that the "cash" is really vouchers that can only be used for computer-related expenses (see pp.32-34 of the Settlement Agreement), so either:
And in any of those cases, Microsoft ends up benefitting from student/staff exposure to Microsoft software. So the fact that the schools are allowed to purchase non-Microsoft products doesn't necessarily mitigate that Microsoft managed to craft themselves a pretty sweet deal.
Quoting from the article:
Um, right. Just like theThis will force the US based companies to pay more, making them even less competative on the global marketplace.
This argument is made frequently, and I've always wondered: why is this a bad thing? Like the parent, I also feel efforts should be made to maintain standards of living; and it seems to me that tariffs in both directions--both on paying wages etc. to foreign workers or companies, and on importing goods/services made by foreign workers or companies--would be a reasonable way to do this. Taxing imports as well seems (to my naive? mind, anyway) like it should keep the playing field level, in that foreign companies would not be able to profit off standard-of-living or currency differences--they'd only be able to retain the same amount as they would have been able to sell for locally. Given that, domestic companies ought to have the edge over foreign ones due to native/local support and reduced transportation costs (FedEx vs. customs + air transport), at least. As long as that state of affairs held, it would render the issue of "global competitiveness" mostly irrelevant--if one company moved offshore, another one would spring up to take its place. Yes, domestic companies would have more difficulty selling to less-well-off countries, but since it's not the job of any country to look out for everyone else, this still seems like a reasonable state of affairs.
So why am I wrong? (Not trolling, simply seeking to lessen my degree of ignorance . . .)
So where did you pull that definition of "reasonable" from? Has it occurred to you that to some people "shit for everyone" might be perfectly reasonable, and no worse than their current situation?
If you've actually got a legal leg to stand on in your own damn country, then make your case and get on with it.
So are you going to finance this case? If not, I'd hardly call making their case "fair", at least in countries where money influences legal outcomes.
Having a too-good memory is what you don't want.
Well, though I haven't read the book myself, I'd rather doubt that good retention and poor pattern matching are necessarily related; I don't do too badly in either area. On the other hand, I can't say I particularly enjoy recalling the number of times I haven't been able to get a date, so maybe you have a point . . .
Actually it was to encourage creativity by allowing the creators (working with/through the publishers) to become rich.
That's exactly what the parent was saying--"not simply to make publishers rich". I don't think anyone will argue that the reason for the monopoly was to generate income for the author/publisher (well, arguments can be made about which one should get the income, but that's a different issue). The point is that the income was not intended as the final goal of copyright, but merely as a means to an end, that end being "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". I think it's pretty clear that that goal has for all intents and purposes disappeared from modern copyright law.
And that's the reason it will always play second fiddle to commercial consumer software.
And that's my point. The authors of such software don't care that it will always "play second fiddle"; unlike some people, they're not out to take over the world. I don't see any problem with that.
For years and years, we've been saying that in the end, we're all the same no matter where we come from, we're all human beings. When it comes to space exploration, it can only be more true. We are not americans or canadians or french or japanese, we are earthlings.
Yes! Even just living in a different country (as I've done in moving to Japan from the US) really brings this point home. People, cultures are different--and that's good! variety is the spice of life and all that--but everybody shares the same basic needs and desires, if only people would realize it. We need more people in the world thinking like you.
Just one thing--I think "Terran" works better in English. "Earthling" reminds me of too many bad SF flicks . . .
Why should I?
Because that's the way most open source software works. The developers have put together something they like, and are offering it to anyone else who wants to use it--that's all. They're not demanding that users gain a certain amount of technical knowledge; in many cases they're not even trying to entice users to use their software at all. It's a lot like a bazaar, say, or a swap-meet; if you find something interesting, feel free to try it out, but nobody will be upset if you don't like it. To each their own, after all.
Now, there are developers out there who respond to legitimate complaints such as yours with "leave me alone you stupid n00b" or the like. I find this unfortunate, since it reflects poorly on all open source developers. At the same time, there are developers who make efforts to ensure that their software can be used as easily as proprietary software. But on the whole, open source software is much more a "peer-to-peer" relationship than a "developer-user" one, and you should keep this in mind when trying such software out.
A good password isn't that hard. You don't need lots of symbols or numbers to make it hard. In fact making a good password is a lot like the devices used to recall information from memory.
Agreed, and I use my own mnemonic devices to make easy-to-remember, hard-to-guess passwords. (The only time I had a password cracked was back when I was a naive telnet-using kid at university . . . argh, that's too many years ago.) But I'm willing to bet that many, many people out there either don't have that insight or simply don't want to be bothered coming up such--else why would we have the persistent "postit-on-monitor" joke?
enforce proper password policies (8 char minimum, numbers, letters and symbols etc).
I've always been against this, or at least the more anal implementations of it, in that forcing people to choose hard-to-remember passwords typically leads to writing the passwords down--often in obvious places--which makes the problem worse instead of better. Good encryption (e.g. ssh instead of telnet) and good security measures (e.g. shadow passwords) are much more effective than draconian policies that don't achieve their ends anyway.
(And as for numbers and symbols making passwords less crackable--admit it, how many of you use 1337speak to make up the number/symbol quota?)
I'm not anywhere even close to a biology major, but curiosity killed . . . err, maybe I shouldn't use that one. Anyway:
Some Googling on the subject says that light from Proxima Centauri reaches the human eye at about 100 photons per second. Proxima is about 4.2 ly ~= 4e16 m away from us, so we're on a sphere of surface area 2e34 m^2. I don't have a mirror handy, but let's say the human eye (pupil) has a surface area of 20 mm^2 = 2e-5 m^2. So Proxima is putting out 1e2 * (2e34/2e-5) = 1e41 photons per second.
Proxima is a red dwarf, so let's say for the sake of argument that it's spitting out 700nm photons, with E = hc/l = 6.6e-34*3e8/7e-7 = 2.8e-19 J; that gives is 2.8e22 J/s of output. Einstein says E=mc^2, so m = E/c^2 = 2.8e22/9e16 = 3e5 kg/s.
If you actually use these numbers for anything, you're insane, and I refuse to furnish you with two million hamburgers a second.
But to prevent, by patents, some person from writing, in a clean room environment, never having seen your commercial code, a program that runs as well, or better than yours, is downright immoral.
So is it also "downright immoral" to prevent, by patents, some person from designing, in a clean room environment, never having seen your commercial mousetrap, a mousetrap that traps as well as, or better than, yours?
Not trolling, just honestly wondering . . .
. . . as long as you open up again afterwards. Otherwise you just make yourself irrelevant.
An effctive alternative is a traffic light that is red and turn green a fixed amount of time after an approaching car has come to a certain distance. Those who were going too fast have to stop, others can drive on smoothly.
As long as they set the distance right. The light on the entrance intersection to my folks' neighborhood is (or at least used to be) set to turn red when you were right in front of the intersection. It was a long light, too, so this pretty much guaranteed a 2-minute wait whenever we went anywhere.
Maybe it's a relic from when people lived the slow life . . .