I worked sales during college at a jewelry store, and the nicer watch companies (Movado, Tag Huer, Rolex) do the same thing. The funny thing is all the paperwork you get with each order... "While each retailer has the right to sell stock at a price of their choosing, (company name here) reserves the right to demand copies of sales records before shipping additional stock, and to refuse sales for any, or no, reason."
If you followed the poster's link, you'd realize the error was with him, not the TV show. The poster misunderstood what was being said - what those results actually are is the number of watt-hours that a certain size bulb used in a one-hour period of being on constantly.
Same thing can happen with any kind of electronics & any kind of primarily inductive load. Good reason to have an isolation transformer, or a UPS, between one's touchy electronics & 220V shop tools.
Just to point out, pretty much nothing in "Planescape : Torment" was created for that game. It was mostly taken from the 1,001 Planescape books written by TSR in the early 1990's.
That leads us into the reason, I think, most pen & paper RPG lovers don't enjoy the computer RPG genre - historically, pen&paper companies made money strictly on imagination & volume. Your customers are (for the most part) coming up with the plot themselves - you need to provide the rules & the background. Short of rewriting the rules twice a year, the only way to really make money is to pump out more & more background.
Eventually you've covered all the Tolkien-esque fantasy you can, so you start on more adventurous (no pun intended) subjects. But with a computer RPG, at least in the state they are today, most of the work isn't making the plotline, or coming up with the background - it's the graphics, and the engine. And as some previous posters mentioned, less-standard characters (Centaurs, Modrons, lycanthropes, dragons, whatever) require whole new sets of graphics & engine.
Its there for the sole purpose of taking advantage of kids that dont know better, the poor or people with way more money than sense.
While I'll agree some locally owned places offer better trade-in prices, there's a lot of areas where there's no other way to sell used games, except for selling them between friends. My friends from college & I usually trade our games amongst each other until we've all played what we want, and then the original buyer will trade them in for some 'new' games...
I wonder when they are going to find a cure for cancer? They've had over FIFTY years to find out, yet they're not even one inch closer today, than they were then. So why do most people put so much faith in these snake oil salesmen?
Responding to your entire post would raise my blood pressure way too high... but I can hit this part up real quick. 'Cancer' isn't one disease, or even one class of disease - like the common cold, or the flu, there's not one cure because it varies so much from type to type. As far as curing it... well, the survival rates (as in, survive long enough for something else to kill you) are much, much higher today than they were even twenty or thirty years ago, much less fifty.
Hmm. I guess I missed the memo that a banker or an accountant isn't considered a white-collar job anymore.
Show me any "financial product" and I can explain how the profit margin is generated through ignorance on the buyer's part.
Well, this is technically correct... but it is technically correct for almost any kind of service. With a few exceptions which require extremely expensive specialized equipment(medical services comes to mind), the difference between you & the person you're paying for a service is knowledge and/or time.
While I could try to do all my own taxes, I realised about two years ago that paying an accountant a few hundred to do that saves me several hundred more. While I could fight a traffic ticket myself, or just pay it, spending two fifty on a lawyer might save me almost a thousand over the next three years.
The fact is, nobody is smart enough to be able to do everything in a society that's generated as much knowledge as ours has. And I'd rather do a few things well than a bunch of things poorly, Mr. Heinlein notwithstanding.
That comment invalidates about half the comments on slashdot that are complaints about... MS...
To be fair, I doubt most of the people on Slashdot could force their company/family/friends to go to another OS, even if they wanted to. So complaining about MS is more like complaining about the quality of your government... While you technically have the power to change it, first you have to convince most of the people around you it's worth the effort.
For-Profit parodies are in a very murky legal area.
The key is that you're making fun of what you're using... In the Supreme Courts words, parody "is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works." So 'The Wind Done Gone' is perfectly legal, because it's using 'Gone with the Wind' to comment on... "Gone with the Wind".
I think the (important) point of this whole debate is... what is due diligence when you're talking about material requested & viewed online? Should there be legal requirements for the website to make it harder to serve the material... or should there be legal requirements for the owner of the computer to filter what's coming in?
But by that point, they either have figured out how to get around the filters their parents have installed, or they've found their dad's (or mom's) stack of old mags...
I won't get concerned until the "Respect for Intellectual Property" badge becomes Eagle-required. At which point I'll personally go down to headquarters and find out what the hell's going on, and tell them to get back to their proper (ie, founding) values. Scout's Honor.
Problem is, I'd imagine some (if not most, or even all) of the National Council members would give a 'respecting the properties of others is one of the most important parts of our founding values' spiel.
At any rate - the ability to throw rocks from the moon has nothing to do with tactical operations in Earth orbit.
True. I wonder, though... which is greater, the amount of diffraction a high-energy laser fired 300,000 km through vaccuum, or the amount of diffraction of the same high-energy laser fired 500 km through atmosphere? I'm willing to bet, even with having to allow for almost two seconds of lead time, firing the same laser from a spot on the moon would be more effective... Course, that assumes you can get the laser there to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked sales during college at a jewelry store, and the nicer watch companies (Movado, Tag Huer, Rolex) do the same thing. The funny thing is all the paperwork you get with each order... "While each retailer has the right to sell stock at a price of their choosing, (company name here) reserves the right to demand copies of sales records before shipping additional stock, and to refuse sales for any, or no, reason."
If you followed the poster's link, you'd realize the error was with him, not the TV show. The poster misunderstood what was being said - what those results actually are is the number of watt-hours that a certain size bulb used in a one-hour period of being on constantly.
Same thing can happen with any kind of electronics & any kind of primarily inductive load. Good reason to have an isolation transformer, or a UPS, between one's touchy electronics & 220V shop tools.
That leads us into the reason, I think, most pen & paper RPG lovers don't enjoy the computer RPG genre - historically, pen&paper companies made money strictly on imagination & volume. Your customers are (for the most part) coming up with the plot themselves - you need to provide the rules & the background. Short of rewriting the rules twice a year, the only way to really make money is to pump out more & more background.
Eventually you've covered all the Tolkien-esque fantasy you can, so you start on more adventurous (no pun intended) subjects. But with a computer RPG, at least in the state they are today, most of the work isn't making the plotline, or coming up with the background - it's the graphics, and the engine. And as some previous posters mentioned, less-standard characters (Centaurs, Modrons, lycanthropes, dragons, whatever) require whole new sets of graphics & engine.
Course, then my parents took my bike away from me for a month. But that's kinda to be expected.
I'm pretty sure my dog is more enlightened than I am, and I know I'm further down the path than most of the people I meet every day...
If God had meant us to come down out of the trees, he would have taken away our prehensile toes!
Suppose you wished we'd just stayed up in the trees then, ya?
While I'll agree some locally owned places offer better trade-in prices, there's a lot of areas where there's no other way to sell used games, except for selling them between friends. My friends from college & I usually trade our games amongst each other until we've all played what we want, and then the original buyer will trade them in for some 'new' games...
What? I'm confused. I mean, part of your post seems to be a reply to the previous. And the rest is a rant directed against... umm... who?
Responding to your entire post would raise my blood pressure way too high... but I can hit this part up real quick. 'Cancer' isn't one disease, or even one class of disease - like the common cold, or the flu, there's not one cure because it varies so much from type to type. As far as curing it... well, the survival rates (as in, survive long enough for something else to kill you) are much, much higher today than they were even twenty or thirty years ago, much less fifty.
Well, this is technically correct... but it is technically correct for almost any kind of service. With a few exceptions which require extremely expensive specialized equipment(medical services comes to mind), the difference between you & the person you're paying for a service is knowledge and/or time.
While I could try to do all my own taxes, I realised about two years ago that paying an accountant a few hundred to do that saves me several hundred more. While I could fight a traffic ticket myself, or just pay it, spending two fifty on a lawyer might save me almost a thousand over the next three years.
The fact is, nobody is smart enough to be able to do everything in a society that's generated as much knowledge as ours has. And I'd rather do a few things well than a bunch of things poorly, Mr. Heinlein notwithstanding.
So if accountants & bankers aren't buisnessmen, who is?
Perhaps it's about time for a Bureau of Sabotage?
They would have done a better job. Probably framed him for downloading child porn, and avoided all this bad publicity.
The key is that you're making fun of what you're using... In the Supreme Courts words, parody "is the use of some elements of a prior author's composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author's works." So 'The Wind Done Gone' is perfectly legal, because it's using 'Gone with the Wind' to comment on... "Gone with the Wind".
I think the (important) point of this whole debate is... what is due diligence when you're talking about material requested & viewed online? Should there be legal requirements for the website to make it harder to serve the material... or should there be legal requirements for the owner of the computer to filter what's coming in?
But by that point, they either have figured out how to get around the filters their parents have installed, or they've found their dad's (or mom's) stack of old mags...
Problem is, I'd imagine some (if not most, or even all) of the National Council members would give a 'respecting the properties of others is one of the most important parts of our founding values' spiel.
True. I wonder, though... which is greater, the amount of diffraction a high-energy laser fired 300,000 km through vaccuum, or the amount of diffraction of the same high-energy laser fired 500 km through atmosphere? I'm willing to bet, even with having to allow for almost two seconds of lead time, firing the same laser from a spot on the moon would be more effective... Course, that assumes you can get the laser there to begin with.