I am a bit confused about something. I'm not familiar with it, but does ISK have any real-world value, or is it just game currency?
ISK is the in-game currency, but you can exchange RL currency for ISK by buying a game-time card and selling it, in-game, for ISK. You can in theory do the opposite, but doing so gets you banned.
It is somewhat lacking in the pure entertainment aspect -- the writing isn't as tight, and the production values are clearly less polished. But it makes up for that, at least for me, in the... texture?
The phrase you're looking for is "snobishness." There are a few less-harsh synonyms you could use, but it's the same general feeling of "my choice is better than yours" that folk who watch community theater over a TV broadcast of the same play have.
(I'm probably going to get chided for this on Slashdot, and it doesn't really answer the question, but I actually like Visual Studio's HTML editor best, if you have access to a Windows machine you can run Visual Web Developer Express for free. Or buy Expression Web, it's pretty affordable.)
On a side note, SharePoint Designer -- the middle child of that program -- is free with validation of windows. Think FrontPage done right.
Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.
Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 1
Using competent 3rd party vendors is always either cheaper or faster than developing in house, so I'm a little worried to hear that NASA wasn't doing this from the outset.
Nice weasel word there, btw. "Competent." What happens when the contractor bungles it? They're not "competent."
COTS, sure. But if you have to hire someone to build you something custom... then you probably want to just hire them directly, instead of funneling money to someone whose only job is to skim money between you and the person doing your work.
outsource only that which is either (1) not customized to you at all, or (2) entirely optional to your business. For instance, outsource webhosting, and hire somenoe for training and tool creation.. but don't outsource the running of your website if you want any benefit from it at all.
Our world is not black and white. Genders are a gray zone ranging from white to black, often divided into five "zones" (yes, they are enough to actually have five different definitions of them).
*ahem*
LGBT advocates will say they want five genders, because they are biased and want to dillute what gender means. A good number of those asking for it are likely trying for the "ask for a cadillcac when you want a chevrolet" reasoning. That is, they don't really beleive there are five genders -- they just want "other" or "n/a" as an option between "M' and "F".
Gender is 99.9% black and white, with a teeny tiny grey line between the two.
And lastly, I'd like to believe that as a community that espouses scientific values and intelligent discourse, the answer should be obvious:...
Bad girlintrainig! You never, ever, EVER presume that just because someone is smart and intelligent they should agree with you -- or that, just because someone disagrees with you, they're either not smart or not intelligent.
I'd say it's far more scientific to brand gender and sex as immutable based on your genetics than to relegate it to subjective measurements And on that note...
Life is full of delicious ambiguity, and people assume that two polar opposites (male and female) have nothing in between. But life isn't like that. Life is a spectrum, and any place we draw the line is arbitrary -- not natural. Nature has its own laws, which are not the laws of men.,
A female is an organism that can produce an ova to create young during its lifespan. A male is an organism that can create sperm to fertilize said Ova during its lfiespan. This is not arbitrary -- this is the scientific definition from biology. Any organism that can do neither of those two during its lifespan is neuter, and any that can do both is hemaphroditic (sic). ANY OTHER DEFINITION is cultural, subjective, non-scientific crap.
The only thing holding me back is that I have heard it's quite monotonous at first.
Find friends in-game ASAP. Eve does not get any less monotonous as you progress -- you just eventually find friends, and it becomes worth it.
If you want to play Eve as PvE, you're essentially playing "how big can my wallet get." It's mindless boredom, and was why I quit when all my RL friends did. I picked it up only when they did, and if I didn't have friends in-game I wouldn't play.
OTOH... if you want to go for PvP, (which you CAN do on day 1) then there's no better game than Eve.
instead of dedicated volunteers firing up their diesel generators to help co-ordinate rescue and relief efforts, there ain't nobody.
search & rescue should be coordinated on the dedicated bands for it -- like, oh, the TV bands that we just vacated.
And I would MUCH rather trust the organization of a relief effort to trained professionals -- like state, federal, and military emergency staff -- to a bunch of "volunteers."
Seems to me that the Indian system worked better and the settlers' system is the broken one, but that's me.
the Indians were at the mercy of nature to prevent starvation. If the "settlers" had not come about, they would have either died, been wiped out, or advanced their own civilization by now, anyway.
That's not the case and they could probably drop your right to them for next year when they decide to resell everything in a lottery or auction
Since we're talking Fenway Park, let's go to NY State law. But let's move from Fenway, to a house you own outside of the city.
Your neighbor puts up a fence that overlaps your property. You never follow up on it, and don't get him to admit that, yes, it's your property. (Or even tell him that it's yours.) Ten years pass. Guess what? That sliver of land that his fence is on is now HIS property.
Let's shift away from real property to personal property. You hand me your bat, along with a piece of paper that says "I will not ever throw away, damage, or use eldavojohn's bat." Ten years pass, and I throw away the bat. You, knowing the bat was really worth a million dollars, sue me. I get your case thrown out of court, because (1) I didn't get anything out of it, so that piece of paper isn't a real contract, and (2), it's not your bat anymore.
Heck, let's shift a wee bit further. You run an MMO, and I play it. Only, I play it from a state that doesn't enforce EULA's on MMO's. Guess what? Now the COURT gets to decide what is and isn't my property in that game you run.
Property rights are not now, and never have been, strictly about contracts.
If you go to DC, head out to the airport -- Air & Space has another branch of the museum with the Enterprise, an F-35, and a half-dozen other prizes that you don't see scattered elsewhere around the country.
do some google searches and see what simple shit questions the typical American can't answer. It's shocking. FYI...I'm an American. --
it's amazing how dumb you can make someone look when you write questions with the idea of seeing how dumb you can make them look. (Some dumb British comedian even made a movie about it a few years back.)
Most of the questions you'll see asked are simply irrelevant to an American's life. And as such, if you ask them right off the head, they often as not won't have an answer. This is not a sign of poor thinking -- it's a sign of INTELLIGENCE.
Want to really test American IQ? (Or, hell, anyone's IQ, for that matter.) Offer a non-trivial cash reward. And ask the same questions. Watch the relative "intelligence" of Americans go up.
I had already figured that one out. What with your bankrupt industry and endless unwinnable wars.
hmm....
1: We have a few companies that go bankrupt. It happens. But as a whole, our industry is beating the snot out of your country. (AMD, Microsoft, Tesla Motors, Boeing, etc, etc.)
2: You're full of it.: 2a: We won the Cold war. 2b: We won the first Afghanistan War when we booted out the Taliban. 2c: We won the 2nd Iraq war when Saddam Hussein was captured.
3: What we suck at is leaving other countries to die. 3a: We're still in Afghanistan, helping prop up that country. 3b: We're still in Iraq, helping prop up that country. 3c-3f: Same as 3a and 3b, but substitute "Germany", "Japan", "South Korea", and "everywhere else".
Oh, for the love of sanity and rational discussion... (I know, this is/., but still!)
MS's patent doesn't cover "using XML to save data from your word processor." It covers a fairly specific bundle of things that they used XML for -- "style hints", "bookmarks", et al. In fact, it's all the crap MS has put into "SGML" files since fracking Office 95.
Oh, and it's NOT ODF -- ODF is a collection of seperate ZIP files. This patent is for a single XML file.
Heck, I even wrote an XML based text editor back when I was learning Java in 2001 or so.
Go read the patent. Go!
The darn thing isn't for a pseudo-WYSIWYG XML editor. It's for a specific bundle of features that let you save your non-XML based word processing file as one single XML file, which includes bookmarks, styles, and "formatting hints" as well.
Making your word processor save to XHTML, or a randomly selected XML dialect? Obvious. The specific way you do that, and include some conventions for features that XML really wasn't meant to support? Non-obivous, and therefore patentable.
Also not all that broad.
And, of course,, the real nice thing: this patent only applies if you through a lot of formatting crap into your XML file as well... and I certainly don't remember anyone dumb enough to do that before Microsoft.
I'm writing a computer program that will figure out every word combination that can possibly be used to form a sentence, and then copyrighting the output. When someone writes something somewhere, I'll sue them for copyright infringement.
Oh, for the love of Stallman.
THAT'S HOW PATENTS WORK, NOT COPYRIGHTS!
Let's say that I, having never read so much as a synopsis of the book, sat down and wrote an almost word-for-word copy of Snowcrash (and let's just assume I can prove that first part in a court of law), and the only real difference being that I used different names for the main characters and the book itself. Do you know what Neal Stephenson's legal recourse would be if I started selling the darn thing?
NOTHING, BECAUSE I DID NOT COPY FROM HIM!
Your program would provide no benefit, because no court would believe that anyone would paw through the quadrillion pages of output your program would produce.
Assuming some court doesn't strike this nonsense down as a violation of fair use rights
Fair Use is not a right. Free speech is a right. Fair Use is a defense against copyright infringement, due to the otherwise chilling affect it would have upon free speech.
And court's can't "strike down" private actions; they simply refuse to recognize them as legally valid.
Fun fact: when you make a contract (like the AP's license), there are three critically important things you should know: 1: Who wrote it. (You or them?) 2: What jurisdiction is covered (Do you just agree that you'd fly out to CA to defend yourself?) 3: What that jurisdiction has said about contracts like yours before.
And the premise that the copyright owner should be able to charge on a per-word basis
Stop.
A copyright holder can charge on any basis they damn well want. Either you have a valid fair use case, and can ignore them, or you don't, and have ZERO RIGHT to use their work without tehir say-so.
How does the AP tie licensed text back to the article it applies to?
They do it by not paying royalties -- they do it by buying a license to distribute the article to others.
Let's say that you're, oh, a novelist with a 100,000 word novel, and a choice of how to get your payment. You can get paid 10% off the top for every one of your $10 books sold, OR you can get a $.10 a word for the right for the publisher to print your novel, and keep all the profit (or risk) to themselves.
If you're Stephen King, and can expect to easily sell way over 10,000 copies, you insist on the first deal. But if you're, oh, a nameless nobody, the $10k looks pretty good. Especially if you're already on to your next project, and need to feed your kids. And if you're a publisher that sells a LOT of almost randomly selected books, the latter looks good to you too--because you pay a fair amount of money to a lot of authors, and so get that lot of books you depend on.
They obviously have to hold copies of works that were not uploaded by the original authors to compare this stuff to. Are they not in mass violation of copyright?
No. Go read the standard of fair use again.
"Academic purposes" are one of the black-letter exemptions. If this were a college doing the bundle and offering it for-free to all participants, instead of a private company making a buck, this wouldn't even be a problem.
But my intelligence isn't proved in some one-time essay. It's all about how I create real solutions for real problems.
If you are incapable of taking a task, and expressing the solutition to said task in written form, then you're essentially sub-literate. Unless you're an astonishing genius, you're just a drain on your company due to your inability.
College doesn't test, train, or reward INTELLIGENCE. It tests, trains, and rewards LEARNING and ABILITY -- which are three very, very different things.
Choosing to bypass testing is the right answer, no matter what the question.
God, I would love to work for your competitor. "Sir, BadAnalogyGuy's company is beating us!" "Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to posit that the money in Eve Online is just as real as a dollar bill.
Eve ISK relates to $$ the same way that game tokens in an arcade do -- or "store credit" in a store does.
I am a bit confused about something. I'm not familiar with it, but does ISK have any real-world value, or is it just game currency?
ISK is the in-game currency, but you can exchange RL currency for ISK by buying a game-time card and selling it, in-game, for ISK. You can in theory do the opposite, but doing so gets you banned.
Why should Apple not be allowed to have its walled garden?
Because they'll lose customers.
And customers are always, ALWAYS allowed to complain.
It is somewhat lacking in the pure entertainment aspect -- the writing isn't as tight, and the production values are clearly less polished. But it makes up for that, at least for me, in the... texture?
The phrase you're looking for is "snobishness." There are a few less-harsh synonyms you could use, but it's the same general feeling of "my choice is better than yours" that folk who watch community theater over a TV broadcast of the same play have.
(I'm probably going to get chided for this on Slashdot, and it doesn't really answer the question, but I actually like Visual Studio's HTML editor best, if you have access to a Windows machine you can run Visual Web Developer Express for free. Or buy Expression Web, it's pretty affordable.)
On a side note, SharePoint Designer -- the middle child of that program -- is free with validation of windows. Think FrontPage done right.
*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.
Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.
Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.
Using competent 3rd party vendors is always either cheaper or faster than developing in house, so I'm a little worried to hear that NASA wasn't doing this from the outset.
Nice weasel word there, btw. "Competent." What happens when the contractor bungles it? They're not "competent."
COTS, sure. But if you have to hire someone to build you something custom... then you probably want to just hire them directly, instead of funneling money to someone whose only job is to skim money between you and the person doing your work.
outsource only that which is either (1) not customized to you at all, or (2) entirely optional to your business. For instance, outsource webhosting, and hire somenoe for training and tool creation.. but don't outsource the running of your website if you want any benefit from it at all.
Our world is not black and white. Genders are a gray zone ranging from white to black, often divided into five "zones" (yes, they are enough to actually have five different definitions of them).
*ahem*
LGBT advocates will say they want five genders, because they are biased and want to dillute what gender means. A good number of those asking for it are likely trying for the "ask for a cadillcac when you want a chevrolet" reasoning. That is, they don't really beleive there are five genders -- they just want "other" or "n/a" as an option between "M' and "F".
Gender is 99.9% black and white, with a teeny tiny grey line between the two.
It's becoming increasingly hard for me to tell the difference.
Go ahead and ask.
"Are you a business or a government?'
Both will self-identify. Assume anyone who doesn't is a crook.
And lastly, I'd like to believe that as a community that espouses scientific values and intelligent discourse, the answer should be obvious:...
Bad girlintrainig! You never, ever, EVER presume that just because someone is smart and intelligent they should agree with you -- or that, just because someone disagrees with you, they're either not smart or not intelligent.
I'd say it's far more scientific to brand gender and sex as immutable based on your genetics than to relegate it to subjective measurements And on that note...
Life is full of delicious ambiguity, and people assume that two polar opposites (male and female) have nothing in between. But life isn't like that. Life is a spectrum, and any place we draw the line is arbitrary -- not natural. Nature has its own laws, which are not the laws of men.,
A female is an organism that can produce an ova to create young during its lifespan. A male is an organism that can create sperm to fertilize said Ova during its lfiespan. This is not arbitrary -- this is the scientific definition from biology. Any organism that can do neither of those two during its lifespan is neuter, and any that can do both is hemaphroditic (sic). ANY OTHER DEFINITION is cultural, subjective, non-scientific crap.
The only thing holding me back is that I have heard it's quite monotonous at first.
Find friends in-game ASAP. Eve does not get any less monotonous as you progress -- you just eventually find friends, and it becomes worth it.
If you want to play Eve as PvE, you're essentially playing "how big can my wallet get." It's mindless boredom, and was why I quit when all my RL friends did. I picked it up only when they did, and if I didn't have friends in-game I wouldn't play.
OTOH... if you want to go for PvP, (which you CAN do on day 1) then there's no better game than Eve.
instead of dedicated volunteers firing up their diesel generators to help co-ordinate rescue and relief efforts, there ain't nobody.
search & rescue should be coordinated on the dedicated bands for it -- like, oh, the TV bands that we just vacated.
And I would MUCH rather trust the organization of a relief effort to trained professionals -- like state, federal, and military emergency staff -- to a bunch of "volunteers."
Seems to me that the Indian system worked better and the settlers' system is the broken one, but that's me.
the Indians were at the mercy of nature to prevent starvation. If the "settlers" had not come about, they would have either died, been wiped out, or advanced their own civilization by now, anyway.
That's not the case and they could probably drop your right to them for next year when they decide to resell everything in a lottery or auction
Since we're talking Fenway Park, let's go to NY State law. But let's move from Fenway, to a house you own outside of the city.
Your neighbor puts up a fence that overlaps your property. You never follow up on it, and don't get him to admit that, yes, it's your property. (Or even tell him that it's yours.) Ten years pass. Guess what? That sliver of land that his fence is on is now HIS property.
Let's shift away from real property to personal property. You hand me your bat, along with a piece of paper that says "I will not ever throw away, damage, or use eldavojohn's bat." Ten years pass, and I throw away the bat. You, knowing the bat was really worth a million dollars, sue me. I get your case thrown out of court, because (1) I didn't get anything out of it, so that piece of paper isn't a real contract, and (2), it's not your bat anymore.
Heck, let's shift a wee bit further. You run an MMO, and I play it. Only, I play it from a state that doesn't enforce EULA's on MMO's. Guess what? Now the COURT gets to decide what is and isn't my property in that game you run.
Property rights are not now, and never have been, strictly about contracts.
If you go to DC, head out to the airport -- Air & Space has another branch of the museum with the Enterprise, an F-35, and a half-dozen other prizes that you don't see scattered elsewhere around the country.
do some google searches and see what simple shit questions the typical American can't answer. It's shocking. FYI...I'm an American.
--
it's amazing how dumb you can make someone look when you write questions with the idea of seeing how dumb you can make them look. (Some dumb British comedian even made a movie about it a few years back.)
Most of the questions you'll see asked are simply irrelevant to an American's life. And as such, if you ask them right off the head, they often as not won't have an answer. This is not a sign of poor thinking -- it's a sign of INTELLIGENCE.
Want to really test American IQ? (Or, hell, anyone's IQ, for that matter.) Offer a non-trivial cash reward. And ask the same questions. Watch the relative "intelligence" of Americans go up.
I had already figured that one out. What with your bankrupt industry and endless unwinnable wars.
hmm....
1: We have a few companies that go bankrupt. It happens. But as a whole, our industry is beating the snot out of your country. (AMD, Microsoft, Tesla Motors, Boeing, etc, etc.)
2: You're full of it.:
2a: We won the Cold war.
2b: We won the first Afghanistan War when we booted out the Taliban.
2c: We won the 2nd Iraq war when Saddam Hussein was captured.
3: What we suck at is leaving other countries to die.
3a: We're still in Afghanistan, helping prop up that country.
3b: We're still in Iraq, helping prop up that country.
3c-3f: Same as 3a and 3b, but substitute "Germany", "Japan", "South Korea", and "everywhere else".
But not before SGML. ... (bullshit redacted)
Oh, for the love of sanity and rational discussion... (I know, this is /., but still!)
MS's patent doesn't cover "using XML to save data from your word processor." It covers a fairly specific bundle of things that they used XML for -- "style hints", "bookmarks", et al. In fact, it's all the crap MS has put into "SGML" files since fracking Office 95.
Oh, and it's NOT ODF -- ODF is a collection of seperate ZIP files. This patent is for a single XML file.
Heck, I even wrote an XML based text editor back when I was learning Java in 2001 or so.
Go read the patent. Go!
The darn thing isn't for a pseudo-WYSIWYG XML editor. It's for a specific bundle of features that let you save your non-XML based word processing file as one single XML file, which includes bookmarks, styles, and "formatting hints" as well.
Making your word processor save to XHTML, or a randomly selected XML dialect? Obvious. The specific way you do that, and include some conventions for features that XML really wasn't meant to support? Non-obivous, and therefore patentable.
Also not all that broad.
And, of course,, the real nice thing: this patent only applies if you through a lot of formatting crap into your XML file as well... and I certainly don't remember anyone dumb enough to do that before Microsoft.
I'm writing a computer program that will figure out every word combination that can possibly be used to form a sentence, and then copyrighting the output. When someone writes something somewhere, I'll sue them for copyright infringement.
Oh, for the love of Stallman.
THAT'S HOW PATENTS WORK, NOT COPYRIGHTS!
Let's say that I, having never read so much as a synopsis of the book, sat down and wrote an almost word-for-word copy of Snowcrash (and let's just assume I can prove that first part in a court of law), and the only real difference being that I used different names for the main characters and the book itself. Do you know what Neal Stephenson's legal recourse would be if I started selling the darn thing?
NOTHING, BECAUSE I DID NOT COPY FROM HIM!
Your program would provide no benefit, because no court would believe that anyone would paw through the quadrillion pages of output your program would produce.
Assuming some court doesn't strike this nonsense down as a violation of fair use rights
Fair Use is not a right. Free speech is a right. Fair Use is a defense against copyright infringement, due to the otherwise chilling affect it would have upon free speech.
And court's can't "strike down" private actions; they simply refuse to recognize them as legally valid.
Fun fact: when you make a contract (like the AP's license), there are three critically important things you should know:
1: Who wrote it. (You or them?)
2: What jurisdiction is covered (Do you just agree that you'd fly out to CA to defend yourself?)
3: What that jurisdiction has said about contracts like yours before.
And the premise that the copyright owner should be able to charge on a per-word basis
Stop.
A copyright holder can charge on any basis they damn well want. Either you have a valid fair use case, and can ignore them, or you don't, and have ZERO RIGHT to use their work without tehir say-so.
How does the AP tie licensed text back to the article it applies to?
They do it by not paying royalties -- they do it by buying a license to distribute the article to others.
Let's say that you're, oh, a novelist with a 100,000 word novel, and a choice of how to get your payment. You can get paid 10% off the top for every one of your $10 books sold, OR you can get a $.10 a word for the right for the publisher to print your novel, and keep all the profit (or risk) to themselves.
If you're Stephen King, and can expect to easily sell way over 10,000 copies, you insist on the first deal. But if you're, oh, a nameless nobody, the $10k looks pretty good. Especially if you're already on to your next project, and need to feed your kids. And if you're a publisher that sells a LOT of almost randomly selected books, the latter looks good to you too--because you pay a fair amount of money to a lot of authors, and so get that lot of books you depend on.
They obviously have to hold copies of works that were not uploaded by the original authors to compare this stuff to. Are they not in mass violation of copyright?
No. Go read the standard of fair use again.
"Academic purposes" are one of the black-letter exemptions. If this were a college doing the bundle and offering it for-free to all participants, instead of a private company making a buck, this wouldn't even be a problem.
But my intelligence isn't proved in some one-time essay. It's all about how I create real solutions for real problems.
If you are incapable of taking a task, and expressing the solutition to said task in written form, then you're essentially sub-literate. Unless you're an astonishing genius, you're just a drain on your company due to your inability.
College doesn't test, train, or reward INTELLIGENCE. It tests, trains, and rewards LEARNING and ABILITY -- which are three very, very different things.
Choosing to bypass testing is the right answer, no matter what the question.
God, I would love to work for your competitor. "Sir, BadAnalogyGuy's company is beating us!" "Ok, just file a complaint. I'm sure that semi-literate guy did something wrong enough to slap them down."