Digital cameras are still relatively expensive, compared to their film counterparts: Basic compact ~ $300 vs. $50 Basic SLR ~ $1000 vs. $300
What you gain though, especially once you leave the basic end of the market alone, is a fast, self-guided education in photography.
I bought the Sony DSC-V1 (a $600 higer-end compact). By that point, you're getting in to a camera which can just point and shoot but also lets you manually adjust apperature and shutter settings, add on flash units, etc. And the thing is, if you have any kind of an interest in photography, you will start playing with those settings.
I'd borrowed a film SLR from relatives in the past. I blew through about a dozen rolls of film and had next to no idea what I ended up with.
With digital, I blow through about fifty shots in a half an hour, reviewing each one as I go and, with the LCD review screen, learning a little bit more about how to improve the next shot. Then I end up ditching the thirty or so that didn't work and repeating. By the end of a session, I know I've got shots which really captured the depth of field I was after, that framed the subject well, that had the balance of light across the scene that I wanted, and so on. I've also probably stumbled on a couple of shots I didn't even expect.
Most importantly though, I've learned to take risks that I would never have done with film. While my wife drove tonight, I was shooting the sunset almost as fast as I could get shots off. I would never have even tried it with film - what kind of idiot would use an unstabilised setup in a moving vehicle on San Diego's bumpy freeways? With digital, it didn't matter. Worst case, I wasted a bit of time, blanked the memory stick and recharged the battery. As it happened, I got the most incredible sunset image I've taken yet.
You can get the same education with film, from an instructor. No doubt an instructor can teach you many things you'd never have learned by yourself. But a simple question for the slashdot readership: Who taught you the software you use professionally? I'm guessing the typical slashdot-type much prefers tinkering with things and finding out for themselves and that's where digital offers itself much more freely than film.
It's more expensive to start. Once you start adding camera accessories and good photoprinters, it gets expensive fast and it works out about the same to print (save you only print the perfect shots, you can review on the computer or LCD). What it does though is give you much more freedom to explore with faster feedback. To me, that's been worth every penny and it's worth the several thousand I'm budgeting for in several months time as the freedom and education of cheaper digital has convinced me I want to try more and more still.
The Belkin Nostromo is a keypad with throttle wheel and D-pad all designed to sit under your left hand.
Or, for a joystick, the Saitek Cyborg Evo is a completely ambidexterous joystick. With the use of thumbscrews, you can adjust a huge amount, even down to the tilt of the top buttons so they're tilted for left handed, not right handed orientation.
That's like "hoping" that a 100megaton nuclear weapon will dislodge the stubborn tree stump near the driveway. I think it'll work.
From the opposite angle, it's like the engineers on the Manhattan Project who were "pretty confident" that it wouldn't start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire earth.
I love it when engineers consider their margin or error small enough to justify risking wiping out all life on the planet. You can just imagine the apology, "Oh bugger! I'm most terribly embarrassed. It appears my slide rule had some dirt on it."
"the Hollywood studios, many of whom tried building their own games divisions in the mid-'90s, could decide to start developing games again or could make the rights to movies very expensive."
You mean we could end up not getting games like The Matrix ReBugged? We'd lose out on all those licenses for the last twenty years that seem (with the exception of the EA LoTR game and Tron 2.0*) to have universally sucked?
All that could happen if Hollywood thought the gaming industry was setting up in competition?
HEY HOLLYWOOD! WE'RE SETTING UP IN COMPETITION!
*I discounted the cooler StarWars Games as the movie company (LucasFilm) and the publisher (LucasArts) are arguably one in the same.
Microsoft have deeper pockets. Some lawyer will learn enough to realise that block sizes mean that a 1Gb disk doesn't store 1*10??*10?? 1k files. He'll then go after them for their FAT system.
I remember when Mortal Kombat first made it to the PC. There was a big fuss made about how the game had "A.I." (almost certainly an exageration but we'll let it slip) that allowed it to learn you play style and adapt accordingly.
So far, so samey for most other beat-em ups. One thing that got talked about, no idea of the varacity, was that it varied the difficulty. So, unless you suddenly pulled off something miraculous, it would keep it challenging but not impossible. If you kept losing at a given point, it would slowly make it easier until you eventually got passed it. If you kept on completing levels on the first attempt, it would keep making it slightly harder until it took a few attempts.
It strikes me as though a Dynamic Difficulty setting could add a lot to modern games, especially if you had some means of telling how hard it had made things for you.
Rather than having the l33t players talk about how they'd beaten Quake on Nightmare, wouldn't it be more interesting to be able to say, "It's DD'd me to level X!" That way it could always get harder and always get easier, meaning you'd never have a game that was too difficult for the very occasional gamer, yet also kept providing a challenge, month after month, play-through after play-through for the hardcore twitch-freaks.
Of course you'd still leave in the fixed difficulty settings for the times when you wanted to be able to play through, at just below your level, without getting beaten back fairly often.
(Note: There is one game I can think of that kind of did this. NeverWinterNights' DM client has a slider so human DMs can keep fights exciting to the last, never getting too easy but also stopping them from getting impassable.)
Even assuming that work is legitimate, at what point can the games company be assumed to have made every reasonable effort to contact the creator?
If there is no statement of ownership, no reasonable means of finding out who did create it, the building owners/occupiers no longer have a record, it was created under an untracable alias, etc. At what point can they be considered to have done everything reasonably possible to contact him and get to use it by default? Does there ever come a point where being uncontactable releases copyright?
Also, who owns the copyright? The artist who created the artwork or the owners of the building that he created it "for"? If you had someone paint a mural in your lobby, unless there was a contract - which I'm assuming most graffiti artists don't use - wouldn't the building owners, not the artist, own all further rights?
So, as a rough rule of thumb, expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today:
Given my 2GHz, 1Gb ram, 128mb video ram, 100Gb hard drive system today, a kind of typical PC, I should be running, by then:
120 GHz, 60 Gb ram, 7.5Gb video ram and a 6 terrabyte hard drive.
However, the following will also be true:
1) Windows 2013 will still be as slow as hell (probably clogging that fast 120 GHz processor with all of the things it securely prevents me from doing).
2) My wife will have finally killed me for all the money I've spent, especially as I swore that last year's 80Ghz processor would see me through for a couple of years.
3) According to Nick's newly coined law - every eighteen months my PC will give off roughly double the heat energy - I have just single handedly caused the ice caps to melt.
A conversation a friend of mine who lived in W1 (Very central London) recounted having:
"Sir, do you have a TV license?" "Nope." "Do you have a TV?" "Nope." "We detected a TV from our van, inside your property." "No you didn't. Must be a mistake." "Sir, I can hear the EastEnder's theme coming from inside your appartment." "You must be imagining it." "Sir, if we need to, we can get a warrant to enter the premises and be back within the hour." "No you can't." "Yes we can Sir, the courts look very favorably upon our requests." "They look even less favorably upon giving search warrants to enter property belonging to the Queen." "Oh. Well... You really should get a license."
The joys of the royal family owning half the best properties in the city.
A lot of people who try the Atkins diet report all that high protein meat (bacon dipped in mayonaise, mmm, that diet sounds appetising) rotting away in their intestine leads to "The Atkins Shit" about ten days to two weeks in.
As your body converts to processing all that fun stuff that digests differently, you too can enjoy catastrophic crapping and constant evil gasses eeking out of your ass. This ensures that, thin and gorgeous as you may now be, women will still want to be nowhere near you.
Recently, the file trading networks have been having some limited success by using the argument: "If there are significant other legitimate uses, a technology cannot be shut down because of its possible uses for piracy."
K++ is touting as a major feature being able to block law enforcement's (you think the RIAA won't play it as their lawyers attempting to do the work of the police?) attempts to crack down on its illegitimate (yes, yes, I know everyone thinks it's legitimate but the law doesn't) uses.
Surely they've just handed the RIAA a victory? They've said, "We've been sneaking in by claiming we have legitimate uses, trading all types of file - and now we've proved that our real purpose was piracy all along."
Yay. In one step, you've got 15% of users back for the couple of months before the policy offers the RIAA all the justification they need to shut you down entirely.
"..largest single take was 17,496 Sony PlayStation electronic game systems worth more than $5 million..." Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?
I'd probably build them in to a massive beowulf cluster so I could run a massively parallel calculator program.
17,500 PS2s * $200 (assuming they're the ones with network adapters) comes out to $3.5million. Not $5 million.
Add to that the fact they're not $200 sales units yet, they're more like $100 wholesale units about to gain a large mark up as they go through distributors, transportation costs and retail. Even sold second hand, assuming you could find 17,500 guys at the pub who all wanted one, you'd be lucky to clear $100 each. So, all in, maybe $1-1.5 million - on a good day. Of course that doesn't make such a good headline.
It sounds like it isn't your decision to call either way. So make sure you provide all of the information, including what the negatives will be, for both methods, then let the people who're paid to decide, decide.
Sometimes, whether we like it or not, whether it suits our meticulous geek processes, staying in business and dealing with shit down the line is a better option than doing it right and going out of business. It's that old line: I can do it fast, cheap or well. Pick any two. In the business world, fast and cheap are going to sometimes win.
The point is, for all you may disagree, you're not paid to disagree. You're paid to do as your manager and more senior management tell you to do. Your job is simply to give them the best information you can to make their decisions.
It's a hard lesson to learn. It goes totally against every feeling of entitlement we have. It doesn't stop it being true though.
Now the important thing is to keep the emails where you notify them of the negative consequences. You're not paid to decide, but you're also not paid to be abused for their decisions. By keeping the emails, you can prove you gave them the information and it was their choice. Knowing you have that saved can also help make the smiling and nodding easier.
Finally, ask yourself... If you were in their position, if you knew you were buying problems in the long term but it was the only way to stay in business long enough, would you appreciate every person who's paid to obey your decisions questioning you on things you already know, don't like, but have to do anyway?
There's a part of me that's entertained by how exploitable the system would be:
1) Goad someone in to mentioning you on their website. 2) Demand right of reply. 3) Just like politicians never reply to the actual question, nor do you.
Now you get someone else to pay all of your hosting costs for you.
Imagine Petsmart, "PetCo has described themselves as the best pet store in the country. We demand the right of redress to fill their site with advertising for our own store."
Every time Microsoft posted anything about Linux, the open source community would get granted rebuttal space on Microsoft's own web servers.
Not only that but who gets the right of reply? Linus? Every contributor to Linux? Anyone who's ever reported a Mozilla bug?
Then there're the counter exploits: Refuse until they take you to court. Continue refusing until the day before the court date. Then post the rebuttal on the same page as the now two-years out of date story.
The reality is it's totally unenforcable. Sit back, rather than get worked up over it, let them try it and watch it fall to pieces around them.
Oh, well, thank god it's just the web monkey's that fuck it all up. It's like the engineers that fucked up the roads by building massive SUVs and the musicians who fucked up the music industry. Now we know who to blame, we can tell them all to just fix it, right?
Wrong.
The reality is that web monkeys are just that, web monkeys. There are very, very few web gurus out there. In almost every case, they're working for managers who don't really understand the web but do understand that producing the greatest streamlined product in the world doesn't begin to compete with providing flashy things when reassuring senior management about why they just spent so much on a website.
Producing excellent content is extremely hard. Not only is it extremely hard, it requires constant updating and investment. Yet when you present that to a marketing director or a CEO, in the ten minute window they have, they see "Hmm, looks kinda boring."
Not only that, but it's a false assumption that users migrate to raw HTML sites. Slashdot actually has a lot of design elements in place. Raw HTML as is being advocated and Slashdot are actually two different things. Slashdot actually uses a lot of tables, a lot of different styles, a lot of color, contrasting backgrounds etc. It's cleaner, yes, but it's also not raw HTML. Raw HTML is practically unnavigable for any amount of content because it's so hard to find what you're after and because, whether fair or not, users perceive it as less appealing.
So, we web monkeys would love to design cleaner sites. But, we're just the monkeys - we're part of a corporate world where budgets get signed by people with a lot less understanding of the web. Those who wave the "raw HTML" banner just serve to muddy the waters by not really getting what they're talking about anyway.
Among others, more complex games and anti-piracy measures built into the media.
We need to charge this much for games because so many are pirated. Now we need to charge you more because we're trying to negate that. I'd like to call them idiots but we consumers are the ones who keep falling for this stuff and teaching them that they can get away with it.
I for one, look forward to the days when Microsoft try running their wonderful code in my DNA. I mean, imagine all the potential:
"I'm sorry, your DNA has just crashed. You're experiencing the blue goop of death."
Of course, all the geeks would run their DNA on Linux. They'd be capable of doing many things faster, they'd live forever compared to their microsoft bretherin and the vast majority of society would never, ever, want to interact with them. So no change there then.
"GameBoy - You'll never have your mum calling to check up on you on it."
Any device that allows your mum to check you've got your thermal underwear on, you've got your coat buttoned up and you'll be home by bedtime, while you're trying to hang out with your friends, is fundamentally uncool.
If you're 20 or 25 years old, it's probably not a good idea to draw a GameBoy out of your pocket on a Friday night in a public place."
Last Friday night, at 2Fast2Furious (I'm in a war of attrition with a friend to drag each other to the worst possible movie), I pulled a platinum SP out of my pocket and played (original GB) Mario in the cinema, waiting for the movie to start. All the little kiddies playing centipede on their cell phones all leant over to watch, as did the older people on a retro kick.
Granted, I've been 26 for two months now, so I'm clearly passed it.
GameBoys have a level of retro cool that completely transcends just about any other retro fad. They also have a stupidly large library of some of the most simply playable games ever. I'd choose to be seen playing one of those things over the "Please look at me, I desperately need to be cool by sticking flashing LED battery packs on my cell phone" alternative - be it Friday night or any other time.
If you start young, odds are you're self taught. You likely type with the balls of your hands on the desk, perched forward in your chair, all the ergonomically unhealthy stuff because you're free to learn bad habits.
Most ~30 year olds who didn't touch a computer until college likely learned to type on a typewriter, in a typing class, where they were taught to do it properly.
I have pretty bad problems with carpal tunnel and RSI issues (to ease the stress on the wrists, you end up transfering to elbows/shoulders etc). I know I type in a terrible position and I've done a lot of research on the subject to try and find ways to deal with it - ultimately though, as soon as I stop conciously thinking about it, my hands always revert back. The joys of deeply ingrained bad habbits that I learned as a four or five year old, in ~1981, with a BBC Micro.
what was that old guy's name? his dog was sprocket
The uncle was Uncle Travelling Mac(k?) if I remember correctly. I don't think the old guy ever had a name. He called the dog Sprocket but Sprocket couldn't talk and hence couldn't call him anything. The fraggles themselves never conversed with him so they didn't call him by name either.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital cameras are still relatively expensive, compared to their film counterparts:
Basic compact ~ $300 vs. $50
Basic SLR ~ $1000 vs. $300
What you gain though, especially once you leave the basic end of the market alone, is a fast, self-guided education in photography.
I bought the Sony DSC-V1 (a $600 higer-end compact). By that point, you're getting in to a camera which can just point and shoot but also lets you manually adjust apperature and shutter settings, add on flash units, etc. And the thing is, if you have any kind of an interest in photography, you will start playing with those settings.
I'd borrowed a film SLR from relatives in the past. I blew through about a dozen rolls of film and had next to no idea what I ended up with.
With digital, I blow through about fifty shots in a half an hour, reviewing each one as I go and, with the LCD review screen, learning a little bit more about how to improve the next shot. Then I end up ditching the thirty or so that didn't work and repeating. By the end of a session, I know I've got shots which really captured the depth of field I was after, that framed the subject well, that had the balance of light across the scene that I wanted, and so on. I've also probably stumbled on a couple of shots I didn't even expect.
Most importantly though, I've learned to take risks that I would never have done with film. While my wife drove tonight, I was shooting the sunset almost as fast as I could get shots off. I would never have even tried it with film - what kind of idiot would use an unstabilised setup in a moving vehicle on San Diego's bumpy freeways? With digital, it didn't matter. Worst case, I wasted a bit of time, blanked the memory stick and recharged the battery. As it happened, I got the most incredible sunset image I've taken yet.
You can get the same education with film, from an instructor. No doubt an instructor can teach you many things you'd never have learned by yourself. But a simple question for the slashdot readership: Who taught you the software you use professionally? I'm guessing the typical slashdot-type much prefers tinkering with things and finding out for themselves and that's where digital offers itself much more freely than film.
It's more expensive to start. Once you start adding camera accessories and good photoprinters, it gets expensive fast and it works out about the same to print (save you only print the perfect shots, you can review on the computer or LCD). What it does though is give you much more freedom to explore with faster feedback. To me, that's been worth every penny and it's worth the several thousand I'm budgeting for in several months time as the freedom and education of cheaper digital has convinced me I want to try more and more still.
The Belkin Nostromo is a keypad with throttle wheel and D-pad all designed to sit under your left hand.
Or, for a joystick, the Saitek Cyborg Evo is a completely ambidexterous joystick. With the use of thumbscrews, you can adjust a huge amount, even down to the tilt of the top buttons so they're tilted for left handed, not right handed orientation.
That's like "hoping" that a 100megaton nuclear weapon will dislodge the stubborn tree stump near the driveway. I think it'll work.
From the opposite angle, it's like the engineers on the Manhattan Project who were "pretty confident" that it wouldn't start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire earth.
I love it when engineers consider their margin or error small enough to justify risking wiping out all life on the planet. You can just imagine the apology, "Oh bugger! I'm most terribly embarrassed. It appears my slide rule had some dirt on it."
"the Hollywood studios, many of whom tried building their own games divisions in the mid-'90s, could decide to start developing games again or could make the rights to movies very expensive."
You mean we could end up not getting games like The Matrix ReBugged? We'd lose out on all those licenses for the last twenty years that seem (with the exception of the EA LoTR game and Tron 2.0*) to have universally sucked?
All that could happen if Hollywood thought the gaming industry was setting up in competition?
HEY HOLLYWOOD! WE'RE SETTING UP IN COMPETITION!
*I discounted the cooler StarWars Games as the movie company (LucasFilm) and the publisher (LucasArts) are arguably one in the same.
If they were Microsoft, not Apple boxes, would the correct term be a [beowulf] "cluster fuck"?
It won't be any of the above...
Microsoft have deeper pockets. Some lawyer will learn enough to realise that block sizes mean that a 1Gb disk doesn't store 1*10??*10?? 1k files. He'll then go after them for their FAT system.
I remember when Mortal Kombat first made it to the PC. There was a big fuss made about how the game had "A.I." (almost certainly an exageration but we'll let it slip) that allowed it to learn you play style and adapt accordingly.
So far, so samey for most other beat-em ups. One thing that got talked about, no idea of the varacity, was that it varied the difficulty. So, unless you suddenly pulled off something miraculous, it would keep it challenging but not impossible. If you kept losing at a given point, it would slowly make it easier until you eventually got passed it. If you kept on completing levels on the first attempt, it would keep making it slightly harder until it took a few attempts.
It strikes me as though a Dynamic Difficulty setting could add a lot to modern games, especially if you had some means of telling how hard it had made things for you.
Rather than having the l33t players talk about how they'd beaten Quake on Nightmare, wouldn't it be more interesting to be able to say, "It's DD'd me to level X!" That way it could always get harder and always get easier, meaning you'd never have a game that was too difficult for the very occasional gamer, yet also kept providing a challenge, month after month, play-through after play-through for the hardcore twitch-freaks.
Of course you'd still leave in the fixed difficulty settings for the times when you wanted to be able to play through, at just below your level, without getting beaten back fairly often.
(Note: There is one game I can think of that kind of did this. NeverWinterNights' DM client has a slider so human DMs can keep fights exciting to the last, never getting too easy but also stopping them from getting impassable.)
Even assuming that work is legitimate, at what point can the games company be assumed to have made every reasonable effort to contact the creator?
If there is no statement of ownership, no reasonable means of finding out who did create it, the building owners/occupiers no longer have a record, it was created under an untracable alias, etc. At what point can they be considered to have done everything reasonably possible to contact him and get to use it by default? Does there ever come a point where being uncontactable releases copyright?
Also, who owns the copyright? The artist who created the artwork or the owners of the building that he created it "for"? If you had someone paint a mural in your lobby, unless there was a contract - which I'm assuming most graffiti artists don't use - wouldn't the building owners, not the artist, own all further rights?
Roughly butchering Moore's law:
10 years / 18 months ~= 6.666
2^6.666~=60
So, as a rough rule of thumb, expect things to be about 50-60 times as powerful as they are today:
Given my 2GHz, 1Gb ram, 128mb video ram, 100Gb hard drive system today, a kind of typical PC, I should be running, by then:
120 GHz, 60 Gb ram, 7.5Gb video ram and a 6 terrabyte hard drive.
However, the following will also be true:
1) Windows 2013 will still be as slow as hell (probably clogging that fast 120 GHz processor with all of the things it securely prevents me from doing).
2) My wife will have finally killed me for all the money I've spent, especially as I swore that last year's 80Ghz processor would see me through for a couple of years.
3) According to Nick's newly coined law - every eighteen months my PC will give off roughly double the heat energy - I have just single handedly caused the ice caps to melt.
A conversation a friend of mine who lived in W1 (Very central London) recounted having:
"Sir, do you have a TV license?"
"Nope."
"Do you have a TV?"
"Nope."
"We detected a TV from our van, inside your property."
"No you didn't. Must be a mistake."
"Sir, I can hear the EastEnder's theme coming from inside your appartment."
"You must be imagining it."
"Sir, if we need to, we can get a warrant to enter the premises and be back within the hour."
"No you can't."
"Yes we can Sir, the courts look very favorably upon our requests."
"They look even less favorably upon giving search warrants to enter property belonging to the Queen."
"Oh. Well... You really should get a license."
The joys of the royal family owning half the best properties in the city.
Don't forget "The Atkins Shit."
A lot of people who try the Atkins diet report all that high protein meat (bacon dipped in mayonaise, mmm, that diet sounds appetising) rotting away in their intestine leads to "The Atkins Shit" about ten days to two weeks in.
As your body converts to processing all that fun stuff that digests differently, you too can enjoy catastrophic crapping and constant evil gasses eeking out of your ass. This ensures that, thin and gorgeous as you may now be, women will still want to be nowhere near you.
Recently, the file trading networks have been having some limited success by using the argument: "If there are significant other legitimate uses, a technology cannot be shut down because of its possible uses for piracy."
K++ is touting as a major feature being able to block law enforcement's (you think the RIAA won't play it as their lawyers attempting to do the work of the police?) attempts to crack down on its illegitimate (yes, yes, I know everyone thinks it's legitimate but the law doesn't) uses.
Surely they've just handed the RIAA a victory? They've said, "We've been sneaking in by claiming we have legitimate uses, trading all types of file - and now we've proved that our real purpose was piracy all along."
Yay. In one step, you've got 15% of users back for the couple of months before the policy offers the RIAA all the justification they need to shut you down entirely.
"..largest single take was 17,496 Sony PlayStation electronic game systems worth more than $5 million..." Seriously, what would you do with 17,000 PlayStations?
I'd probably build them in to a massive beowulf cluster so I could run a massively parallel calculator program.
17,500 PS2s * $200 (assuming they're the ones with network adapters) comes out to $3.5million. Not $5 million.
Add to that the fact they're not $200 sales units yet, they're more like $100 wholesale units about to gain a large mark up as they go through distributors, transportation costs and retail. Even sold second hand, assuming you could find 17,500 guys at the pub who all wanted one, you'd be lucky to clear $100 each. So, all in, maybe $1-1.5 million - on a good day. Of course that doesn't make such a good headline.
Is it your decision?
It sounds like it isn't your decision to call either way. So make sure you provide all of the information, including what the negatives will be, for both methods, then let the people who're paid to decide, decide.
Sometimes, whether we like it or not, whether it suits our meticulous geek processes, staying in business and dealing with shit down the line is a better option than doing it right and going out of business. It's that old line: I can do it fast, cheap or well. Pick any two. In the business world, fast and cheap are going to sometimes win.
The point is, for all you may disagree, you're not paid to disagree. You're paid to do as your manager and more senior management tell you to do. Your job is simply to give them the best information you can to make their decisions.
It's a hard lesson to learn. It goes totally against every feeling of entitlement we have. It doesn't stop it being true though.
Now the important thing is to keep the emails where you notify them of the negative consequences. You're not paid to decide, but you're also not paid to be abused for their decisions. By keeping the emails, you can prove you gave them the information and it was their choice. Knowing you have that saved can also help make the smiling and nodding easier.
Finally, ask yourself... If you were in their position, if you knew you were buying problems in the long term but it was the only way to stay in business long enough, would you appreciate every person who's paid to obey your decisions questioning you on things you already know, don't like, but have to do anyway?
Personally, I prefer fava beans and a nice Epson. Thththththththth.
There's a part of me that's entertained by how exploitable the system would be:
1) Goad someone in to mentioning you on their website.
2) Demand right of reply.
3) Just like politicians never reply to the actual question, nor do you.
Now you get someone else to pay all of your hosting costs for you.
Imagine Petsmart, "PetCo has described themselves as the best pet store in the country. We demand the right of redress to fill their site with advertising for our own store."
Every time Microsoft posted anything about Linux, the open source community would get granted rebuttal space on Microsoft's own web servers.
Not only that but who gets the right of reply? Linus? Every contributor to Linux? Anyone who's ever reported a Mozilla bug?
Then there're the counter exploits: Refuse until they take you to court. Continue refusing until the day before the court date. Then post the rebuttal on the same page as the now two-years out of date story.
The reality is it's totally unenforcable. Sit back, rather than get worked up over it, let them try it and watch it fall to pieces around them.
Take your queue from these guys, web monkey.
Oh, well, thank god it's just the web monkey's that fuck it all up. It's like the engineers that fucked up the roads by building massive SUVs and the musicians who fucked up the music industry. Now we know who to blame, we can tell them all to just fix it, right?
Wrong.
The reality is that web monkeys are just that, web monkeys. There are very, very few web gurus out there. In almost every case, they're working for managers who don't really understand the web but do understand that producing the greatest streamlined product in the world doesn't begin to compete with providing flashy things when reassuring senior management about why they just spent so much on a website.
Producing excellent content is extremely hard. Not only is it extremely hard, it requires constant updating and investment. Yet when you present that to a marketing director or a CEO, in the ten minute window they have, they see "Hmm, looks kinda boring."
Not only that, but it's a false assumption that users migrate to raw HTML sites. Slashdot actually has a lot of design elements in place. Raw HTML as is being advocated and Slashdot are actually two different things. Slashdot actually uses a lot of tables, a lot of different styles, a lot of color, contrasting backgrounds etc. It's cleaner, yes, but it's also not raw HTML. Raw HTML is practically unnavigable for any amount of content because it's so hard to find what you're after and because, whether fair or not, users perceive it as less appealing.
So, we web monkeys would love to design cleaner sites. But, we're just the monkeys - we're part of a corporate world where budgets get signed by people with a lot less understanding of the web. Those who wave the "raw HTML" banner just serve to muddy the waters by not really getting what they're talking about anyway.
Among others, more complex games and anti-piracy measures built into the media.
We need to charge this much for games because so many are pirated. Now we need to charge you more because we're trying to negate that. I'd like to call them idiots but we consumers are the ones who keep falling for this stuff and teaching them that they can get away with it.
The IRS could learn something here. *fears*
Modern day technology concepts and biology will both one day become so advanced that they are are... indistinguishable
Wow. Imagine a beowulf cluster of me!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I for one, look forward to the days when Microsoft try running their wonderful code in my DNA. I mean, imagine all the potential:
"I'm sorry, your DNA has just crashed. You're experiencing the blue goop of death."
Of course, all the geeks would run their DNA on Linux. They'd be capable of doing many things faster, they'd live forever compared to their microsoft bretherin and the vast majority of society would never, ever, want to interact with them. So no change there then.
One last thought...
"GameBoy - You'll never have your mum calling to check up on you on it."
Any device that allows your mum to check you've got your thermal underwear on, you've got your coat buttoned up and you'll be home by bedtime, while you're trying to hang out with your friends, is fundamentally uncool.
If you're 20 or 25 years old, it's probably not a good idea to draw a GameBoy out of your pocket on a Friday night in a public place."
Last Friday night, at 2Fast2Furious (I'm in a war of attrition with a friend to drag each other to the worst possible movie), I pulled a platinum SP out of my pocket and played (original GB) Mario in the cinema, waiting for the movie to start. All the little kiddies playing centipede on their cell phones all leant over to watch, as did the older people on a retro kick.
Granted, I've been 26 for two months now, so I'm clearly passed it.
GameBoys have a level of retro cool that completely transcends just about any other retro fad. They also have a stupidly large library of some of the most simply playable games ever. I'd choose to be seen playing one of those things over the "Please look at me, I desperately need to be cool by sticking flashing LED battery packs on my cell phone" alternative - be it Friday night or any other time.
I'd suggest the opposite is true...
If you start young, odds are you're self taught. You likely type with the balls of your hands on the desk, perched forward in your chair, all the ergonomically unhealthy stuff because you're free to learn bad habits.
Most ~30 year olds who didn't touch a computer until college likely learned to type on a typewriter, in a typing class, where they were taught to do it properly.
I have pretty bad problems with carpal tunnel and RSI issues (to ease the stress on the wrists, you end up transfering to elbows/shoulders etc). I know I type in a terrible position and I've done a lot of research on the subject to try and find ways to deal with it - ultimately though, as soon as I stop conciously thinking about it, my hands always revert back. The joys of deeply ingrained bad habbits that I learned as a four or five year old, in ~1981, with a BBC Micro.
what was that old guy's name? his dog was sprocket
The uncle was Uncle Travelling Mac(k?) if I remember correctly. I don't think the old guy ever had a name. He called the dog Sprocket but Sprocket couldn't talk and hence couldn't call him anything. The fraggles themselves never conversed with him so they didn't call him by name either.
I wonder if he got that job just on the basis of his name...
If that were the case, don't you think Dr. Evil would be working for the RIAA, not staring in all those Austin Powers movies?