A man whose company makes its money writing game engines says, "APIs are going to go away. It's going to be very, very hard to build a game engine in the future when you can't rely on the APIs anymore. So everyone'll have to switch to the few companies that build game engines instead. Like mine. I recommend you start now and save yourself the headache."
Hmm, I detect no bias whatsoever.
Well, almost as little as when nVidia tells the world that they have seen the future and it's in GPGPUs replacing CPUs. Amazing how everyone has seen the future, it supports their business model and the rest of us can save ourselves a lot of pain if we jump on what pays them well.
I tried showing one of my female colleagues my pocket projector.
Anyone hiring?
Re:Write Code In HTML To Render Hello World?
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Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
To be fair, you can split hairs and say he said, "Code" rather than "Program" but coding still implies some form of codifying information.
The HTML to render Hello World is... Hello World.
Sure, you can wrap it in additional tags. Sure, if you want it to be valid XHTML, you need DTDs, parent tags and all the rest.
Even then though, the actual Hello World displaying part is just exactly that, the un-enCODEed text: Hello World.
Write Code In HTML To Render Hello World?
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
I'd argue that if you can't differentiate between a markup and a programming language, you probably shouldn't be running the shop... or espousing opinions about who should... either.
Game vs. Experience Score
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Review: Spore
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· Score: 5, Interesting
As a pure game... the 4/5, 8/10 ratings are about fair. It's a good but not amazing game that leaves you with a sense you'll have seen pretty much everything within a few days and then be left kind of tweaking around before letting it gather dust.
But...
It's also one of those games that just has "landmark experience" stamped all over it. Black And White was a slightly worse game yet, even with a more limited scope, is still discussed as being a key moment in gaming history where people's eyes were opened.
There has never been a game with this quality level of procedural animation and texturing. There has never been a game with such a stunningly easy to use editor that lets you build incredibly complex vehicles and texture them in a couple of minutes with absolutely zero experience in modelling and texturing. There has never been a game with cross pollenization of content like Spore.
I've been gaming for way too long. I still count Elite as my greatest game of all time for just how utterly beyond what anyone else even contemplated at the time (3D, huge universes, flight, you name it). I still remember the ultimately kind of boring but amazing for what you could create Disney's Stunt Island. I remember the movie feel of the original Wing Commander and finally having characters that felt like they mattered getting killed off. I remember Dungeon Master finally giving a real feel of being in actual dungeons even if it was 90 degree block movement. I remember Sim City and Sim Earth blowing me away with their depth. I remember the Lemmings taking the 2D everyone thought was dead and slapping it upside the head with its new mechanics. I remember getting blown away by the scope of Ultima Underworld, my first time on a MUD and stepping in to EverQuest for the first time...
This game is going to be one of those memories. Even if the game itself gets old kind of quickly, the sheer volume of new things it introduces, that are going to be copied and used in differing combinations in games from here on out... For me, it makes it unmissable.
In several years time, when I pick up Doom V, I'm expecting to see an editor that doesn't take a degree to master but instead lets me quickly throw in corridors, rooms, doors, gun turrets with the ease of Spore's building editor. Instead of dropping in generic creatures or spending weeks building them, my NPCs are going to take me five minutes to drag custom shapes on to, slap on a few cybernetics that already have properties assigned and then drop on a bigger gun that it already knows what to do with. I'll drop a tank that I threw together in five minutes in... then decide I don't like it and quickly change it out with a six legged walker. In two or three hours, I'll have a huge mod, completely different to anyone else's, with all new creatures, weapons, vehicles, buildings, etc.
At that point, gaming will be take as big a leap forward as it did when Doom first introduced WAD files and modding.
And I've no desire to have missed that moment's birth because I thought Spore might get boring after a couple of days.
So...
Game: 8/10, maybe even 7/10
Innovation/had to be there: 15/10
Ultimately: No brainer purchase for people who like being a part of gaming, not just playing the latest flashy shooter.
Don't Play On A PC
on
Review: Spore
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· Score: 2, Informative
The same install DVD will install to either your PC or a Mac. If you don't like what it does on a PC, put it on a Mac.
If you want to be a geek about it, go with a mobius strip rather than a ring.
Plus then you get a lifetime of wry jokes about marriage being an endless treadmill with no possibility of escape. *grins*
And, yes, I get to make that joke. Eight years of marriage in... I love it. I wouldn't change it. But, trust me, there'll be days where you wonder what the hell you did. Those couples that last seem to accept those days as part of the journey and roll with them. Those with romantic notions about the perfection of love always seem to fall apart when they're confronted by those days that, yes, everyone gets.
Make a joke of it. Acknowledge they're coming. Let them be what they're going to be, knowing you knew they were coming and those days are OK too. You'll be stronger for it.
I saw them when they were in San Diego, a few months back. They're all musty and falling apart anyway. I say digitize them and then recycle the paper in to something more useful to people today... like a Vista how-to guide. Everyone wins.
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
I love that Fry's has signs up at their registers saying their receipts cause cancer... then they ask you to touch the damn things to show them to their anti-theft goons on the way out.
My response is usually, "I just saw the sign that says your receipt causes cancer. I'm sure as hell not touching it. But if you want to reach in to my pocket to get it, feel free. Ignore the hole." Curiously, they've never once cared enough about anti-theft to go fishing.
Of course, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron and nitrogen are also all believed to cause cancer in California.
Company making a full disclosure (almost never happens)
Wisdom of crowds (individual guesses are wrong but the average of all the wrong guesses tends to be more accurate than...)
Individual guesses (some get lucky, most miss)
Company refusing to acknowledge any issues lest they have to pay for an expensive recall.
He may not be an expert in the field. Statistically, pulling a name at random out of the phonebook still has a greater chance of finding the right person than a company denying that there's even a phonebook.
The reality is that a large number of people are having problems with dropped calls, a very large number have significant problems with response time (particularly, it seems, if they've largely filled the device), and almost everyone are having problems with the device locking up and needing semi-regular hard reboots. Even first gen iPhone users who've upgraded to the 2.0 software are complaining about many more issues but at least they can revert - something not open to 3G users.
My guess, and I'm just a programmer/nerd and not a qualified phone engineer, is that it's a combination of newly sourced and poorly tested parts running in a major OS recode that also didn't get the level of testing any other wider ranging OS would get (they couldn't run a beta because Apple have a bitch of a time with leaks and cling on more tightly to avoiding them than most companies).
I may be right, I may be wrong. Statistically, whether the cat is dead or alive in the box, guessing about its state will sometimes be right. Apple's policy of keeping quiet and pretending there's no cat, no box and quantum states only happen to other companies ensures their answers are worse than other people's guesses.
If you have a moronic lawyer defending you who doesn't know how to apply them, they're completely useless.
You have a small chance the judge will be so aware of the law that they'll save you from your incompetent lawyer but, pretty much, no matter how good the law, you're screwed if your lawyer's an idiot.
In this case, the Data Protection Act says the information is owned by the people it is about, merely licensed by the guy who had it in his LinkedIn account. A competent lawyer should be able to present that as "Sure, you can argue he did all kinds of bad things to the company and is maybe liable... but the information still isn't his to give to you and it's illegal to demand it."
Unfortunately, an incompetent one who doesn't understand the law well enough to use that defense is still going to lose you the case - good laws or not.
As a teenager in the early 90s, I had about 1/30th-1/15th the cost of a then typical game coming in as pocket money each week. If I skipped lunch each day, I could maybe boost it to 1/5th of the cost of a game each week but I went hungry a lot.
Realistically, the only way for me to play the games of the time (Strike Commander, X-Wing, Stunt Island, etc.) was for two or three friends and I to each buy a fraction of the games and let the others take copies in exchange for taking copies of their games, ourselves.
Not noble. But when you're twelve or thirteen, nobility doesn't really factor in when compared to getting or not getting to play all the games the magazines were hyping up.
My best suggestion for this one?
They don't really have the income, nor are they going to get the income. You can't find a way to make people without money more profitable today.
What you can do is find a way to give them an alternative other than piracy so it's not so habitual when they finally do have money. Plus you can build their enjoyment of gaming so, when they do have money, they ultimately spend it on games. Perhaps some kind of a deal with after school computer clubs where the school systems get licenses for the games if the school wants to open them up after hours? Yes, gaming hardware, yadda, yadda... but many indie games don't push hardware in the same way.
2. Quick Network Game At Work
Everyone deserves the right to get a humiliating kill in on their boss from time to time. Getting ten or twenty people to all have a copy of a $50, just so they can play for an hour once a week, is plain crazy.
Games with real demo modes... get played on the demo mode (and those that enjoy it at work go and buy the full game for home use). Games with no demo modes get no CD cracks. With the number of discs needed, quick math has everyone asking, "Do I feel $1,000 bad about copying?" They never buy a copy afterwards as they already know how to crack it.
Solution 1: Good demos. The real old kind. Think Doom where you could play the first third of the whole game.
Solution 2: Charge for the server, online multiplayer, single player content. Give the LAN client away. Add a few extra loading screens to the LAN only install that remind you that the purchase gets you so much more. Let it serve as your advertising where you'd never get the sales anyway. 20 players all tempted to buy the full game if it's good beats the hell out of 20 pirates or 20 people who're playing something else.
3. A Lot Of Games Suck
Sorry, harsh reality check. We've all been burned by games that bought advertising on game review sites and strangely got very prominent placement and a more glowing review than they deserved. You only have to drop $50 for a Matrix game that sucks mightily, a D&D game that constantly fails its saving throw vs. crash to desktop, or Doom 3 that looks amazing yet leaves you staggeringly bored (holy crap, did I just imply I miss Romero?) and you get jaded fast.
In my case, now I'm older, money's less of an issue but time is, I tend to just skip a lot of games entirely. In the past, I'd take a copy just to try it and then... well... I had a copy, what was the point in finding $50?
Solution: Good demos again. Ones with a real, appreciable, chunk of the content.
You want to be even smarter with extra content? If there are eight chapters to your game, give away chapters 1 & 2 so people get a good chance to try it. Then offer the choice... The $40-50 box buy for all the rest or they can just buy what they want at $10/chapter via online activation. This way, your barrier of entry to the next chunk is WAY lower.
4. Nothing In The Box But Digital Data
Digital data can be grabbed from the internet or copied from a disc.
I remember a time when manuals came packed with back story, maps, hints and tips, walkthroughs of the first level or two, tables of information on spe
This also comes within a week of Barry George being released after being wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of British TV presenter, Jill Dando. In his case, a particle of gun powder was detected on him and this was used to argue he was clearly the murderer. Eight years of his life gone, the conviction was ruled unsafe because the defense weren't allowed to point out the entirely true fact: a single particle proves absolutely nothing and is well within normal contamination levels.
Shows like CSI are incredibly dangerous. They lead us to assume that just because we can detect something, it somehow proves guilt. A single particle of gun powder goes not prove you fired a specific murder weapon. Traces of drugs on your banknotes don't prove they were involved in drug dealing (though police forces throughout the U.S. deliberately abuse that false assumption to merit seizing the money). Traces of drugs on someone's fingertips prove nothing more than they came in contact with U.S. currency which has been found to have up to 1,300 micrograms of cocaine per bill.
At what point does a privacy breach demand punishment?
The problem's in the question.
If you look for a single point, you create a system where it reinforces bad behavior...
Minor breach: "You pesky perisher, you!" "Hmm, guess I can do it again, no consequences."
Medium breach: "Tut, tut, very naughty!" "Hmm, guess I can do it again, no consequences."
Major breach: "That was very naught!" "Hmm, still no consequences, this shit really is risk free."
Marginally less major breach that someone makes an issue of, "YOU ARE EVIL, YOU MUST DIE!" "WHOA! That's kind of unfair. No one had an issue before!"
Instead of reinforcing that a behavior is consequence free, how about an escalating scale that allows for minor infractions to be punished suitably, ensuring most people learn before major punishments become necessary and those that do get the major punishments truly deserve them.
Make every case of a snooping ex punishable by a $500, easy to obtain, civil judgment in small claims - with more serious ones slowly gaining criminal records, probation, jail time, etc. Let them know that there are consequences there and then you likely won't have them learning it's OK and your giving a sudden and apparently inconsistent sentence when they do it hundreds of times, accessing more sensitive information.
They'll wish you well with that recording. Then, entirely within the law, they'll take a walk around your vehicle and find all of the little things that they would have likely waived if you were being cooperative.
Your tire tread's looking a little low. I'm sorry, your car's not safe to drive, I'll have to get it towed. Oops, did I leave your 4x4 in gear and blew your transmission? I'm SO sorry, but legally not liable.
Your front windows are tinted... Hmm, that'll be another ticket. Wiper bottles empty (this one's a pentalty point in the UK)? Could you check your brake lights for me?
Even better, in California, they duck under your vehicle to check VIN numbers. You don't have a camera pointing under there? And, what a shame, your VIN number's scratched off in one place (we'll just ignore the cop's keys have metal flakes all over them now). Looks like this car has stolen parts. I'm sorry, we have to tow and destroy. It's the law, you know.
Quite legally, unless you're meticulous about vehicle upkeep, they can find a whole bunch of minor annoyances for you. Questionably legally, they can likely find a few ways to get your car towed and damaged in the process. With only a little faking of evidence, they can come up with ways to have it destroyed.
Yeah, some of them are dicks. Some of them are dicks who break the law - and catching them on camera is a nice victory. The smart ones are dicks who know how to stay within the law while doing no end of harm to you perfectly legally.
Unless you've got the luxury of a huge amount of space, the only way you're going to come close to exercising all groups is via free weights.
Multi exercise machines don't even come close (more on that later). Treadmills/stationary bikes are great for burning calories which'll do most of your weight loss goals but you're asking about all muscle groups. BOSU balls, steps, jump ropes are all more limited in application. The other great full body exercise, swimming, isn't really an option in the privacy of your own home unless you're rich enough to have a good sized pool.
The problem with free weights, and this comes from being married to a physical therapist who's also an ACE certified personal trainer, is: You're doing it wrong.
Don't feel bad. Just about everyone does. From the Navy guys I've watched prepping for their PRTs by holding a dumbell in one position and flapping their elbows like chickens to those who swing weights and let the momentum carry them through the weak spots to those who only really focus on a few core groups.
This is what a good personal trainer will do for you (and, yes, I hate the idea of paying the meathead ones too). A good one will slow you down and perfect your form: meaning you're actually building the weak points not just swinging past them. A good one will start you on machines (really good for isolating the exact form you need but lousy at exercising all of the supporting groups) and then slowly move you over to free weights (really good at exercising a lot of supporting groups, lousy at teaching you good form). A good one will also teach you a whole range of exercises so you're not just bulking your biceps with no work on your triceps, strengthening abs without matching your lats, working on your upper body with no attention to your chicken legs (yes, you, 95% of guys in gyms).
Look at it this way...
How good of a coder would you be if you never learned from other people's code and never had anyone review yours? Sure, you might be a prodigy and do some cool trick most people have never thought of. More likely, you'll write messy, inefficient code that seems like it works while leaving memory leaks everywhere.
In the same way, you might manage to learn everything about lifting from message boards and videos. More likely, you'll get a fair amount right but still be doing a few gastly things that it never occurs to you they're wrong.
This is why we suck it up, venture in to a gym, find a good trainer (being willing to fire the bad ones until we get that one we vibe with), and learn the technique first... so we can then get it right in our splendid isolation.
a single noncommercial user, for a single upload or download of an MP3 file for personal use
As I understand it, it's never been about your providing a single instance for a single copy.
The damages figure is calculated with the assumption that an average file, made available on a file sharing network, is downloaded x number of times. Multiplying the retail value of the file by 3 (typical for punative damages) then by the assumed figure, x, you reach the default award.
That implies congress accepted the assumption that the average was 250 copies were made ($1 x 3 x 250 copies = $750).
Yes, it's terribly unfair that they "assume" you've had each file copied an average of 250 times. Then again, if they had to prove every single instance, damages would generally be so paltry as to serve no dissuasive effect.
Yes, we can argue that we feel it shouldn't be serving a dissuasive effect. We can argue that the RIAA should just have to suck it up. But, the way the law works, the legislative branch decides what should and shouldn't be the penalty, the judicial branch gets to stop it if it's grossly unfair and, if we still don't like it, we the people can vote in a different legislative branch.
It also raises the spectre, on a pay per infringement basis, that all the RIAA then has to do is write a script that downloads each file 10,000 times and they now go for $1 x 3 x 10,000 proven copies you made available for $30,000. In some ways, a fixed $750 or whatever the number may be, saves us from an even more abusable system.
And, no, as I understand it, "entrapment" isn't a defense against a civil entity - only if the police do it to you.
Given that too many humans is already the biggest threat to the planet, I may have spotted a teeny, tiny flaw here.
Sure, we can get more efficient. Maybe even 50% more efficient. But a population that doubles every twenty to thirty years means you've got to manage that 50% efficiency savings every 20-30 years, not just once, if you want to keep up with the sheer damage our out of control population growth is doing.
Check out more or less any Legoland. They have a walk through production process. Sure, it's old equipment that isn't legitimately functioning but they show you everything from the grains to the dies to the packing process.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news...
A man whose company makes its money writing game engines says, "APIs are going to go away. It's going to be very, very hard to build a game engine in the future when you can't rely on the APIs anymore. So everyone'll have to switch to the few companies that build game engines instead. Like mine. I recommend you start now and save yourself the headache."
Hmm, I detect no bias whatsoever.
Well, almost as little as when nVidia tells the world that they have seen the future and it's in GPGPUs replacing CPUs. Amazing how everyone has seen the future, it supports their business model and the rest of us can save ourselves a lot of pain if we jump on what pays them well.
I tried showing one of my female colleagues my pocket projector.
Anyone hiring?
To be fair, you can split hairs and say he said, "Code" rather than "Program" but coding still implies some form of codifying information.
The HTML to render Hello World is... Hello World.
Sure, you can wrap it in additional tags. Sure, if you want it to be valid XHTML, you need DTDs, parent tags and all the rest.
Even then though, the actual Hello World displaying part is just exactly that, the un-enCODEed text: Hello World.
I'd argue that if you can't differentiate between a markup and a programming language, you probably shouldn't be running the shop... or espousing opinions about who should... either.
As a pure game... the 4/5, 8/10 ratings are about fair. It's a good but not amazing game that leaves you with a sense you'll have seen pretty much everything within a few days and then be left kind of tweaking around before letting it gather dust.
But...
It's also one of those games that just has "landmark experience" stamped all over it. Black And White was a slightly worse game yet, even with a more limited scope, is still discussed as being a key moment in gaming history where people's eyes were opened.
There has never been a game with this quality level of procedural animation and texturing. There has never been a game with such a stunningly easy to use editor that lets you build incredibly complex vehicles and texture them in a couple of minutes with absolutely zero experience in modelling and texturing. There has never been a game with cross pollenization of content like Spore.
I've been gaming for way too long. I still count Elite as my greatest game of all time for just how utterly beyond what anyone else even contemplated at the time (3D, huge universes, flight, you name it). I still remember the ultimately kind of boring but amazing for what you could create Disney's Stunt Island. I remember the movie feel of the original Wing Commander and finally having characters that felt like they mattered getting killed off. I remember Dungeon Master finally giving a real feel of being in actual dungeons even if it was 90 degree block movement. I remember Sim City and Sim Earth blowing me away with their depth. I remember the Lemmings taking the 2D everyone thought was dead and slapping it upside the head with its new mechanics. I remember getting blown away by the scope of Ultima Underworld, my first time on a MUD and stepping in to EverQuest for the first time...
This game is going to be one of those memories. Even if the game itself gets old kind of quickly, the sheer volume of new things it introduces, that are going to be copied and used in differing combinations in games from here on out... For me, it makes it unmissable.
In several years time, when I pick up Doom V, I'm expecting to see an editor that doesn't take a degree to master but instead lets me quickly throw in corridors, rooms, doors, gun turrets with the ease of Spore's building editor. Instead of dropping in generic creatures or spending weeks building them, my NPCs are going to take me five minutes to drag custom shapes on to, slap on a few cybernetics that already have properties assigned and then drop on a bigger gun that it already knows what to do with. I'll drop a tank that I threw together in five minutes in... then decide I don't like it and quickly change it out with a six legged walker. In two or three hours, I'll have a huge mod, completely different to anyone else's, with all new creatures, weapons, vehicles, buildings, etc.
At that point, gaming will be take as big a leap forward as it did when Doom first introduced WAD files and modding.
And I've no desire to have missed that moment's birth because I thought Spore might get boring after a couple of days.
So...
Game: 8/10, maybe even 7/10
Innovation/had to be there: 15/10
Ultimately: No brainer purchase for people who like being a part of gaming, not just playing the latest flashy shooter.
The same install DVD will install to either your PC or a Mac. If you don't like what it does on a PC, put it on a Mac.
...is now free on conditions including that she have no contact with ... any employee from her ISP.
Granted, I'm used to trying to call an engineer out from US ISPs... But how is this different to what you get without a court order?
If you want to be a geek about it, go with a mobius strip rather than a ring.
Plus then you get a lifetime of wry jokes about marriage being an endless treadmill with no possibility of escape. *grins*
And, yes, I get to make that joke. Eight years of marriage in... I love it. I wouldn't change it. But, trust me, there'll be days where you wonder what the hell you did. Those couples that last seem to accept those days as part of the journey and roll with them. Those with romantic notions about the perfection of love always seem to fall apart when they're confronted by those days that, yes, everyone gets.
Make a joke of it. Acknowledge they're coming. Let them be what they're going to be, knowing you knew they were coming and those days are OK too. You'll be stronger for it.
Then I'm willing to bet you don't know what a premise is.
â"verb (used with object) to assume, either explicitly or implicitly, (a proposition) as a premise for a conclusion.
â"verb (used without object) to state or assume a premise.
A premise doesn't have to be accurate. It has to simply be an assumed foundation for an argument.
They can absolutely defend their belief with rock solid premises. For example:
If was assume God exists.
And we assume God smites those who don't believe in him.
(the premise)
Then it makes a lot of sense to believe.
(a very accurate statement IF the assumptions that form the premise are true)
I saw them when they were in San Diego, a few months back. They're all musty and falling apart anyway. I say digitize them and then recycle the paper in to something more useful to people today... like a Vista how-to guide. Everyone wins.
It's still beyond me why they can't manage to offer a sliding scale...
First 100 GB... You get at the full bandwidth.
For each additional 50 GB, it drops by 25% of whatever it was last.
First 100GB = 100%
100-150GB = 75%
150-200GB = 56%
200-250GB = 42%
250-300GB = 32%
300-350GB = 24%
350-400GB = 18%
400-450GB = 13%
450-500GB = 10%
Now you've got a system where no one ever finds their connection suddenly shut off on them for the remainder of the month.
Instead, it just keeps getting slower and slower to the point where much over 250 GB is going to have slowed so much they'd really have a hard time going much further anyway... and those 5GB movie downloads they used to get within an hour now need to run all night, if not all day and all night, and so are no longer appealing anyway.
Though, to be fair... Funny how it's only those companies that make money by charging for the delivery of TV and movies that seem to have issues with users using the kind of bandwidth needed to get TV and movies without them.
I love that Fry's has signs up at their registers saying their receipts cause cancer... then they ask you to touch the damn things to show them to their anti-theft goons on the way out.
My response is usually, "I just saw the sign that says your receipt causes cancer. I'm sure as hell not touching it. But if you want to reach in to my pocket to get it, feel free. Ignore the hole." Curiously, they've never once cared enough about anti-theft to go fishing.
Of course, hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron and nitrogen are also all believed to cause cancer in California.
In order of level of accuracy we have:
He may not be an expert in the field. Statistically, pulling a name at random out of the phonebook still has a greater chance of finding the right person than a company denying that there's even a phonebook.
The reality is that a large number of people are having problems with dropped calls, a very large number have significant problems with response time (particularly, it seems, if they've largely filled the device), and almost everyone are having problems with the device locking up and needing semi-regular hard reboots. Even first gen iPhone users who've upgraded to the 2.0 software are complaining about many more issues but at least they can revert - something not open to 3G users.
My guess, and I'm just a programmer/nerd and not a qualified phone engineer, is that it's a combination of newly sourced and poorly tested parts running in a major OS recode that also didn't get the level of testing any other wider ranging OS would get (they couldn't run a beta because Apple have a bitch of a time with leaks and cling on more tightly to avoiding them than most companies).
I may be right, I may be wrong. Statistically, whether the cat is dead or alive in the box, guessing about its state will sometimes be right. Apple's policy of keeping quiet and pretending there's no cat, no box and quantum states only happen to other companies ensures their answers are worse than other people's guesses.
No matter how good the laws...
If you have a moronic lawyer defending you who doesn't know how to apply them, they're completely useless.
You have a small chance the judge will be so aware of the law that they'll save you from your incompetent lawyer but, pretty much, no matter how good the law, you're screwed if your lawyer's an idiot.
In this case, the Data Protection Act says the information is owned by the people it is about, merely licensed by the guy who had it in his LinkedIn account. A competent lawyer should be able to present that as "Sure, you can argue he did all kinds of bad things to the company and is maybe liable... but the information still isn't his to give to you and it's illegal to demand it."
Unfortunately, an incompetent one who doesn't understand the law well enough to use that defense is still going to lose you the case - good laws or not.
1. I was cheap.
As a teenager in the early 90s, I had about 1/30th-1/15th the cost of a then typical game coming in as pocket money each week. If I skipped lunch each day, I could maybe boost it to 1/5th of the cost of a game each week but I went hungry a lot.
Realistically, the only way for me to play the games of the time (Strike Commander, X-Wing, Stunt Island, etc.) was for two or three friends and I to each buy a fraction of the games and let the others take copies in exchange for taking copies of their games, ourselves.
Not noble. But when you're twelve or thirteen, nobility doesn't really factor in when compared to getting or not getting to play all the games the magazines were hyping up.
My best suggestion for this one?
They don't really have the income, nor are they going to get the income. You can't find a way to make people without money more profitable today.
What you can do is find a way to give them an alternative other than piracy so it's not so habitual when they finally do have money. Plus you can build their enjoyment of gaming so, when they do have money, they ultimately spend it on games. Perhaps some kind of a deal with after school computer clubs where the school systems get licenses for the games if the school wants to open them up after hours? Yes, gaming hardware, yadda, yadda... but many indie games don't push hardware in the same way.
2. Quick Network Game At Work
Everyone deserves the right to get a humiliating kill in on their boss from time to time. Getting ten or twenty people to all have a copy of a $50, just so they can play for an hour once a week, is plain crazy.
Games with real demo modes... get played on the demo mode (and those that enjoy it at work go and buy the full game for home use). Games with no demo modes get no CD cracks. With the number of discs needed, quick math has everyone asking, "Do I feel $1,000 bad about copying?" They never buy a copy afterwards as they already know how to crack it.
Solution 1: Good demos. The real old kind. Think Doom where you could play the first third of the whole game.
Solution 2: Charge for the server, online multiplayer, single player content. Give the LAN client away. Add a few extra loading screens to the LAN only install that remind you that the purchase gets you so much more. Let it serve as your advertising where you'd never get the sales anyway. 20 players all tempted to buy the full game if it's good beats the hell out of 20 pirates or 20 people who're playing something else.
3. A Lot Of Games Suck
Sorry, harsh reality check. We've all been burned by games that bought advertising on game review sites and strangely got very prominent placement and a more glowing review than they deserved. You only have to drop $50 for a Matrix game that sucks mightily, a D&D game that constantly fails its saving throw vs. crash to desktop, or Doom 3 that looks amazing yet leaves you staggeringly bored (holy crap, did I just imply I miss Romero?) and you get jaded fast.
In my case, now I'm older, money's less of an issue but time is, I tend to just skip a lot of games entirely. In the past, I'd take a copy just to try it and then... well... I had a copy, what was the point in finding $50?
Solution: Good demos again. Ones with a real, appreciable, chunk of the content.
You want to be even smarter with extra content? If there are eight chapters to your game, give away chapters 1 & 2 so people get a good chance to try it. Then offer the choice... The $40-50 box buy for all the rest or they can just buy what they want at $10/chapter via online activation. This way, your barrier of entry to the next chunk is WAY lower.
4. Nothing In The Box But Digital Data
Digital data can be grabbed from the internet or copied from a disc.
I remember a time when manuals came packed with back story, maps, hints and tips, walkthroughs of the first level or two, tables of information on spe
rather than something like ... PhysL
I may be wrong but I think naming your product Fizzle might make it a hard sell. Perhaps DampSquib(tm)?
Why, yes, I have touched US currency. That's grounds for termination now?
news.yahoo.com
This also comes within a week of Barry George being released after being wrongfully imprisoned for the murder of British TV presenter, Jill Dando. In his case, a particle of gun powder was detected on him and this was used to argue he was clearly the murderer. Eight years of his life gone, the conviction was ruled unsafe because the defense weren't allowed to point out the entirely true fact: a single particle proves absolutely nothing and is well within normal contamination levels.
Shows like CSI are incredibly dangerous. They lead us to assume that just because we can detect something, it somehow proves guilt. A single particle of gun powder goes not prove you fired a specific murder weapon. Traces of drugs on your banknotes don't prove they were involved in drug dealing (though police forces throughout the U.S. deliberately abuse that false assumption to merit seizing the money). Traces of drugs on someone's fingertips prove nothing more than they came in contact with U.S. currency which has been found to have up to 1,300 micrograms of cocaine per bill.
At what point does a privacy breach demand punishment?
The problem's in the question.
If you look for a single point, you create a system where it reinforces bad behavior...
Minor breach: "You pesky perisher, you!" "Hmm, guess I can do it again, no consequences."
Medium breach: "Tut, tut, very naughty!" "Hmm, guess I can do it again, no consequences."
Major breach: "That was very naught!" "Hmm, still no consequences, this shit really is risk free."
Marginally less major breach that someone makes an issue of, "YOU ARE EVIL, YOU MUST DIE!" "WHOA! That's kind of unfair. No one had an issue before!"
Instead of reinforcing that a behavior is consequence free, how about an escalating scale that allows for minor infractions to be punished suitably, ensuring most people learn before major punishments become necessary and those that do get the major punishments truly deserve them.
Make every case of a snooping ex punishable by a $500, easy to obtain, civil judgment in small claims - with more serious ones slowly gaining criminal records, probation, jail time, etc. Let them know that there are consequences there and then you likely won't have them learning it's OK and your giving a sudden and apparently inconsistent sentence when they do it hundreds of times, accessing more sensitive information.
The rotation of oscillating rotational planets, as influenced by female homo sapiens with large gluteal regions.
If the cop's smart:
They'll wish you well with that recording. Then, entirely within the law, they'll take a walk around your vehicle and find all of the little things that they would have likely waived if you were being cooperative.
Your tire tread's looking a little low. I'm sorry, your car's not safe to drive, I'll have to get it towed. Oops, did I leave your 4x4 in gear and blew your transmission? I'm SO sorry, but legally not liable.
Your front windows are tinted... Hmm, that'll be another ticket. Wiper bottles empty (this one's a pentalty point in the UK)? Could you check your brake lights for me?
Even better, in California, they duck under your vehicle to check VIN numbers. You don't have a camera pointing under there? And, what a shame, your VIN number's scratched off in one place (we'll just ignore the cop's keys have metal flakes all over them now). Looks like this car has stolen parts. I'm sorry, we have to tow and destroy. It's the law, you know.
Quite legally, unless you're meticulous about vehicle upkeep, they can find a whole bunch of minor annoyances for you. Questionably legally, they can likely find a few ways to get your car towed and damaged in the process. With only a little faking of evidence, they can come up with ways to have it destroyed.
Yeah, some of them are dicks. Some of them are dicks who break the law - and catching them on camera is a nice victory. The smart ones are dicks who know how to stay within the law while doing no end of harm to you perfectly legally.
Unless you've got the luxury of a huge amount of space, the only way you're going to come close to exercising all groups is via free weights.
Multi exercise machines don't even come close (more on that later). Treadmills/stationary bikes are great for burning calories which'll do most of your weight loss goals but you're asking about all muscle groups. BOSU balls, steps, jump ropes are all more limited in application. The other great full body exercise, swimming, isn't really an option in the privacy of your own home unless you're rich enough to have a good sized pool.
The problem with free weights, and this comes from being married to a physical therapist who's also an ACE certified personal trainer, is: You're doing it wrong.
Don't feel bad. Just about everyone does. From the Navy guys I've watched prepping for their PRTs by holding a dumbell in one position and flapping their elbows like chickens to those who swing weights and let the momentum carry them through the weak spots to those who only really focus on a few core groups.
This is what a good personal trainer will do for you (and, yes, I hate the idea of paying the meathead ones too). A good one will slow you down and perfect your form: meaning you're actually building the weak points not just swinging past them. A good one will start you on machines (really good for isolating the exact form you need but lousy at exercising all of the supporting groups) and then slowly move you over to free weights (really good at exercising a lot of supporting groups, lousy at teaching you good form). A good one will also teach you a whole range of exercises so you're not just bulking your biceps with no work on your triceps, strengthening abs without matching your lats, working on your upper body with no attention to your chicken legs (yes, you, 95% of guys in gyms).
Look at it this way...
How good of a coder would you be if you never learned from other people's code and never had anyone review yours? Sure, you might be a prodigy and do some cool trick most people have never thought of. More likely, you'll write messy, inefficient code that seems like it works while leaving memory leaks everywhere.
In the same way, you might manage to learn everything about lifting from message boards and videos. More likely, you'll get a fair amount right but still be doing a few gastly things that it never occurs to you they're wrong.
This is why we suck it up, venture in to a gym, find a good trainer (being willing to fire the bad ones until we get that one we vibe with), and learn the technique first... so we can then get it right in our splendid isolation.
a single noncommercial user, for a single upload or download of an MP3 file for personal use
As I understand it, it's never been about your providing a single instance for a single copy.
The damages figure is calculated with the assumption that an average file, made available on a file sharing network, is downloaded x number of times. Multiplying the retail value of the file by 3 (typical for punative damages) then by the assumed figure, x, you reach the default award.
That implies congress accepted the assumption that the average was 250 copies were made ($1 x 3 x 250 copies = $750).
Yes, it's terribly unfair that they "assume" you've had each file copied an average of 250 times. Then again, if they had to prove every single instance, damages would generally be so paltry as to serve no dissuasive effect.
Yes, we can argue that we feel it shouldn't be serving a dissuasive effect. We can argue that the RIAA should just have to suck it up. But, the way the law works, the legislative branch decides what should and shouldn't be the penalty, the judicial branch gets to stop it if it's grossly unfair and, if we still don't like it, we the people can vote in a different legislative branch.
It also raises the spectre, on a pay per infringement basis, that all the RIAA then has to do is write a script that downloads each file 10,000 times and they now go for $1 x 3 x 10,000 proven copies you made available for $30,000. In some ways, a fixed $750 or whatever the number may be, saves us from an even more abusable system.
And, no, as I understand it, "entrapment" isn't a defense against a civil entity - only if the police do it to you.
This is specially visible on the rocks (but even in action on the plancks of the fences).
Odd. I heard these were pretty constant.
save millions of lives
Given that too many humans is already the biggest threat to the planet, I may have spotted a teeny, tiny flaw here.
Sure, we can get more efficient. Maybe even 50% more efficient. But a population that doubles every twenty to thirty years means you've got to manage that 50% efficiency savings every 20-30 years, not just once, if you want to keep up with the sheer damage our out of control population growth is doing.
Check out more or less any Legoland. They have a walk through production process. Sure, it's old equipment that isn't legitimately functioning but they show you everything from the grains to the dies to the packing process.