Secondly, this is all dones through legal weaselese. In this case:
1) I've licensed D&D 3e to you under the OGL. That license states that it is non-revokable, and therefore there is NO WAY I can stop you from releasing all you want under it. However... 2) I can offer you the opportunity to license D&D 4e from me under a new license. I can put any clause into that license I want. I can say you need to shave your head, paint your arse blue, and change your name to Stacy if I want. You have the option of either accepting those terms, or not licensing 4e from me.
Note that you could probably take some of those conditions to court for a judgement, if they were particularly egregious. A court may rule that certain licensing restrictions are invalid and unenforceable, and no longer stand. That's why you often see a clause at the end of a license which says something like, "In the event that certain parts of this license are determined to be unenforceable, the remaining parts are still valid." Much of this detail though, depends on country and jurisdiction. The only caveat with your point 2 is that you can't contract someone to do something illegal, or at the least, that section is void. So you can't take somebody to court to enforce a contract on somebody's life because the hitman refused to actually carry it out. That may be extreme, as that TYPE of contract may be illegal by other laws, but even if it wasn't it would still be void by the "you can't legally bind somebody to do something illegal" catch-all. That might vary by country, but I think any legal system based off of old english common-law (basically anything that ever WAS a British Colony, and some others too) this applies too, though IANAL.
I don't know how "subsequent contracts" work though. Can they null older ones? Or what? Assuming it's both the same parties involved, "common sense" would seem to indicate that if you both agree to the new terms that they can void anything in the earlier contract, which would make the clause perfectly enforceable.
I agree with you. Too often parents feel that they need to plan out their child's life, whereas it's probably better in the end to let the child figure out as much of it as is reasonable. Ease them in to decision-making, first on simple activities, like what they're going to do in the backyard, then further into what they're going to eat in restaurants, and further and further. I know for my own sake, my parents always asked me what I was going to do during the summer, not them telling me (unless there was a family event or something of course).
Be involved with your children's lives, but be there as a "sanity check" and not as the one that directs every little thing they do. And LET them get hurt a bit. Not seriously of course, but hey, that skinned knee really DOES teach them something. Or as Calvin said, "If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you haven't been living!"
He didn't say he didn't like that he answered them clearly, he seems to be indicating that he doesn't agree with the answers. What's wrong with having a different opinion on matters? It isn't who answers the most eloquently, it's who has the answer closest to what you agree with! So why attack the OP on not liking the answers given?
While I agree that one codebase is a big part of it, I would also say that testing has quite a lot to do with it. Unless you have a decent rate of return on it, why test for more platforms than you really need to? And in Linux, the situation is SEVERELY exacerbated by the number of distributions, as enough of them (even the "big" ones) do it "enough differently" to completely screw you over on the small things. LSB is a great idea, but how much is it REALLY implemented?
So basically, even if you were doing cross-platform already with a library that supported it (let's say you were already doing Win and Mac, and the Mac was using OpenGL) with minimal code changes necessary, you'd STILL have a huge testing burden on any Linux port, with a questionable amount of return in purchases, along with needing to test the changes with every new sub-version of the distros you choose.
For non open-source games (virtually all of any size), they just don't have the people to find the 500 different "hacks" necessary to get it to run near-perfect on all of the iterations out there. But with Win and Mac, it's MUCH easier to be much more certain, easing both the Testing and Support burdens.
Actually that's exactly it. Between the chargers, cables, the mouse you have for it, headphones, and all the other junk you put in your laptop bag (it's actually the ONLY carry-on bag I have when flying since I can fit my other things in there), what about all of that? Seems like that would re-disqualify you.
Considering they're in the sky, and they're networked, are they really just TRYING to make it obvious that it's Skynet? I swear humanity could even be TOLD that it's going to become an AI and we'd STILL fund the damned thing.;)
I would guess it's even worse in the case of laptops, as most of those have a "hibernate" feature, which basically dumps all of your RAM directly to disk and powers down COMPLETELY, which means that even if they don't turn it on, they can just read the RAM image dump that's on the disk. Completely separate from what's talked about here, but seems like it's something that would work.
I don't know about state-of-the-art, but the Light up the World foundation has been using high-efficiency white LEDs for a few years now in 3rd-world country lighting projects. Their website may have more info on exactly how their technology compares to what's "bleeding edge" current in this area. But regardless, White LEDs (WLEDs on their site) definitely exist and are in-use.
Up next, Frequent Slashdotter finally moves to Ubuntu, feels that this is the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
Uh huh. From the article:
But to this day I've never heard an answer to one question: Since even Linux advocates admit that it's harder to use, what can you do with Linux that you can't do with Windows, to make it worth switching over to? If I was nervous about Vista because some of the interface had changed and some of my old programs no longer worked, it wasn't helpful to tell me to switch to a system where all of the interface would change and none of my old programs would work.
This is how at LEAST 95% of computer users feel IMO. And going beyond that to the first half of the statement, people keep talking about the console wars in terms of a "killer app" and how that's what the PS3 needs to break through. Whatever, I don't want to get in to that here, but why isn't the same being said about Linux? For the average user, the best Linux can offer is "mostly as good" and often incompatible (and by that I mean, if even something SLIGHTLY doesn't work, people don't want to care how to fix it. Making it "just work" is everything). Yes you can customize, yes you can add all these different things made by people for free, but quite frankly most people don't care! They just want a computer to work "as they expect" and no more. Once ANY expectation is broken, they rebel against it. The only exception is when something is SO good (and often so easy to use as well) that it invalidates the rest. Linux DOES NOT HAVE THIS right now for most users.
A friend of mine coaches kids for weight loss in the "Shape Down" program. Among the things that are no-nos are TV and video games: including educational games. It's encouraged to get outside and get some physical activity. There's nothing wrong with physical activity, and is in fact a GREAT thing to get more of whenever possible (I work out 3 times a week myself, plus whatever I do for fun beyond that), but would this same person say "make sure not to read books, as that's a sessile activity"? I would put the odds of that at near-zero.
You need physical activity, but saying all activities where you're sitting down is bad is rather over-simplistic.
You have to approach this through terms they know, in that any form of media you expose kids to, you have to ask someone why one is OK and another isn't? If it's pure ignorance, they have no case. If they start citing things like violence, imagery, etc, you confront them with the ratings system, and inquire about how they choose movies, TV, etc, and why they'd allow a higher rating on the games than the other media, and then start complaining about the games.
Just as I wouldn't expose a child to the "Saw" series I probably wouldn't give them GTA or some of the more gory games either. So why is there such an uproar about the latter, but not the former? It's just plain ignorance.
>But there is a sizable group of people that won't be happy until our men all have beards, and our women are wearing burkas.
While there are a tiny minority of people who think like this in the Muslim world, they would be considered the crazy people shouting at you on street corners if it weren't for the US occupying their holy lands. Do you really think there is any chance whatsoever that any Muslim country could defeat or overthrow the US? At worst they can piss us off real bad. But that's the point, that you don't NEED very many of them for it to happen. You only need... about 19 of them to knock down some buildings actually.
The point is that you can't make policy like that. There is NO policy that won't make somebody, somewhere want to come and cause violence. It's how large a threat they have the potential or have PROVEN themselves to be versus the resources needed to defend against them. And of course, try not to deliberately antagonize either when you don't have to, but regardless, I repeat that there is NO policy that won't piss somebody, somewhere, off enough to want to cause harm.
No no, the correct thing to do is to employ a shadow government that holds all the power, and then operate merely as a figurehead. That way, you get all the perks without any of the responsibility. Actually you get very few perks with ALL of the responsibility when things go wrong. No power to actually do anything, yet you're the one blamed when things go wrong.
Of the 272,111 persons released from prisons in 15 States in 1994, an estimated 67.5% were rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within 3 years, 46.9% were reconvicted, and 25.4% resentenced to prison for a new crime.
This is from '94, so their website stats are fairly old, but the principal stands.
If somebody else can come up with something more recent (and more directly applicable), great, but I'm kinda short on time when posting. Maybe later I'll have something better.
Because the point of a penal system should be reform, not vengeance. Wrong, on both points, the focus of the system should be first and foremost Public Protection. The entire reason for laws like this is because the system is not fulfilling this primary goal and keeping people away from society until we can be very sure (never certain, as that doesn't exist) that they won't re-offend. You do know that MOST crimes are committed by repeat offenders right? The need for laws containing those who are most likely to be the source of further crimes is because the legal system (it is NOT a Justice system) has failed to protect the public, so the public must do what it can to protect itself.
Reform may be one way to try and make someone not re-offend, but for sexual predators, this is almost-never possible. Thus they should never be let out. And if someone realizes what they are, and show true remorse, they should also know themselves well enough to know that they ARE a danger to others, and thus still stay locked away. That's what being truly responsible for your actions would be. Letting them out, regardless of original sentence length is just plain irresponsible.
I've actually never liked the remix version of To Far Away Times that they have there (I heard it first quite some time ago, back when I trolled Chronocompendium). The song has some of the gentleness, but none of the power of the original, nor the subtlety. I think they captured it exactly WRONG in fact. It's not a "bad quality song" in that it's a hack, or performed badly, but I think they took the song in entirely the wrong direction, and that it isn't faithful to the original.
You're not wrong on Soule's work. I didn't like Guild Wars, but I don't regret buying the collector's edition purely because you got the game's soundtrack on CD, and the music was outstanding. As you said, his work on The Elder Scrolls was also good.
But considering they were going back into the console days, omitting one of the greatest tracks EVER imo is a great disgrace. The ending theme to Chrono Trigger (ranked the greatest RPG of all time on at least one list I've seen, and I don't disagree) is a piece called "To Far Away Times." It's a perfect blend of subtlety and power at different times. The music overall for the game is also a cut above nearly everything else, but this piece just pulls out all the stops and makes a masterpiece.
I found it on YouTube from an ending playthrough a guy did: here The song itself starts at EXACTLY 1m in, and ends around the 5:20 mark.
Well putting aside the fact that the game DESIGN is around the idea of a level (arkanoid especially would be a COMPLETELY different game with some kind of continual level), let's give a modern example: The Halo series. In more than one case you get on/off a ship, a planet, or wherever. Teleported, or any other method of "fast travel" then gets you "between levels" of the game. But as the "quip" in the tag for this article said, why do books have chapters? The answer is the same as for games: to segment the story. Either for something as simple as a new art look, or for story reasons, breaking up the game isn't necessarily a bad thing. Go back to one of the earliest methods of storytelling, theatre, and you see acts in the play that are NOT there just to change the set on-stage, but also help segment the story.
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium. Sometimes seamless works (HL2 is nearly-seamless, though there is the "slow teleport" which definitely qualifies as a break in the continuity), and sometimes you need the break-up to move around the story (Halo). And some games just work better with discrete campaigns, such as RTS games. And even the FPS example you gave, any WWII game. Well as veterans can tell you, the fighting DOES stop at some points. You make discrete attacks, push forward, and hold. It's not anything like the games of course, but it's not 24/7/365 from the start to the end of any war.
Levels work as both a story tool, and a gameplay tool. If they're eliminated, you need a reason for that too, which is OK, but they shouldn't be eliminated "just because."
Of course, it's not 100% efficient, so it's still only a fancy battery. The additional power has to come from somewhere, and hopefully it won't be oil or coal. Kind of. A section from the article is enlightening here:
Even with the small amount of electricity applied, the hydrogen ultimately provides more energy as a fuel than the electricity needed to drive the reactor. Incorporating all energy inputs and outputs, the overall efficiency of the vinegar-fueled system is better than 80 percent, far better than the efficiency for generation of the leading alternative fuel, ethanol.
Which is implying that if you throw this hydrogen into a fuel cell as the source of electricity for the process, you still come out far ahead with lots of usable electricity afterwards.
This isn't perpetual energy, as the "ultimate source" of the energy is the plant material, and the sun itself that grew the plants. All that is "outside input" into the cycle is to "get it going" initially, and after that the only "input energy" is from the plant material itself.
But if the article is mis-stating the amount of electricity used, and you actually need more input into it than what you get out from the hydrogen, then this is actually useless. Kind of like how the ethanol production facilities in the USA consume HUGE amounts of coal to turn the corn into ethanol, which kind of defeats the purpose of the process. What this type of thing would do, if it's as efficient as advertised, is that the production facility itself would be "off the grid" with only the plant being the input material, and still having excess hydrogen to sell. This also depends on there being ENOUGH excess hydrogen (after the feedback I mean) that this is economically viable.
They use them because most people don't want to re-rip and re-encode their library of movies AGAIN. They'll probably use the new codec for new things, but for everything already done, they're not going to spend the time to re-do them for questionable benefit (the source material is only up to a certain quality anyways).
Most freedoms are privileges (from a pure survival standpoint I mean), yet we've made them rights because we feel they make for a better society overall. Be VERY careful whenever you want to clamp down on something we've had choice in for quite a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
1) I've licensed D&D 3e to you under the OGL. That license states that it is non-revokable, and therefore there is NO WAY I can stop you from releasing all you want under it. However...
2) I can offer you the opportunity to license D&D 4e from me under a new license. I can put any clause into that license I want. I can say you need to shave your head, paint your arse blue, and change your name to Stacy if I want. You have the option of either accepting those terms, or not licensing 4e from me.
Note that you could probably take some of those conditions to court for a judgement, if they were particularly egregious. A court may rule that certain licensing restrictions are invalid and unenforceable, and no longer stand. That's why you often see a clause at the end of a license which says something like, "In the event that certain parts of this license are determined to be unenforceable, the remaining parts are still valid." Much of this detail though, depends on country and jurisdiction. The only caveat with your point 2 is that you can't contract someone to do something illegal, or at the least, that section is void. So you can't take somebody to court to enforce a contract on somebody's life because the hitman refused to actually carry it out. That may be extreme, as that TYPE of contract may be illegal by other laws, but even if it wasn't it would still be void by the "you can't legally bind somebody to do something illegal" catch-all. That might vary by country, but I think any legal system based off of old english common-law (basically anything that ever WAS a British Colony, and some others too) this applies too, though IANAL.
I don't know how "subsequent contracts" work though. Can they null older ones? Or what? Assuming it's both the same parties involved, "common sense" would seem to indicate that if you both agree to the new terms that they can void anything in the earlier contract, which would make the clause perfectly enforceable.
Any thoughts been expressed yet on if these are foreshocks to something greater, or if these are just it?
I agree with you. Too often parents feel that they need to plan out their child's life, whereas it's probably better in the end to let the child figure out as much of it as is reasonable. Ease them in to decision-making, first on simple activities, like what they're going to do in the backyard, then further into what they're going to eat in restaurants, and further and further. I know for my own sake, my parents always asked me what I was going to do during the summer, not them telling me (unless there was a family event or something of course).
Be involved with your children's lives, but be there as a "sanity check" and not as the one that directs every little thing they do. And LET them get hurt a bit. Not seriously of course, but hey, that skinned knee really DOES teach them something. Or as Calvin said, "If your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you haven't been living!"
He didn't say he didn't like that he answered them clearly, he seems to be indicating that he doesn't agree with the answers. What's wrong with having a different opinion on matters? It isn't who answers the most eloquently, it's who has the answer closest to what you agree with! So why attack the OP on not liking the answers given?
While I agree that one codebase is a big part of it, I would also say that testing has quite a lot to do with it. Unless you have a decent rate of return on it, why test for more platforms than you really need to? And in Linux, the situation is SEVERELY exacerbated by the number of distributions, as enough of them (even the "big" ones) do it "enough differently" to completely screw you over on the small things. LSB is a great idea, but how much is it REALLY implemented?
So basically, even if you were doing cross-platform already with a library that supported it (let's say you were already doing Win and Mac, and the Mac was using OpenGL) with minimal code changes necessary, you'd STILL have a huge testing burden on any Linux port, with a questionable amount of return in purchases, along with needing to test the changes with every new sub-version of the distros you choose.
For non open-source games (virtually all of any size), they just don't have the people to find the 500 different "hacks" necessary to get it to run near-perfect on all of the iterations out there. But with Win and Mac, it's MUCH easier to be much more certain, easing both the Testing and Support burdens.
Actually that's exactly it. Between the chargers, cables, the mouse you have for it, headphones, and all the other junk you put in your laptop bag (it's actually the ONLY carry-on bag I have when flying since I can fit my other things in there), what about all of that? Seems like that would re-disqualify you.
Dubious goals here it seems IMO.
Considering they're in the sky, and they're networked, are they really just TRYING to make it obvious that it's Skynet? I swear humanity could even be TOLD that it's going to become an AI and we'd STILL fund the damned thing. ;)
I would guess it's even worse in the case of laptops, as most of those have a "hibernate" feature, which basically dumps all of your RAM directly to disk and powers down COMPLETELY, which means that even if they don't turn it on, they can just read the RAM image dump that's on the disk. Completely separate from what's talked about here, but seems like it's something that would work.
I don't know about state-of-the-art, but the Light up the World foundation has been using high-efficiency white LEDs for a few years now in 3rd-world country lighting projects. Their website may have more info on exactly how their technology compares to what's "bleeding edge" current in this area. But regardless, White LEDs (WLEDs on their site) definitely exist and are in-use.
You need physical activity, but saying all activities where you're sitting down is bad is rather over-simplistic.
You have to approach this through terms they know, in that any form of media you expose kids to, you have to ask someone why one is OK and another isn't? If it's pure ignorance, they have no case. If they start citing things like violence, imagery, etc, you confront them with the ratings system, and inquire about how they choose movies, TV, etc, and why they'd allow a higher rating on the games than the other media, and then start complaining about the games.
Just as I wouldn't expose a child to the "Saw" series I probably wouldn't give them GTA or some of the more gory games either. So why is there such an uproar about the latter, but not the former? It's just plain ignorance.
In a local article about this, I read that a former Pope FOUNDED the school, which I find quite ironic.
While there are a tiny minority of people who think like this in the Muslim world, they would be considered the crazy people shouting at you on street corners if it weren't for the US occupying their holy lands. Do you really think there is any chance whatsoever that any Muslim country could defeat or overthrow the US? At worst they can piss us off real bad. But that's the point, that you don't NEED very many of them for it to happen. You only need... about 19 of them to knock down some buildings actually.
The point is that you can't make policy like that. There is NO policy that won't make somebody, somewhere want to come and cause violence. It's how large a threat they have the potential or have PROVEN themselves to be versus the resources needed to defend against them. And of course, try not to deliberately antagonize either when you don't have to, but regardless, I repeat that there is NO policy that won't piss somebody, somewhere, off enough to want to cause harm.
Here's a video of it on google video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=680106771263243162
The last line in the summary should be "Hail to the King baby!"
C'mon! How could they do a homage and NOT have that line?
This is from '94, so their website stats are fairly old, but the principal stands.
If somebody else can come up with something more recent (and more directly applicable), great, but I'm kinda short on time when posting. Maybe later I'll have something better.
Reform may be one way to try and make someone not re-offend, but for sexual predators, this is almost-never possible. Thus they should never be let out. And if someone realizes what they are, and show true remorse, they should also know themselves well enough to know that they ARE a danger to others, and thus still stay locked away. That's what being truly responsible for your actions would be. Letting them out, regardless of original sentence length is just plain irresponsible.
I've actually never liked the remix version of To Far Away Times that they have there (I heard it first quite some time ago, back when I trolled Chronocompendium). The song has some of the gentleness, but none of the power of the original, nor the subtlety. I think they captured it exactly WRONG in fact. It's not a "bad quality song" in that it's a hack, or performed badly, but I think they took the song in entirely the wrong direction, and that it isn't faithful to the original.
You're not wrong on Soule's work. I didn't like Guild Wars, but I don't regret buying the collector's edition purely because you got the game's soundtrack on CD, and the music was outstanding. As you said, his work on The Elder Scrolls was also good.
But considering they were going back into the console days, omitting one of the greatest tracks EVER imo is a great disgrace. The ending theme to Chrono Trigger (ranked the greatest RPG of all time on at least one list I've seen, and I don't disagree) is a piece called "To Far Away Times." It's a perfect blend of subtlety and power at different times. The music overall for the game is also a cut above nearly everything else, but this piece just pulls out all the stops and makes a masterpiece.
I found it on YouTube from an ending playthrough a guy did: here The song itself starts at EXACTLY 1m in, and ends around the 5:20 mark.
Well putting aside the fact that the game DESIGN is around the idea of a level (arkanoid especially would be a COMPLETELY different game with some kind of continual level), let's give a modern example: The Halo series. In more than one case you get on/off a ship, a planet, or wherever. Teleported, or any other method of "fast travel" then gets you "between levels" of the game. But as the "quip" in the tag for this article said, why do books have chapters? The answer is the same as for games: to segment the story. Either for something as simple as a new art look, or for story reasons, breaking up the game isn't necessarily a bad thing. Go back to one of the earliest methods of storytelling, theatre, and you see acts in the play that are NOT there just to change the set on-stage, but also help segment the story.
Overall, I wouldn't put "seamless" above story in ANY case, in any medium. Sometimes seamless works (HL2 is nearly-seamless, though there is the "slow teleport" which definitely qualifies as a break in the continuity), and sometimes you need the break-up to move around the story (Halo). And some games just work better with discrete campaigns, such as RTS games. And even the FPS example you gave, any WWII game. Well as veterans can tell you, the fighting DOES stop at some points. You make discrete attacks, push forward, and hold. It's not anything like the games of course, but it's not 24/7/365 from the start to the end of any war.
Levels work as both a story tool, and a gameplay tool. If they're eliminated, you need a reason for that too, which is OK, but they shouldn't be eliminated "just because."
Which is implying that if you throw this hydrogen into a fuel cell as the source of electricity for the process, you still come out far ahead with lots of usable electricity afterwards.
This isn't perpetual energy, as the "ultimate source" of the energy is the plant material, and the sun itself that grew the plants. All that is "outside input" into the cycle is to "get it going" initially, and after that the only "input energy" is from the plant material itself.
But if the article is mis-stating the amount of electricity used, and you actually need more input into it than what you get out from the hydrogen, then this is actually useless. Kind of like how the ethanol production facilities in the USA consume HUGE amounts of coal to turn the corn into ethanol, which kind of defeats the purpose of the process. What this type of thing would do, if it's as efficient as advertised, is that the production facility itself would be "off the grid" with only the plant being the input material, and still having excess hydrogen to sell. This also depends on there being ENOUGH excess hydrogen (after the feedback I mean) that this is economically viable.
They use them because most people don't want to re-rip and re-encode their library of movies AGAIN. They'll probably use the new codec for new things, but for everything already done, they're not going to spend the time to re-do them for questionable benefit (the source material is only up to a certain quality anyways).
Most freedoms are privileges (from a pure survival standpoint I mean), yet we've made them rights because we feel they make for a better society overall. Be VERY careful whenever you want to clamp down on something we've had choice in for quite a long time.