So you're saying that if someone comes round to your house to re-shingle the roof or paint some doors that you are under no obligation to pay for the work afterwards? I must be missing something because that just sound so stupid.
You did, you presume I entered into a contract to have the work done for a price. If I didn't ask him to re-shingle my roof or paint the doors, you can be sure as hell I'm not going to pay him for the work. Similarly, as much as might like my neighbour's lawn being well manicured and as much as it might increase the sale price of my home, I will not be paying him for the privilege of living next to his beautiful lawn. Should everyone who sees a painting be morally required to pay the artist? What about everyone who sees a picture of the painting? If someone takes a picture of the painting are they morally required to pay the artist because they took the picture?
Hmmm. So the first person who buys a copy of the CD pays their 10 bucks and the musician has now been paid? There'd be no musicians.
Believe or not, musicians predate the invention of CDs by at least a decade or two... Heck, they were even around before Edison invented his music recording device.
More specifically the argument was that if I copy a song, the musician didn't get paid for it. Well he did, but not by me. But then again he didn't perform the song again and so didn't do any work for me to have to listen to the copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of it.
I like free stuff as much as the next man, but unless the musician (or the musicians representatives) have offered the music up for free download you are depriving him (or his representatives) of some income. They are being deprived of something, so it is stealing.
No, absolutely not. By your definition it's just as much stealing to not buy the CD as it is to pirate it. Either way I'm depriving him of the exact same income and therefore either both are stealing or neither. It is not logically consistent to treat them differently under your definition.
Here's the problem, you're stuck in an old paradigm where people sell copies of a work. This paradigm works only when it's difficult to copy, thus DRM is natural product of that world view when faced with a world where copies are essentially free to make. You create barriers to make it more expensive to make copies. Classic monopolist behaviour. You have to step back and look at the situation again. Then you'll realize that maybe we shouldn't have to pay for copies of the music when they can be made for free. There's no strong ethical justification for it, merely copyright laws, which for most of human history didn't exist. Believe or not, people wrote books, played music, and lived their lives for most of history without copyright laws.
Copyright laws were extended to sound recordings because it was feared that the phonograph would bring about the end to live performances, and therefore musicians would no longer be able to make a living. So far that hasn't happened, maybe we should reconsider whether copyright is actually necessary.
It seems to me that there needs to be a moral judgement made at the very beginning: if someone else has invested time/money/whatever into creating a unique good, and it is their intent to sell it for profit, do you (or anyone else) have the right to benefit from their work without compensating them?
Unequivocably, yes. There are a few exceptions where that is not the case, and that usually involves trespass or using someone else's property without their permission. Ideas can't be patented, trademarked or copyrighted.
would argue that you do not, because theft is not restricted to monetary loss alone. (And so the argument made earlier by another poster, "it's ok because I wouldn't have bought it anyway," is intellectually bereft.) If you are unwilling to pay for the work of another, and they do not offer it for free, you're not entitled to it, plain and simple.
See this is where things get complicated. I can't ethically compel someone to do work for me, but should someone be able to ethically compel me to pay for their work? Theft is a simple concept you take something from someone without their consent. I can't steal music, I can only steal the medium the music is stored on. Now you have to understand is in the case of pirated music someone paid for it. The musician has been paid. The people who are loosing money are the people who make the physical storage devices for the music, they aren't getting paid because people aren't buying their music storage devices because the internet obsoletes them. Now you might argue the musician hasn't been paid enough for the music, that's the main argument the music distribution companies make, because they give a very small portion of the money they make to the musician, they claim you're robbing the musician by refusing to pay for a physical copy of his music, regardless of the reason. They cite declining CD sales and say it's because of piracy, they do that to justify increasingly draconian legislation to support the declining business of music distribution.
There's not really much more to the morality of that argument, as I see it.
The problem here seems to be that you don't unstand the actual situation, and buying into the distribution company's agenda-driven simplification.
What you have just proven is that DRM is evil. It forces people to pay for material they wouldn't have otherwise had to pay for.
You see your argument that the "the artist (and the rest of the chain from shop keepers to recording labels/studios/etc) would have got a share of the monies", is tantamount to the argument that breaking windows is good for the economy. It's not, instead of paying for the CD, the purchaser will be using his money on something else. Thus he gets the music and the something else and everyone is net better off.
This is the problem with DRM and Intellectual Property. It artificially creates a scarcity in order to allow some specific groups to make money off of it. Now you may say DRM is needed to support "200 Million Dollar Movies", my response is simple: Why do we need "200 Million Dollar Movies"? DRM and IP is propping a bloated an inefficient movie industry that wastes huge amounts of money on what are frequently bad actors who have "name cred". Did you see what they did to "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"? These are people we're supposed to protect?
There are a lot of people who need a wake up call. Musicians don't make much money from CD sales, if they sell a million copies of the CD, they make $100,000 split between the band, so to make a middle class income, each band of 4 needs to sell more than 2 million CDs a year. Plus the band often has to cover recording expenses so it's more like 3 million CDs a year. So how do musicians become rich? Mostly concert appearances, since few studious allow the musician to own the rights to their own music. Now concert appearances are an actual scarcity. The number of people who can go is limited by the number of people the venue can accomodate.
In a DRM free world the people who loose the most are the recording companies. Why should we support leeches who provide no value?
You're almost correct on the rounding thing, he was stealing the banks money. Essentially he created a number that the bank owe him in money so he was definitely taking money from someone. That doesn't apply to the music copying example because it creates no obligation for the artist to pay me for listening to his music. Piracy is a victimless crime, and in many cases, it's a crime only because of the criminal actions of the companies being pirated.
No matter how you look at it, DRM is evil. The only question that exists is whether it's a necessary evil, I don't think so. Everything will be DRM'd regardless of actual value, on the off chance that there might be profit to be had by restricting it, and Life + 75 years is a ridiculous extent of time, and even once that term is over, it's still illegal to circumvent the DRM to access public domain material. Stop for a moment and ask yourself how many songs from 1930s are you still listening to? How many musicians who died in 1930s are you listening to? For the vast majority of people those are both 0.
You fail to understand reality, young padawan. It only takes one Jedi to unleash the power of the force.
Or simply put, one person can crack the DRM and then release infinite DRM-free copies. You can't make it difficult enough to prevent people from doing it, all you can do is make it extremely profitable for those who can crack it. Mark my words, the stricter the DRM, the more money the professional pirating outfits will make. Essentially, DRM is creating one of the new growth sectors that funds organized crime.
Not much of a surprise, there, remember they haven't put them up for sale yet. They're business executives, they "know more" about "selling" then us "informed fans". So to them, there's nothing for them to learn yet. We haven't started not buying their console yet. You have to give them a chance to be proven wrong before you start lamenting about how they never learn. Besides, if they are right and the silent majority is going to buy the console any way, then it's you who hasn't been proven wrong yet.
I suspect they will be more surprised a month after launch than you will be, though.
This prior art clause sounds like a deliberate sabotage clause in the contract. Strike it out immediately and let the employer know you are not amused and consider it to be bad faith negotiation. It's an attempt to get you to make a static list of dynamic ideas, so that they can sue you later, if they choose to. The basic idea is that in the off chance that you make a lot of money after working for them. So it's simply stupid for anyone to sign any contract with that type of clause in it. It's only purpose is to screw you over in the future, because the company doesn't trust you but they want you to trust them.
Always remember, corporations are bound to one master and one master only: profit. Do not ever sign a contract that requires you to list all of your ideas because on the one hand you are effectively giving the company your inspiration and on the other humans aren't perfect you will forget something and if that's the idea that takes off and you make enough money to make it worth their while, the company will sue you for every single dime you made. And you'll have already given them the evidence that allows them to sue you.
No the Bush Administration was stupid enough to falsify the intelligence leading to the Iraq War because they were stupid enough to believe that they new better than the experts and stupid enough to assume that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction because former Republican Administration were stupid enough to sell the weapons to Saddam Hussein in the first place. They were stupid enough to lie to congress and were stupid enough that they couldn't surpress contrary opinions in the intelligence comittee without making a big fuss over it. And they were stupid enough to use evidence that was obviously wrong.
There's no contradiction here because no part of their idiotic bumbling could ever be qualified as smart.
There's a few things that really help out on the micromanagement. Some of this was attempted in Masters of Orion III, but it fell short on too many other fronts to be really stand-out.
For example cities should produce according to the following
1) Civilization wide default build queue.
- Let me set the order I want my buildings built in by default in every city. There should be a queue of buildings and the order they should be built. For instance say I want marketplace, factory, bank, and then powerplant built in every city, but I don't want any Cathedrals because they cost too much for upkeep. I should be able to list those buildings in that order, and have Cathedrals on a of list buildings to never build. 2) Alternate/assignable queues
- Let me set the order I want something built in 3) Manual control
- Let me turn off automation for the cities I need to control, usually border cities need to be monitored closely and my wonder-building cities as well.
Other handy tools would come in nice, like a production list that shows me the best "value" purchases I can make. By this I mean the most turns saved at the least price. Possibly, there should also be a value sorter, so that the best improvements for the least cost could also be shown. So for example if something is going to improve the monetary flow in the city by 2 gold, it would rate higher than the 1 gold improvement in another city, as long as it cost less than double the 1 gold improvement.
When new improvements are discovered I should have the option of switching all production, all building production, all wonder production, or all military production to building that new unit/improvement. Also I loved, the industrial units from Alpha Centauri that allowed you to send out foragers for a city to bring in extra food/minerals/resources from far away squares. When you used them it totally changed the game added a new level of strategy for the harder difficulty levels.
It's an unholy mixture or patriotism and religious certainty, and apathy. There are five main groups:
1) You see America is the chosen country of God, and therefore it's elections can't be fraudulent because God wouldn't let that happen to his chosen country. Therefore any allegations of fraud must be the work of those evil satanic athiests.
2) The Republicans won, I'm a Republican and therefore I won't do anything to rock the boat.
3) Who cares? Government is evil and one group of evil commies is just as bad as the other.
4) The Democrats lost, I'm a Democract and therefore I'm outraged and it must have been fraud.
5) Oh my god. We vote on these things? I've seen more secure machines at the checkout counter at the supermarket!
The first three groups have no incentive to even acknowledge a problem exists, and the 4th group tends to discredit the 5th group by making claims of fraud that are poorly backed up.
Somehow, I suspect Diebold's ATMs are in fact the lowest quality acceptable to the banks who use them and the lowest cost. So fact they are not the highest caliber machines, they are the "the highest caliber machines the lowest bidder is capable of producing".
Most likely because PCs are rarely placed in front of a sofa or hooked up to a 32 (or larger) inch screen. Or in other words, it's not deemed a feature that will allow them to sell more copies of a game, or at least "enough" copies to justify the expense in time and effort to add the feature.
This is half perception, half convenience. It's more convenient to have your computer on your desk when you use it for work, but your desk isn't a very convenient for gaming with friends. It's cheaper to get a specialized purpose computer, like a console to serve as a secondary game-playing machine than it is to get a computer, and most people like the convenience of not having to move their computer around and not having it subjected to accidental damage from children/other gamers. The other half, perception comes from this historical orginal reason for the adoption of console games, and they are now perceived as the primary platform for shared gaming, and a primary platiform for action oriented games.
Apparently SCO is much better at the smoke and mirrors game. Also, Microsoft actually did infringe on the patent (regardless of the value of the patent) so it's much easier to get a judgement for specific claims that are trivially proven true, than to get one against nebulous constantly-shifting claims that are individually difficult to disprove. SCO should have a rather large slap down coming. I expect no less than "pay the defendants legal costs" which at this point may be more than the judgement against Microsoft.
Because we love to see Microsoft slapped down regardless of the reason. We're still against software patents, we just want to spent a few minutes shouting "ha-ha" at Microsoft. Maybe even shout a few "If you'd done a better job of stopping software patents, this wouldn't have happened!" at them.
Stop being so ignorant. When was the last time you played a PC game that was multiplayer and wasn't turn based/hotseat on a single pc. The last time I played a game where 2 people could play simultaneously on one computer, was probably a decade ago, and it involved 2 people sharing a keyboard. Hardly as convenient as a gaming console with 2 controllers.
Maybe I'm different from a lot of people, the Wii-mote looks like a gimmick. There's a lot of hype about how this will "revolutionize" gaming, I don't see it. I see it being great for first person shooters, but that seems to be about it, to me. The whole "swinging it in a sword fight" type of stuff seems to likely be as much fun as playing a fighting game using the dance pad. In other words, completely overrated by rabid fans, and not very much fun for average players.
But the real reason I am most likely to get the PS3 over the 360 or the Wii, is simply games. I don't expect to see the games I want to play on the Wii or the 360. I want to play games like "Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom", "Dynasty Warriors 6", "Final Fantasy XIII", "Golden Axe", "Grand Theft Auto IV", "Heavenly Sword", "The Lord of the Rings: The White Council ", "Monster Kingdom", "Ratchet & Clank 5" not "Duck Hunt Wii". Checking the list of announced Wii games, there's only games I would ever want to play are "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess" and "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers". Even with a 1 year lead, the Xbox is has fewer games announced that I would want to play. The only ones are those like "Enchanted Arms" and "Phantasy Star Universe". Mostly I want cool co-op games that I can play with friends and I don't see those at all for the 360 or the Wii*.
* The Wii will most definitely have party games but I don't see many co-op games for it.
I don't know whether these guys have a clue or not, however, when I look at what appeals to me, their prediction seems reasonable. The prediction that Nintendo will score a major victory is predicated on the Wii being so great that disrupts the status quo, thus rendering all analytical projection irrelevent. It's possible, but it's predicted a lot more often than it occurs. Let's not forget about the way the Segway revolutionized transportation, shall we?
While a nice naturalistic point of view, it's not really true. It's a lie that people with agendas push. Animals can, and do in fact "hate" and "kill another member of [their] own species through hatred". In particular, here's a short mention of one incident where one "tribe" of chimpanzees waged war against another "tribe" and exterminating the other tribe:
As late as the early 70s, it still appeared plausible that the "pre-cultural" paradise on earth whose potential existence haunted the European imagination long before the birth of Rousseau manifested itself in its pristine form in the social life of the chimpanzee. It was man, separate from all the animals, who would kill conspecifics, who was insanely aggressive because of the rapid and unpredictable growth of his cortex; because of the pathological effect of his culture; because of his capacity for language (and ideology) and tool-use. But then in the depths of the Combe National Park in Tanzania Figan, Humphrey and their "Kasekala" compatriots moved out of their habitual territory and attacked and mortally wounded Godi, a member of the "Kahama" group. Initially perceived as an aberration, this pattern of behavior soon came to appear common, if not defining. Less than two months after the attack on Godi, De was dispatched, in the same manner then, a year later, Goliath and so on, until all seven of the adult Kahama males (and some of the females) were killed.
On the flip side, Team OS/2's lack of structure meant that it was vulnerable. Various journalists have documented a "dirty tricks" campaign by Microsoft.[citation needed] Online, numerous individuals (nicknamed "Microsoft Munchkins" by John C. Dvorak[citation needed]) used pseudonyms to attack OS/2 and manipulate online discussions. Whittle was the target of a vicious character assassination campaign, and anyone friendly to OS/2 faced numerous vociferous attacks as well.[citation needed] Some journalists who were less than enthusiastic about OS/2 received death threats and other nasty e-mail from numerous sources, always identified in taglines as "Team OS/2".[citation needed] Ultimately, at least some of Microsoft's efforts were exposed on Will Zachmann's Canopus forum on CompuServe, where the owner of one particular account, ostensibly belonging to "Steve Barkto", (who had been attacking OS/2, David Barnes, Whittle, and other OS/2 fans) was discovered to be funded by the credit card of a high-level Microsoft employee / evangelist who had also been active in the forums.[citation needed] James Fallows, a nationally-renowned journalist, even weighed in to state that the stylistic fingerprint found in the Barkto posts were almost certainly a match with the stylistic fingerprints in the Microsoft evangelist's postings.[citation needed] Will Zachmann sent an open letter to Steve Ballmer, futilely demanding a public investigation into the business practices of the publicly traded Microsoft.[citation needed] What is clear is that Microsoft was taking seriously the threat posed by Team OS/2 and their online and real-world activities.
If your project can't meet at least 75% of it's goals, it's a complete failure. Anything less than 90% compliance is pathetic.
To put it simply, it's ok to have bugs on some of the obscure parts of the specification, but as long as IE7 still fails on the routine every day uses of CSS, it's garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're saying that if someone comes round to your house to re-shingle the roof or paint some doors that you are under no obligation to pay for the work afterwards? I must be missing something because that just sound so stupid.
You did, you presume I entered into a contract to have the work done for a price. If I didn't ask him to re-shingle my roof or paint the doors, you can be sure as hell I'm not going to pay him for the work. Similarly, as much as might like my neighbour's lawn being well manicured and as much as it might increase the sale price of my home, I will not be paying him for the privilege of living next to his beautiful lawn. Should everyone who sees a painting be morally required to pay the artist? What about everyone who sees a picture of the painting? If someone takes a picture of the painting are they morally required to pay the artist because they took the picture?
Hmmm. So the first person who buys a copy of the CD pays their 10 bucks and the musician has now been paid? There'd be no musicians.
Believe or not, musicians predate the invention of CDs by at least a decade or two... Heck, they were even around before Edison invented his music recording device.
More specifically the argument was that if I copy a song, the musician didn't get paid for it. Well he did, but not by me. But then again he didn't perform the song again and so didn't do any work for me to have to listen to the copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of it.
I like free stuff as much as the next man, but unless the musician (or the musicians representatives) have offered the music up for free download you are depriving him (or his representatives) of some income. They are being deprived of something, so it is stealing.
No, absolutely not. By your definition it's just as much stealing to not buy the CD as it is to pirate it. Either way I'm depriving him of the exact same income and therefore either both are stealing or neither. It is not logically consistent to treat them differently under your definition.
Here's the problem, you're stuck in an old paradigm where people sell copies of a work. This paradigm works only when it's difficult to copy, thus DRM is natural product of that world view when faced with a world where copies are essentially free to make. You create barriers to make it more expensive to make copies. Classic monopolist behaviour. You have to step back and look at the situation again. Then you'll realize that maybe we shouldn't have to pay for copies of the music when they can be made for free. There's no strong ethical justification for it, merely copyright laws, which for most of human history didn't exist. Believe or not, people wrote books, played music, and lived their lives for most of history without copyright laws.
Copyright laws were extended to sound recordings because it was feared that the phonograph would bring about the end to live performances, and therefore musicians would no longer be able to make a living. So far that hasn't happened, maybe we should reconsider whether copyright is actually necessary.
And we all know no one has ever worked their way up from a small self-funded work to something bigger. It never happens!
It seems to me that there needs to be a moral judgement made at the very beginning: if someone else has invested time/money/whatever into creating a unique good, and it is their intent to sell it for profit, do you (or anyone else) have the right to benefit from their work without compensating them?
Unequivocably, yes. There are a few exceptions where that is not the case, and that usually involves trespass or using someone else's property without their permission. Ideas can't be patented, trademarked or copyrighted.
would argue that you do not, because theft is not restricted to monetary loss alone. (And so the argument made earlier by another poster, "it's ok because I wouldn't have bought it anyway," is intellectually bereft.) If you are unwilling to pay for the work of another, and they do not offer it for free, you're not entitled to it, plain and simple.
See this is where things get complicated. I can't ethically compel someone to do work for me, but should someone be able to ethically compel me to pay for their work? Theft is a simple concept you take something from someone without their consent. I can't steal music, I can only steal the medium the music is stored on. Now you have to understand is in the case of pirated music someone paid for it. The musician has been paid. The people who are loosing money are the people who make the physical storage devices for the music, they aren't getting paid because people aren't buying their music storage devices because the internet obsoletes them. Now you might argue the musician hasn't been paid enough for the music, that's the main argument the music distribution companies make, because they give a very small portion of the money they make to the musician, they claim you're robbing the musician by refusing to pay for a physical copy of his music, regardless of the reason. They cite declining CD sales and say it's because of piracy, they do that to justify increasingly draconian legislation to support the declining business of music distribution.
There's not really much more to the morality of that argument, as I see it.
The problem here seems to be that you don't unstand the actual situation, and buying into the distribution company's agenda-driven simplification.
What you have just proven is that DRM is evil. It forces people to pay for material they wouldn't have otherwise had to pay for.
You see your argument that the "the artist (and the rest of the chain from shop keepers to recording labels/studios/etc) would have got a share of the monies", is tantamount to the argument that breaking windows is good for the economy. It's not, instead of paying for the CD, the purchaser will be using his money on something else. Thus he gets the music and the something else and everyone is net better off.
This is the problem with DRM and Intellectual Property. It artificially creates a scarcity in order to allow some specific groups to make money off of it. Now you may say DRM is needed to support "200 Million Dollar Movies", my response is simple: Why do we need "200 Million Dollar Movies"? DRM and IP is propping a bloated an inefficient movie industry that wastes huge amounts of money on what are frequently bad actors who have "name cred". Did you see what they did to "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"? These are people we're supposed to protect?
There are a lot of people who need a wake up call. Musicians don't make much money from CD sales, if they sell a million copies of the CD, they make $100,000 split between the band, so to make a middle class income, each band of 4 needs to sell more than 2 million CDs a year. Plus the band often has to cover recording expenses so it's more like 3 million CDs a year. So how do musicians become rich? Mostly concert appearances, since few studious allow the musician to own the rights to their own music. Now concert appearances are an actual scarcity. The number of people who can go is limited by the number of people the venue can accomodate.
In a DRM free world the people who loose the most are the recording companies. Why should we support leeches who provide no value?
You're almost correct on the rounding thing, he was stealing the banks money. Essentially he created a number that the bank owe him in money so he was definitely taking money from someone. That doesn't apply to the music copying example because it creates no obligation for the artist to pay me for listening to his music. Piracy is a victimless crime, and in many cases, it's a crime only because of the criminal actions of the companies being pirated.
No matter how you look at it, DRM is evil. The only question that exists is whether it's a necessary evil, I don't think so. Everything will be DRM'd regardless of actual value, on the off chance that there might be profit to be had by restricting it, and Life + 75 years is a ridiculous extent of time, and even once that term is over, it's still illegal to circumvent the DRM to access public domain material. Stop for a moment and ask yourself how many songs from 1930s are you still listening to? How many musicians who died in 1930s are you listening to? For the vast majority of people those are both 0.
You fail to understand reality, young padawan. It only takes one Jedi to unleash the power of the force.
Or simply put, one person can crack the DRM and then release infinite DRM-free copies. You can't make it difficult enough to prevent people from doing it, all you can do is make it extremely profitable for those who can crack it. Mark my words, the stricter the DRM, the more money the professional pirating outfits will make. Essentially, DRM is creating one of the new growth sectors that funds organized crime.
Not much of a surprise, there, remember they haven't put them up for sale yet. They're business executives, they "know more" about "selling" then us "informed fans". So to them, there's nothing for them to learn yet. We haven't started not buying their console yet. You have to give them a chance to be proven wrong before you start lamenting about how they never learn. Besides, if they are right and the silent majority is going to buy the console any way, then it's you who hasn't been proven wrong yet.
I suspect they will be more surprised a month after launch than you will be, though.
Someone's a little bitter...
This prior art clause sounds like a deliberate sabotage clause in the contract. Strike it out immediately and let the employer know you are not amused and consider it to be bad faith negotiation. It's an attempt to get you to make a static list of dynamic ideas, so that they can sue you later, if they choose to. The basic idea is that in the off chance that you make a lot of money after working for them. So it's simply stupid for anyone to sign any contract with that type of clause in it. It's only purpose is to screw you over in the future, because the company doesn't trust you but they want you to trust them.
Always remember, corporations are bound to one master and one master only: profit. Do not ever sign a contract that requires you to list all of your ideas because on the one hand you are effectively giving the company your inspiration and on the other humans aren't perfect you will forget something and if that's the idea that takes off and you make enough money to make it worth their while, the company will sue you for every single dime you made. And you'll have already given them the evidence that allows them to sue you.
No the Bush Administration was stupid enough to falsify the intelligence leading to the Iraq War because they were stupid enough to believe that they new better than the experts and stupid enough to assume that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction because former Republican Administration were stupid enough to sell the weapons to Saddam Hussein in the first place. They were stupid enough to lie to congress and were stupid enough that they couldn't surpress contrary opinions in the intelligence comittee without making a big fuss over it. And they were stupid enough to use evidence that was obviously wrong.
There's no contradiction here because no part of their idiotic bumbling could ever be qualified as smart.
There's a few things that really help out on the micromanagement. Some of this was attempted in Masters of Orion III, but it fell short on too many other fronts to be really stand-out.
For example cities should produce according to the following
1) Civilization wide default build queue.
- Let me set the order I want my buildings built in by default in every city. There should be a queue of buildings and the order they should be built. For instance say I want marketplace, factory, bank, and then powerplant built in every city, but I don't want any Cathedrals because they cost too much for upkeep. I should be able to list those buildings in that order, and have Cathedrals on a of list buildings to never build.
2) Alternate/assignable queues
- Let me set the order I want something built in
3) Manual control
- Let me turn off automation for the cities I need to control, usually border cities need to be monitored closely and my wonder-building cities as well.
Other handy tools would come in nice, like a production list that shows me the best "value" purchases I can make. By this I mean the most turns saved at the least price. Possibly, there should also be a value sorter, so that the best improvements for the least cost could also be shown. So for example if something is going to improve the monetary flow in the city by 2 gold, it would rate higher than the 1 gold improvement in another city, as long as it cost less than double the 1 gold improvement.
When new improvements are discovered I should have the option of switching all production, all building production, all wonder production, or all military production to building that new unit/improvement. Also I loved, the industrial units from Alpha Centauri that allowed you to send out foragers for a city to bring in extra food/minerals/resources from far away squares. When you used them it totally changed the game added a new level of strategy for the harder difficulty levels.
It's an unholy mixture or patriotism and religious certainty, and apathy. There are five main groups:
1) You see America is the chosen country of God, and therefore it's elections can't be fraudulent because God wouldn't let that happen to his chosen country. Therefore any allegations of fraud must be the work of those evil satanic athiests.
2) The Republicans won, I'm a Republican and therefore I won't do anything to rock the boat.
3) Who cares? Government is evil and one group of evil commies is just as bad as the other.
4) The Democrats lost, I'm a Democract and therefore I'm outraged and it must have been fraud.
5) Oh my god. We vote on these things? I've seen more secure machines at the checkout counter at the supermarket!
The first three groups have no incentive to even acknowledge a problem exists, and the 4th group tends to discredit the 5th group by making claims of fraud that are poorly backed up.
Somehow, I suspect Diebold's ATMs are in fact the lowest quality acceptable to the banks who use them and the lowest cost. So fact they are not the highest caliber machines, they are the "the highest caliber machines the lowest bidder is capable of producing".
I've heard he's also gotten a hold of Vecna's Heart and that's quite the potent artifact.
Most likely because PCs are rarely placed in front of a sofa or hooked up to a 32 (or larger) inch screen. Or in other words, it's not deemed a feature that will allow them to sell more copies of a game, or at least "enough" copies to justify the expense in time and effort to add the feature.
This is half perception, half convenience. It's more convenient to have your computer on your desk when you use it for work, but your desk isn't a very convenient for gaming with friends. It's cheaper to get a specialized purpose computer, like a console to serve as a secondary game-playing machine than it is to get a computer, and most people like the convenience of not having to move their computer around and not having it subjected to accidental damage from children/other gamers. The other half, perception comes from this historical orginal reason for the adoption of console games, and they are now perceived as the primary platform for shared gaming, and a primary platiform for action oriented games.
What game?
Apparently SCO is much better at the smoke and mirrors game. Also, Microsoft actually did infringe on the patent (regardless of the value of the patent) so it's much easier to get a judgement for specific claims that are trivially proven true, than to get one against nebulous constantly-shifting claims that are individually difficult to disprove. SCO should have a rather large slap down coming. I expect no less than "pay the defendants legal costs" which at this point may be more than the judgement against Microsoft.
Because we love to see Microsoft slapped down regardless of the reason. We're still against software patents, we just want to spent a few minutes shouting "ha-ha" at Microsoft. Maybe even shout a few "If you'd done a better job of stopping software patents, this wouldn't have happened!" at them.
Stop being so ignorant. When was the last time you played a PC game that was multiplayer and wasn't turn based/hotseat on a single pc. The last time I played a game where 2 people could play simultaneously on one computer, was probably a decade ago, and it involved 2 people sharing a keyboard. Hardly as convenient as a gaming console with 2 controllers.
Maybe I'm different from a lot of people, the Wii-mote looks like a gimmick. There's a lot of hype about how this will "revolutionize" gaming, I don't see it. I see it being great for first person shooters, but that seems to be about it, to me. The whole "swinging it in a sword fight" type of stuff seems to likely be as much fun as playing a fighting game using the dance pad. In other words, completely overrated by rabid fans, and not very much fun for average players.
But the real reason I am most likely to get the PS3 over the 360 or the Wii, is simply games. I don't expect to see the games I want to play on the Wii or the 360. I want to play games like "Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom", "Dynasty Warriors 6", "Final Fantasy XIII", "Golden Axe", "Grand Theft Auto IV", "Heavenly Sword", "The Lord of the Rings: The White Council ", "Monster Kingdom", "Ratchet & Clank 5" not "Duck Hunt Wii". Checking the list of announced Wii games, there's only games I would ever want to play are "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess" and "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers". Even with a 1 year lead, the Xbox is has fewer games announced that I would want to play. The only ones are those like "Enchanted Arms" and "Phantasy Star Universe". Mostly I want cool co-op games that I can play with friends and I don't see those at all for the 360 or the Wii*.
* The Wii will most definitely have party games but I don't see many co-op games for it.
I don't know whether these guys have a clue or not, however, when I look at what appeals to me, their prediction seems reasonable. The prediction that Nintendo will score a major victory is predicated on the Wii being so great that disrupts the status quo, thus rendering all analytical projection irrelevent. It's possible, but it's predicted a lot more often than it occurs. Let's not forget about the way the Segway revolutionized transportation, shall we?
From http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~peterson/primate/ch
So, no, humans aren't even exceptional in the capacity for murder.
Ah, forget about the blackjack too.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/13046.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=5
http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/msinc.html
This one is just about MS organizing bloggers, they only get acklowledgement, but don't (directly) get money:
http://www.betanews.com/article/MS_Taps_Bloggers_
My allegations related directly to this event:
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2.
And of course there's the Microsoft College Ambassador program:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/10
And that's just what I could find in a few minutes with Google.
Really, 50% compliant is 50% non-compliant.
If your project can't meet at least 75% of it's goals, it's a complete failure. Anything less than 90% compliance is pathetic.
To put it simply, it's ok to have bugs on some of the obscure parts of the specification, but as long as IE7 still fails on the routine every day uses of CSS, it's garbage.
Immoral not illegal. Learn the difference.
That's because
1) The 360 isn't that good
and
2) Microsoft has a proven track record of paying people to astroturf