It's pretty obvious, and it's pretty obviously not piracy.
When six studios all release a similar game (say another RTS) the market for this type of game is going to be saturated. Gamers are smart enough to realize that fantasy monsters and giant robots are just skins, it's the gameplay and mechanics. If there are all roughly equal they're going to sell based on marketing. EA and similar companies can afford the big displays, the end-of-aisle positioning, etc. Smaller companies games are going to be buried and if they don't offer anything else that RTS buyer has a fairly low chance of getting to that game before finding one that suits their needs.
With online games (be it Everquest or UT2004) it's even worse. People buy games specifically because they're popular. You don't want to buy a MMORPG only to discover that in a ICQ/MSN type situation all of your friends use the other program. For shooters and such their value to a gamer is largely based on the number of people playing on public servers when they get home. UT2004 is great for this. On the other hand, Death Robots 9000 may be a great game but you and six people, including the three creators, are the only people who will be playing it online.
Pirates, the ones I've seen anyways, have ten times more pirated games than anyone would ever buy. I've seen pirates with 350+ games, I've only known a few people who have ever bought even 50. Most of these games don't even represent a lost profit to the company because the pirate wouldn't have bought them anyways. Further, most pirates eventually grow up and get a job and $50 is no longer a month of lawn mowing, it's a few hours of after-tax income, and the same ammount as going to the bar or on a date. Compare that with time on usenet downloading and burning and most people eventually decide to start paying for software. Essentially, piracy is mostly done by kids who couldn't (reasonably) buy the game anyways and they usually give it up later on. Also, They usually pirate a ton of games which drives up statistics but doesn't actually have an impact on anyone's balance sheet.
So, you have fairly minimal losses from piracy, despite scary statistics, and you have huge market overcrowding and feedback loops that favour already popular games. Seems to be fairly obvious that it's market forces driving gaming companies out of business. Piracy doesn't help, but it doesn't hurt much either.
If people are so greedy and stupid as to reject an identically appearing stone simply because it's not as expensive, fuck em. I know it's something a lot of people feel but I really don't think their feelings are relevant to anything.
I really have no patience for the ego-driven need to have more expensive toys than someone else and therefore no respect for people who feel this way.
This sort of elitist, classist, bullshit is just as ignorant as racism and just as damaging. People who exhibit these traits should be treated like a Klan member in full garb.
And mixing your content and your code and your markup wouldn't create just as scrambled python, despite mandatory whitespaceing? It wouldn't make your java serverlets just as crufty, even if the code was strewn through object-oriented code?
Breaking basic design principles, like seperating your markup (be it HTML, or 3d-rendering) from the content generation (physics, input routines, whatever) from your code (bot AI, shaders, etc) is stupid. You can ruin a program in any language and you can write solid modular code in any language. Blaming the tool for a programmer problem just makes it clear you don't know the difference.
Only to the simple-minded. A screwdriver may function as a prybar but you'd be an imbecile if you bought one instead of a prybar, given the choice. Prybars are cheaper, sturdier, and usually designed to best apply leverage.
If you did not choose the screwdrivers for the job a prybar you are merely short-sighted and foolish if you do not make a not of it being inappropriate and at least note that when it fails, a proper replacement should be bought.
All things have varying levels of fitness and you might be able (or required) to jury-rig something together but that doesn't mean it is as fit a solution as it could be.
Tables have a lot of cruft that Slashdot doesn't need, if nothing else, it's simply slower to display tons of data in nested tables because the browser needs to use a generic code-path that could allow for any of these table to potentially not be just a fancy block indent.
Can she tell the difference between the opera and a DVD of an opera in 'normal' usage (ie, watching one, then the other)? Can she tell the difference between a cz and a diamond in 'normal' usage (ie, wearing one, then wearing the other)? You can be trained to notice the difference, but I've worked in the jewellery industry and my opinion is that the differences aren't a matter of 'better'. You can get a coated cut-glass 'stone' that glitters more than a diamond and if you like the way it looks (and it's in a piece that plays to its strengths) then the cut-glass makes just as nice of a piece.
The durability of diamonds is an issue, but you could get the cut-glass replaced every year for life for less than the price of a 1ct diamond, there's a limit to the value of durability.
If you can't tell the difference between choices and expected usage will not show a difference, is there a difference, in a practical sense? If not, can you justify an often exorbitant price difference?
Does that mean the cz doesn't look like a diamond, or that she's a gold-digging whore who wants to know she can yank you around by your dick to the tune of $10k for a stupid rock?
Sorry, but it's the truth. If the ring will never be subjected to a test that would prove the stone isn't a cz then it should be irrelevant if it is. If she's demanding real diamond it's merely for a status symbol.
Perhaps I'm unreasonably rational and ignoring the emotional aspects, but I feel that if someone throws away a house down-payment (3-6 months after-tax wages, the "recommended" ammount, is probably 5-10% of the purchase value of a house in your price-range) just for bragging rights, they're an idiot.
There's a certain ammount of fundamental complexity inherent in solving certain problems. New languages can reduce the difficulty of describing the fundamental steps - like perl's first-class regexps makes a 1-step process out of what would be a hundred lines of code in C, but you can't go lower than that. If part of the problem solution is that the text look a certain way when done and that way involves mangling the line, you have to do that step, be it in a textual regexp or in a flow-chart. Otherwise you've got ambiguity and your program may or may not do what you want.
Anyways, the point is that you can only simplify a complex problem so far. Once you've taken the weights off of the developers' backs (which is good) you have to recognize that a certain number of steps need to be described and, if standard libraries don't cover those steps, the steps themselves decompose to potentially many more steps.
Drawing graphs and such is a great way of linking concepts together. When an area is a "solved problem" the graph and the code required to implement it may be one and the same. Unfortunately, sort of by definition, unsolved problems can't be graphed away. You can draw all the circuit diagrams you want, but if you don't have any capacitors your drawing the symbol isn't going to make the product work.
Further, many problems are more easily expressed in one language than another, either to avoid ambiguity or to use specific concepts. You can write a numerical equation in standard symbols, with integral signs and so on, or you can write it in English "For the range of number n to n squared, perform blah, sum the results, etc". It's the same thing but one is more concise. Neat graphical symbols with lines between them are not going to be the most concise or easy to use language for all problems. Saying that they are is ignoring not only mathematic proofs but common sense.
Sure, you can visually link a few tools together, piping output from one into another, and you can click a few boxes and generate a basic SQL query. Wow.
That's great for hello-world level tasks, like calculating the fibonacci series, or defining a data model. Sure, you could essentially write a 'Notepad' equivalent with twenty clicks because it's mainly one big text-entry dialog with a file and edit menu, all of which use standard functions and know how to interact with the text dialog.
Now write the grammar-checker. Or, write a program that generates a 3d-model from a list of surface descriptions in XML format. Write a 'bot' that navigates through the 3d-world described while considering tactical and strategic concerns.
At some point all of the trivial clickable stuff is done and you need to do the heavy lifting - things for which no standard dialogs are written. And you always reach this point, if you try to go at all off the beaten path (you know, innovate). For the bot example you could 'click and drag' some inputs to customize an already-written bot AI if it was exposed as an API, but you couldn't make it do anything truly new.
And your falacy in assuming we (the doubters) will be proven wrong is that there's a difference between doubting we'll ever reach the moon and doubting that we'll reach it with method X. I don't doubt that programming simple things will become easier, I already see this in fact. I merely doubt that it'll happen in a drag-and-drop interface and that this data modelling will ever be on the cutting edge.
It'll come along and handle all the trivial stuff, like letting users script application usage, or define 'macros' in programs like Photoshop where you drag the output of a filter onto another filter, into a loop of filter and sharpen till a certain point, to a resize function, etc.
We'll get to the moon, but your hot-air balloons won't be how - not that we won't have hot-air balloons, but it's painfully obvious to someone in the aerospace field that hot-air balloons are of limited use in travel between planetary bodies (though inflatable balloons did function well as a landing mechanism), much like clickable interfaces might be used as part of many systems, but not as the core.
Actually, this is said all to often and is very wrong.
A store can kick you out almost any time they want, but not if they enter into a business deal with you and try to kick when convenient for them.
It's actually illegal for casinos to kick people out when they start doing well, unless there's evidence of illegal actions. However because casinos... fund... politicians as they're known to do, they usually do have a law saying that remembering cards is illegal. But hey, nothing wrong with the mob bribing politicians.
In a jurisdiction without these unfair laws though, the casino would need to show cause to expel you. You could sue them for it in many instances, if suing the mob wasn't unhealthy.
Your property rights don't let you be as arbitrary as you'd think. If a business ever sends you a named invitation to an event they must let you attend, though they could watch you in hopes of finding a reason to kick you out again.
As soon as you take any money from me you'll find your rights to be a lot more limited. (In all fields - this is why many people won't even take gas money for driving friends around. This could be interpretted as a business which puts a lot more liability on the driver in case of accident.)
All these guys did is predict the outcome more accurately. It's not like they looked at anything that is supposed to be secret or tampered with anything. They merely watched the action and predicted the outcome. It's as if you showed me the dice in your hand and threw them in such a fashion that I could guess how they'd land. This used to be a problem in casinos and that's why for craps you have to throw the die hard enough to bounce off the oddly-shaped end wall. Why isn't the burden with them like it should be?
Must be great to have a few million dollars to slip to local politicians. Certainly nicer than having to obey the law...
Resistance to occupation requires you to strap high explosives to yourself and blow yourself up on a bus full of civilians? Whose the one making very unreasonable statements here?
Records from the 1920s and thereabouts suggest that Jewish settlers were in fact quite careful to move in to unoccupied areas and harm their new neighbors as little as possible. Impartial documentation shows that the Arab states issued the threats, usually in the context of religious statements. Certainly the wars with Israel were started by direct attacks from the Arab nations.
The Palestinians and the Arab nations around them are outright lucky that the Jews are as nice as they have been. Giving back territory won in a defensive war is nearly unprecedented.
But yeah, I'm so far beyond the bounds of reasons that further discussion is pointless. Strap a bomb to yourself and go kill someone over it, that's exactly the action your justifying.
It's a very popular myth that there was this vast empty space on the map that the Jewish refugees from WWII could occupy. The truth is that there were plenty of people aready living there, getting screwed over by the British Empire's form of Zionism.
The number of Arabs in the area increased along with the number of Jews. The area wasn't empty, but there wasn't displacement going on. The Jews moved in, and many Arabs followed because of the jobs that were being created. Today if you wanted to moved six million people into the area you'd have to put other people somewhere else. At the turn of the century there was a lot of room for the settlers to move in without pushing Palestinians away.
Ben Gurion was quoted as saying such things as "under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." Arab leaders, both political and religious were quoted as saying things more like "push them into the sea." "destroy the entire Jewish race". Statements like these were made before the formation of Israel and clearly reflect general attitudes.
Israel is Jewish state. Orthodox Judaism is the only legally recognized form of Judaism, and has considerable authority, with control over marriages, burials, and decisions over "who's a Jew". It takes great twisting of the language to regard that as secular.
Canada is largely Christian, our laws are based on biblical rules, our definition of marriage, etc. Yet it is easy to advance in industry or politics as an athiest or a member of another religion.
In a similar way Israel is secular. It's a largely Jewish country and many of the people in power are Jewish, but it's not a requirement - in fact enough people in power are specifically not Jewish that it's not even an unspoken requirement.
My point here is that the Jewish people will listen to people who aren't of their religion or race enough to grant them rights and positions of power. This is in direct contradiction to many of the countries in the area where Islam is *the* state religion and at best, people of other religions are expected to pay a 'tax'.
It takes greater twisting to regard a nation conceived for and dedicated to one ethnic group, as "multi-ethnic". To call civilian homes "military targets" goes beyond twisting words and into breaking.
What's the last Jewish military operation where they bombed civilian houses without giving the occupants every chance to leave? I know they blow up houses of dead terrorists, and that they bomb terrorists who sometimes surround themselves with civilians, but I'm looking for a military operation where civilians were the target, or where large civilian casualties were expected and acceptable.
Contrast to the Palestinian method of waging war which is the strap bomb to brainwashed teenagers and have them specifically targets civilians in malls and on busses.
Israel isn't perfect by any stretch, but they try to avoid non-terrorists and large-scale destruction. For the Palestinians leaders, civilian casualties are exactly the goal.
It is entirely possible for both sides of a conflict to be "bad guys". (Say, Stalin and Hitler.)
Sure, it is. But even in that case Hitler was the agressor and while Stalin was a monster, he was the one being attacked.
When you've got one side which is largely religious fanatics bent on nothing less than the complete elimination of the whole race of their enemies, and one side which just wishes that the others would stick to their states goals for peace and stop the killing, it seems even more cut and dried.
Frankly, until the religious fanatics quit their insane babbling about their moronic beliefs and quit trying to kill everyone based on those beliefs, they aren't going to get anywhere and the world is going to start sanctioning harsher and harsher tactics for dealing with them. They can whine until blue in the face about how hard-done-by they are and how everyone is out to get them, but if they keep
Just get a low-end job doing something for an airline. Have your terrorists take a flight every now and then. If they're flagged you can find out when the screeners haul them off for a fruitless check (of course on these flights they'd be as clean as a newborn babe) and you remove them from any position they have in your organization. If they aren't on the list they merely establish a background as someone who flies frequently making it even easier to bypass security in the future.
They won't release the list, but if you can watch the use of the list you can figure out who is on it by who gets hassled. If they don't do extra checks based on the list it's not going to stop you from flying with a bomb and won't inconvenience you much.
But the whole idea is pretty lame. Criminals use fake ID. The current crop of religious idiots also uses suicide bombers who only have to sneak past security once, the first and last time.
You are so terribly uninformed. The area occupied by Israel was largely unoccupied before the late 1800s and early 1900s when Jewish settlers started moving into the area. In the beginning they were quite popular - despite the long-lasting anti-semitism of many Muslims they brought industry and prosperity to the area. Moreso, they let the Arabs in the area be full citizens in Israel when it formed - Israel is currently the only democracy in the area. Ironically the Arab in the area have more political freedom in Israel than in the surrounding countries. Further, modern Israel is secular - there are many Jews, but the political structure isn't religious unlike in most of the surrounding countries.
When Israel was formed it was the largest single group of Jews in the world and its creation was merely a matter of the British setting borders in the area to best represent the political/racial groups. Most of the Arab countries in the area have no more historical right than Israel does.
Then consider the tactics. The Palestinians intentionally target civilians. The israelis intentionally target known terrorists, often passing up a chance at assasinating them until they're not surrounded by civilians. The Muslims intentionally try to kill the innocent - the Israelis do so only by accident.
Israel has gone out of their way to be fair, even going so far as to give back land taken during a defensive war. Ask yourself what any other country would do if in the process of defending itself in a war it pushed the enemy back and captured land. Would they give it back later, or keep it as just spoils of war? There's very little historical precedent for giving territory back to the agressors, yet Israel did this. The countries surrounding them easily have enough territory to take in the Palestinians and this has been proposed by people looking for peaceful solutions for years, but the Palestinians are left where they are. It just goes to show that the Muslims in the area aren't united by the fight for Palestinian freedom, they're united by religious hatred for Jews and the Palestinians are being used as pawns.
One group is secular, democratic, multi-racial, and targets military targets. The other group is religious, a theocracy (in practice, not on paper), racist, homophobic, etc, and intentionally targets civilians. Who really is the bad guy in this scenario?
Or, you could write your OS to segregate all applications into virtual machines, where they can only see the files, network services, and resources that they need. (Summarized during install, and subject to approval and change by the user.) For instance, if you use Outlook and Word, Word needs to read your address book in Outlook, but nothing else. Outlook doesn't even need to know that Word exists, if it browses the drive it shouldn't see anything other than/Program Files/Outlook/ and maybe a few read-only DLLs in the/windows/system directory. Even emailing files could be done by opening the file browser and dragging files onto the email program - no need to let Outlook browse around and find the file itself.
In a tight little sandbox like this you're limited to programs screwing up their own data - outlook viruses could delete your old email (but not any backups) and could send email, but they couldn't wipe drives or email secret documents. Word MacroViruses could write themselves to other Word files open, but couldn't send email, or browse the drive, etc.
It's how services are often run on Unix - sandbox them on their own virtual machine so that even if there's a hole in the program it can't break out to the main filesystem or to other services. Then you only need to secure the virtualization engine - while not a trivial task, it is easier than trying to write everything as a hardened network service even if it's only a text-filter program that might be called insecurely.
In other words, you won't have a right to a copy but they won't have a right to forbid you. But, because you don't have a right to the copy they can copy-protect the CD without blocking your rights (you have none) and of course, making a personal copy will be allowed but having the ability to do so will not be, see the USA's DMCA.
A worthless feel-good measure, unless they say that the consumer has the RIGHT to do this, not merely isn't violating copyright law.
If cheap (half price?) upgrades were available between versions it wouldn't be an issue and people wouldn't feel ripped off. If the company took the original CD back when providing the upgrade there'd still be the same number of "licenses" in circulation - theoretically it should mean they wouldn't have to pay the musician again for that SACD you upgraded to, because you've still got the same song, just with different sampling and mixing. Everyone understands that technology moves on and old formats are replaced with new - the only reason it seems so bad in music and not for example, computer games, is that music has a long lifespan and we see the same companies that sell music bringing out the new formats. When Sony gets to sell new copies of all their music when they bring out SACD or some new format it's hard to not see that as a money grab.
I'm actually glad that fame-seeking hackers are breaking into CC companies and other financial institutions that are supposed to be secure. If it wasn't them, it'd be people breaking in for theft, not fame. If the kiddies hadn't raised awareness we'd be screwed because we'd be more vulnerable and the attacker would be out to exploit everything they found. This way I have a warning of which banks and online stores to avoid. It's as if someone broke into a lock & safe company, into the highest-priced safe, and left a blow-up sheep and a mocking note, then sent pictures of the weaknesses to the newspaper so that everyone would know how weak the security they were being asked to trust really way.
Much better your business gets egg on its face than I mistakenly trust you and get a crappy product or insecure service.
btw, get over your AC paranoia - it's simply not convenient to login from every computer I find myself reading Slashdot from.
The pop thing is a kludge because not only do you have to not download her email, but she has to not download yours. If either of you make a mistake it's a pain.
With IMAP if a few get in the wrong category you can simply mark them as unread and drag them into the appropriate folder, as if they never went in the wrong place originally.
Look at it economically. For all your love of the US, a large ammount of tech purchasing comes from them. If the US government mandates DRM on PC platforms and blocks imports from companies/countries who still produce "piracy enabled" PCs, you'll see a lot of companies putting DRM in their whole product line or going out of business for lack of a market.
The big media companies realize that the analog hole needs to be plugged, they're going to bribe and coerce other countries, via bought politicians in the USA, to pass DRM-friendly laws.
Why did Australia pass a form of the DMCA? Why is Canada considering it? Not because it's a great law - because the USA is threatening unspecified trade issues that'll cost these countries a fortune.
If open source and free software take off and gain a critical mass before MS and the MPAA/etc lobby enough politicians to do this, we'll be fine. If not, the outsiders (you and me) will be squeezed out.
You say that these rules would only affect the US, but they'd really affect everyone using an MS OS. That does include most of the world. It's pirated, but it could still refuse to play DVDs on non-DRM'd computers one day.
The fight is far from a guaranteed win, and make no mistake, it is a fight. MS's wet dream, along with the MPAA and every other media reseller, would love for you to be on a DRMed PC where you have to jump through hoops to view non-corporate media and where competitor's keys accidently got onto the revoked list... "terrible shame, we'll look into that really soon now."
The media player thing is a stupid holdover, like the browser thing, from when that mattered. I'd say drop the eye-for-an-eye and fine them for their past transgressions.
My big solution to MS would be placing all of their IP on file-formats and network protocols into the public domain, as well as forbidding them from ever getting patents (or other restrictive devices) on what should be interoperability issues. (Trying to look ahead at what they will be doing with these patent they've been getting.) Also, I'd force them to provide the file-format and network handling code they use in their products, keep it current, and release it under the BSD license.
The courts need to step up and make a decisive statement that you can't own formats, or obviously, the code to access a public format. In either trade-secret, patent, or EULA ways.
Microsoft's continual issue has been in trying to prevent competition. The remedies (not the fines - those are the wake-up call) should be intended to prevent them from doing this in the future the same as you take the right to drive from someone who abuses it. They claim to be capitalists, how about they produce a product and let people choose freely, on the merits of the product.
Re:OK so they get fined and told how to distribute
on
Microsoft and EU Talks End
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The trial is actually about what Microsoft did, not what they are doing. There are various cases of them outright lying about competitors products and coding their own product (great to control the OS) to break the competition's products. They did use unfair influence to tie their prices not to the number of units bought, but the the number of competitor's units bought.
Currently they've only written about trying to embrace and extend certain necessary protocols to kill Linux, they've had close dealing with SCO, etc.
While at any one time there may not be enough to say MS should be shut down for, the company has had a history of outright criminal actions.
This isn't an MS thing, this is an accountability thing. If you harm your competitors though criminal actions you NEED to be punished. Otherwise we're simply saying to everyone that if you want to succeed you need to break the law, and that you won't be punished for doing so. Not if you break really big laws at any rate. Rob a 7-11 and go to jail for life. Steal billions and we'll let you keep your ill-gotten gains.
I couldn't care less if MS made a complete reversal and was now sponsoring needy children in Africa, they need to be smacked around for their past transgresions that put them where they are today. The fact they haven't stopped just makes it worse.
If trusted computing takes off your Mandrake days will be limited. Potentially because of restrictions in your new BIOS and it only running signed code, or maybe only because everyone and their dog writes their web pages to query the new security features in IE which has your BIOS securely prove who you are, before you get to access their webpage. Easy to avoid if it's a geocities page about their cats, but what about when every business does this - not for security, but because clueless users are convinced that if they don't do this, it's not secure.
You'll be sitting back in Linux, without any software to do this and without the legal right to create your own, and you'll be ghettoized slowly as there are less and less businesses who you can deal with. Less forums you can join without the ability to prove your ID through a digitally signed CPU id from your bios.
We *have* to stamp this crap out before it takes over. It will not be left to consumer choice. Do you think Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions on this to ASK you if you want them to control your computer? Hello!?!
As little as you like it, the buggy whip analogy is a valid one. For one reason or another, fair or not, it is becoming impossible to restrict the duplication and distribution of copyrighted works in a manner required to make cd sales a viable business method.
Do you recognize this and cope with it, or do you order the tides to stop?
You can't stop the expansion of computers and by extension, digital media transfer. If you watermark your music it'll be wrapped in a zip file, if you put DRM into computers it'll be stripped out, emulated around, or otherwiser made irrelevant.
If you persist in trying to protect your outdated business model (the buggy whips) you'll lose, but only after costing everyone billions and laying waste to a generation of advancement by mandating broken-by-design restrictions.
There's a seperate discussion about the validity of copyright, and it's not a simple issue either, but this is a buggy-whip issue. The selling of plastic disks is dead, recognize it and move on. The selling of individual access to copyrighted works is in a coma and not expected to survive, recognize this and plan for its demise.
This happens in every industry. You show off to get a job, then start slacking until the boss decides you aren't worth it, and you get fired. He doesn't get to demand your wages back for the time you slacked, it's simply his responsibility to monitor the value he gets for his investment on an ongoing basis.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty obvious, and it's pretty obviously not piracy.
When six studios all release a similar game (say another RTS) the market for this type of game is going to be saturated. Gamers are smart enough to realize that fantasy monsters and giant robots are just skins, it's the gameplay and mechanics. If there are all roughly equal they're going to sell based on marketing. EA and similar companies can afford the big displays, the end-of-aisle positioning, etc. Smaller companies games are going to be buried and if they don't offer anything else that RTS buyer has a fairly low chance of getting to that game before finding one that suits their needs.
With online games (be it Everquest or UT2004) it's even worse. People buy games specifically because they're popular. You don't want to buy a MMORPG only to discover that in a ICQ/MSN type situation all of your friends use the other program. For shooters and such their value to a gamer is largely based on the number of people playing on public servers when they get home. UT2004 is great for this. On the other hand, Death Robots 9000 may be a great game but you and six people, including the three creators, are the only people who will be playing it online.
Pirates, the ones I've seen anyways, have ten times more pirated games than anyone would ever buy. I've seen pirates with 350+ games, I've only known a few people who have ever bought even 50. Most of these games don't even represent a lost profit to the company because the pirate wouldn't have bought them anyways. Further, most pirates eventually grow up and get a job and $50 is no longer a month of lawn mowing, it's a few hours of after-tax income, and the same ammount as going to the bar or on a date. Compare that with time on usenet downloading and burning and most people eventually decide to start paying for software. Essentially, piracy is mostly done by kids who couldn't (reasonably) buy the game anyways and they usually give it up later on. Also, They usually pirate a ton of games which drives up statistics but doesn't actually have an impact on anyone's balance sheet.
So, you have fairly minimal losses from piracy, despite scary statistics, and you have huge market overcrowding and feedback loops that favour already popular games. Seems to be fairly obvious that it's market forces driving gaming companies out of business. Piracy doesn't help, but it doesn't hurt much either.
If people are so greedy and stupid as to reject an identically appearing stone simply because it's not as expensive, fuck em. I know it's something a lot of people feel but I really don't think their feelings are relevant to anything.
I really have no patience for the ego-driven need to have more expensive toys than someone else and therefore no respect for people who feel this way.
This sort of elitist, classist, bullshit is just as ignorant as racism and just as damaging. People who exhibit these traits should be treated like a Klan member in full garb.
And mixing your content and your code and your markup wouldn't create just as scrambled python, despite mandatory whitespaceing? It wouldn't make your java serverlets just as crufty, even if the code was strewn through object-oriented code?
Breaking basic design principles, like seperating your markup (be it HTML, or 3d-rendering) from the content generation (physics, input routines, whatever) from your code (bot AI, shaders, etc) is stupid. You can ruin a program in any language and you can write solid modular code in any language. Blaming the tool for a programmer problem just makes it clear you don't know the difference.
Only to the simple-minded. A screwdriver may function as a prybar but you'd be an imbecile if you bought one instead of a prybar, given the choice. Prybars are cheaper, sturdier, and usually designed to best apply leverage.
If you did not choose the screwdrivers for the job a prybar you are merely short-sighted and foolish if you do not make a not of it being inappropriate and at least note that when it fails, a proper replacement should be bought.
All things have varying levels of fitness and you might be able (or required) to jury-rig something together but that doesn't mean it is as fit a solution as it could be.
Tables have a lot of cruft that Slashdot doesn't need, if nothing else, it's simply slower to display tons of data in nested tables because the browser needs to use a generic code-path that could allow for any of these table to potentially not be just a fancy block indent.
Can she tell the difference between the opera and a DVD of an opera in 'normal' usage (ie, watching one, then the other)? Can she tell the difference between a cz and a diamond in 'normal' usage (ie, wearing one, then wearing the other)? You can be trained to notice the difference, but I've worked in the jewellery industry and my opinion is that the differences aren't a matter of 'better'. You can get a coated cut-glass 'stone' that glitters more than a diamond and if you like the way it looks (and it's in a piece that plays to its strengths) then the cut-glass makes just as nice of a piece.
The durability of diamonds is an issue, but you could get the cut-glass replaced every year for life for less than the price of a 1ct diamond, there's a limit to the value of durability.
If you can't tell the difference between choices and expected usage will not show a difference, is there a difference, in a practical sense? If not, can you justify an often exorbitant price difference?
Does that mean the cz doesn't look like a diamond, or that she's a gold-digging whore who wants to know she can yank you around by your dick to the tune of $10k for a stupid rock?
Sorry, but it's the truth. If the ring will never be subjected to a test that would prove the stone isn't a cz then it should be irrelevant if it is. If she's demanding real diamond it's merely for a status symbol.
Perhaps I'm unreasonably rational and ignoring the emotional aspects, but I feel that if someone throws away a house down-payment (3-6 months after-tax wages, the "recommended" ammount, is probably 5-10% of the purchase value of a house in your price-range) just for bragging rights, they're an idiot.
There's a certain ammount of fundamental complexity inherent in solving certain problems. New languages can reduce the difficulty of describing the fundamental steps - like perl's first-class regexps makes a 1-step process out of what would be a hundred lines of code in C, but you can't go lower than that. If part of the problem solution is that the text look a certain way when done and that way involves mangling the line, you have to do that step, be it in a textual regexp or in a flow-chart. Otherwise you've got ambiguity and your program may or may not do what you want.
Anyways, the point is that you can only simplify a complex problem so far. Once you've taken the weights off of the developers' backs (which is good) you have to recognize that a certain number of steps need to be described and, if standard libraries don't cover those steps, the steps themselves decompose to potentially many more steps.
Drawing graphs and such is a great way of linking concepts together. When an area is a "solved problem" the graph and the code required to implement it may be one and the same. Unfortunately, sort of by definition, unsolved problems can't be graphed away. You can draw all the circuit diagrams you want, but if you don't have any capacitors your drawing the symbol isn't going to make the product work.
Further, many problems are more easily expressed in one language than another, either to avoid ambiguity or to use specific concepts. You can write a numerical equation in standard symbols, with integral signs and so on, or you can write it in English "For the range of number n to n squared, perform blah, sum the results, etc". It's the same thing but one is more concise. Neat graphical symbols with lines between them are not going to be the most concise or easy to use language for all problems. Saying that they are is ignoring not only mathematic proofs but common sense.
Sure, you can visually link a few tools together, piping output from one into another, and you can click a few boxes and generate a basic SQL query. Wow.
That's great for hello-world level tasks, like calculating the fibonacci series, or defining a data model. Sure, you could essentially write a 'Notepad' equivalent with twenty clicks because it's mainly one big text-entry dialog with a file and edit menu, all of which use standard functions and know how to interact with the text dialog.
Now write the grammar-checker. Or, write a program that generates a 3d-model from a list of surface descriptions in XML format. Write a 'bot' that navigates through the 3d-world described while considering tactical and strategic concerns.
At some point all of the trivial clickable stuff is done and you need to do the heavy lifting - things for which no standard dialogs are written. And you always reach this point, if you try to go at all off the beaten path (you know, innovate). For the bot example you could 'click and drag' some inputs to customize an already-written bot AI if it was exposed as an API, but you couldn't make it do anything truly new.
And your falacy in assuming we (the doubters) will be proven wrong is that there's a difference between doubting we'll ever reach the moon and doubting that we'll reach it with method X. I don't doubt that programming simple things will become easier, I already see this in fact. I merely doubt that it'll happen in a drag-and-drop interface and that this data modelling will ever be on the cutting edge.
It'll come along and handle all the trivial stuff, like letting users script application usage, or define 'macros' in programs like Photoshop where you drag the output of a filter onto another filter, into a loop of filter and sharpen till a certain point, to a resize function, etc.
We'll get to the moon, but your hot-air balloons won't be how - not that we won't have hot-air balloons, but it's painfully obvious to someone in the aerospace field that hot-air balloons are of limited use in travel between planetary bodies (though inflatable balloons did function well as a landing mechanism), much like clickable interfaces might be used as part of many systems, but not as the core.
Actually, this is said all to often and is very wrong.
... fund ... politicians as they're known to do, they usually do have a law saying that remembering cards is illegal. But hey, nothing wrong with the mob bribing politicians.
A store can kick you out almost any time they want, but not if they enter into a business deal with you and try to kick when convenient for them.
It's actually illegal for casinos to kick people out when they start doing well, unless there's evidence of illegal actions. However because casinos
In a jurisdiction without these unfair laws though, the casino would need to show cause to expel you. You could sue them for it in many instances, if suing the mob wasn't unhealthy.
Your property rights don't let you be as arbitrary as you'd think. If a business ever sends you a named invitation to an event they must let you attend, though they could watch you in hopes of finding a reason to kick you out again.
As soon as you take any money from me you'll find your rights to be a lot more limited. (In all fields - this is why many people won't even take gas money for driving friends around. This could be interpretted as a business which puts a lot more liability on the driver in case of accident.)
Oh wah, somebody cheated a casino.
All these guys did is predict the outcome more accurately. It's not like they looked at anything that is supposed to be secret or tampered with anything. They merely watched the action and predicted the outcome. It's as if you showed me the dice in your hand and threw them in such a fashion that I could guess how they'd land. This used to be a problem in casinos and that's why for craps you have to throw the die hard enough to bounce off the oddly-shaped end wall. Why isn't the burden with them like it should be?
Must be great to have a few million dollars to slip to local politicians. Certainly nicer than having to obey the law...
Resistance to occupation requires you to strap high explosives to yourself and blow yourself up on a bus full of civilians? Whose the one making very unreasonable statements here?
Records from the 1920s and thereabouts suggest that Jewish settlers were in fact quite careful to move in to unoccupied areas and harm their new neighbors as little as possible. Impartial documentation shows that the Arab states issued the threats, usually in the context of religious statements. Certainly the wars with Israel were started by direct attacks from the Arab nations.
The Palestinians and the Arab nations around them are outright lucky that the Jews are as nice as they have been. Giving back territory won in a defensive war is nearly unprecedented.
But yeah, I'm so far beyond the bounds of reasons that further discussion is pointless. Strap a bomb to yourself and go kill someone over it, that's exactly the action your justifying.
It's a very popular myth that there was this vast empty space on the map that the Jewish refugees from WWII could occupy. The truth is that there were plenty of people aready living there, getting screwed over by the British Empire's form of Zionism.
The number of Arabs in the area increased along with the number of Jews. The area wasn't empty, but there wasn't displacement going on. The Jews moved in, and many Arabs followed because of the jobs that were being created. Today if you wanted to moved six million people into the area you'd have to put other people somewhere else. At the turn of the century there was a lot of room for the settlers to move in without pushing Palestinians away.
Ben Gurion was quoted as saying such things as "under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them." Arab leaders, both political and religious were quoted as saying things more like "push them into the sea." "destroy the entire Jewish race". Statements like these were made before the formation of Israel and clearly reflect general attitudes.
Israel is Jewish state. Orthodox Judaism is the only legally recognized form of Judaism, and has considerable authority, with control over marriages, burials, and decisions over "who's a Jew". It takes great twisting of the language to regard that as secular.
Canada is largely Christian, our laws are based on biblical rules, our definition of marriage, etc. Yet it is easy to advance in industry or politics as an athiest or a member of another religion.
In a similar way Israel is secular. It's a largely Jewish country and many of the people in power are Jewish, but it's not a requirement - in fact enough people in power are specifically not Jewish that it's not even an unspoken requirement.
My point here is that the Jewish people will listen to people who aren't of their religion or race enough to grant them rights and positions of power. This is in direct contradiction to many of the countries in the area where Islam is *the* state religion and at best, people of other religions are expected to pay a 'tax'.
It takes greater twisting to regard a nation conceived for and dedicated to one ethnic group, as "multi-ethnic". To call civilian homes "military targets" goes beyond twisting words and into breaking.
What's the last Jewish military operation where they bombed civilian houses without giving the occupants every chance to leave? I know they blow up houses of dead terrorists, and that they bomb terrorists who sometimes surround themselves with civilians, but I'm looking for a military operation where civilians were the target, or where large civilian casualties were expected and acceptable.
Contrast to the Palestinian method of waging war which is the strap bomb to brainwashed teenagers and have them specifically targets civilians in malls and on busses.
Israel isn't perfect by any stretch, but they try to avoid non-terrorists and large-scale destruction. For the Palestinians leaders, civilian casualties are exactly the goal.
It is entirely possible for both sides of a conflict to be "bad guys". (Say, Stalin and Hitler.)
Sure, it is. But even in that case Hitler was the agressor and while Stalin was a monster, he was the one being attacked.
When you've got one side which is largely religious fanatics bent on nothing less than the complete elimination of the whole race of their enemies, and one side which just wishes that the others would stick to their states goals for peace and stop the killing, it seems even more cut and dried.
Frankly, until the religious fanatics quit their insane babbling about their moronic beliefs and quit trying to kill everyone based on those beliefs, they aren't going to get anywhere and the world is going to start sanctioning harsher and harsher tactics for dealing with them. They can whine until blue in the face about how hard-done-by they are and how everyone is out to get them, but if they keep
Just get a low-end job doing something for an airline. Have your terrorists take a flight every now and then. If they're flagged you can find out when the screeners haul them off for a fruitless check (of course on these flights they'd be as clean as a newborn babe) and you remove them from any position they have in your organization. If they aren't on the list they merely establish a background as someone who flies frequently making it even easier to bypass security in the future.
They won't release the list, but if you can watch the use of the list you can figure out who is on it by who gets hassled. If they don't do extra checks based on the list it's not going to stop you from flying with a bomb and won't inconvenience you much.
But the whole idea is pretty lame. Criminals use fake ID. The current crop of religious idiots also uses suicide bombers who only have to sneak past security once, the first and last time.
You are so terribly uninformed. The area occupied by Israel was largely unoccupied before the late 1800s and early 1900s when Jewish settlers started moving into the area. In the beginning they were quite popular - despite the long-lasting anti-semitism of many Muslims they brought industry and prosperity to the area. Moreso, they let the Arabs in the area be full citizens in Israel when it formed - Israel is currently the only democracy in the area. Ironically the Arab in the area have more political freedom in Israel than in the surrounding countries. Further, modern Israel is secular - there are many Jews, but the political structure isn't religious unlike in most of the surrounding countries.
When Israel was formed it was the largest single group of Jews in the world and its creation was merely a matter of the British setting borders in the area to best represent the political/racial groups. Most of the Arab countries in the area have no more historical right than Israel does.
Then consider the tactics. The Palestinians intentionally target civilians. The israelis intentionally target known terrorists, often passing up a chance at assasinating them until they're not surrounded by civilians. The Muslims intentionally try to kill the innocent - the Israelis do so only by accident.
Israel has gone out of their way to be fair, even going so far as to give back land taken during a defensive war. Ask yourself what any other country would do if in the process of defending itself in a war it pushed the enemy back and captured land. Would they give it back later, or keep it as just spoils of war? There's very little historical precedent for giving territory back to the agressors, yet Israel did this. The countries surrounding them easily have enough territory to take in the Palestinians and this has been proposed by people looking for peaceful solutions for years, but the Palestinians are left where they are. It just goes to show that the Muslims in the area aren't united by the fight for Palestinian freedom, they're united by religious hatred for Jews and the Palestinians are being used as pawns.
One group is secular, democratic, multi-racial, and targets military targets. The other group is religious, a theocracy (in practice, not on paper), racist, homophobic, etc, and intentionally targets civilians. Who really is the bad guy in this scenario?
Or, you could write your OS to segregate all applications into virtual machines, where they can only see the files, network services, and resources that they need. (Summarized during install, and subject to approval and change by the user.) For instance, if you use Outlook and Word, Word needs to read your address book in Outlook, but nothing else. Outlook doesn't even need to know that Word exists, if it browses the drive it shouldn't see anything other than /Program Files/Outlook/ and maybe a few read-only DLLs in the /windows/system directory. Even emailing files could be done by opening the file browser and dragging files onto the email program - no need to let Outlook browse around and find the file itself.
In a tight little sandbox like this you're limited to programs screwing up their own data - outlook viruses could delete your old email (but not any backups) and could send email, but they couldn't wipe drives or email secret documents. Word MacroViruses could write themselves to other Word files open, but couldn't send email, or browse the drive, etc.
It's how services are often run on Unix - sandbox them on their own virtual machine so that even if there's a hole in the program it can't break out to the main filesystem or to other services. Then you only need to secure the virtualization engine - while not a trivial task, it is easier than trying to write everything as a hardened network service even if it's only a text-filter program that might be called insecurely.
In other words, you won't have a right to a copy but they won't have a right to forbid you. But, because you don't have a right to the copy they can copy-protect the CD without blocking your rights (you have none) and of course, making a personal copy will be allowed but having the ability to do so will not be, see the USA's DMCA.
A worthless feel-good measure, unless they say that the consumer has the RIGHT to do this, not merely isn't violating copyright law.
If cheap (half price?) upgrades were available between versions it wouldn't be an issue and people wouldn't feel ripped off. If the company took the original CD back when providing the upgrade there'd still be the same number of "licenses" in circulation - theoretically it should mean they wouldn't have to pay the musician again for that SACD you upgraded to, because you've still got the same song, just with different sampling and mixing. Everyone understands that technology moves on and old formats are replaced with new - the only reason it seems so bad in music and not for example, computer games, is that music has a long lifespan and we see the same companies that sell music bringing out the new formats. When Sony gets to sell new copies of all their music when they bring out SACD or some new format it's hard to not see that as a money grab.
I'm actually glad that fame-seeking hackers are breaking into CC companies and other financial institutions that are supposed to be secure. If it wasn't them, it'd be people breaking in for theft, not fame. If the kiddies hadn't raised awareness we'd be screwed because we'd be more vulnerable and the attacker would be out to exploit everything they found. This way I have a warning of which banks and online stores to avoid. It's as if someone broke into a lock & safe company, into the highest-priced safe, and left a blow-up sheep and a mocking note, then sent pictures of the weaknesses to the newspaper so that everyone would know how weak the security they were being asked to trust really way.
Much better your business gets egg on its face than I mistakenly trust you and get a crappy product or insecure service.
btw, get over your AC paranoia - it's simply not convenient to login from every computer I find myself reading Slashdot from.
Use IMAP, it's made for this sort of issue.
The pop thing is a kludge because not only do you have to not download her email, but she has to not download yours. If either of you make a mistake it's a pain.
With IMAP if a few get in the wrong category you can simply mark them as unread and drag them into the appropriate folder, as if they never went in the wrong place originally.
Look at it economically. For all your love of the US, a large ammount of tech purchasing comes from them. If the US government mandates DRM on PC platforms and blocks imports from companies/countries who still produce "piracy enabled" PCs, you'll see a lot of companies putting DRM in their whole product line or going out of business for lack of a market.
... "terrible shame, we'll look into that really soon now."
The big media companies realize that the analog hole needs to be plugged, they're going to bribe and coerce other countries, via bought politicians in the USA, to pass DRM-friendly laws.
Why did Australia pass a form of the DMCA? Why is Canada considering it? Not because it's a great law - because the USA is threatening unspecified trade issues that'll cost these countries a fortune.
If open source and free software take off and gain a critical mass before MS and the MPAA/etc lobby enough politicians to do this, we'll be fine. If not, the outsiders (you and me) will be squeezed out.
You say that these rules would only affect the US, but they'd really affect everyone using an MS OS. That does include most of the world. It's pirated, but it could still refuse to play DVDs on non-DRM'd computers one day.
The fight is far from a guaranteed win, and make no mistake, it is a fight. MS's wet dream, along with the MPAA and every other media reseller, would love for you to be on a DRMed PC where you have to jump through hoops to view non-corporate media and where competitor's keys accidently got onto the revoked list
The media player thing is a stupid holdover, like the browser thing, from when that mattered. I'd say drop the eye-for-an-eye and fine them for their past transgressions.
My big solution to MS would be placing all of their IP on file-formats and network protocols into the public domain, as well as forbidding them from ever getting patents (or other restrictive devices) on what should be interoperability issues. (Trying to look ahead at what they will be doing with these patent they've been getting.) Also, I'd force them to provide the file-format and network handling code they use in their products, keep it current, and release it under the BSD license.
The courts need to step up and make a decisive statement that you can't own formats, or obviously, the code to access a public format. In either trade-secret, patent, or EULA ways.
Microsoft's continual issue has been in trying to prevent competition. The remedies (not the fines - those are the wake-up call) should be intended to prevent them from doing this in the future the same as you take the right to drive from someone who abuses it. They claim to be capitalists, how about they produce a product and let people choose freely, on the merits of the product.
The trial is actually about what Microsoft did, not what they are doing. There are various cases of them outright lying about competitors products and coding their own product (great to control the OS) to break the competition's products. They did use unfair influence to tie their prices not to the number of units bought, but the the number of competitor's units bought.
Currently they've only written about trying to embrace and extend certain necessary protocols to kill Linux, they've had close dealing with SCO, etc.
While at any one time there may not be enough to say MS should be shut down for, the company has had a history of outright criminal actions.
This isn't an MS thing, this is an accountability thing. If you harm your competitors though criminal actions you NEED to be punished. Otherwise we're simply saying to everyone that if you want to succeed you need to break the law, and that you won't be punished for doing so. Not if you break really big laws at any rate. Rob a 7-11 and go to jail for life. Steal billions and we'll let you keep your ill-gotten gains.
I couldn't care less if MS made a complete reversal and was now sponsoring needy children in Africa, they need to be smacked around for their past transgresions that put them where they are today. The fact they haven't stopped just makes it worse.
If trusted computing takes off your Mandrake days will be limited. Potentially because of restrictions in your new BIOS and it only running signed code, or maybe only because everyone and their dog writes their web pages to query the new security features in IE which has your BIOS securely prove who you are, before you get to access their webpage. Easy to avoid if it's a geocities page about their cats, but what about when every business does this - not for security, but because clueless users are convinced that if they don't do this, it's not secure.
You'll be sitting back in Linux, without any software to do this and without the legal right to create your own, and you'll be ghettoized slowly as there are less and less businesses who you can deal with. Less forums you can join without the ability to prove your ID through a digitally signed CPU id from your bios.
We *have* to stamp this crap out before it takes over. It will not be left to consumer choice. Do you think Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions on this to ASK you if you want them to control your computer? Hello!?!
As little as you like it, the buggy whip analogy is a valid one. For one reason or another, fair or not, it is becoming impossible to restrict the duplication and distribution of copyrighted works in a manner required to make cd sales a viable business method.
Do you recognize this and cope with it, or do you order the tides to stop?
You can't stop the expansion of computers and by extension, digital media transfer. If you watermark your music it'll be wrapped in a zip file, if you put DRM into computers it'll be stripped out, emulated around, or otherwiser made irrelevant.
If you persist in trying to protect your outdated business model (the buggy whips) you'll lose, but only after costing everyone billions and laying waste to a generation of advancement by mandating broken-by-design restrictions.
There's a seperate discussion about the validity of copyright, and it's not a simple issue either, but this is a buggy-whip issue. The selling of plastic disks is dead, recognize it and move on. The selling of individual access to copyrighted works is in a coma and not expected to survive, recognize this and plan for its demise.
This happens in every industry. You show off to get a job, then start slacking until the boss decides you aren't worth it, and you get fired. He doesn't get to demand your wages back for the time you slacked, it's simply his responsibility to monitor the value he gets for his investment on an ongoing basis.