IF people can believe that millions of abductees are lying why then is it illogical to believe our government may have faked the moon landings?
Because people who get "abducted" are all fruits. They have stupid stories about anal probing. The aliens always confirm these people's opinions (that conveniently are always ignored because of a conspiracy) about whatever ridiculous thing they're going on about. These people don't understand the difference between causality and correlation, they say things like "It didn't look like a plane [to me], I couldn't find out that it was a weather balloon, so it *must* have been a UFO" and they don't even understand why they're ridiculous.
That's why they don't get believed. They're not mentally all there and they make assumptions from too-few facts.
To this day no other country has put a man on the moon.
What does this mean? Because no other country tried (why, most of them were allies with one of the two countries that were trying), it must be false? No other country has made a plane like the SR-71, or nuclear submarines as capable as the US, but most people believe in those.
The space-race was a massive attempt by both sides to demoralize the other side by proving them to be less capable. Don't you think the Russians would have pointed out the US's lies if they could have? They've sent probes around the moon before. It'd be a simple matter to have sent out close enough to the landing site to photograph the empty site for proof that there never was anything there.
If you were in a contest with someone and suspected they won a big prize by cheating, and all you had to do to check was send someone to review tapes of part of the contest, wouldn't you do so? Wouldn't you blow the whistle? How about if the other person was your sworn enemy and you could humiliate them completely by this?
What is really so suspicious about the moon landings? The rocketry technology is there, I prove it every time I use a signal broadcast by a geo-synchronous satellite. The life-support equipment is there, this is actually easier than building a suit that'll work at great depths.
On one side of the UFO vs Moon Landing you have a bunch of trained scientists willing to show you the inbetween steps and the documentation, as well as explaining why certain things don't match your explanations and show how you can test these assumptions in an unbiased experiemnt. On the other hand, you'd got a bunch of crystal-power using, accupuncture practising, new-age weenies who make claims like UFO abduction or perpetual motion and yet get violent and abusive when you ask for a demonstration, let alone proof.
If students can learn an office suite and desktop environment like Mandrake, or Redhat, and they can't apply these skills to Windows, they don't deserve to graduate. Students taught on a Mac manage to transfer their skills to other computers with a day or so of orientation, so why do you expect Linux will be much harder? You do know it's not all command-line based, right? There are applications other than grep and vim.
Perhaps they'll be addicted to system stability and being able to move documents between programs... It might be hard to go back after that.
This is like saying that records are exact duplicates of the original music because they're analog. Even if the recording process was perfect, the materials aren't and can't hold exactly the shape intended.
The photograph is limited by the (fairly large) size of the light-sensitive grains in the film.
I'd trust digital processes more because you can keep all in-between steps and use only documented sharpening routines, etc. Both sides could go back to the same digitally signed original and follow the steps themselves. With optical processes you trade your distrust of digital for completely untraceable analog steps. Who knows what was done to the picture? Nobody can ever repeat an analog step exactly the second time so you can't ever get the same result from the negative. Was it because it was intentionally added, or because there was just a small mistake during one of the processes?
Using digital is fine if you scan the negative at a high enough resolution to capture the film grain (and thus be assured of capturing all detail) or if you shoot at a resolution that provides more detail on resolution charts than the analog film which would be used.
Purists will insist that because *some* film has incredibly small grains, if handled perfectly, that all film is 30+ MP, but we'll be laughing at them with out 5+ MP cameras that surpass anything film really has to offer. Just the same as audiophiles who prefer the "warmth" (static) of records...
Modems used to print it when they lost carrier, so BBSes would watch for it and force a reset of that line, in case they had missed the hardware handshaking that was a little spotty in the old days. So, you'd convince someone to type NO CARRIER and they'd be kicked offline.
Some systems had a bit of an accounting bug where they tallied billing every hour, or when you logged off. If you were kicked off, they forgot. So some people would NO CARRIER themselves just before the hour.
You can't just ban it though. It'll still happen but the devices will come from the third-world instead of reputable medical companies.
Make abuse of it illegal, make it illegal to give to someone else. And make it cheap.
If it's cheap (and easily available) and it's a crime to supply it, chances are that it'll be easier to get legally (and turn yourself into a veggie) than be strung along by someone else.
But, if these things do get invented, and I imagine they will, it'll effectively be a cheap and painless (joyful even) mode of suicide. Kids that sniff gasoline today might decide that dying of pleasure is much better than living in a hellhole. And how are we to stop that, or do we?
And a synth can't mimic a piano? It seems that many "piano traits" are things synths should have, like variable-sensitivity keys and such. When synths have that, what's the stop them from loading piano sounds?
Building a device to *just* emulate a piano seems so limiting.
How long have good synths been around? Most "good" piano players I know started as children, so likely good synth players will as well. Anyone older than 25 couldn't really have grown up with a synth the way most piano players grew up with a piano.
Eventually synths will take over. There's no sound difference some good DSP code can't fix and they're much more than just a piano.
Copyright already doesn't apply. In your example I might not be allowed to copy your letter completely but I could summarize in enough detail to get all the details across, and facts aren't copyrightable, I could freely reproduce your daughter's cell-phone number.
Do I think you should have control over the information you create and its distribution? No. If you don't want people to know something, keep it a secret. Can you imagine how much farther western society would fall if people could sue each other for blabbing a secret? "Your honor, Susan told Jimmy that I had a crush on him, embarrasing me and causing $300k dollars in emotional damage."
Copyright exist *ONLY* to ensure that authors get the first chance to profit from their works, NOT to allow them to control the use of their works.
Well, the idea is that copyright protection is used only to guarantee the author a monopoly on sales. It's not intended to be used to keep something private.
The idea of ever-increasing fees is a good one, especially the idea that they double, making it impossible for anyone to hold onto their works forever.
Moreso, I'd have that just cover commercial user. I'd say that fair use rights should be extended from day one and that personal, not-for-profit copies should be allowed after a short period, fifteen years or something.
I don't think Disney should lose Mickey Mouse just so another company can start making movies with him, as much as I think that popular culture should quickly belong to the people who lived with it. Companies merely wanting to make their own copyrighted movies, but with someone else's characters, can wait longer.
Completely irrelevant. Your freedom of association has nothing to do with control over a product.
If you make a product and sell it, I can buy it. If you don't want me to have it you can choose not to sell to me, but if you sell to someone else I can buy it from them.
You *do not* get to dictate what someone does with something you sold them. If you don't want someone using your creation, whatever it is, in some certain way, you'd better not sell it.
Both parties can win. Let's say that I'm good at making furniture and you're not. I can make a chair for $20 (parts and labour), you'd put that much into parts alone (wastage) and then much extra time, trying to come up to speed. If I sell you the chair for $30 it's still less than it would cost you to make it, but I profit from it as well.
Not all profit is a "fucking over". If I don't make more than $20 per chair, I starve (or rather, quit making chairs and start farming). Even "profit" over and above expenses often goes towards future expenses (retirement) and everyone has the right to self-enrichment, as long as they don't do it at the expense of others.
The "fucking over" comes when I make a chair for $10, and sell it for $90, keeping you from undercutting me by telling my suppliers that if they sell supplies to you I'll stop dealing with them, thus causing them (as I'm the biggest customer) to go bankrupt. Additional fucking over comes when the chair has a "license agreement" printed on the bottom saying that only one person is ever allowed to sit in a chair, other people need other chairs, even if there're empty chairs available.
You're right that economics (in the long run) is zero-sum. In a closed system, more value can't be invented, but the world is a long way from being a closed system and with potential space industry, etc, it may never be. Have you heard the phrase "A rising tide floats all boats"? In a non-closed economy it's true. If I make my customers wealthy, they'll have more money to spend, hopefully to spend on my products.
Not so. I quite enjoyed _My Big Fat Greek Wedding_. There have even been other "chick flicks" that didn't suck. Few and far between perhaps, but they do exist. You need to keep up with a network of guy friends and when you hear about a movie like this that isn't overly sappy you can take your wife/gf to it, garnering major brownie points and yet not having to sit through a Goldie Hawn or Barbara Streisand movie.
The problem with payment options for software is that people don't really understand that it's not at all like a physical product and they keep trying to price it like one.
If you rent a car for a day, nobody else can use it. If you didn't really need it and just let it sit by the curb you'd still be depriving the company of a car. It makes sense to charge you full price (except perhaps wear and tear) because you represent a missed opportunity to rent to someone else.
Software isn't like this. If I pay for a one-day use of Photoshop and don't use it, all I cost was some bits in a billing spreadsheet, or the up-front cost of sending the package. My not using it means they don't need to do anything and thus they don't have any real costs. But you know the pricing model isn't going to reflect this.
It's similar to the piracy loons who claim that every copy of Photoshop selling for $1 in Asia is ($799) on the books of Adobe, as if someone who wasn't going to pay anyway costs them a sale.
Back to the "Of these three, pick any two" topic... It's not unreasonable to expect a product to stay current, to have a return policy, and to be your property.
It's how shareware works. You get to try the product, often in a very full-featured way, you usually get any updates they release in the near future, so you don't get stuck with an old version, there's a subscription (cheaper purchase for owners of old versions) to allow you to keep current, and it's yours, they can't take it away and don't try.
In fact, the ideal shareware model seems to be to only lightly cripple, or perhaps just nag past low usage limit / day. This lets a person use it fully and actually become dependent on it so that they really want to buy it.
I expect companies won't ever realize this. Commercial software tends to get more painful to use as time goes on, as if they don't even realize that it's the lowly despicable users who in the end, are their source of revenue.
Stolen Information, blah, blah, blah. Did anyone burst in with a gun and take it from the person who compiled the list, or sneak in at night and open the safe? No, it was leaked. Big difference.
As much as I'd like the government to pass a ton of laws and crack down on people who gossip about me, using *STOLEN INFORMATION*, it's still a stupid idea. If you tell someone something, they can pass it on. It's the way the world works. Deal with it instead of advocating a bunch of legal measures to protect stupid companies from themselves.
Should we even care? Hell no. It's not like it'd be impossible to do business if secrets like this always leaked. It'd mean that they wouldn't plan this sort of thing as far in advance and maybe they'd stop having such big sales, instead having a more consistent price. But if they can't learn the lesson that children do, that secrets are hard to keep if you tell them to even one person, maybe they do deserve to die out.
Think about that before you go on about ILLEGAL INFORMATION!
As Ellis says, it's only an open question to IP lawyers. In all ways it's a closed issue. After-agreement modifications to contracts on the part of a single party have *never* in any legal system that the western world uses, or is based on. (Some conditions can be open for either party to change, but only if the other agreed to it, pre-sale.)
There's *NO* basis for the claim that "IP" (the misnomer that it is) should be any different. Some claim that "you can simply return it, if you don't agree", and even if it were true (which is most definately is not), that doesn't mean that it's legal to impose conditions like that.
Actually, bait-and-switch laws prevent changing the conditions of an offer (advertised sale), so it's likely that they'd prevent you imposing more restrictions. If you don't print your EULA, in full, in your print ads (prominently) you probably can't make it stick.
The only (single!) case that has ever been found in favor of EULAs was a copyright issue where EULAs were only tangentially related. The company forbid something in the EULA that copyright already prevented, the case hung on traditional copyright law, not post-sale contracts. All other courts, in all other cases, have found against EULAs.
Think about it this way, would the coalition of software publishers be spending millions on bribes (oops, sorry, "donations"...) to try to pass the UCITA if EULAs were valid now. They know full well they aren't, but they want to keep up appearances so they don't admit it.
Bullshit it doesn't. There's no concievable reason (benefit to society) why those prices should be secret, nor any legal basis for making them so.
The whole idea of capitalism is that people have total knowledge. They know how the items people are selling relate to each other, and they know the prices beforehand so that they can pick the best.
Both of these (consumer-run product info sites and pricing-list sites) are things that businesses dislike, precisely because they don't want to actually compete, they want guaranteed revenue. An educated consumer will probably be a violation of the law in a few years.
I downloaded some lossless music a while back. I played around with MP3s enough to be able to tell a bad one instantly and often pick up better ones, so I wanted to see what I was missing.
Turns out that three of the seven songs I downloaded had blips in them. Much more annoying than slight mushiness or something.
It made me think that people trading lossless music are into it for the dick war. They're only there because it's glamorous to trade larger files. This feeling was reenforced after doing some blind tests on high-quality OGGs and --r3mix MP3s from LAME, they were so close to the original that not only could I not pick the best, but I couldn't hear any difference at all.
> It is not an "after-sale restriction" since you still have what you purchased, namely a box and a silver coaster [...]
Do they advertise it this way (just a coaster), or do they show pictures of fantasy characters killing monsters, with actual in-game screenshots? If they advertise it as a $30 coaster, you're right. If they advertise it as an online game that you need their software to play, then it becomes an after-sale restriction. They imply that by buying the box and paying a monthly fee that you can do what you see on the box.
> [...] to connect to their servers you have to agree to another contract (which you explicitly do every time you sign on) telling you what you can and cannot do.
Click-throughs are irrelevant. Unless they're pre-sale. Only one (USA) case has ever upheld click-throughs and it was a copyright case where click-through licensing was only tangentially related.
They'd be free and clear if they gave the game discs away (or for S&H only) and did the whole transaction after making you read a license. Until they go to something like this, they have no case.
> [...] in order for them to survive they have to take as tough a stance on this as they can.
Wah. Life is tough. Bad business models (which this is, if they can't do it profitably and legally) don't deserve corporate welfare.
> I checked into all of this (and actually got legal advice)
Then you did explain the circumstances, or the lawyer wasn't compotent, or you didn't catch it when they said "Well, they have no case, but they can make your life miserable, don't piss off people with money."
They don't, and can't, have a case. The DMCA doesn't even apply because ShowEQ doesn't involve the game software at all and they can't claim copyright on information they're sending to you, based on your actions in the game.
> If you interfere with this, they will not be happy. [and you will be made unhappy if they want]
Actually, the contract you sign for monthly service is limited by the fact that you purchased the game and weren't informed of any limitations.
If the game was a commodity (telephone) that wasn't controlled by the service provider, this is different. The service provider's first contact with you is the contract.
In the EQ case, the only use of the game is to play online. They spell out the 'monthly fee required' clause, but if they don't spell out the limitations (we get to snoop, etc, etc) they very well might not apply because the deal is finalized when you buy the game, not when you sign up, because the only use of the game is to use with their service, so if you buy the game, you're buying the service. They can't impose after-sale restrictions any more than the usual EULA could.
If they want to get around this they should give the client away, thus not forming a contract at this time, and spelling out all limitations online pre-registration.
Well, Open Source(tm) isn't really the definition of open source, it's just one group's view of it. For most purposes, open source (and many of the many-eyeballs benefits) could be achieved with proprietary software that had a visible codebase (not just for people who pay a lot, or sign an NDA, etc) and encouraged people to discuss and suggest changes.
This wouldn't happen for someone like MS with their shared-source plan because 1) it's users at home who have the time to help with someone else's project and 2) MS are jerks who have alienated most of the good coders.
But Apple is getting good results even though MacOS X is largely proprietary.
Largely. Though she does admit to being suprised at one point when the slander campaign against her isn't supported by the whole opposing party. This shows a bit that Weber isn't saying everyone of those philosophies is a "bad guy".
And I think it was said at one point that conservative/liberal parties were more evil incompotents than would have been expected because they were the ones who were grabbing for power during the death of the old government. They were also the ones willing to bind together parties of conflicting interests just to hold power, where other people in their parties would have been willing to maintain the old multi-party structure even though it meant they didn't totally control it.
Seems fairly realistic. Not all politicians are nasty, but most who succeed are simply because they must sell out to do so.
But yes, these characters were the shallowest of the bunch. Even Saint-Just and crowd were doing good, as they saw it.
This is why book 11 will be quite neat. Neither government is of useless incompotents, both are likable and believe themselves to be in the right, and both navies are staffed by skilled people.
I liked the "bad" Manticorans for one main reason, they kept the "good guys" from being all pure and good, simply by virtue of their planet of birth. This actually gave some story value to Honor's political adventures that wouldn't have been there is everyone had agreed with her and/or been rational.
I did like the 1-7 books more than 8-10 though, except than in 8-10 the Peeps are getting more interesting.
Not quite. A man gives a few billion and people say, nice, but not enough to entitle you to do the other crap you do without being called on it.
Give whatever you can, to whatever you will. I won't criticize. But if you brag about it, I'll point out that it's not the absolute size of the donation that matters as much as the percentage. If someone with $100B gives $1B, it's much like me giving $1K. In fact, because more income goes to necesities at a lower income I actually have much less spare money, so that $1k likely directly impacts my budget, for someone with billions they've already taken care of actual expenses with the first millions, the rest is gravy. As such, it doesn't hurt as much, so they deserve to have this pointed out when they brag about their generosity.
Microsoft also makes a big deal about donations, like the MS Office licenses it donated to the Red Cross after 9/11. Total cost to MS, $50 in CDs, tax write-off... much higher.
I wonder about the accuracy of those numbers. I run Linux at home, and a Windows/Linux mix at work, on about six machines, but all of them run Mozilla, which reports itself as IE6 on WinXP. Even the P133 with Win98 and IE4.x(?) because I spoof the user agent string with Proximitron. (Mainly because of idiot web designers like you're replying to.)
How accurate are these numbers really likely to be?
Re:Death before dis' Honor.
on
War of Honor
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· Score: 2
Actually, Burdette was very highly ranked in competition. The issue was that he trained in a non-fighting style, where Honor was shown earlier losing points to her instructor because she fought in a style that went for killing shots instead of "touches".
And as someone below this points out, she had a bionic eye in the third and fourth books that specifically gave her telescopic vision. She again lost this in later books (burned out) and got an even better eye at the same time as she got her new arm.
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Because people who get "abducted" are all fruits. They have stupid stories about anal probing. The aliens always confirm these people's opinions (that conveniently are always ignored because of a conspiracy) about whatever ridiculous thing they're going on about. These people don't understand the difference between causality and correlation, they say things like "It didn't look like a plane [to me], I couldn't find out that it was a weather balloon, so it *must* have been a UFO" and they don't even understand why they're ridiculous.
That's why they don't get believed. They're not mentally all there and they make assumptions from too-few facts.
What does this mean? Because no other country tried (why, most of them were allies with one of the two countries that were trying), it must be false? No other country has made a plane like the SR-71, or nuclear submarines as capable as the US, but most people believe in those.
The space-race was a massive attempt by both sides to demoralize the other side by proving them to be less capable. Don't you think the Russians would have pointed out the US's lies if they could have? They've sent probes around the moon before. It'd be a simple matter to have sent out close enough to the landing site to photograph the empty site for proof that there never was anything there.
If you were in a contest with someone and suspected they won a big prize by cheating, and all you had to do to check was send someone to review tapes of part of the contest, wouldn't you do so? Wouldn't you blow the whistle? How about if the other person was your sworn enemy and you could humiliate them completely by this?
What is really so suspicious about the moon landings? The rocketry technology is there, I prove it every time I use a signal broadcast by a geo-synchronous satellite. The life-support equipment is there, this is actually easier than building a suit that'll work at great depths.
On one side of the UFO vs Moon Landing you have a bunch of trained scientists willing to show you the inbetween steps and the documentation, as well as explaining why certain things don't match your explanations and show how you can test these assumptions in an unbiased experiemnt. On the other hand, you'd got a bunch of crystal-power using, accupuncture practising, new-age weenies who make claims like UFO abduction or perpetual motion and yet get violent and abusive when you ask for a demonstration, let alone proof.
Who do you really think is more believable?
If students can learn an office suite and desktop environment like Mandrake, or Redhat, and they can't apply these skills to Windows, they don't deserve to graduate. Students taught on a Mac manage to transfer their skills to other computers with a day or so of orientation, so why do you expect Linux will be much harder? You do know it's not all command-line based, right? There are applications other than grep and vim.
Perhaps they'll be addicted to system stability and being able to move documents between programs... It might be hard to go back after that.
This is like saying that records are exact duplicates of the original music because they're analog. Even if the recording process was perfect, the materials aren't and can't hold exactly the shape intended.
The photograph is limited by the (fairly large) size of the light-sensitive grains in the film.
I'd trust digital processes more because you can keep all in-between steps and use only documented sharpening routines, etc. Both sides could go back to the same digitally signed original and follow the steps themselves. With optical processes you trade your distrust of digital for completely untraceable analog steps. Who knows what was done to the picture? Nobody can ever repeat an analog step exactly the second time so you can't ever get the same result from the negative. Was it because it was intentionally added, or because there was just a small mistake during one of the processes?
Using digital is fine if you scan the negative at a high enough resolution to capture the film grain (and thus be assured of capturing all detail) or if you shoot at a resolution that provides more detail on resolution charts than the analog film which would be used.
Just like film grain, it's a valid comparison.
Purists will insist that because *some* film has incredibly small grains, if handled perfectly, that all film is 30+ MP, but we'll be laughing at them with out 5+ MP cameras that surpass anything film really has to offer. Just the same as audiophiles who prefer the "warmth" (static) of records...
Modems used to print it when they lost carrier, so BBSes would watch for it and force a reset of that line, in case they had missed the hardware handshaking that was a little spotty in the old days. So, you'd convince someone to type NO CARRIER and they'd be kicked offline.
Some systems had a bit of an accounting bug where they tallied billing every hour, or when you logged off. If you were kicked off, they forgot. So some people would NO CARRIER themselves just before the hour.
You can't just ban it though. It'll still happen but the devices will come from the third-world instead of reputable medical companies.
Make abuse of it illegal, make it illegal to give to someone else. And make it cheap.
If it's cheap (and easily available) and it's a crime to supply it, chances are that it'll be easier to get legally (and turn yourself into a veggie) than be strung along by someone else.
But, if these things do get invented, and I imagine they will, it'll effectively be a cheap and painless (joyful even) mode of suicide. Kids that sniff gasoline today might decide that dying of pleasure is much better than living in a hellhole. And how are we to stop that, or do we?
And a synth can't mimic a piano? It seems that many "piano traits" are things synths should have, like variable-sensitivity keys and such. When synths have that, what's the stop them from loading piano sounds?
Building a device to *just* emulate a piano seems so limiting.
How long have good synths been around? Most "good" piano players I know started as children, so likely good synth players will as well. Anyone older than 25 couldn't really have grown up with a synth the way most piano players grew up with a piano.
Eventually synths will take over. There's no sound difference some good DSP code can't fix and they're much more than just a piano.
Copyright already doesn't apply. In your example I might not be allowed to copy your letter completely but I could summarize in enough detail to get all the details across, and facts aren't copyrightable, I could freely reproduce your daughter's cell-phone number.
Do I think you should have control over the information you create and its distribution? No. If you don't want people to know something, keep it a secret. Can you imagine how much farther western society would fall if people could sue each other for blabbing a secret? "Your honor, Susan told Jimmy that I had a crush on him, embarrasing me and causing $300k dollars in emotional damage."
Copyright exist *ONLY* to ensure that authors get the first chance to profit from their works, NOT to allow them to control the use of their works.
Well, the idea is that copyright protection is used only to guarantee the author a monopoly on sales. It's not intended to be used to keep something private.
The idea of ever-increasing fees is a good one, especially the idea that they double, making it impossible for anyone to hold onto their works forever.
Moreso, I'd have that just cover commercial user. I'd say that fair use rights should be extended from day one and that personal, not-for-profit copies should be allowed after a short period, fifteen years or something.
I don't think Disney should lose Mickey Mouse just so another company can start making movies with him, as much as I think that popular culture should quickly belong to the people who lived with it. Companies merely wanting to make their own copyrighted movies, but with someone else's characters, can wait longer.
Completely irrelevant. Your freedom of association has nothing to do with control over a product.
If you make a product and sell it, I can buy it. If you don't want me to have it you can choose not to sell to me, but if you sell to someone else I can buy it from them.
You *do not* get to dictate what someone does with something you sold them. If you don't want someone using your creation, whatever it is, in some certain way, you'd better not sell it.
Both parties can win. Let's say that I'm good at making furniture and you're not. I can make a chair for $20 (parts and labour), you'd put that much into parts alone (wastage) and then much extra time, trying to come up to speed. If I sell you the chair for $30 it's still less than it would cost you to make it, but I profit from it as well.
Not all profit is a "fucking over". If I don't make more than $20 per chair, I starve (or rather, quit making chairs and start farming). Even "profit" over and above expenses often goes towards future expenses (retirement) and everyone has the right to self-enrichment, as long as they don't do it at the expense of others.
The "fucking over" comes when I make a chair for $10, and sell it for $90, keeping you from undercutting me by telling my suppliers that if they sell supplies to you I'll stop dealing with them, thus causing them (as I'm the biggest customer) to go bankrupt. Additional fucking over comes when the chair has a "license agreement" printed on the bottom saying that only one person is ever allowed to sit in a chair, other people need other chairs, even if there're empty chairs available.
You're right that economics (in the long run) is zero-sum. In a closed system, more value can't be invented, but the world is a long way from being a closed system and with potential space industry, etc, it may never be. Have you heard the phrase "A rising tide floats all boats"? In a non-closed economy it's true. If I make my customers wealthy, they'll have more money to spend, hopefully to spend on my products.
Not so. I quite enjoyed _My Big Fat Greek Wedding_. There have even been other "chick flicks" that didn't suck. Few and far between perhaps, but they do exist. You need to keep up with a network of guy friends and when you hear about a movie like this that isn't overly sappy you can take your wife/gf to it, garnering major brownie points and yet not having to sit through a Goldie Hawn or Barbara Streisand movie.
The problem with payment options for software is that people don't really understand that it's not at all like a physical product and they keep trying to price it like one.
If you rent a car for a day, nobody else can use it. If you didn't really need it and just let it sit by the curb you'd still be depriving the company of a car. It makes sense to charge you full price (except perhaps wear and tear) because you represent a missed opportunity to rent to someone else.
Software isn't like this. If I pay for a one-day use of Photoshop and don't use it, all I cost was some bits in a billing spreadsheet, or the up-front cost of sending the package. My not using it means they don't need to do anything and thus they don't have any real costs. But you know the pricing model isn't going to reflect this.
It's similar to the piracy loons who claim that every copy of Photoshop selling for $1 in Asia is ($799) on the books of Adobe, as if someone who wasn't going to pay anyway costs them a sale.
Back to the "Of these three, pick any two" topic... It's not unreasonable to expect a product to stay current, to have a return policy, and to be your property.
It's how shareware works. You get to try the product, often in a very full-featured way, you usually get any updates they release in the near future, so you don't get stuck with an old version, there's a subscription (cheaper purchase for owners of old versions) to allow you to keep current, and it's yours, they can't take it away and don't try.
In fact, the ideal shareware model seems to be to only lightly cripple, or perhaps just nag past low usage limit / day. This lets a person use it fully and actually become dependent on it so that they really want to buy it.
I expect companies won't ever realize this. Commercial software tends to get more painful to use as time goes on, as if they don't even realize that it's the lowly despicable users who in the end, are their source of revenue.
Stolen Information, blah, blah, blah. Did anyone burst in with a gun and take it from the person who compiled the list, or sneak in at night and open the safe? No, it was leaked. Big difference.
As much as I'd like the government to pass a ton of laws and crack down on people who gossip about me, using *STOLEN INFORMATION*, it's still a stupid idea. If you tell someone something, they can pass it on. It's the way the world works. Deal with it instead of advocating a bunch of legal measures to protect stupid companies from themselves.
Should we even care? Hell no. It's not like it'd be impossible to do business if secrets like this always leaked. It'd mean that they wouldn't plan this sort of thing as far in advance and maybe they'd stop having such big sales, instead having a more consistent price. But if they can't learn the lesson that children do, that secrets are hard to keep if you tell them to even one person, maybe they do deserve to die out.
Think about that before you go on about ILLEGAL INFORMATION!
As Ellis says, it's only an open question to IP lawyers. In all ways it's a closed issue. After-agreement modifications to contracts on the part of a single party have *never* in any legal system that the western world uses, or is based on. (Some conditions can be open for either party to change, but only if the other agreed to it, pre-sale.)
There's *NO* basis for the claim that "IP" (the misnomer that it is) should be any different. Some claim that "you can simply return it, if you don't agree", and even if it were true (which is most definately is not), that doesn't mean that it's legal to impose conditions like that.
Actually, bait-and-switch laws prevent changing the conditions of an offer (advertised sale), so it's likely that they'd prevent you imposing more restrictions. If you don't print your EULA, in full, in your print ads (prominently) you probably can't make it stick.
The only (single!) case that has ever been found in favor of EULAs was a copyright issue where EULAs were only tangentially related. The company forbid something in the EULA that copyright already prevented, the case hung on traditional copyright law, not post-sale contracts. All other courts, in all other cases, have found against EULAs.
Think about it this way, would the coalition of software publishers be spending millions on bribes (oops, sorry, "donations"...) to try to pass the UCITA if EULAs were valid now. They know full well they aren't, but they want to keep up appearances so they don't admit it.
Bullshit it doesn't. There's no concievable reason (benefit to society) why those prices should be secret, nor any legal basis for making them so.
The whole idea of capitalism is that people have total knowledge. They know how the items people are selling relate to each other, and they know the prices beforehand so that they can pick the best.
Both of these (consumer-run product info sites and pricing-list sites) are things that businesses dislike, precisely because they don't want to actually compete, they want guaranteed revenue. An educated consumer will probably be a violation of the law in a few years.
I downloaded some lossless music a while back. I played around with MP3s enough to be able to tell a bad one instantly and often pick up better ones, so I wanted to see what I was missing.
Turns out that three of the seven songs I downloaded had blips in them. Much more annoying than slight mushiness or something.
It made me think that people trading lossless music are into it for the dick war. They're only there because it's glamorous to trade larger files. This feeling was reenforced after doing some blind tests on high-quality OGGs and --r3mix MP3s from LAME, they were so close to the original that not only could I not pick the best, but I couldn't hear any difference at all.
> It is not an "after-sale restriction" since you still have what you purchased, namely a box and a silver coaster [...]
Do they advertise it this way (just a coaster), or do they show pictures of fantasy characters killing monsters, with actual in-game screenshots? If they advertise it as a $30 coaster, you're right. If they advertise it as an online game that you need their software to play, then it becomes an after-sale restriction. They imply that by buying the box and paying a monthly fee that you can do what you see on the box.
> [...] to connect to their servers you have to agree to another contract (which you explicitly do every time you sign on) telling you what you can and cannot do.
Click-throughs are irrelevant. Unless they're pre-sale. Only one (USA) case has ever upheld click-throughs and it was a copyright case where click-through licensing was only tangentially related.
They'd be free and clear if they gave the game discs away (or for S&H only) and did the whole transaction after making you read a license. Until they go to something like this, they have no case.
> [...] in order for them to survive they have to take as tough a stance on this as they can.
Wah. Life is tough. Bad business models (which this is, if they can't do it profitably and legally) don't deserve corporate welfare.
> I checked into all of this (and actually got legal advice)
Then you did explain the circumstances, or the lawyer wasn't compotent, or you didn't catch it when they said "Well, they have no case, but they can make your life miserable, don't piss off people with money."
They don't, and can't, have a case. The DMCA doesn't even apply because ShowEQ doesn't involve the game software at all and they can't claim copyright on information they're sending to you, based on your actions in the game.
> If you interfere with this, they will not be happy. [and you will be made unhappy if they want]
That is true.
Actually, the contract you sign for monthly service is limited by the fact that you purchased the game and weren't informed of any limitations.
If the game was a commodity (telephone) that wasn't controlled by the service provider, this is different. The service provider's first contact with you is the contract.
In the EQ case, the only use of the game is to play online. They spell out the 'monthly fee required' clause, but if they don't spell out the limitations (we get to snoop, etc, etc) they very well might not apply because the deal is finalized when you buy the game, not when you sign up, because the only use of the game is to use with their service, so if you buy the game, you're buying the service. They can't impose after-sale restrictions any more than the usual EULA could.
If they want to get around this they should give the client away, thus not forming a contract at this time, and spelling out all limitations online pre-registration.
Well, Open Source(tm) isn't really the definition of open source, it's just one group's view of it. For most purposes, open source (and many of the many-eyeballs benefits) could be achieved with proprietary software that had a visible codebase (not just for people who pay a lot, or sign an NDA, etc) and encouraged people to discuss and suggest changes.
This wouldn't happen for someone like MS with their shared-source plan because 1) it's users at home who have the time to help with someone else's project and 2) MS are jerks who have alienated most of the good coders.
But Apple is getting good results even though MacOS X is largely proprietary.
Largely. Though she does admit to being suprised at one point when the slander campaign against her isn't supported by the whole opposing party. This shows a bit that Weber isn't saying everyone of those philosophies is a "bad guy".
And I think it was said at one point that conservative/liberal parties were more evil incompotents than would have been expected because they were the ones who were grabbing for power during the death of the old government. They were also the ones willing to bind together parties of conflicting interests just to hold power, where other people in their parties would have been willing to maintain the old multi-party structure even though it meant they didn't totally control it.
Seems fairly realistic. Not all politicians are nasty, but most who succeed are simply because they must sell out to do so.
But yes, these characters were the shallowest of the bunch. Even Saint-Just and crowd were doing good, as they saw it.
This is why book 11 will be quite neat. Neither government is of useless incompotents, both are likable and believe themselves to be in the right, and both navies are staffed by skilled people.
I liked the "bad" Manticorans for one main reason, they kept the "good guys" from being all pure and good, simply by virtue of their planet of birth. This actually gave some story value to Honor's political adventures that wouldn't have been there is everyone had agreed with her and/or been rational.
I did like the 1-7 books more than 8-10 though, except than in 8-10 the Peeps are getting more interesting.
Not quite. A man gives a few billion and people say, nice, but not enough to entitle you to do the other crap you do without being called on it.
... much higher.
Give whatever you can, to whatever you will. I won't criticize. But if you brag about it, I'll point out that it's not the absolute size of the donation that matters as much as the percentage. If someone with $100B gives $1B, it's much like me giving $1K. In fact, because more income goes to necesities at a lower income I actually have much less spare money, so that $1k likely directly impacts my budget, for someone with billions they've already taken care of actual expenses with the first millions, the rest is gravy. As such, it doesn't hurt as much, so they deserve to have this pointed out when they brag about their generosity.
Microsoft also makes a big deal about donations, like the MS Office licenses it donated to the Red Cross after 9/11. Total cost to MS, $50 in CDs, tax write-off
I wonder about the accuracy of those numbers. I run Linux at home, and a Windows/Linux mix at work, on about six machines, but all of them run Mozilla, which reports itself as IE6 on WinXP. Even the P133 with Win98 and IE4.x(?) because I spoof the user agent string with Proximitron. (Mainly because of idiot web designers like you're replying to.)
How accurate are these numbers really likely to be?
Actually, Burdette was very highly ranked in competition. The issue was that he trained in a non-fighting style, where Honor was shown earlier losing points to her instructor because she fought in a style that went for killing shots instead of "touches".
And as someone below this points out, she had a bionic eye in the third and fourth books that specifically gave her telescopic vision. She again lost this in later books (burned out) and got an even better eye at the same time as she got her new arm.