The evil marketing firms of the world can still survive in a world with AdBlock et al... They just need to cast a more narrow net - Target those who, for whatever reason (old? stupid? Researchers studying the behavior of bottom-feeders in a shrinking ecosystem?) don't block ads - And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Wow, I've never actually SEEN someone use the Broken Window fallacy without being sarcastic. Good show, ol' bean!
...No you wouldn't. The *game logic* is on the server. You'd have to create your own server to play it. This makes it very hard to pirate, AND very tied to having a good internet connection even in "private" mode
No, it's not. The game uses an extreme amount of CPU as it crunches those numbers itself, and the game continues to run even if your internet connection is lost. The only thing the server handles is the Facebook-like social gaming elements, and the save files.
The "Oh, our server handles all the number crunching" was a bold faced lie by EA and Maxis, because that kind of number crunching would not be possible without a monthly fee to pay for server maintenance.
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy met with an unfortunate accident.
There has been a lot of that happening recently in the gun-rights subculture.
LK
Hahahaha, yeah, the liberal mafia is coming to get ya. BOOGIDY BOOGIDY BOO~~~.
Anything to keep people paranoid and scared and above all else, buying more guns they don't need.
Having said that, I expect this to be banned, with the NRA's support. Not because of safety regulations or what have you, but because the NRA's purpose is to get people buying more guns, and if you can print a gun for effectively nothing, they're not going to be all that enthused about the idea.
This is ridiculous. If I were her, I'd call up the company and ask them if I could license their trademark for my existing book for $1 in perpetuity. This would resolve the issue of them being forced to defend their trademark.
If that didn't work, I'd remove the book from Amazon UK, because I wouldn't want to be sued in the UK by this UK-based company, but then I'd file a counter-DMCA takedown on Amazon - US?
I don't know if this is good legal advice. I'm not a lawyer. But this is what I would do if I had a ebook under my name. Either that, or since it's a ebook, I would just rename the book and just do like Prince did and append at the end of its name (formerly known as "Spots the Space Marines")
$1 in perpetuity? That sounds reasonable, which suggests to me you've never heard of Games Workshop before.
This is the company that sues people who try to sell their products online, because they feel that they're the only ones with the right to use a shopping cart (You can check out The War Store for a brief explanation of this)
... that requires gaming stores that want to stock them give them a percentage of their store in free shelf space and make huge orders just to order anything at all...
...that banned exports to Australia because due to exchange rate shenanigans, it is literally cheaper to buy their product in the UK and pay shipping to Aus/NZ than to buy it from Games Workshop.
Games Workshop is not a company that is in any way reasonable. The only reason they're even still around is they have a very large amount of inertia and have some rather delightfully interesting storylines -- interesting enough that Blizzard ripped them off wholesale to make Warcraft (Warhammer Fantasy) and Starcraft (Warhammer 40k).
... Having said that, and descending completely into the frothy rant stage of the evening, the game itself is disgustingly overpriced, sub-par from a rule and balance standpoint, perpetually and intentionally traps their customers in a forced upgrade cycle... It's literally only a matter of time before Privateer Press or Wizards of the Coast buy them out.
But yeah. GW is a bit butthurt because of Blizzard wholesale stealing, well, everything that Blizzard has been successful with in the past 20 years from Games Workshop. I'm not terribly surprised they're more vigilant nowadays.
And once again for the 1,000,000 time, yes, and this isn't the place to get legal advice...
True, but there's really any advice that you should ask for from./er's? How to meet members of the opposite sex? Which Linux distro to use? Whether Metro is better than Unity?
Once you get it in perspective, the question makes as much sense as any other.
Except this wasn't even a request for advice. This was a thinly veiled attempt to invoke the Streisand Effect.
Remember, a manufacturer, unless obligated by law, does not have to provide anything post-sale unless they've stated that they will.
Would like to watch when car manufacturers (all at the same time, sure) will start to follow NIKON'S policy.
CC.
They already kind of are. You can get more details here, at the Right to Repair coalition: http://www.righttorepair.org/
Basically, various companies have realized that they can charge dealers exorbitant fees for diagnostic equipment if they make said diagnostics proprietary trade secrets, and then the dealers will have to funnel the costs to the consumer -- which is fine, because the dealers are the only place in town to get the cars repaired at. It's gotten so bad that I've even seen proprietary light bulbs for some vehicles.
Are you sure they weren't doing the well known, "good cop, bad cop"? I do not think the order of torture, then bribery is random at all. The torturing effects how someone responds to bribery later.
There really is no in spite of. It's just the status quo.
If your "bad cop" routine involves hanging known innocents from hooks until they die and shoving flashlights up people's children's asses in front of them to get them to talk (both things confirmed by the Red Cross to have happened to people under our watch in Iraq), seek a different career path.
I have bad news, but films are designed to sell advertising, tickets, and concessions food in that order. you dont achieve all these things by making an accurate depiction of a subject matter, you sensationalize it. among other things patently false in several other films:
1. Abraham lincoln, neither vampire hunter nor martial arts expert
2. transformers: cars do not in fact transform into killer robots.
3. Jurrasic park: while UNIX is in fact quite useful in the administration of automated SCADA systems, no such systems have been constructed to date for the express purpose of housing genetically cloned dinosaurs, which also do not exist.
4. zero dark thirty: "terror" is in fact not something a nation can declare war on or successfully claimed to have emerged the victor from.
Ya know, I think I'd watch a parody movie about Wikileaks. One where Assange is a Cyborg Ninja from the 45th century, sent back to save the world from what the United States will become. But not while he's still alive. I guess I'm saying that my descendants would probably enjoy that movie.
But 1, 2, 3 -- those are obviously based on fantasy. Not reality. This movie is ostensibly based on real people, real events. That puts it in a different light. It is held in a higher standard.
Imagine a movie about Linus Torvalds, where he's portrayed as actively attempting to destroy America's economy by being a socialist communist pink fascist obsessed with "stealing" from American programmers, who put up a valiant and noble fight against him. Would suck, wouldn't it?
As for #4, having not seen the latest "Rah Rah War is Awesome" movie there, nor do I really intend to. (I try to not support political assassination whenever possible.) I can only say that your comment on Zero Dark Thirty seems like more of a statement of fact about a real life policy enacted by the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama administration.
Don't get me wrong, Zero Dark Thirty is probably the closest thing in that list to being relevant, but you miss a bigger point -- 0DT takes a very disgusting pro-torture stance, which is pure propaganda bordering on outright fantasy.
We caught Bin Laden DESPITE using torture, not BECAUSE of it.
They literally used inverse phase wave mapping to remove the vocals on his song, then sang the same lyrics, including the "Johnny C's in Trouble" line
Although the Glee version is a very close reproduction, I don't think it's done by channel phase inverting trick because that technique results in a mono backing track, and their backing track is clearly stereo. Plus if you listen closely on headphones you can hear they're using different drum samples and the instruments sound a bit different.
However, it's worth noting that the only thing used in Jonathan Coulton's cover from the original is the lyrics. The cover has completely new chord progression and vocal melody that doesn't exist in the original rap at all. Essentially in this case the "cover" is a completely different song with the lyrics from "Baby got back", so I think it's still a clear copyright violation regardless of how they reproduced Coulton's music.
Literally they are note for note the same as far as instrumental bits go. Ok, there are SMALL differences are when they used the audio version of a poorly done photoshop job to remove certain elements, like the duck quacking (which can still be heard, faintly), but, that's just me.
And yeah, it's a clear copyright violation. And the guys from Glee should know better. However, I *believe* their stance is that JoCo is just some silly little Internet artist and they can get away with this because what can he do, eh?
I personally think they vastly underestimated how big his followings are on the Interwebs, and how loud us computer nerds can be when we feel one of our own (remember, Coulton was a Slashdotting computer programmer before making it big as a musician) is being thrown under the bus.
as a typical/.er I did not RTFA... but how can he claim rights to a cover? he covered a song, and he is claiming copyright on the cover of a song, that is copyritten by someone else? Am I understanding this correctly???
No, you are not understanding it correctly. He did not do a mere cover, as in, him singing over Sir Mix-A-Lot's instruments. He did an acoustic arrangement on top of Sir Mix-A-Lot's lyrics, which he sang in what I call a folk-rock style.
Glee literally stole his instrument track note for note (save for some REALLY clumsy editing to remove a duck quacking) and are now profiting off his work.
There is separate licensing for covers and derivative works. Coulton only got a license to cover, although his certainly an original take on it, he has no special ownership over his version, anyone else getting a license to cover can perform a version identical to coultons.
Except the Berne Convention gives him copyright over the derivative work. They cannot just steal it and say "welp, it's a cover, so you have no rights." Especially since it's an original arrangement (he didn't just sing along to the original instruments).
And it's not that they just got a licence and decided to do an acoustic, folk-like version like Coulton did. They literally used inverse phase wave mapping to remove the vocals on his song, then sang the same lyrics, including the "Johnny C's in Trouble" line (whereas the original was "Mix-a-Lot's in Trouble"), and this is key: On top of his original instrumental track.
They blatantly stole a song online, are attempting to profit from it, and oh yeah, the producer for Glee basically taunted Coulton on Twitter, suggesting he should be happy he got ripped off.
Oh, and did I mention that this isn't the first time they've done it? By far?
And Youtube, obviously. And most importantly: Hulu and any other sites that host Glee on demand -- Fox, for example. Dish and DirectTV also have on demand access, are they susceptible to DMCA requests?
I think the point is, Linus would rather the guy not do any work than to continue to produce such garbage code. He would rather make every change himself, than to rely on fellow-programmers who will only make things worse.
There's a term for people with attitudes like this; who express them by public tantrums: A Prima Donna.
Ok, I'll bite: How is an email in a private mailing list a "public tantrum"?
Most people I know who have genuine, diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome already call themselves Autistic. They use the term Asperger's sparingly, only to explain afterwards, once they are sure the other person understands where they're coming from. They do so because so many assholes on the Internet have latched onto Asperger's Syndrome as a synonym for being a socially maladjusted asshole of various varieties.
On the other hand, Most people I know who have self-diagnosed, "Internet Asperger's" -- the "I'm a dick but it's MEDICAL so you can't call me out on my bad behavior" syndrome that so many forum twits have -- well, they can go fuck themselves. I would think this would finally put the nail in the coffin for that particular misuse, but I've already seen the various "Assburgers" trolls start to call themselves Autistic instead.
lol. you're naive. Looks like you never actually read an ISP contract. The only thing guaranteed in it is that you pay the ISP. Everything else is at the discretion of the ISP.
Only in the US. The UK and rest of the EU have sane consumer protection laws.
With Eve Online and X3 available, is there real need for rebooting the space sim genre? I would understand the concern if there really was no games available, but there are and they're both pretty great. On top of that I wouldn't want to touch single player space sim anymore. Eve is just that good.
Well, X3 is showing it's age -- which is why they're rebooting it.
I don't mean gameplay or even artistically -- the game's engine cannot support enough ram to handle the full simulation anymore. When you play the latest X3 games you are literally in a race against time before the game's engine craps out. This is even moreso with the not-quite-official-but-encouraged Xtended updates.
Oooh, they finally managed to kill one man half way around the world from me! I feel so much safer now that Bin Laden is gone... the chance of dying from a terrorist attack may have been well below 0.00001% before but... I bet it's down to, like, half of that now!
Say... how much did it cost to wage the war that killed this one man?
Almost 25% of what Bush's tax giveaway to the rich cost. Although that one's ongoing.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt to go after people with modded consoles that went terribly awry.
No. It's a partially completed feature, a Hardcore mode that either wasn't finished or left to be padded out as DLC. There's some code left in the game for it, including a check to see if anyone has the mode enabled, but since it wasn't finished it just enables it.
Bit of faulty logic, easily fixed, although apparently the game outright deletes your character data upon death with the mode enabled, so if you have already been nailed by it, too bad.
see, that's were the misunderstanding lies: wikipedia summarises quite well:
Under U.S. law, typefaces and the characters they contain are considered to be utilitarian objects whose utility outweighs any merit that may exist in protecting their creative elements. Typefaces are exempt from copyright protection in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). However, this finding was limited in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc., wherein it was held that scalable computer fonts, i.e., the instructions necessary to render a typeface, constitute a "computer program" for the purposes of copyright law and hence are subject to protection. Hence the computer file(s) associated with a scalable font will generally be protected even though the specific design of the characters is not.
So in the US I would assume Boers has not claim, but you still can not distribute those CDs:)
Ah, so you can get around this copyright by simply downloading a PNG (or some form of open Vector format file) of the font, and then converting that to an actual font file?
Having said this, you'll be pleased to note that yes, there is a Comic Sans Dyslexic version, with the same "weighting" as Gill Dyslexic adds to Gill.
Internet Rule 135 -- Any sufficiently bad idea provided as an example of what not to do will be done by someone, if only to say someone did it. Internet Rule 135, Corollary A -- This goes doubly true for MMORPG players.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, the OpenDyslexic guy specifically states he intended his project to infringe on the other Dyslexic fonts.
On the other hand, This Christian Boer guy comes across as having tried to stake a claim on the very idea of using a weighted font to combat Dyslexia.
On the, er, foot, the comparison image [apathyonline.net] that Boer shows off does have quite a few similarities. And beyond merely the "well duh, they're the same letters" level of similarities.
On the er, other foot, Holy cow, did not know that you cannot copyright a font. That explains all those $10 CDs with 5000 fonts on them and the like. I presume this means I can go find a copy of WildWord for free online instead of having to pay $TEXAS to replace the old digital download files I lost back in the day?
You push the power button on the Kindle Fire and the screen turns off. You push it again and the screen comes on and you're looking at the lock screen with adds - swipe the screen and the lock screen and ads go away. They are not displayed on the screen when the device is off.
On the e-ink displays the ads are displayed when the Kindle is turned off, but it requires no power to maintain the screen in that state - every once in a while the device wakes up, updates the ad and goes back to sleep - it uses very tiny amounts of power and has almost on impact on expected battery life.
You push the power button on the Kindle Fire and the screen turns off. You push it again and the screen comes on and you're looking at the lock screen with adds - swipe the screen and the lock screen and ads go away. They are not displayed on the screen when the device is off.
On the e-ink displays the ads are displayed when the Kindle is turned off, but it requires no power to maintain the screen in that state - every once in a while the device wakes up, updates the ad and goes back to sleep - it uses very tiny amounts of power and has almost on impact on expected battery life.
The Fire thing sounds perfectly fine then. That's almost an ideal way to set it up, in fact, I'm surprised there isn't a "Special Offers" iPhone or iPod with the same setup.
The eInk thing, well, I own a Gen 2 Kindle, and my friend owns a newer one with Special Offers, and I know for a fact that his battery lasts nowhere near as long as mine, all other things considered.
Slashdot Mirror
The evil marketing firms of the world can still survive in a world with AdBlock et al... They just need to cast a more narrow net - Target those who, for whatever reason (old? stupid? Researchers studying the behavior of bottom-feeders in a shrinking ecosystem?) don't block ads - And leave the rest of us the hell alone.
Wow, I've never actually SEEN someone use the Broken Window fallacy without being sarcastic. Good show, ol' bean!
...No you wouldn't. The *game logic* is on the server. You'd have to create your own server to play it. This makes it very hard to pirate, AND very tied to having a good internet connection even in "private" mode
No, it's not. The game uses an extreme amount of CPU as it crunches those numbers itself, and the game continues to run even if your internet connection is lost. The only thing the server handles is the Facebook-like social gaming elements, and the save files.
The "Oh, our server handles all the number crunching" was a bold faced lie by EA and Maxis, because that kind of number crunching would not be possible without a monthly fee to pay for server maintenance.
I wouldn't be surprised if this guy met with an unfortunate accident.
There has been a lot of that happening recently in the gun-rights subculture.
LK
Hahahaha, yeah, the liberal mafia is coming to get ya. BOOGIDY BOOGIDY BOO~~~.
Anything to keep people paranoid and scared and above all else, buying more guns they don't need.
Having said that, I expect this to be banned, with the NRA's support. Not because of safety regulations or what have you, but because the NRA's purpose is to get people buying more guns, and if you can print a gun for effectively nothing, they're not going to be all that enthused about the idea.
This is ridiculous. If I were her, I'd call up the company and ask them if I could license their trademark for my existing book for $1 in perpetuity. This would resolve the issue of them being forced to defend their trademark.
If that didn't work, I'd remove the book from Amazon UK, because I wouldn't want to be sued in the UK by this UK-based company, but then I'd file a counter-DMCA takedown on Amazon - US?
I don't know if this is good legal advice. I'm not a lawyer. But this is what I would do if I had a ebook under my name. Either that, or since it's a ebook, I would just rename the book and just do like Prince did and append at the end of its name (formerly known as "Spots the Space Marines")
$1 in perpetuity? That sounds reasonable, which suggests to me you've never heard of Games Workshop before.
This is the company that sues people who try to sell their products online, because they feel that they're the only ones with the right to use a shopping cart (You can check out The War Store for a brief explanation of this)
... that requires gaming stores that want to stock them give them a percentage of their store in free shelf space and make huge orders just to order anything at all...
...that banned exports to Australia because due to exchange rate shenanigans, it is literally cheaper to buy their product in the UK and pay shipping to Aus/NZ than to buy it from Games Workshop.
Games Workshop is not a company that is in any way reasonable. The only reason they're even still around is they have a very large amount of inertia and have some rather delightfully interesting storylines -- interesting enough that Blizzard ripped them off wholesale to make Warcraft (Warhammer Fantasy) and Starcraft (Warhammer 40k).
... Having said that, and descending completely into the frothy rant stage of the evening, the game itself is disgustingly overpriced, sub-par from a rule and balance standpoint, perpetually and intentionally traps their customers in a forced upgrade cycle... It's literally only a matter of time before Privateer Press or Wizards of the Coast buy them out.
But yeah. GW is a bit butthurt because of Blizzard wholesale stealing, well, everything that Blizzard has been successful with in the past 20 years from Games Workshop. I'm not terribly surprised they're more vigilant nowadays.
And once again for the 1,000,000 time, yes, and this isn't the place to get legal advice...
True, but there's really any advice that you should ask for from ./er's? How to meet members of the opposite sex? Which Linux distro to use? Whether Metro is better than Unity?
Once you get it in perspective, the question makes as much sense as any other.
Except this wasn't even a request for advice. This was a thinly veiled attempt to invoke the Streisand Effect.
Remember, a manufacturer, unless obligated by law, does not have to provide anything post-sale unless they've stated that they will.
Would like to watch when car manufacturers (all at the same time, sure) will start to follow NIKON'S policy.
CC.
They already kind of are. You can get more details here, at the Right to Repair coalition:
http://www.righttorepair.org/
Basically, various companies have realized that they can charge dealers exorbitant fees for diagnostic equipment if they make said diagnostics proprietary trade secrets, and then the dealers will have to funnel the costs to the consumer -- which is fine, because the dealers are the only place in town to get the cars repaired at. It's gotten so bad that I've even seen proprietary light bulbs for some vehicles.
Are you sure they weren't doing the well known, "good cop, bad cop"? I do not think the order of torture, then bribery is random at all. The torturing effects how someone responds to bribery later.
There really is no in spite of. It's just the status quo.
If your "bad cop" routine involves hanging known innocents from hooks until they die and shoving flashlights up people's children's asses in front of them to get them to talk (both things confirmed by the Red Cross to have happened to people under our watch in Iraq), seek a different career path.
upcoming film depicting wikileaks
I have bad news, but films are designed to sell advertising, tickets, and concessions food in that order. you dont achieve all these things by making an accurate depiction of a subject matter, you sensationalize it. among other things patently false in several other films:
1. Abraham lincoln, neither vampire hunter nor martial arts expert
2. transformers: cars do not in fact transform into killer robots.
3. Jurrasic park: while UNIX is in fact quite useful in the administration of automated SCADA systems, no such systems have been constructed to date for the express purpose of housing genetically cloned dinosaurs, which also do not exist.
4. zero dark thirty: "terror" is in fact not something a nation can declare war on or successfully claimed to have emerged the victor from.
Ya know, I think I'd watch a parody movie about Wikileaks. One where Assange is a Cyborg Ninja from the 45th century, sent back to save the world from what the United States will become. But not while he's still alive. I guess I'm saying that my descendants would probably enjoy that movie.
But 1, 2, 3 -- those are obviously based on fantasy. Not reality. This movie is ostensibly based on real people, real events. That puts it in a different light. It is held in a higher standard.
Imagine a movie about Linus Torvalds, where he's portrayed as actively attempting to destroy America's economy by being a socialist communist pink fascist obsessed with "stealing" from American programmers, who put up a valiant and noble fight against him. Would suck, wouldn't it?
As for #4, having not seen the latest "Rah Rah War is Awesome" movie there, nor do I really intend to. (I try to not support political assassination whenever possible.) I can only say that your comment on Zero Dark Thirty seems like more of a statement of fact about a real life policy enacted by the Bush Administration and continued by the Obama administration.
Don't get me wrong, Zero Dark Thirty is probably the closest thing in that list to being relevant, but you miss a bigger point -- 0DT takes a very disgusting pro-torture stance, which is pure propaganda bordering on outright fantasy.
We caught Bin Laden DESPITE using torture, not BECAUSE of it.
They literally used inverse phase wave mapping to remove the vocals on his song, then sang the same lyrics, including the "Johnny C's in Trouble" line
Although the Glee version is a very close reproduction, I don't think it's done by channel phase inverting trick because that technique results in a mono backing track, and their backing track is clearly stereo. Plus if you listen closely on headphones you can hear they're using different drum samples and the instruments sound a bit different.
However, it's worth noting that the only thing used in Jonathan Coulton's cover from the original is the lyrics. The cover has completely new chord progression and vocal melody that doesn't exist in the original rap at all. Essentially in this case the "cover" is a completely different song with the lyrics from "Baby got back", so I think it's still a clear copyright violation regardless of how they reproduced Coulton's music.
Here's a version where someone synched up the two versions via the first few instrumental hits at the start of the song:
https://soundcloud.com/alacrion/joco-v-glee
Literally they are note for note the same as far as instrumental bits go. Ok, there are SMALL differences are when they used the audio version of a poorly done photoshop job to remove certain elements, like the duck quacking (which can still be heard, faintly), but, that's just me.
And yeah, it's a clear copyright violation. And the guys from Glee should know better. However, I *believe* their stance is that JoCo is just some silly little Internet artist and they can get away with this because what can he do, eh?
I personally think they vastly underestimated how big his followings are on the Interwebs, and how loud us computer nerds can be when we feel one of our own (remember, Coulton was a Slashdotting computer programmer before making it big as a musician) is being thrown under the bus.
as a typical /.er I did not RTFA... but how can he claim rights to a cover? he covered a song, and he is claiming copyright on the cover of a song, that is copyritten by someone else? Am I understanding this correctly???
No, you are not understanding it correctly. He did not do a mere cover, as in, him singing over Sir Mix-A-Lot's instruments. He did an acoustic arrangement on top of Sir Mix-A-Lot's lyrics, which he sang in what I call a folk-rock style.
Glee literally stole his instrument track note for note (save for some REALLY clumsy editing to remove a duck quacking) and are now profiting off his work.
There is separate licensing for covers and derivative works. Coulton only got a license to cover, although his certainly an original take on it, he has no special ownership over his version, anyone else getting a license to cover can perform a version identical to coultons.
Except the Berne Convention gives him copyright over the derivative work. They cannot just steal it and say "welp, it's a cover, so you have no rights." Especially since it's an original arrangement (he didn't just sing along to the original instruments).
And it's not that they just got a licence and decided to do an acoustic, folk-like version like Coulton did. They literally used inverse phase wave mapping to remove the vocals on his song, then sang the same lyrics, including the "Johnny C's in Trouble" line (whereas the original was "Mix-a-Lot's in Trouble"), and this is key: On top of his original instrumental track.
They blatantly stole a song online, are attempting to profit from it, and oh yeah, the producer for Glee basically taunted Coulton on Twitter, suggesting he should be happy he got ripped off.
Oh, and did I mention that this isn't the first time they've done it? By far?
This is the point at which he should submit a DMCA takedown request to Apple.
And Youtube, obviously. And most importantly: Hulu and any other sites that host Glee on demand -- Fox, for example. Dish and DirectTV also have on demand access, are they susceptible to DMCA requests?
Hitler was ok, he didn't kill as many people as Stalin.
Stalin was ok, he didn't kill as many as the Church.
I think the point is, Linus would rather the guy not do any work than to continue to produce such garbage code. He would rather make every change himself, than to rely on fellow-programmers who will only make things worse.
There's a term for people with attitudes like this; who express them by public tantrums: A Prima Donna.
Ok, I'll bite: How is an email in a private mailing list a "public tantrum"?
Most people I know who have genuine, diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome already call themselves Autistic. They use the term Asperger's sparingly, only to explain afterwards, once they are sure the other person understands where they're coming from. They do so because so many assholes on the Internet have latched onto Asperger's Syndrome as a synonym for being a socially maladjusted asshole of various varieties.
On the other hand, Most people I know who have self-diagnosed, "Internet Asperger's" -- the "I'm a dick but it's MEDICAL so you can't call me out on my bad behavior" syndrome that so many forum twits have -- well, they can go fuck themselves. I would think this would finally put the nail in the coffin for that particular misuse, but I've already seen the various "Assburgers" trolls start to call themselves Autistic instead.
Such is life on the interwebs.
lol. you're naive. Looks like you never actually read an ISP contract. The only thing guaranteed in it is that you pay the ISP. Everything else is at the discretion of the ISP.
Only in the US. The UK and rest of the EU have sane consumer protection laws.
With Eve Online and X3 available, is there real need for rebooting the space sim genre? I would understand the concern if there really was no games available, but there are and they're both pretty great. On top of that I wouldn't want to touch single player space sim anymore. Eve is just that good.
Well, X3 is showing it's age -- which is why they're rebooting it.
I don't mean gameplay or even artistically -- the game's engine cannot support enough ram to handle the full simulation anymore. When you play the latest X3 games you are literally in a race against time before the game's engine craps out. This is even moreso with the not-quite-official-but-encouraged Xtended updates.
not taking money from someone != giving the rich money. Unless you dont believe you own any money and the government gives you an allowance.
Tax cuts are equally damaging to the budget as expenditures. Only in Wingnuttia are tax cuts budget neutral.
Oooh, they finally managed to kill one man half way around the world from me! I feel so much safer now that Bin Laden is gone... the chance of dying from a terrorist attack may have been well below 0.00001% before but... I bet it's down to, like, half of that now!
Say... how much did it cost to wage the war that killed this one man?
Almost 25% of what Bush's tax giveaway to the rich cost. Although that one's ongoing.
... that would be the appearance of safety. I don't think anything that has been done has actually added any significant safety.
EDUCATE THYSELF.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt to go after people with modded consoles that went terribly awry.
No. It's a partially completed feature, a Hardcore mode that either wasn't finished or left to be padded out as DLC. There's some code left in the game for it, including a check to see if anyone has the mode enabled, but since it wasn't finished it just enables it.
Bit of faulty logic, easily fixed, although apparently the game outright deletes your character data upon death with the mode enabled, so if you have already been nailed by it, too bad.
see, that's were the misunderstanding lies: wikipedia summarises quite well:
Under U.S. law, typefaces and the characters they contain are considered to be utilitarian objects whose utility outweighs any merit that may exist in protecting their creative elements. Typefaces are exempt from copyright protection in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). However, this finding was limited in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc., wherein it was held that scalable computer fonts, i.e., the instructions necessary to render a typeface, constitute a "computer program" for the purposes of copyright law and hence are subject to protection. Hence the computer file(s) associated with a scalable font will generally be protected even though the specific design of the characters is not.
So in the US I would assume Boers has not claim, but you still can not distribute those CDs :)
Ah, so you can get around this copyright by simply downloading a PNG (or some form of open Vector format file) of the font, and then converting that to an actual font file?
No more comic sans? Please?
Having said this, you'll be pleased to note that yes, there is a Comic Sans Dyslexic version, with the same "weighting" as Gill Dyslexic adds to Gill.
Internet Rule 135 -- Any sufficiently bad idea provided as an example of what not to do will be done by someone, if only to say someone did it.
Internet Rule 135, Corollary A -- This goes doubly true for MMORPG players.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, the OpenDyslexic guy specifically states he intended his project to infringe on the other Dyslexic fonts.
On the other hand, This Christian Boer guy comes across as having tried to stake a claim on the very idea of using a weighted font to combat Dyslexia.
On the, er, foot, the comparison image [apathyonline.net] that Boer shows off does have quite a few similarities. And beyond merely the "well duh, they're the same letters" level of similarities.
On the er, other foot, Holy cow, did not know that you cannot copyright a font. That explains all those $10 CDs with 5000 fonts on them and the like. I presume this means I can go find a copy of WildWord for free online instead of having to pay $TEXAS to replace the old digital download files I lost back in the day?
You push the power button on the Kindle Fire and the screen turns off. You push it again and the screen comes on and you're looking at the lock screen with adds - swipe the screen and the lock screen and ads go away. They are not displayed on the screen when the device is off.
On the e-ink displays the ads are displayed when the Kindle is turned off, but it requires no power to maintain the screen in that state - every once in a while the device wakes up, updates the ad and goes back to sleep - it uses very tiny amounts of power and has almost on impact on expected battery life.
You push the power button on the Kindle Fire and the screen turns off. You push it again and the screen comes on and you're looking at the lock screen with adds - swipe the screen and the lock screen and ads go away. They are not displayed on the screen when the device is off.
On the e-ink displays the ads are displayed when the Kindle is turned off, but it requires no power to maintain the screen in that state - every once in a while the device wakes up, updates the ad and goes back to sleep - it uses very tiny amounts of power and has almost on impact on expected battery life.
The Fire thing sounds perfectly fine then. That's almost an ideal way to set it up, in fact, I'm surprised there isn't a "Special Offers" iPhone or iPod with the same setup.
The eInk thing, well, I own a Gen 2 Kindle, and my friend owns a newer one with Special Offers, and I know for a fact that his battery lasts nowhere near as long as mine, all other things considered.