If they make their own system and link it to Steam, it would be awesome if I could buy a game once and have access to it from both the PC and the console. Heck, I would be happy with a small additional fee like $5.00. I never understood why I have to buy a game I already bought at full retail when I want it for another system. I already paid for most of the work that went into making the game. Why should I be charged for the whole thing again when they could simply charge me for the small part they had to change to get it to work on another system?
While I don't understand why they can't use the PC version of the Kinect for the PC version of the game, I am also more concerned with the new content they are making exclusive to the Xbox 360. What about the rest of us?
Except that the kinect is what is doing the voice recognition. It's not just being used as mic input.
So? They created a PC version of the Kinect. I don't see any reason for them to make content exclusive to a specific system. Besides, I am sure they could just process the mic input themselves instead of having the Kinect do it.
That fact that a creator chooses to use a publisher is hardly the fault of the copyright system. There are many creators that self-publish. As technology becomes cheaper, there will be less and less of a reason for creators to use publishers at all. If you choose to use a publisher, it was your decision to make. No one if forced to use a publisher.
The Java language took time and effort to develop, so the original author may be granted (by the government) a monopoly over his creation for 20 years. Then it falls into public domain.
Where did the 20 years come from?
That's how long it should be - one generation.
First off, copyright does not need to be one generation long. Copyright's purpose is to create incentives to create content. To do that, assuming your business model is to sell content and not its complements, copyright only needs to be long enough to create a reasonable expectation of profit from works. I would say 10 years would be more than enough for that in most areas. Copyright is not supposed to be a means to do something once and then make money from it forever.
Second off, a language is a means of expression not a expression itself. I can understand copyrighting an implementation of an API but I cannot understand copyrighting the API itself.
I am not saying I would not try to stop if someone walked out in front of my car. What I am saying is that getting run over is the natural consequence of not looking before walking into the street. What is even worse is that the person that walks in front of a moving vehicle is not only endangering their own life but also the life of the driver. How bad would you feel if you caused someone to swerve into a tree and die because you decided not to look before walking across the street.
There is only a statistically small number of people who cannot see. With the increasing number of electric cars, it would be much cheaper and make a lot more sense to have seeing eye dogs trained for a little longer than to have every electric car fitted with additional equipment to make unnecessary noise. Actually, I doubt it would even take additional training considering the seeing eye dogs probably are already trained to look and not just listen.
... some idiot student is laughing at how easy it is to throw the school into a frenzy and have an excuse to not go to the classes that his parents would otherwise force him to attend.
I can think of three ways off the top of my head for a blind man to walk across the street without getting hit by silent cars. Get a small handheld device that detects when big, fast-moving objects are coming by, walk with someone who can see, or have their seeing eye dog trained to not walk in front of a moving vehicle. If a blind person does not bother with any form of augmented traveling, then yes, they deserve to be hit by a car just as much as the guy who can see who walks into the street without looking.
It's quite obvious that people are abusing the system and that results in increased prices for everyone. As someone who doesn't abuse that, I welcome the move so we honest people get things cheaper. Screw those who ruin things for everyone else.
The policy is unnecessarily invasive and it will easily hurt legitimate customers. While it might be rare, it is completely possible that a legitimate customer will purchase at least two items in a 90 day window and more than one of them ends up being defective.
As to your "ten years", iirc I started on my Paxil Diaries book almost ten years ago. I still need to design its dust jacket.
Sorry. Let me clarify. I meant ten years from the day that it is released for public viewing/sale. I was not including the production time in the ten years.
I can see that some things should be renewable. I loathe Disney for advocating all these crazy laws that we have today. But - they do have something of a point with renewable copyrights. Mickey Mouse would have gone out of copyright well before I graduated high school. Probably before I graduated elementary school - he's been around that long. But, Mickey Mouse has been a money generator all these decades.
Let them have renewable copyrights. First renewal, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second renewal, millions of dollars. Third renewal, tens of millions. Fourth renewal, hundreds of millions. Just keep upping the ante by an order of magnitude. If they want to pay, the government benefits. If they don't want to pay, the people benefit. At some stage, even Mickey Mouse will be retired. I don't think they would renew even Mickey for a billion dollars!
I think it would be better to just protect the characters separate from the copyright and make that renewable. That way, if they are planning on making new works, they don't have to worry about another company stepping on their toes and it keeps external entities from defacing the characters in a way that would make them unprofitable to use again. The actual works those characters are in would evenually be release to the public domain. By continually paying the renewal fee a company can perpetually protect their characters from being used in new works without their permission.
Copyright should only be 17 years, renewable only by the Person (not Corporation) that created it, during their lifetime and in the year of their death by their heirs.
Why does copyright need to renewable at all? If you can't make a profit off something in 17 years, you need to consider going into another business. Also, I would argue 10 years would be a more appropriate copyright length.
Or maybe the people who liked it (or at least didn't hate it enough to be a whiny little bitch about it) enjoyed getting there more than the destination. I may not have been happy about the way it ended, but I can take a fucking step back and enjoy the series without discounting the whole thing cause the last minutes didn't jive with what I thought should happen.
Endings can destroy a good story. This is especially so when the story is told in the form of a video game. If you spend hundreds of hours in a story, you expect all your work to have value. Mass Effect 3 invalidates the whole point of your journey. In the game, you are trying to save galactic civilization from the jaws of death. By the end of the game, what you accomplish is saving a tiny blip in comparison. The destruction of the Mass Effect relays alone will cause galactic civilization to be crippled for what I would guess at least one thousand years. Many planets are saved from annihilation but all their supply chains are gone. Many of the survivors will probably starve or die of disease. For Earth, which was the primary planet to save in the game, it is even worse. Most of the galactic civilization has to survive together on a single planet. While many of the races joined together to fight the Reapers, much of the glue that held them together will be gone after the war. Conflicting cultures and goals combined with extremely scares resources will probably cause war until most of those who survived the Reaper war at Earth will die. Again, many will probably also starve and die of disease.
In the end, there might be some living, breathing, intelligent beings around but they are all living in a resource scarce post-apocalyptic galaxy which might as well be a world because they can only longer travel to the rest of the inhabited worlds.
They might not make a Mass Effect 4 but they will make other games. I am fed up with EA. While I am sure plenty of people will keep doing business with them, I will not. They don't respect their customers.
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If they make their own system and link it to Steam, it would be awesome if I could buy a game once and have access to it from both the PC and the console. Heck, I would be happy with a small additional fee like $5.00. I never understood why I have to buy a game I already bought at full retail when I want it for another system. I already paid for most of the work that went into making the game. Why should I be charged for the whole thing again when they could simply charge me for the small part they had to change to get it to work on another system?
While I don't understand why they can't use the PC version of the Kinect for the PC version of the game, I am also more concerned with the new content they are making exclusive to the Xbox 360. What about the rest of us?
Except that the kinect is what is doing the voice recognition. It's not just being used as mic input.
So? They created a PC version of the Kinect. I don't see any reason for them to make content exclusive to a specific system. Besides, I am sure they could just process the mic input themselves instead of having the Kinect do it.
That fact that a creator chooses to use a publisher is hardly the fault of the copyright system. There are many creators that self-publish. As technology becomes cheaper, there will be less and less of a reason for creators to use publishers at all. If you choose to use a publisher, it was your decision to make. No one if forced to use a publisher.
The Java language took time and effort to develop, so the original author may be granted (by the government) a monopoly over his creation for 20 years. Then it falls into public domain.
Where did the 20 years come from? That's how long it should be - one generation.
First off, copyright does not need to be one generation long. Copyright's purpose is to create incentives to create content. To do that, assuming your business model is to sell content and not its complements, copyright only needs to be long enough to create a reasonable expectation of profit from works. I would say 10 years would be more than enough for that in most areas. Copyright is not supposed to be a means to do something once and then make money from it forever. Second off, a language is a means of expression not a expression itself. I can understand copyrighting an implementation of an API but I cannot understand copyrighting the API itself.
I didn't even realize over-the-air public broadcasting still existed.
100% tax of your income money will go to the government if you are a politician. Problem solved.
... to piss off the geeks?
I am not saying I would not try to stop if someone walked out in front of my car. What I am saying is that getting run over is the natural consequence of not looking before walking into the street. What is even worse is that the person that walks in front of a moving vehicle is not only endangering their own life but also the life of the driver. How bad would you feel if you caused someone to swerve into a tree and die because you decided not to look before walking across the street.
There is only a statistically small number of people who cannot see. With the increasing number of electric cars, it would be much cheaper and make a lot more sense to have seeing eye dogs trained for a little longer than to have every electric car fitted with additional equipment to make unnecessary noise. Actually, I doubt it would even take additional training considering the seeing eye dogs probably are already trained to look and not just listen.
... some idiot student is laughing at how easy it is to throw the school into a frenzy and have an excuse to not go to the classes that his parents would otherwise force him to attend.
I hope they catch the "bomber".
See my comment below.
I can think of three ways off the top of my head for a blind man to walk across the street without getting hit by silent cars. Get a small handheld device that detects when big, fast-moving objects are coming by, walk with someone who can see, or have their seeing eye dog trained to not walk in front of a moving vehicle. If a blind person does not bother with any form of augmented traveling, then yes, they deserve to be hit by a car just as much as the guy who can see who walks into the street without looking.
If someone is too stupid to look before walking into the street, they deserve to be run over.
... so the rest of us do not have to pay for the system if we decide to buy the car.
Most of the Head First books will be good for the young'n--I'm 30 and I still need their cheery images to keep me interested ;-)
Yes. The Head First books are pretty awesome.
Have him learn python. On any OS.
If you are going to teach him Python, have him take CS101 at Udacity. It is more fun than reading a book.
If it ever makes it to where I live, I will definitely be a customer.
It's quite obvious that people are abusing the system and that results in increased prices for everyone. As someone who doesn't abuse that, I welcome the move so we honest people get things cheaper. Screw those who ruin things for everyone else.
The policy is unnecessarily invasive and it will easily hurt legitimate customers. While it might be rare, it is completely possible that a legitimate customer will purchase at least two items in a 90 day window and more than one of them ends up being defective.
They need to find a better way to prevent fraud.
As to your "ten years", iirc I started on my Paxil Diaries book almost ten years ago. I still need to design its dust jacket.
Sorry. Let me clarify. I meant ten years from the day that it is released for public viewing/sale. I was not including the production time in the ten years.
I can see that some things should be renewable. I loathe Disney for advocating all these crazy laws that we have today. But - they do have something of a point with renewable copyrights. Mickey Mouse would have gone out of copyright well before I graduated high school. Probably before I graduated elementary school - he's been around that long. But, Mickey Mouse has been a money generator all these decades.
Let them have renewable copyrights. First renewal, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Second renewal, millions of dollars. Third renewal, tens of millions. Fourth renewal, hundreds of millions. Just keep upping the ante by an order of magnitude. If they want to pay, the government benefits. If they don't want to pay, the people benefit. At some stage, even Mickey Mouse will be retired. I don't think they would renew even Mickey for a billion dollars!
I think it would be better to just protect the characters separate from the copyright and make that renewable. That way, if they are planning on making new works, they don't have to worry about another company stepping on their toes and it keeps external entities from defacing the characters in a way that would make them unprofitable to use again. The actual works those characters are in would evenually be release to the public domain. By continually paying the renewal fee a company can perpetually protect their characters from being used in new works without their permission.
Copyright should only be 17 years, renewable only by the Person (not Corporation) that created it, during their lifetime and in the year of their death by their heirs.
Why does copyright need to renewable at all? If you can't make a profit off something in 17 years, you need to consider going into another business. Also, I would argue 10 years would be a more appropriate copyright length.
Dude, posting spoilers so soon, not cool :( You kinda ruined it for me now.
That's OK. Bioware and EA would have ruined it for you later.
Or maybe the people who liked it (or at least didn't hate it enough to be a whiny little bitch about it) enjoyed getting there more than the destination. I may not have been happy about the way it ended, but I can take a fucking step back and enjoy the series without discounting the whole thing cause the last minutes didn't jive with what I thought should happen.
Endings can destroy a good story. This is especially so when the story is told in the form of a video game. If you spend hundreds of hours in a story, you expect all your work to have value. Mass Effect 3 invalidates the whole point of your journey. In the game, you are trying to save galactic civilization from the jaws of death. By the end of the game, what you accomplish is saving a tiny blip in comparison. The destruction of the Mass Effect relays alone will cause galactic civilization to be crippled for what I would guess at least one thousand years. Many planets are saved from annihilation but all their supply chains are gone. Many of the survivors will probably starve or die of disease. For Earth, which was the primary planet to save in the game, it is even worse. Most of the galactic civilization has to survive together on a single planet. While many of the races joined together to fight the Reapers, much of the glue that held them together will be gone after the war. Conflicting cultures and goals combined with extremely scares resources will probably cause war until most of those who survived the Reaper war at Earth will die. Again, many will probably also starve and die of disease.
In the end, there might be some living, breathing, intelligent beings around but they are all living in a resource scarce post-apocalyptic galaxy which might as well be a world because they can only longer travel to the rest of the inhabited worlds.
They might not make a Mass Effect 4 but they will make other games. I am fed up with EA. While I am sure plenty of people will keep doing business with them, I will not. They don't respect their customers.