The one thing that imaginary property mongers won't touch is religious organizations - the undisputed kings of imaginary things.
I seem to recall there was some religious organization (maybe even the Mormons again) where some guy was ripping off Nintendo games and turning out "clean" rebranded versions and selling them for profit. Despite blatant and obvious copyright infringements, they never touched the guy. It may have even been on slashdot.
HA. Typical non-evil mastermind thinking! you will never get anywhere thinking like that! The question is, "SO where is the Beowulf cluster of lawyers to mount this on?"
I bet part of it is because the MSRP is the price for most new games. Period.
You either pay, $40, $50, or $60 for a game.
There's no negotiation, no discussion with the market with respect to what is a reasonable price due to a natural monopoly.
I would buy more games if they weren't so expensive.
Why don't they offer differing versions of multiplayer games with a pricing scheme? Not something that gives players an advantage over others in combat or against NPCs. That way combat of the moment is level no matter how much you paid. But maybe something that makes you progress faster, or gives you more inventory space or something.
Make it so you can upgrade to these higher priced version later if you want.
Get freaking creative with your business model instead of this stone stupid scheme of:
It's $40 to get in, and $14.95 a month thereafter, period.
You have the power to make more money and make your customers happier with something like I mentioned above.
For example I just today learned that there's an item that makes you level faster, but the only way to get it is to recruit four friends into becoming subscribers. And I'm considering setting up 4 new accounts temporarily just to get it. Lucky for me I'm gainfully employed and not living in my parents' basement or something, so the cost doesn't amount to much compared to my existing expenditures on eating out.
It's not the notation I was protesting. 1/60hz isn't unreasonable, just a bit low. The actual human heart rate is closer to 70-75bpm or 1.25/60hz. But the fact that you didn't even catch that, and then backpedaled on the notation speaks volumes of your skill in applying actual science.
HFCS
Do you believe in palmistry and phrenology too?
Chemically it should be the same
Is it or isn't it the same? Chemically speaking there's no such thing as "should". It either is or it isn't. If it isn't then there's no reason to expect that it will behave even remotely similarly. Water and ozone are both chemically very similar to the oxygen we breathe, but have rather different properties.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think HFCS is a good thing, but I don't attempt to demonize it.
As one notable PhD once said, the most accurate way to describe HFCS is it's "no better than regular sugar".
IMHO, people like you are just smart enough to be dangerous.
If the ISP is getting paid and the customer isn't complaining, the business relationship could be said to be satisfactorily established to the satisfaction of both parties.
There's no legal need to tie usage information from IT to customer information from billing.
It's why you can calm a baby by placing it close to your chest, it hears the heart beat again.
Surely it couldn't be the baby is also warm, cushioned (boobs, yay), and comfortable being held.
The law prohibits using animal wombs for human babies. You seem to have something mechanical in mind. I imagine that a sheep or pig womb (biologically very similar to humans) would probably handle a human embryo just fine. Sheep wombs have been making sheep babies for about the same amount of time as human wombs have been making human babies.
What if out of this proactively banned research we were able to save babies' lives because the they can be transplanted into sheep? It would not an abomination, or some frankensteinian sheep-baby, it would be a perfectly normal human that happened to gestate in an unusual place. A baby's genetics (and therefore all characterstics aside from birth defects) are determined at conception, not gestation. So it wouldn't matter what womb the baby formed in, it would still be completely human if it was conceived with human sperm and ova.
The mother's body (kidney, hearts, lungs, livers) act as the baby's for the first 9 months. We haven't perfected artificial copies of those yet, so what is the artificial womb supposed to do? We're already seeing problems where a constant flow motor in place of a heart causes problems in the rest of the body that had grown accustom to a (1/60) Hz throbbing.
Who said it was artifical? The law is talking about animal wombs. One, almost no human heart rate is 1/60hz. Two, it's not that regular most of the time. "accomstomed" is a very vague and unscientific term. The human body is very capable of becoming "accostomed" to all sorts of new conditions. Three, you cited absolutely no evidence. I would hazard a guess that a pulsing pump was simply the best natured could come up with as a substitute for a constant flow. It works because the body has adapted to it, as is proven by the fact that blood flow can be completely stopped for minutes without any detectable damage. People have heart attacks every day, or heart murmors where bloodflow ceases and the body lives anyway. So you have it rather backwards. It's not that the body has become "accostomed" to ~1/60hz or so, but rather the body has evolved to be able to handle intermittent flow.
Artificial / Cow milk is no substitute for breast milk during young development.
Wrong. You can raise a baby just fine without any milk whatsoever. Many women can't breast feed at all, and so the baby never had any human milk and they turned out just fine.
The fatty chains and stuff can't be replicated by any formula
Yet. There's nothing magical about it, stop pretending that there's some unquantifiable characteristic in any aspect of conception, gestation, or birth. There isn't. It's only that we may not understand some aspects yet.
what makes them think that the fluids the mother and baby exchange?
What makes you think there's something special about a chemical process that we'll never be able to replicate it?
The human body is an infinitely complex system of feedback loops and control systems. I can't ever see us getting this right artificially. If the baby is low on X, the mothers body will give it more X.
Again, you seem to be attributing magical unfathomable properties to the birth process. Also, I do not think that word means what you think that it means. Infinity as far as we know is a completely made up mathematical concept that doesn't actually occur in reality. Again, nothing magical. Just problems we haven't solved yet. And there's no scientific proof that a mother's body automatically follows with providing whatever the baby needs. In ord
And I am a complementary example to parent of this post.
I buy GTCs and sell them to people like the above. I have a full time job, I go to the gym regularly, and have a girlfriend. (I know, blowing two stereotypes!) So my time is at more of a premium than my money. Also, I used to do a lot of grinding for in game money (ISK) and got sick of it.
So now I buy my ISK from players with game time cards purchased directly from CCP (EVE's developer company). Some poor college student gets to play without real world dollars, I get ISK and don't have to devote 20 hours a week to it.
Further, the ISK isn't magicked into existence by CCP directly, rather it's magicked into existence through players using normal game mechanics, such as killing mobs as it were. So the market isn't destroyed by it. It's actually a win-win-win scenario.
Which is why it's so strange that people still buy ISK from third parties. The prices aren't worse, you're incredibly likely to get caught, and there's a way to buy the ISK that won't get you banned.
If Microsoft ends support for XP before it's supplanted by Vista or Windows 7, they'll coerce some users into upgrading, sure, but they'll also be creating a market for third parties to get paid to support the OS Microsoft doesn't anyone using anymore.
But what I expect will actually happen - put on your megagreed/evil hat to follow this one - is that Microsoft will "End Official Free Support" and force all XP users to pay through the nose for official XP support. Basically, do what they want, and pay them for an "upgrade"*, or pay them for support for your "legacy OS" that they do not want you using. Either way, they get more of your money. Win win for them.
*Quoted because popular opinion here is that Vista/7 aren't actually upgrades.
The penalties mentioned only apply if you're not actually the copyright holder. They do not apply if your DMCA claim is utter bullshit. In short, you can make false claims utter impunity.
They were very careful to write the law that way so that it would have minimal repercussions for copyright holders when abused, and maximum impact even when abused. For that reason it's about the most heinous and abusive law ever passed in the U.S. as far as favoring corporations over the people.
And then regular users start complaining: "Why does it take so long to send an email? It's just freaking email!"
Don't get me wrong, it's a novel approach but it punishes the innocent too.
The real solution to spam is to get people to stop buying things from advertisements in email, and stop falling for scams in emails. If it didn't work at least a little bit, they wouldn't be doing it. Spam is only a symptom of that problem. But good luck solving that one.:-/
Another treat-the-symptom approach might be to cut the hand off of spammers or some such. And I would love it if they would occasionally hold the producers of the products being advertised via spam accountable for a change. You know the spammers aren't sending emails on their behalf out of the goodness of their hearts (after all, we all know spammers don't have hearts).
I always read the main technological hurdle of wind power was that it is "bursty" and difficult to get a stable, steady flow of power from it, and it's also difficult to store for when it's actually needed rather than when the wind is gusting.
It's one of the fundamental requirements of a power plant: Continuous, mostly stable power.
Which is why nuclear, coal burning, and hydroelectric work so well. It's easy to control the power generation a couple of steps up the energy chain from the part that spins the generator.
Maybe some sort of computer controlled infinite clutch for wind power?
Except its UI is still decades behind Media Player Classic.
Who cares about having two cameras on a single display? I just want to watch movies by double clicking them and have the movie start with no fuss in a minimalist window.
MPC does this, and configuring it isn't like navigating labyrinth complete with minotaur (as VLC is).
But in all seriousness, any legal system based on attempting to codify the infinite number of possible immoral and unethical actions into a form of unreadable muck commonly known as "legalese" is doomed to failure at its very inception. The goal of such a system is purportedly so that it can be utterly fair by adhering strictly to the letter of the law, but we all know that sufficient money and or lawyers can bend or twist the spirit of the law for their own personal gains, subverting it or escaping its rule entirely. And we have these parasites of the system called lawyers that have vested interest in preserving the status quo for their own personal gains, so we'll likely never see the end of it.
It's about the worst cascade failure of modern civilization that began when some extremely short sighted schmuck several hundred thought we could codify all possible permutations of undesirable human behavior. The most important thing human society could do is abolish such a system and replace it with one holds to simply written laws and interprets them on case by case basis with strict adherence to the spirit of the law as it applies to modern society. No more lawyers, no more loopholes, no more long drawn out legal processes that no one but lawyers can read or understand, no more getting off by being rich or slipping through loopholes because you have an expensive suite of legal-system-parasites, no more shady barely-legal practices that don't quite violate the letter of the law.
But they'll probably add more DRM in the future, lobby harder, and generally give us less while attempting to charge more.
Seems to be their typical reaction to any type of change or encroachment on their nearly obsolete business models. While I don't believe hard copy game selling will ever die as long as we have walmart, it's not a market that is growing as fast as digital delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
Doubtful.
The one thing that imaginary property mongers won't touch is religious organizations - the undisputed kings of imaginary things.
I seem to recall there was some religious organization (maybe even the Mormons again) where some guy was ripping off Nintendo games and turning out "clean" rebranded versions and selling them for profit. Despite blatant and obvious copyright infringements, they never touched the guy. It may have even been on slashdot.
Don't blame laziness!
Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.
Clever. Now all they have to do is look for the guy that just started running.
Free excuse to shove off work for a few hours, duh.
HA. Typical non-evil mastermind thinking! you will never get anywhere thinking like that!
The question is, "SO where is the Beowulf cluster of lawyers to mount this on?"
[citation needed]
I bet part of it is because the MSRP is the price for most new games. Period.
You either pay, $40, $50, or $60 for a game.
There's no negotiation, no discussion with the market with respect to what is a reasonable price due to a natural monopoly.
I would buy more games if they weren't so expensive.
Why don't they offer differing versions of multiplayer games with a pricing scheme? Not something that gives players an advantage over others in combat or against NPCs. That way combat of the moment is level no matter how much you paid. But maybe something that makes you progress faster, or gives you more inventory space or something.
Make it so you can upgrade to these higher priced version later if you want.
Get freaking creative with your business model instead of this stone stupid scheme of:
It's $40 to get in, and $14.95 a month thereafter, period.
You have the power to make more money and make your customers happier with something like I mentioned above.
For example I just today learned that there's an item that makes you level faster, but the only way to get it is to recruit four friends into becoming subscribers. And I'm considering setting up 4 new accounts temporarily just to get it. Lucky for me I'm gainfully employed and not living in my parents' basement or something, so the cost doesn't amount to much compared to my existing expenditures on eating out.
It's not the notation I was protesting. 1/60hz isn't unreasonable, just a bit low. The actual human heart rate is closer to 70-75bpm or 1.25/60hz. But the fact that you didn't even catch that, and then backpedaled on the notation speaks volumes of your skill in applying actual science.
Do you believe in palmistry and phrenology too?
Is it or isn't it the same? Chemically speaking there's no such thing as "should". It either is or it isn't. If it isn't then there's no reason to expect that it will behave even remotely similarly. Water and ozone are both chemically very similar to the oxygen we breathe, but have rather different properties.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think HFCS is a good thing, but I don't attempt to demonize it.
As one notable PhD once said, the most accurate way to describe HFCS is it's "no better than regular sugar".
IMHO, people like you are just smart enough to be dangerous.
Agreed, if you only read the stories (and I use the term loosely), you're missing the point entirely and doing it wrong completely.
If the ISP is getting paid and the customer isn't complaining, the business relationship could be said to be satisfactorily established to the satisfaction of both parties.
There's no legal need to tie usage information from IT to customer information from billing.
Surely it couldn't be the baby is also warm, cushioned (boobs, yay), and comfortable being held.
The law prohibits using animal wombs for human babies. You seem to have something mechanical in mind. I imagine that a sheep or pig womb (biologically very similar to humans) would probably handle a human embryo just fine. Sheep wombs have been making sheep babies for about the same amount of time as human wombs have been making human babies.
What if out of this proactively banned research we were able to save babies' lives because the they can be transplanted into sheep? It would not an abomination, or some frankensteinian sheep-baby, it would be a perfectly normal human that happened to gestate in an unusual place. A baby's genetics (and therefore all characterstics aside from birth defects) are determined at conception, not gestation. So it wouldn't matter what womb the baby formed in, it would still be completely human if it was conceived with human sperm and ova.
Who said it was artifical? The law is talking about animal wombs. One, almost no human heart rate is 1/60hz. Two, it's not that regular most of the time. "accomstomed" is a very vague and unscientific term. The human body is very capable of becoming "accostomed" to all sorts of new conditions. Three, you cited absolutely no evidence. I would hazard a guess that a pulsing pump was simply the best natured could come up with as a substitute for a constant flow. It works because the body has adapted to it, as is proven by the fact that blood flow can be completely stopped for minutes without any detectable damage. People have heart attacks every day, or heart murmors where bloodflow ceases and the body lives anyway. So you have it rather backwards. It's not that the body has become "accostomed" to ~1/60hz or so, but rather the body has evolved to be able to handle intermittent flow.
Wrong. You can raise a baby just fine without any milk whatsoever. Many women can't breast feed at all, and so the baby never had any human milk and they turned out just fine.
Yet. There's nothing magical about it, stop pretending that there's some unquantifiable characteristic in any aspect of conception, gestation, or birth. There isn't. It's only that we may not understand some aspects yet.
What makes you think there's something special about a chemical process that we'll never be able to replicate it?
Again, you seem to be attributing magical unfathomable properties to the birth process. Also, I do not think that word means what you think that it means. Infinity as far as we know is a completely made up mathematical concept that doesn't actually occur in reality. Again, nothing magical. Just problems we haven't solved yet. And there's no scientific proof that a mother's body automatically follows with providing whatever the baby needs. In ord
Except they probably don't even realize it.
And everyone else gets to suffer for it.
It's called a slashvertisment around here.
But given that this directly affects - often the majority of - the lives of 11.5 million people, it is actually pretty newsworthy.
Bah, typo:
Should read: "The prices are higher"
And I am a complementary example to parent of this post.
I buy GTCs and sell them to people like the above. I have a full time job, I go to the gym regularly, and have a girlfriend. (I know, blowing two stereotypes!) So my time is at more of a premium than my money. Also, I used to do a lot of grinding for in game money (ISK) and got sick of it.
So now I buy my ISK from players with game time cards purchased directly from CCP (EVE's developer company). Some poor college student gets to play without real world dollars, I get ISK and don't have to devote 20 hours a week to it.
Further, the ISK isn't magicked into existence by CCP directly, rather it's magicked into existence through players using normal game mechanics, such as killing mobs as it were. So the market isn't destroyed by it. It's actually a win-win-win scenario.
Which is why it's so strange that people still buy ISK from third parties. The prices aren't worse, you're incredibly likely to get caught, and there's a way to buy the ISK that won't get you banned.
If Microsoft ends support for XP before it's supplanted by Vista or Windows 7, they'll coerce some users into upgrading, sure, but they'll also be creating a market for third parties to get paid to support the OS Microsoft doesn't anyone using anymore.
But what I expect will actually happen - put on your megagreed/evil hat to follow this one - is that Microsoft will "End Official Free Support" and force all XP users to pay through the nose for official XP support. Basically, do what they want, and pay them for an "upgrade"*, or pay them for support for your "legacy OS" that they do not want you using. Either way, they get more of your money. Win win for them.
*Quoted because popular opinion here is that Vista/7 aren't actually upgrades.
I find your ideas interesting and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The penalties mentioned only apply if you're not actually the copyright holder. They do not apply if your DMCA claim is utter bullshit. In short, you can make false claims utter impunity.
They were very careful to write the law that way so that it would have minimal repercussions for copyright holders when abused, and maximum impact even when abused. For that reason it's about the most heinous and abusive law ever passed in the U.S. as far as favoring corporations over the people.
FYI: The DMCA a major focus www.chillingeffects.org.
And then regular users start complaining: "Why does it take so long to send an email? It's just freaking email!"
Don't get me wrong, it's a novel approach but it punishes the innocent too.
The real solution to spam is to get people to stop buying things from advertisements in email, and stop falling for scams in emails. If it didn't work at least a little bit, they wouldn't be doing it. Spam is only a symptom of that problem. But good luck solving that one. :-/
Another treat-the-symptom approach might be to cut the hand off of spammers or some such. And I would love it if they would occasionally hold the producers of the products being advertised via spam accountable for a change. You know the spammers aren't sending emails on their behalf out of the goodness of their hearts (after all, we all know spammers don't have hearts).
Money.
I always read the main technological hurdle of wind power was that it is "bursty" and difficult to get a stable, steady flow of power from it, and it's also difficult to store for when it's actually needed rather than when the wind is gusting.
It's one of the fundamental requirements of a power plant: Continuous, mostly stable power.
Which is why nuclear, coal burning, and hydroelectric work so well. It's easy to control the power generation a couple of steps up the energy chain from the part that spins the generator.
Maybe some sort of computer controlled infinite clutch for wind power?
Except its UI is still decades behind Media Player Classic.
Who cares about having two cameras on a single display? I just want to watch movies by double clicking them and have the movie start with no fuss in a minimalist window.
MPC does this, and configuring it isn't like navigating labyrinth complete with minotaur (as VLC is).
Seconded.
VLC has about the worst UI imaginable excepting EVE Online and the gimp.
MPC on the other hand is intuitive, easy to use, fully featured, minimalist, and basically all around awesome.
One of those programs that just works the way you want it to without having to mess with it, and without getting in the way.
Fixed that for ya.
But in all seriousness, any legal system based on attempting to codify the infinite number of possible immoral and unethical actions into a form of unreadable muck commonly known as "legalese" is doomed to failure at its very inception. The goal of such a system is purportedly so that it can be utterly fair by adhering strictly to the letter of the law, but we all know that sufficient money and or lawyers can bend or twist the spirit of the law for their own personal gains, subverting it or escaping its rule entirely. And we have these parasites of the system called lawyers that have vested interest in preserving the status quo for their own personal gains, so we'll likely never see the end of it.
It's about the worst cascade failure of modern civilization that began when some extremely short sighted schmuck several hundred thought we could codify all possible permutations of undesirable human behavior. The most important thing human society could do is abolish such a system and replace it with one holds to simply written laws and interprets them on case by case basis with strict adherence to the spirit of the law as it applies to modern society. No more lawyers, no more loopholes, no more long drawn out legal processes that no one but lawyers can read or understand, no more getting off by being rich or slipping through loopholes because you have an expensive suite of legal-system-parasites, no more shady barely-legal practices that don't quite violate the letter of the law.
They'll probably learn nothing.
But they'll probably add more DRM in the future, lobby harder, and generally give us less while attempting to charge more.
Seems to be their typical reaction to any type of change or encroachment on their nearly obsolete business models. While I don't believe hard copy game selling will ever die as long as we have walmart, it's not a market that is growing as fast as digital delivery.