Actually, I am. I watch most of those shows with my wife, as well as the movies, as well as playing tennis, geocaching, card games, board games, and video games.
First thing's first. Get a ReplayTV or a TiVo, and only watch stuff that you've intentionally recorded. Just watching whatever's on is going to be a mistake. Anyone watching TV without a PVR is doing it wrong.
The problem I have with the "I don't have a TV, go read a book" crowd is that it's not like books are inherently better than TV. Sure, in general, the quality may be a bit higher and the degree to which you're being imaginative is probably greater, but there's plenty of tripe being published, just as there's plenty of crap being shown on TV.
Also, who says that "good TV" can't simply be entertaining? I watch a number of shows that aren't "challenging" to any degree, but make me laugh and leave me in a good mood, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hell, I even watch American Idol -- with ReplayTV each episode is between 15-20 minutes -- simply because watching competitions and being your own judge is entertaining, and I refuse to let some holier-than-thou zealot make me feel bad about myself for doing so.
I regularly watch Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Scrubs, Arrested Development, Alias, Gilmore Girls, and The O.C., and sure, some of those are more fluff than others, but I am watching for entertainment, so I watch what entertains me.
For the record, I also have a healthy NetFlix subscription, I rock climb, geocache, play tennis and softball, play card games, board games, video games, and do some side programming projects. There's no reason TV can't live alongside all those other activities.
If someone pulled in front of you and you rear ended them, it is likely that you will be held accountable for the accident, no matter how blatantly you were cut off and how impossible it was for you to avoid the idiot and how fast you were going at the time.
On the contrary, if they pulled out of driveway it's clearly their fault, and if they changed into my lane without proper clearance, it's also their fault.
The police can usually calculate your speed at the time of impact based on the condition of the wreckage to a remarkable degree of accuracy - this device simply saves them time. You have to remember that in Canada (at least in Alberta - I don't know about Quebec), the mounties can close a highway all day to investigate a collision if they wat to. Typicly they won't unless the case is of particular notoriety.
How accurately can they estimate it, though? What if the difference between you being cited and someone else being cited is 15mph? What if they estimate 65mph, but the black box says 80mph, which are they going to trust?
If this is going to be admissable evidence, it needs to be accurate,. I don't see how that's even debatable.
As for calibration errors, I think it's a non-issue. If you're involved in a collision in which your bumper is crushed, but the rest of the car is intact, and the black box claims you were impacted the tree at 182 MPH, I'm pretty sure common-sense would prevail and the data would be discarded.
Well, sure, obvious cases would be thrown out. But what if you were driving exactly at a 65mph speed limit when someone pulled out in front of you, and your black box said you were going 80mph, potentially making the accident your fault? (or at least causing a speeding citation)
If punishments are going to be meted out based on these things' values, we better be sure that they can be trusted.
Sadly this sounds like a nail in the Deus Ex franchise's creativity coffin.
I don't understand comments like this -- a studio is taking the Deus Ex universe in a different direction, and you lament the killing of creativity?
I think there's all sorts of possibilities for a game in the Deus Ex universe that's more action oriented. Biomods and tools skewed less towards rpg interactions and more towards offensive or defensive combat, simulation based so you can make combat-interesting tactical decisions that result in emergent behaviors, etc.
Say what you will about DX:IW (which I'm immensely proud of, BTW), but I think this could be totally cool, and I'm honestly a bit perplexed that so many people would start slamming Clan Wars without knowing more than the barest of facts about it.
Yeah. I'll feel guilty about it, when the fed actually proves that copyrights exist in order to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
It sure doesn't feel like limited times.
I agree with your point, but given that many of the p2p files are actually being distributed BEFORE they are being released, I don't see how correctly time-limiting the copyright system is going to impact the damage done (perceived or real) by p2p apps.
So now the prison system will be keeping DANGEROUS FILE SHARERS off the streets, while at the same time Los Angeles is releasing thousands of prisoners early becuase of a lack of funding
It's all civil (monetary) penalties. There's no jailtime involved.
The solution is not to punish infringement, it is to increasingly legalize infringement so that people's behavior need not significantly change, but they get to stay on the right side of the law.
But if the cornerstone of the p2p problem is that people are distributing content for free, how exactly are we going to change the laws so that there remains some notion of copyright so that it's still vaible to produce music/movies/games?
It's easy to say "change the law", but the current p2p behavior just seems to fundamentally at odds with practicality that I don't see how it would work.
And the inventors of automobiles were really unfair to the horse & buggy industry. If the business model is obsolete, then it's obsolete, get over it.
I hear this kind of argument all the time, and I just don't think it holds up.
The transition from a horse & buggy to an automobile was not a "business model" change, it was a change of product -- and consumers preferred the latter. Furthermore, downloading songs for free hardly qualifies as a "business model".
Do you honestly believe that your sample set is representative? Somehow I doubt it.
I was merely responding to another post. Pardon me for not blurring the argument by involving every issue that's even slightly related. (Someone: "Apples suck." I: "No, apples rule." You: "You're purposely ignoring the fact that many apples are green!")
Please. It's more like "wrt Kazaa, don't pirate, buy or don't listen", then "but I pirate so I know what to buy", then "yeah but that's not true of most people". Each statement logically follows the next.
It's the musicians' product. Never mind that many musicians are just as unhappy about the RIAA as most p2p users.
Whoa, now who's blurring the argument? Who cares how the artists feel about the RIAA -- there's a product out there that's being illegally distributed, and suing is a valid response. Feel free to argue for a different system, or make a case for changing the law, but the whole "the artists are being screwed too" doesn't excuse the rampant, deliberate, opportunistic piracy that's going on.
I fail to see why artists can't adopt the same model: if you want to get paid for producing something, get someone to hire you to produce it.
This may work when you're providing a product to a particular person or entity, but if you're selling to the public, it clearly doesn't work at all.
Do you really think the general public will put up the money for a movie ticket a year in advance of the film being done? Or $50 years before a video game is released?
Seriously, the freedom to copy information trumps the freedom to make money. There are few things that should not be freely distributed, very few... What few examples I can think of are really far-fetched.
How exactly am I supposed to fund a $10M video game if it's freely distributable as soon as I release it? How well does that seem to be working for non-crippled shareware?
Restrictions on copying information don't exist solely for the preservation of business. They also exist because some organization of information takes real work, and therefore has real value. If you take away the value, doing the work either becomes thankless or impossible.
Alan Tudyk, who plays Wash, reportedly stole the Big Red Button that was used during the episode "Out of Gas", and left it with Joss, telling him to "hit it when his miracle arrived" and they would all return.
First, I note that you didn't actually address any of my questions about the fairness of disparate voting potency. There's just a fundamental unfairness there that I can't get past.
Second, please explain how the electoral system protects us against appealing to demographic bands. I simply don't see how it works out that our system protects us from the voting trends of demographic groups.
In fact, it seems to me that our system actually encourages exactly that. Candidates don't need to court voters in most states. "Swing states" are common knowledge, and candidates most definitely DO try to appeal to the demographics in those states, regardless of how representative that demographic is to the country as a whole.
Your only choices are to either fight an uphill battle in a congress that doesn't care about you or to move to another country.
Yep. And if my state does the same, I can fight or move out of the state. How is that any better?
Yes, having many states, each with their own laws allows more diversity -- but it also introduces strange inconsistencies. And I stand by my original statement that states are only marginally more "local government" than federal government.
For things that have local impact, truly local governments should have jurisdiction. If there's not a substantial argument for something to be decided locally, it should be decided nationally. Local governance has its place, as does national governance. Unfortunately, state governance has the disadvantages of both.
First, I didn't mean my original post to be a troll. I asked those questions in all seriousness.
To respond to your point, no, it doesn't really matter how long it took God to create earth -- that's not the issue. The issue is that our religious leaders had been telling us one thing for hundreds (thousands?) of years, and as soon as science disproves them, they change their story to "well, we didn't mean LITERALLY seven days".
Given that these leader rely so heavily on "faith" (that is, unquestionable trust), how does this kind of backpedaling not strain their credability? How many times does someone need to be told to trust something that turns out to not be true before they figure out that the person can't be trusted?
The only explanation I can come up with is that these doctrinal changes happen so slowly that within a given person's lifetime the doctrine appears to remain fairly constant, but I'm not sure I buy that.
The federal government was supposed to be absolutely nothing more than a "glue" between the states, and the states voted for that "glue" via the electoral college. Now, the federal government has more influence over people's lives than their local governments, and this is the deep fundamental problem that gets mistakenly re-cast as a problem with the electoral process.
On the contrary, I think in today's age of relocation and instant communication a strong federal government is what makes the most sense.
Why should I have to get a new driver's license when I move from state to state? Why should Texas have no income tax but New Hampshire have no sales tax? Why should someone living in Dallas have his government more tied to that of El Paso than that of Oklahoma City?
I'm all for local government, but states are too big to adequately provide that. I'd much rather see a system that algorithmically divided the entire country up into populationally-equal districts that provide REAL local government for locally-appropriate issues, and let the rest of us act like the atomic country that we are.
Of course, it'll never happen, but it makes sense to me anyway.:-)
All the electoral college does is skew the value of votes towards the small states (since they have proportionally more electoral votes than populous states) and the swing states.
I don't see how the logic of your example works -- if a David Duke-like candidate was appealing to the majority "heartland" of the country, losing NY and California might not be enough to stop him, because no matter how many people vote against him, they only have so many electoral votes to contribute -- and remember those states have proportionally lower electoral votes to begin out with.
Would not NY and California be better equipped to stop such a candidate in a straight-up democracy where their larger number of votes would count just as much as those from the "heartland"?
In the 2000 election, I went through the results and determined that votes in places like Idaho turned out to be more than 3 times as potent (percentage-of-elector-wise) as votes in California. Additionally, I just fundamentally can't find a system fair where my Democratic vote (in Texas) contributes absolutely nothing towards my candidate getting elected. A vote in Ohio is vastly more important than a vote in Texas. Does that seem fair, or right?
It's a national office. We should have a national election.
funny how my fellow members of a religion, where the founder was dissatisfied with how the current religious leaders had lost sight of the meaning of the words and instead focused on strict literal adherence to the law, are hell bent on making people accept a little story written a very long time ago in a very different time literally.
Funny how as science continues to disprove Biblical statements represented as fact the Bible becomes more and more "poetic".
How literally was everyone taking Genesis 100 years ago? How literally is everyone taking it now? What's changed, except that our knowledge of science has risen and our tolerance of dogma has dropped? If we're supposed to accept religious teachings on faith, is it too much to ask that those teachings be constant, and not be continuously backpedaling as their disproven? And how is it that these peddlers of religion haven't lost all credability by now?
Microsoft has been vastly more friendly to developers than Sony. The PS2 is an unmitigated nightmare to program for and all the tools that have any semblance of user-friendlyness are thirdparty (and thus you have to purchase separately).
Xbox development, on the other hand, includes Visual Studio.NET (including integration of the Xbox build and debugging processes), some fairly good development tools, and one astoundingly good tool (Pix). It's got its problems, but all-in-all, Xbox is a dream to develop for.
As far as MS buying companies and forcing them into Xbox development, back that up with some examples. Bungie and Rare are the two that come to mind, but it's hard to imagine how Bungie could have done better, and Rare just went from one exclusive arrangement to another.
Being able and encouraged by your owner to focus and work exclusively with a single unchanging platform sounds very very good to me, speaking as a game developer.
It's got plenty applications, but not normal user applications.
I bet a lot of normal users will be archving HD video pretty shortly. I'm doing it right now, and at 8.9GB/hr, having terrabytes to work with would be pretty handy.
Plus, people could now rip their entire CD collection and not need to use any compression at all, and with enough albums, terrabytes could be useful.
Strange, the marriage between me and my wife doesn't follow most of the "traditions" of marriage -- both work, no kids, etc. And there's not a speck of religion in our marriage, and hasn't been from our wedding ceremony to this day.
Yet, the law legally recognizes our marriage. Contrary to what many people feel, "marriage" is largely a legal matter in this country.
Slashdot Mirror
First thing's first. Get a ReplayTV or a TiVo, and only watch stuff that you've intentionally recorded. Just watching whatever's on is going to be a mistake. Anyone watching TV without a PVR is doing it wrong.
The problem I have with the "I don't have a TV, go read a book" crowd is that it's not like books are inherently better than TV. Sure, in general, the quality may be a bit higher and the degree to which you're being imaginative is probably greater, but there's plenty of tripe being published, just as there's plenty of crap being shown on TV.
Also, who says that "good TV" can't simply be entertaining? I watch a number of shows that aren't "challenging" to any degree, but make me laugh and leave me in a good mood, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hell, I even watch American Idol -- with ReplayTV each episode is between 15-20 minutes -- simply because watching competitions and being your own judge is entertaining, and I refuse to let some holier-than-thou zealot make me feel bad about myself for doing so.
I regularly watch Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Scrubs, Arrested Development, Alias, Gilmore Girls, and The O.C., and sure, some of those are more fluff than others, but I am watching for entertainment, so I watch what entertains me.
For the record, I also have a healthy NetFlix subscription, I rock climb, geocache, play tennis and softball, play card games, board games, video games, and do some side programming projects. There's no reason TV can't live alongside all those other activities.
How accurately can they estimate it, though? What if the difference between you being cited and someone else being cited is 15mph? What if they estimate 65mph, but the black box says 80mph, which are they going to trust?
If this is going to be admissable evidence, it needs to be accurate,. I don't see how that's even debatable.
If punishments are going to be meted out based on these things' values, we better be sure that they can be trusted.
(since I've already posted, I sure hope someone with mod status tags the parent as flamebait or troll)
Um, you do realize that I was the Lead Programmer on DX:IW, right?
As far as reviews go, DX:IW ended up with marginally worse reviews than its predecessor, see:
GameRankings or
MetaCritic
Note that the vast majority of reviews are in the 80-100% range. And then read a few of the ones that aren't to get a gauge on their quality.
Anyway, sorry that you didn't like the game. I hope that our future endeavors are more to your liking.
I think there's all sorts of possibilities for a game in the Deus Ex universe that's more action oriented. Biomods and tools skewed less towards rpg interactions and more towards offensive or defensive combat, simulation based so you can make combat-interesting tactical decisions that result in emergent behaviors, etc.
Say what you will about DX:IW (which I'm immensely proud of, BTW), but I think this could be totally cool, and I'm honestly a bit perplexed that so many people would start slamming Clan Wars without knowing more than the barest of facts about it.
I've got a house in SW Austin that's a half-hour commute up MoPac during rush hour, is 2300 sq ft, and less than 2/3 that cost.
Sorry, but if you've been working downtown for the state and moved to Cedar Park you've pretty much dug your own grave, traffic-wise.
It's easy to say "change the law", but the current p2p behavior just seems to fundamentally at odds with practicality that I don't see how it would work.
The transition from a horse & buggy to an automobile was not a "business model" change, it was a change of product -- and consumers preferred the latter. Furthermore, downloading songs for free hardly qualifies as a "business model".
Please. It's more like "wrt Kazaa, don't pirate, buy or don't listen", then "but I pirate so I know what to buy", then "yeah but that's not true of most people". Each statement logically follows the next.
Whoa, now who's blurring the argument? Who cares how the artists feel about the RIAA -- there's a product out there that's being illegally distributed, and suing is a valid response. Feel free to argue for a different system, or make a case for changing the law, but the whole "the artists are being screwed too" doesn't excuse the rampant, deliberate, opportunistic piracy that's going on.
Do you really think the general public will put up the money for a movie ticket a year in advance of the film being done? Or $50 years before a video game is released?
Restrictions on copying information don't exist solely for the preservation of business. They also exist because some organization of information takes real work, and therefore has real value. If you take away the value, doing the work either becomes thankless or impossible.
Alan Tudyk, who plays Wash, reportedly stole the Big Red Button that was used during the episode "Out of Gas", and left it with Joss, telling him to "hit it when his miracle arrived" and they would all return.
Universal Stuidos are owned by GE, who in turn owns The Sci-Fi Channel. So that's probably the most likely place if Firefly is to make a return to TV.
First, I note that you didn't actually address any of my questions about the fairness of disparate voting potency. There's just a fundamental unfairness there that I can't get past.
Second, please explain how the electoral system protects us against appealing to demographic bands. I simply don't see how it works out that our system protects us from the voting trends of demographic groups.
In fact, it seems to me that our system actually encourages exactly that. Candidates don't need to court voters in most states. "Swing states" are common knowledge, and candidates most definitely DO try to appeal to the demographics in those states, regardless of how representative that demographic is to the country as a whole.
Your only choices are to either fight an uphill battle in a congress that doesn't care about you or to move to another country.
Yep. And if my state does the same, I can fight or move out of the state. How is that any better?
Yes, having many states, each with their own laws allows more diversity -- but it also introduces strange inconsistencies. And I stand by my original statement that states are only marginally more "local government" than federal government.
For things that have local impact, truly local governments should have jurisdiction. If there's not a substantial argument for something to be decided locally, it should be decided nationally. Local governance has its place, as does national governance. Unfortunately, state governance has the disadvantages of both.
First, I didn't mean my original post to be a troll. I asked those questions in all seriousness.
To respond to your point, no, it doesn't really matter how long it took God to create earth -- that's not the issue. The issue is that our religious leaders had been telling us one thing for hundreds (thousands?) of years, and as soon as science disproves them, they change their story to "well, we didn't mean LITERALLY seven days".
Given that these leader rely so heavily on "faith" (that is, unquestionable trust), how does this kind of backpedaling not strain their credability? How many times does someone need to be told to trust something that turns out to not be true before they figure out that the person can't be trusted?
The only explanation I can come up with is that these doctrinal changes happen so slowly that within a given person's lifetime the doctrine appears to remain fairly constant, but I'm not sure I buy that.
Why should I have to get a new driver's license when I move from state to state? Why should Texas have no income tax but New Hampshire have no sales tax? Why should someone living in Dallas have his government more tied to that of El Paso than that of Oklahoma City?
I'm all for local government, but states are too big to adequately provide that. I'd much rather see a system that algorithmically divided the entire country up into populationally-equal districts that provide REAL local government for locally-appropriate issues, and let the rest of us act like the atomic country that we are.
Of course, it'll never happen, but it makes sense to me anyway.
All the electoral college does is skew the value of votes towards the small states (since they have proportionally more electoral votes than populous states) and the swing states.
I don't see how the logic of your example works -- if a David Duke-like candidate was appealing to the majority "heartland" of the country, losing NY and California might not be enough to stop him, because no matter how many people vote against him, they only have so many electoral votes to contribute -- and remember those states have proportionally lower electoral votes to begin out with.
Would not NY and California be better equipped to stop such a candidate in a straight-up democracy where their larger number of votes would count just as much as those from the "heartland"?
In the 2000 election, I went through the results and determined that votes in places like Idaho turned out to be more than 3 times as potent (percentage-of-elector-wise) as votes in California. Additionally, I just fundamentally can't find a system fair where my Democratic vote (in Texas) contributes absolutely nothing towards my candidate getting elected. A vote in Ohio is vastly more important than a vote in Texas. Does that seem fair, or right?
It's a national office. We should have a national election.
How literally was everyone taking Genesis 100 years ago? How literally is everyone taking it now? What's changed, except that our knowledge of science has risen and our tolerance of dogma has dropped? If we're supposed to accept religious teachings on faith, is it too much to ask that those teachings be constant, and not be continuously backpedaling as their disproven? And how is it that these peddlers of religion haven't lost all credability by now?
Bah.
Please.
.NET (including integration of the Xbox build and debugging processes), some fairly good development tools, and one astoundingly good tool (Pix). It's got its problems, but all-in-all, Xbox is a dream to develop for.
Microsoft has been vastly more friendly to developers than Sony. The PS2 is an unmitigated nightmare to program for and all the tools that have any semblance of user-friendlyness are thirdparty (and thus you have to purchase separately).
Xbox development, on the other hand, includes Visual Studio
As far as MS buying companies and forcing them into Xbox development, back that up with some examples. Bungie and Rare are the two that come to mind, but it's hard to imagine how Bungie could have done better, and Rare just went from one exclusive arrangement to another.
Being able and encouraged by your owner to focus and work exclusively with a single unchanging platform sounds very very good to me, speaking as a game developer.
I bet a lot of normal users will be archving HD video pretty shortly. I'm doing it right now, and at 8.9GB/hr, having terrabytes to work with would be pretty handy.
Plus, people could now rip their entire CD collection and not need to use any compression at all, and with enough albums, terrabytes could be useful.
Strange, the marriage between me and my wife doesn't follow most of the "traditions" of marriage -- both work, no kids, etc. And there's not a speck of religion in our marriage, and hasn't been from our wedding ceremony to this day.
Yet, the law legally recognizes our marriage. Contrary to what many people feel, "marriage" is largely a legal matter in this country.