But yeah, people should learn that "rouge" is French for red, and "rogue" is English for unexpected/abnormal/destructive.
And while we're at it:
No-one with a basic education should mix up their homonyms. They're wrong if they think nobody notices. Mistakes here, there and everwhere make the post lose credibility. Check your posts before posting or you're going to be ignored.
Take a look at how many recording companies are
part of the RIAA. The RIAA has too much control, there's almost no difference between boycotting the RIAA-owned companies, and boycotting all music sold on CDs.
A better tactic is to boycott specific bands that are loud and public with their support for the RIAA and their actions. Make it so that nobody wants to speak up for the RIAA, and every artist who speaks up speaks up *against* them.
Sure, you'll still have all the same people hiding behind the RIAA suits, but when the celebrities are saying they hate the industry, and the suits are saying the industry is "good for America(tm)" then who do you think the average music buyer is going to listen to?
Have you ever watched CNN? I mean really, calling these people journalists is an insult to every journalist in the world. There may be "reporters" working at CNN, but I can't remember ever seeing a journalist.
I remember the (latest) invasion of Iraq, where CNN showed, for minutes on end, live footage from a tank somewhere in the middle of the night. All you could see was light green blobs on a dark green background, yet they carried that image for minutes. Meanwhile, on another non-commercial news station, they were having a forum discussion on the reasons for the invasion. CNN is as much about journalism and news as MTV is about music.
You're right about them caring if it can raise interest (i.e. ratings), but don't expect them to do any research on the story, or anything else a journalist would do. If you send something to them, do all the research for them. Give them a script they can speak on air. If you just tell them about a story and want them to follow it up... that's just too much work.
He probably has croni... er... friends. Contact him anyhow. Just because someone can't vote doesn't mean you shouldn't contact them. If you happen to know any bureaucrats in the right area, contact them too. They may say "hey boss, we're getting a lot of heat about this". But, if anybody can put pressure on the heritage minister, do that. She's supposed to be protecting canadian heritage, not selling things out to the huge US conglomerates.
Sure, you can do a *lot* without FTL travel and communication. You can make some really interesting stories involving only what current physics says is possible or likely... but some of the staples of science fiction are gone.
If you're limited to significantly slower-than-light travel your stories have to take place in our solar system. They can't involve any alien species, because no aliens would bother spending millenia coming to earth. You *might* be able to include a *message* from aliens, but you couldn't have any two-way communication, unless your story spanned centuries. Basically aliens are gone completely.
You'd have to pick one planet for a setting, and stick with it. Travel between planets would be a very rare and costly thing, and if you want people walking on the surface of that planet then you're probably limited to Earth, Venus or Mars.
To me, the lack of aliens is the biggest problem with no FTL travel. You can have great science fiction without FTL travel, but what's fiction with only humans?
For as long as there have been stories, there have been non-humans. Ancient egyptians had their half-animal gods. Ancient greeks had the a variety of non-human monsters. In modern times, we're pretty sure there are no "monsters" on earth, certainly nothing out there that has an intelligence comparable to ours... so does millenia of telling stories with non-humans have to come to an end? I guess we can make the modern science-friendly equivalent be "the self-aware machine", but when the "monster" is your own creation, that's a whole different brand of story.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is keeping the world internally consistent. Decide on a mechanism for FTL travel, fully figure out how it works, what its limits are, etc, and tell a story from there. Just because a story has FTL travel doesn't mean it has to have leprechauns, violate thermodynamics laws, etc.
I like really hard science fiction, but I also like well written fantasy, and ancient myths (I highly recommend the Iliad). Star Wars and Star Trek are the softest of soft science fiction. They modify the laws of the world as needed to fit the story they want to tell. Why not have "firm science fiction". Create a set of rules that govern the world, make sure they all logically coexist, and then stick to those laws. The physics need not be the physics we understand today, but make sure that the differences fit in the areas that we don't fully understand today. Oh, and include aliens. Let's not abandon millenia of precedent just because modern physics can't fully explain how it would work.
I've heard about the "commander" mode, or "role", but don't know all that much about it. Is it at all similar to how the Commander role works in Savage? What else are people really looking forward to? Is this one supposed to be more friendly with on-screen text? BF 1942 was awful with that, it was sometimes unreadable. Vietnam I think was a bit better but far from great.
Are there vehicles that play really differently than what's available in BF 1942 or Vietnam? One thing that was both good and bad in that one was the realism of the vehicles. It was good in that there were lots of vehicles, all of which were driveable, but it was bad because the realism mix just wasn't right. On one hand, one person could "crew" a tank completely, driving it, shooting, etc. There was a place for a second person, but their role was pretty useless -- just a machine gunner or something. On the other hand, the look and abilities of the tanks was vaguely realistic. I think it would have been much more interesting if you *needed* a crew of 3 to make a tank work, and in a ship you could either fire the main guns, or move the ship, not both.
Anyhow, I'll have to check out the demo, see what's new...
In any case, I think you have the right idea, only the difference between typing letters and moving along a line is that a line is continuous but characters are discrete. You don't need analog control (a mouse, scroll wheel, etc) to make discrete changes.
For a few days in a row, you can increase productivity, but based on this guy's research, shortly after that, you start to lose productivity to such an extent that after 2 months you would have been better off sticking with 40 hour weeks. In addition, if after those 2 months you go back to 40 hour weeks, it will take a while for people to recover from the 60 hour weeks.
So yeah, a "crunch mode" of a few days works. I would even guess that you can get away with 2 weeks of "crunch time", but beyond that, you're eating into your future productivity. But, even then, at 60 hours a week, the chance of a catastrophic error on any given day (accidentally nuking the CVS tree, tripping over the plug to the server, etc.) goes up dramatically. So even a short crunch mode is risky.
If a manager understood this, and only used crunch mode in dire emergencies, and then examined what went wrong so that it wouldn't happen next time... that would be good for everybody, managers, employees, everybody.
What about when your wife wants to balance the checkbook and you're busy playing CTF or an RTS?
Many households have more than one TV, and many also have more than one computer. It's pretty easy to move to a different room for either TV watching or game playing. It would be a bit different if you want to play online and the other TV location isn't wired for network access, but really, getting a second TV is much cheaper than getting a second computer.
I think you're right about the controllers though. It isn't just about getting a keyboard and mouse working for the console. That might actually be easy if everything is Bluetooth (as long as the game makers support those controllers). The difficulty is finding an appropriate surface for the controllers. I think what's really needed is a couch-friendly controller that give you the precision you get from a mouse-and-keyboard, but one without the need for a flat surface to rest it on (coffee tables just don't compare to desks).
Has anybody ever made a game controller with an embedded trackball? That really sounds like it might do the trick. Instead of having the analog stick on the left side, just put a trackball in its place. It wouldn't be quite as intuitive or natural as a keyboard and mouse, but it would be far better than a mini-joystick.
For PC gaming I use a mouse and keyboard for FPSes and RTSes, I use a joystic (not a joypad, but a true joystick) for flight-sim type games, and I have a gamepad lying around somewhere too. But there are times when a console's gamepad is better than what I have for the PC. For example, trying to fly planes/helicopters in BF 1942 or BF Vietnam is really tough because they're just not well suited to keyboard/mouse control.
Console controllers don't have the precision you want for FPSes or the ease of selecting that you want for RTSes, but there's nothing saying the next-gen consoles won't have good controls. The PS3 is supposed to have bluetooth controllers. There are already bluetooth mice and keyboards. All that's really needed is that the people writing the games support more than just the gamepad.
If they can get the controllers right, there really isn't much that makes a PC better than a console, and if they're smart they could fix the console to add those mixing things.
Controllers are the hard part. It's not just that a PC has a keyboard and mouse, it's also that a PC also typically sits on a desk that provides a place to put them. A coffee-table isn't nearly as ergonomic as a PC for keyboard and mouse use. So the challenge for controllers isn't just getting something that gives you the control of a keyboard and mouse, but also designing something that can be used while sitting on a couch.
PCs also used to have the advantage of having network access, making online gaming possible, and downloading new content possible. That's made it's way to consoles, with the unfortunate "patch it later" mentality beginning to creep in too. The biggest drawback I see here is that the consoles the networks for consoles seem to often be really closed-down rather than something ad-hoc like you can get with Diablo etc.
The one really difficult missing bit is "modding" console games. While some games let you customize them to some extent, it's hard to imagine someone doing a "Halo 2 Total Conversion" for a console. Maybe they can fix that though, by offering free PC downloads of tools and stuff, you'd have to edit and mod on the PC then transfer to the console, but maybe it could work.
Overall though, I think console gaming taking over is a really good thing. Knowing that designers optimized the game for *exactly your hardware*, and that nobody else has an advantage or disadvantage based on their hardware is great. It makes any multiplayer game much more fair, and makes it so that you never have to buy a game and wonder how well it will play on your PC.
It would be great if someone would make a fake x-box live network. The live capabilities are great, I just don't like being tied to Microsoft, or paying large fees to them even though I'm already paying my own bandwidth charges. I know, they pay for the server side stuff, but most gaming should be peer-to-peer.
It's impossible to keep the advantage. If the US trades fairly, then goods produced in India can be made more cheaply and so Americans will buy them. Money will flow to India and equilibrium will eventually be established.
If the US trades unfairly, it will end up wasting money on enforcement, so not only will the American-made goods cost more, but you'll also be wasting money.
In the end, more equilibrium is inevitable. So, what's the smart thing to do?
The answer is simple. Raise their standard of living. If everybody has to have the same standard of living, why not see to it that everybody's standard of living is higher.
If it's pollution that you're worried about, then make it cheaper to make a pollution-free car than a polluting one. If it's child labour that bothers you, make sure that it's easier to use robots than children. If it's disease, then try to make sure that there are no diseases for anybody, not just expensive treatments for those who can afford it.
Accept the fact that the the US standard of living will eventually approach that of the rest of the world, then decide to improve the world's standard of living. That's really the only solution.
Seriously though, this won't change anything about illegal immigration, it will just make it more annoying for them. Last time the border ppl started inspecting incoming vehicles carefully and turning back people trying to enter the country illegally, the farmers(*) all freaked out and demanded that their illegal workers be allowed in so that they could have the help they needed to get their produce to market.
When you build an economy on illegal workers you kinda give up the high ground in complaining about them.
I hate it when people send me text messages with this sort of thing because they never give enough information. If they would just call I could ask them for the bits they forgot.
If text messages were cheaper than phone calls, I might use them, but here (in the US) you are charged for every text message, but calls are free. No incentive at all to use text messages.
I think that the emphasis of any copyright legislation should be based on promoting the production of scientific and artistic works. That should be the guiding principle behind any law and any enforcement, not profit.
Intellectual property is about the government granting someone a temporary monopoly on something, in the hopes that it will have a net benefit for the society. The monopoly is not a right that a creator has, it's a tradeoff. The government will permit you a temporary monopoly in exchange for you helping society when that temporary monopoly expires.
The extent and expiry of the monopoly should be designed so that society benefits, and not so that the artist/creator benefits. So, if the country is going to permit software patents, it should limit their duration to one or two years, something long enough so that the invention is worth it, but short enough that the technology is still relevant by the time the patent expires. I think it's best to exclude software patents entirely but that's just me.
I think another main feature of the law should be to guarantee that creators are compensated, rather than huge corporations. I would make it illegal to assign copyrights, patents and other IP to companies, and permit them to only be assigned to individuals or small groups of individuals. A person can choose to exclusively license his/her IP to a company if he/she so chooses, but such agreements must be made on a per-property basis. No contracts saying all IP created during a period is owned by a company.
Finally I think having terms in the law dealing specifically with Open licenses. This is the very core of "for the public good". Make it much harder to prosecute open-source developers for IP infringement. Even perhaps set aside some public money to advise and defend registered open-source development groups from lawsuits.
IP laws shouldn't be about money, they should be about freedom and public good.
Damn right, if someone can't afford to fight off the plague, let them die from it. It can't affect me, I'm *rich*. And if they die, don't *force* me to pay for removing their bloated corpse from the middle of the street, I'll move it if I want to. Oh yeah, and "street"? That's what we call the ruts where I drive most often. Can you believe in some places the government forces people to pay taxes so they can make roads?
Canada has college football -- it's called the CFL. I'm half kidding, but only half. Doug Flutie is famous for what? An incredible pass in college -- and a great career in Canada. The NFL thought he was too short, so he went to Canada and essentially continued his college career. His salary was a bit higher, but nothing like an NFL player's salary, and the game was more wild, much like a college game. If you like college football, you would probably be a CFL fan.
The article says "the technique could have potential uses in...". The parent comment says "this technology just happens to have potential..."
Neither is talking about this particular implementation of the technology. It's no surprise that something in the lab can't produce more energy than it consumes. I'm pretty sure that creating energy is one of the goals of this process.
I just think it's funny that they try to limit the applications.
That's kinda like saying "The 'Internet' could have potential uses in communications, biomedical research and remote sensing."
If small-scale fusion that produces more power than it consumes is indeed possible, it could have implications everywhere in everything. Portable, standalone fusion power sources could (in time) change everything. ((Note to self: do not mention phasers and lose all credibility....))
You're right of course, the formatting of the information has no bearing on the overall output. If it's written down, it's good enough. I don't know why people think such things. Do they think that people should use the blink tag to make their words stand out? Of course not. The only thing that matters is the words. Was that memo useful? No, it only contained "lorem ipsum" and stuff. Would that help you decide whether or not the world was in danger? No. It's the contents that matter. Formatting is just something you do to make it pretty. Who cares about making it pretty? When it's the fate of the world at stake you don't want to distract them with pretty boxes, lines, or other things. Oh, by the way, bin Laden is determined to strike in the US tomorrow. Obviously you'll know that from reading this paragraph. It's not like I need to put blinking lights around that or anything. All I had to do was write it. In fact, blinking lights might distract you from the important message I'm conveying.
What about the ads for "Airwaves" chewing gum in the game? I haven't played it myself, but I hear that there is at least one CG scene that is essentially a gum commercial. Sam Fisher whips out the gum, label-out, the camera takes a look at the stuff, and he pops it in his mouth.
From what I hear, it adds nothing to the game, and is really blatant. Even worse than the ads in Burnout 3 or Need for Speed Underground 2.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game with blatant advertising like that.
Slashdot Mirror
But yeah, people should learn that "rouge" is French for red, and "rogue" is English for unexpected/abnormal/destructive.
And while we're at it:
No-one with a basic education should mix up their homonyms. They're wrong if they think nobody notices. Mistakes here, there and everwhere make the post lose credibility. Check your posts before posting or you're going to be ignored.
Take a look at how many recording companies are part of the RIAA. The RIAA has too much control, there's almost no difference between boycotting the RIAA-owned companies, and boycotting all music sold on CDs.
A better tactic is to boycott specific bands that are loud and public with their support for the RIAA and their actions. Make it so that nobody wants to speak up for the RIAA, and every artist who speaks up speaks up *against* them.
Sure, you'll still have all the same people hiding behind the RIAA suits, but when the celebrities are saying they hate the industry, and the suits are saying the industry is "good for America(tm)" then who do you think the average music buyer is going to listen to?
Have you ever watched CNN? I mean really, calling these people journalists is an insult to every journalist in the world. There may be "reporters" working at CNN, but I can't remember ever seeing a journalist.
I remember the (latest) invasion of Iraq, where CNN showed, for minutes on end, live footage from a tank somewhere in the middle of the night. All you could see was light green blobs on a dark green background, yet they carried that image for minutes. Meanwhile, on another non-commercial news station, they were having a forum discussion on the reasons for the invasion. CNN is as much about journalism and news as MTV is about music.
You're right about them caring if it can raise interest (i.e. ratings), but don't expect them to do any research on the story, or anything else a journalist would do. If you send something to them, do all the research for them. Give them a script they can speak on air. If you just tell them about a story and want them to follow it up... that's just too much work.
He probably has croni... er... friends. Contact him anyhow. Just because someone can't vote doesn't mean you shouldn't contact them. If you happen to know any bureaucrats in the right area, contact them too. They may say "hey boss, we're getting a lot of heat about this". But, if anybody can put pressure on the heritage minister, do that. She's supposed to be protecting canadian heritage, not selling things out to the huge US conglomerates.
Sure, you can do a *lot* without FTL travel and communication. You can make some really interesting stories involving only what current physics says is possible or likely... but some of the staples of science fiction are gone.
If you're limited to significantly slower-than-light travel your stories have to take place in our solar system. They can't involve any alien species, because no aliens would bother spending millenia coming to earth. You *might* be able to include a *message* from aliens, but you couldn't have any two-way communication, unless your story spanned centuries. Basically aliens are gone completely.
You'd have to pick one planet for a setting, and stick with it. Travel between planets would be a very rare and costly thing, and if you want people walking on the surface of that planet then you're probably limited to Earth, Venus or Mars.
To me, the lack of aliens is the biggest problem with no FTL travel. You can have great science fiction without FTL travel, but what's fiction with only humans?
For as long as there have been stories, there have been non-humans. Ancient egyptians had their half-animal gods. Ancient greeks had the a variety of non-human monsters. In modern times, we're pretty sure there are no "monsters" on earth, certainly nothing out there that has an intelligence comparable to ours... so does millenia of telling stories with non-humans have to come to an end? I guess we can make the modern science-friendly equivalent be "the self-aware machine", but when the "monster" is your own creation, that's a whole different brand of story.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is keeping the world internally consistent. Decide on a mechanism for FTL travel, fully figure out how it works, what its limits are, etc, and tell a story from there. Just because a story has FTL travel doesn't mean it has to have leprechauns, violate thermodynamics laws, etc.
I like really hard science fiction, but I also like well written fantasy, and ancient myths (I highly recommend the Iliad). Star Wars and Star Trek are the softest of soft science fiction. They modify the laws of the world as needed to fit the story they want to tell. Why not have "firm science fiction". Create a set of rules that govern the world, make sure they all logically coexist, and then stick to those laws. The physics need not be the physics we understand today, but make sure that the differences fit in the areas that we don't fully understand today. Oh, and include aliens. Let's not abandon millenia of precedent just because modern physics can't fully explain how it would work.
I've heard about the "commander" mode, or "role", but don't know all that much about it. Is it at all similar to how the Commander role works in Savage? What else are people really looking forward to? Is this one supposed to be more friendly with on-screen text? BF 1942 was awful with that, it was sometimes unreadable. Vietnam I think was a bit better but far from great.
Are there vehicles that play really differently than what's available in BF 1942 or Vietnam? One thing that was both good and bad in that one was the realism of the vehicles. It was good in that there were lots of vehicles, all of which were driveable, but it was bad because the realism mix just wasn't right. On one hand, one person could "crew" a tank completely, driving it, shooting, etc. There was a place for a second person, but their role was pretty useless -- just a machine gunner or something. On the other hand, the look and abilities of the tanks was vaguely realistic. I think it would have been much more interesting if you *needed* a crew of 3 to make a tank work, and in a ship you could either fire the main guns, or move the ship, not both.
Anyhow, I'll have to check out the demo, see what's new...
Until you said "all intensive purposes", you probably meant to say "all intents and purposes".
In any case, I think you have the right idea, only the difference between typing letters and moving along a line is that a line is continuous but characters are discrete. You don't need analog control (a mouse, scroll wheel, etc) to make discrete changes.
The important word there is "days".
For a few days in a row, you can increase productivity, but based on this guy's research, shortly after that, you start to lose productivity to such an extent that after 2 months you would have been better off sticking with 40 hour weeks. In addition, if after those 2 months you go back to 40 hour weeks, it will take a while for people to recover from the 60 hour weeks.
So yeah, a "crunch mode" of a few days works. I would even guess that you can get away with 2 weeks of "crunch time", but beyond that, you're eating into your future productivity. But, even then, at 60 hours a week, the chance of a catastrophic error on any given day (accidentally nuking the CVS tree, tripping over the plug to the server, etc.) goes up dramatically. So even a short crunch mode is risky.
If a manager understood this, and only used crunch mode in dire emergencies, and then examined what went wrong so that it wouldn't happen next time... that would be good for everybody, managers, employees, everybody.
What about when your wife wants to balance the checkbook and you're busy playing CTF or an RTS?
Many households have more than one TV, and many also have more than one computer. It's pretty easy to move to a different room for either TV watching or game playing. It would be a bit different if you want to play online and the other TV location isn't wired for network access, but really, getting a second TV is much cheaper than getting a second computer.
I think you're right about the controllers though. It isn't just about getting a keyboard and mouse working for the console. That might actually be easy if everything is Bluetooth (as long as the game makers support those controllers). The difficulty is finding an appropriate surface for the controllers. I think what's really needed is a couch-friendly controller that give you the precision you get from a mouse-and-keyboard, but one without the need for a flat surface to rest it on (coffee tables just don't compare to desks).
Has anybody ever made a game controller with an embedded trackball? That really sounds like it might do the trick. Instead of having the analog stick on the left side, just put a trackball in its place. It wouldn't be quite as intuitive or natural as a keyboard and mouse, but it would be far better than a mini-joystick.
For PC gaming I use a mouse and keyboard for FPSes and RTSes, I use a joystic (not a joypad, but a true joystick) for flight-sim type games, and I have a gamepad lying around somewhere too. But there are times when a console's gamepad is better than what I have for the PC. For example, trying to fly planes/helicopters in BF 1942 or BF Vietnam is really tough because they're just not well suited to keyboard/mouse control.
Console controllers don't have the precision you want for FPSes or the ease of selecting that you want for RTSes, but there's nothing saying the next-gen consoles won't have good controls. The PS3 is supposed to have bluetooth controllers. There are already bluetooth mice and keyboards. All that's really needed is that the people writing the games support more than just the gamepad.
If they can get the controllers right, there really isn't much that makes a PC better than a console, and if they're smart they could fix the console to add those mixing things.
Controllers are the hard part. It's not just that a PC has a keyboard and mouse, it's also that a PC also typically sits on a desk that provides a place to put them. A coffee-table isn't nearly as ergonomic as a PC for keyboard and mouse use. So the challenge for controllers isn't just getting something that gives you the control of a keyboard and mouse, but also designing something that can be used while sitting on a couch.
PCs also used to have the advantage of having network access, making online gaming possible, and downloading new content possible. That's made it's way to consoles, with the unfortunate "patch it later" mentality beginning to creep in too. The biggest drawback I see here is that the consoles the networks for consoles seem to often be really closed-down rather than something ad-hoc like you can get with Diablo etc.
The one really difficult missing bit is "modding" console games. While some games let you customize them to some extent, it's hard to imagine someone doing a "Halo 2 Total Conversion" for a console. Maybe they can fix that though, by offering free PC downloads of tools and stuff, you'd have to edit and mod on the PC then transfer to the console, but maybe it could work.
Overall though, I think console gaming taking over is a really good thing. Knowing that designers optimized the game for *exactly your hardware*, and that nobody else has an advantage or disadvantage based on their hardware is great. It makes any multiplayer game much more fair, and makes it so that you never have to buy a game and wonder how well it will play on your PC.
"3. Download and make them use spyware"
My own humble opinion? Skip this step.
yeah not yea.
'Yea' is olde englishe. 'Yeah' is the common informal way of saying yes.
It would be great if someone would make a fake x-box live network. The live capabilities are great, I just don't like being tied to Microsoft, or paying large fees to them even though I'm already paying my own bandwidth charges. I know, they pay for the server side stuff, but most gaming should be peer-to-peer.
It's impossible to keep the advantage. If the US trades fairly, then goods produced in India can be made more cheaply and so Americans will buy them. Money will flow to India and equilibrium will eventually be established.
If the US trades unfairly, it will end up wasting money on enforcement, so not only will the American-made goods cost more, but you'll also be wasting money.
In the end, more equilibrium is inevitable. So, what's the smart thing to do?
The answer is simple. Raise their standard of living. If everybody has to have the same standard of living, why not see to it that everybody's standard of living is higher.
If it's pollution that you're worried about, then make it cheaper to make a pollution-free car than a polluting one. If it's child labour that bothers you, make sure that it's easier to use robots than children. If it's disease, then try to make sure that there are no diseases for anybody, not just expensive treatments for those who can afford it.
Accept the fact that the the US standard of living will eventually approach that of the rest of the world, then decide to improve the world's standard of living. That's really the only solution.
You have liquid immigrants now? Coool.....
Seriously though, this won't change anything about illegal immigration, it will just make it more annoying for them. Last time the border ppl started inspecting incoming vehicles carefully and turning back people trying to enter the country illegally, the farmers(*) all freaked out and demanded that their illegal workers be allowed in so that they could have the help they needed to get their produce to market.
When you build an economy on illegal workers you kinda give up the high ground in complaining about them.
"Um... what pub?"
I hate it when people send me text messages with this sort of thing because they never give enough information. If they would just call I could ask them for the bits they forgot.
If text messages were cheaper than phone calls, I might use them, but here (in the US) you are charged for every text message, but calls are free. No incentive at all to use text messages.
Dude, you obviously don't go to the same meetings as me. I doubt the boss would notice if I hung myself (quietly) in the corner.
I think that the emphasis of any copyright legislation should be based on promoting the production of scientific and artistic works. That should be the guiding principle behind any law and any enforcement, not profit.
Intellectual property is about the government granting someone a temporary monopoly on something, in the hopes that it will have a net benefit for the society. The monopoly is not a right that a creator has, it's a tradeoff. The government will permit you a temporary monopoly in exchange for you helping society when that temporary monopoly expires.
The extent and expiry of the monopoly should be designed so that society benefits, and not so that the artist/creator benefits. So, if the country is going to permit software patents, it should limit their duration to one or two years, something long enough so that the invention is worth it, but short enough that the technology is still relevant by the time the patent expires. I think it's best to exclude software patents entirely but that's just me.
I think another main feature of the law should be to guarantee that creators are compensated, rather than huge corporations. I would make it illegal to assign copyrights, patents and other IP to companies, and permit them to only be assigned to individuals or small groups of individuals. A person can choose to exclusively license his/her IP to a company if he/she so chooses, but such agreements must be made on a per-property basis. No contracts saying all IP created during a period is owned by a company.
Finally I think having terms in the law dealing specifically with Open licenses. This is the very core of "for the public good". Make it much harder to prosecute open-source developers for IP infringement. Even perhaps set aside some public money to advise and defend registered open-source development groups from lawsuits.
IP laws shouldn't be about money, they should be about freedom and public good.
Damn right, if someone can't afford to fight off the plague, let them die from it. It can't affect me, I'm *rich*. And if they die, don't *force* me to pay for removing their bloated corpse from the middle of the street, I'll move it if I want to. Oh yeah, and "street"? That's what we call the ruts where I drive most often. Can you believe in some places the government forces people to pay taxes so they can make roads?
Damn commies.
Canada has college football -- it's called the CFL. I'm half kidding, but only half. Doug Flutie is famous for what? An incredible pass in college -- and a great career in Canada. The NFL thought he was too short, so he went to Canada and essentially continued his college career. His salary was a bit higher, but nothing like an NFL player's salary, and the game was more wild, much like a college game. If you like college football, you would probably be a CFL fan.
The article says "the technique could have potential uses in ...". The parent comment says "this technology just happens to have potential ..."
Neither is talking about this particular implementation of the technology. It's no surprise that something in the lab can't produce more energy than it consumes. I'm pretty sure that creating energy is one of the goals of this process.
I just think it's funny that they try to limit the applications.
That's kinda like saying "The 'Internet' could have potential uses in communications, biomedical research and remote sensing."
If small-scale fusion that produces more power than it consumes is indeed possible, it could have implications everywhere in everything. Portable, standalone fusion power sources could (in time) change everything. ((Note to self: do not mention phasers and lose all credibility....))
You're right of course, the formatting of the information has no bearing on the overall output. If it's written down, it's good enough. I don't know why people think such things. Do they think that people should use the blink tag to make their words stand out? Of course not. The only thing that matters is the words. Was that memo useful? No, it only contained "lorem ipsum" and stuff. Would that help you decide whether or not the world was in danger? No. It's the contents that matter. Formatting is just something you do to make it pretty. Who cares about making it pretty? When it's the fate of the world at stake you don't want to distract them with pretty boxes, lines, or other things. Oh, by the way, bin Laden is determined to strike in the US tomorrow. Obviously you'll know that from reading this paragraph. It's not like I need to put blinking lights around that or anything. All I had to do was write it. In fact, blinking lights might distract you from the important message I'm conveying.
Not only that, but once you start playing the $60 dollar game, it shows you all kinds of in-game ads for things like chewing gum.
What about the ads for "Airwaves" chewing gum in the game? I haven't played it myself, but I hear that there is at least one CG scene that is essentially a gum commercial. Sam Fisher whips out the gum, label-out, the camera takes a look at the stuff, and he pops it in his mouth.
From what I hear, it adds nothing to the game, and is really blatant. Even worse than the ads in Burnout 3 or Need for Speed Underground 2.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a game with blatant advertising like that.