I also use a 2" pipe for the barell and
a 2" to 6 or 8" adapter with a short length
of the large diameter and a cap. Works real good!
Same here, though I use a 6" T coupling as
the actual chamber... Spark-plug through a
screw-on top cap, fired by a BBQ igniter on
about 20 meters of HV wire, and about 10
reducing couplings for the back plug, so
that hopefully it would blow that cleanly
rather than explode if something "bad"
happens (like the potato jamming somehow).
Also, a point on Fuel... forget the hairspray,
it will gum-up the inside something awful. Get
a butane lighter refil bottle (like $3) and a
60cc irrigation syringe (no needle, they have
around a half-centimeter opening at the tip).
Fill it once per liter of chamber for a perfect
air:fuel ratio.
How can they ignore people who will
not buy their hardware and OSes?
Because most people know absolutely nothing
about this, and will go out and buy the new
much-hyped "Pentium 5 FX Palladium! with
patented Ultra TCPA technology! To make
your web experience faster over even a 300
baud packet radio modem!".
Those of us who have a clue will avoid
this as long as possible, and might
even make it a few years without ugrading
(hey, my current desktop has lived a few
years, and it still runs well), but when
even grandma has a 500GHz machine with
a terrabyte of 1:1 CPU-synchronous RAM
and a petabyte of solid-state disk space,
we simply won't have the option of not
upgrading our pathetic oversized
calculators.
I purchase about 3 complete computer
systems and OSes for everyone Joe Sixpack
buys
But for every one of us, they have three
thousand joe sixpacks to buy into
whatever they tell him he wants.
pretty, and I don't like it any
more than you, but a geek-only boycott
will simply never exert enough market
pressure to make a difference.
From the comments so far, I will presume
most Slashdotters have no experience with
WindRiver.
Exercising great restraint to avoid writing
anything they would likely sue me for (such
as a factual tale of my experience dealing
with them for over two years), I would just
like to point out that we should not, in any
way, consider this "good" news.
Aside from their "quality" tools (the fixing
of which I can thank for giving me a reason
to learn Tcl), expect to hear about a GPL
violation within a few weeks. And if they
handle that accusation like they handle their
customers' bug reports, well, good ol' Darl
may start sounding fairly reasonable to deal
with.
Given that, what is the point of the EFF
proposing "fixes" to help keep the computer
owner in control, when its primary design
goal is the exact opposite?
Because it throws the ball back over the fence
to those trying to force DRM on us.
In essence, the EFF has given these folks an
ultimatum - "You want a trusted computing
environment, but not the public backlash?
You can fix it like this. Now put up or
shut up".
Up to this point, the Palladium group
et al could safely ignore most of
us, since all of us opposed to DRM have
basically just whined about it. Now that
someone (and a respectable someone, at
that) has offered them a way to get what
they claim they want, choosing to ignore
that will very tangibly clarify the real
intent - If they ignore the EFF's recommendations
completely, they all but publically admit
they only care about stripping users of
the right to use their own machines, rather
than creating some fictional "safe" computing
environment.
In the past, I have worked on a number of
"small" contracting jobs, where I figured
"Okay, ten hours of work at most, I'll quote
$1000 and take $500".
In every case but one, 20 hours of effort
later, I ended up giving the customer an
ultimatum "Pick five problems, I'll give you
five more hours of work. Accept it, or get
someone else to start from scratch".
The problem doesn't so much involve the
quality of the software (I consider my code
fairly decent), but in customer expectations.
People who want a small app to do something
trivial tend to think they'll get something
comparable to what Microsoft would give a
team of 20 a few months to do. "What? It
won't automatically put data in my
[closed-format] datebook? Unacceptible!".
I tried doing the same, with very detailed
specs, but you'll still get burned on the
minutiae - If you can come up with a spec
sufficient to leave no room whatsoever for
differences of opinion, you've already
completed the project and just want to sell
the result.
So, ALWAYS go for an hourly rate. Give an
honest, non-binding estimate of the total
cost, but insist they pay you hourly.
The very first job I took under those conditions,
I not only didn't get burned, but realized
an unexpected benefit - If, after ten hours of
research and phone calls, the customer decides
(even on your recommendation) that the project
seems infeasible at the moment, you still get
paid for your time. And yes, you can include
time in project-related phone calls - Keeping
that in mind makes long-winded chats with a
babbling customer far more tolerable.
Remember to bill for every single second you
spend in an activity you wouldn't have otherwise
engaged in if not for the project, just make
sure to document it well. We geeks tend to
think "I didn't spend that time coding, so
I won't bill for it"; Fortunately, a friend more
business-minded than myself pointed out the error
of that, and it totally blew me away - Next
invoice I submitted, the customer didn't even
blink at seeing 4 hours of phone calls and 7
hours of research. People get a bit
touchier about time spend travelling, so make
sure to mention that up front if the job will
require you to put in more than a token amount
of time driving between places. In general,
though, you can "safely" bill for travel
other than to-and-from home - Anything
(job-related, obviously) after that first
stop counts as fair game.
If you're willing to pay for the game, why
are your panties all in a bunch over Steam?
It's not like it would affect you if you have
a legitimate copy of the game.
Ys, it would indeed affect me.
First of all, Steam requires a live internet
connection to play. Not just to
register, or to activate, but every time you
want to play. Goodbye gaming during that
boring 10-hour flight, eh?
Second, Steam not only makes possible, but
forces, whatever patches Valve has
decided to make, on the users. you simply
don't have the option of saying "gee, y'know,
it runs fine right now, and I don't want the
new uberfun zone, so I'll skip this update".
Nope. They release a patch, you get it next
time you connect.
Third, related to #2, you have no way to keep
playing if Valve gets bored. Yeah, the
servers will probably stay up for a year or
two, to avoid lawsuits, but personally, I still
play games well over a decade old. What odds
do you lay on the Steam servers staing up for
over a decade? Not very good, I'd wager.
Fourth, have you read about the typical user
experience with connecting to a Steam server?
It makes AOL-in-the-mid-90s look easy to connect
to by comparison. Valve already has money-in-pocket
by the time users try to connect, so has very
little motivation to guarantee the capacity to
let everyone get on. And, as history has shown,
doesn't give a damn.
And finally, some people just don't like
having companies treat them like criminals,
or having minor annoyances pop up every time
they want to play a game they legitimately
buy. Whether as minor as a "no-CD" crack
(which often makes the game far more
responsive in general, since it doesn't wait
for the CD to spin up every now and then),
or as major as disabling Steam, when people
buy games, they want to play those
games, not jump through hoops to prove they
really paid for it.
So there's got to be some other motive behind
your words... something more to the tune of
"Someone please make a crack so I don't have
to buy the game."
Not really, no. If the above explanation
doesn't do it for you, I guess nothing will.
So enjoy all the BS, and if someday we meet
on a plane, I'll share my bought-but-cracked
copy with you, as you gaze forlornly at the
screen when your uncracked copy presents the
highly accusatory "cannot connect with server,
ya damn pirate" screen. Perhaps then
you'll "get it", why things like Steam count
as "bad" even if you legally own a copy of
the game.
Which would actually help Valve,
because while I really want to buy
and play this game, Hell will get a tad
chilly before I put up with the associated
DRM.
So c'mon, all you little cracking groups
out there, grab this source and make us
a fix for the rights-sucking crap the
call Steam.
We plan to fire him in about 2 months, he
won't be told by project manager/hr until the
day it happens, our whole office knows
If the "whole office" knows, then he
knows.
And if he knows, you'd better pray to
whatever imaginary friend you believe in that
he has a better work ethic than most geeks,
or come Monday after the Friday he goes for
good... Well, I don't even want to imagine
what sort of time-delayed damage a person could
do over the course of two months.
The fact that they aren't dickheads?
Whats to stop me from dumping grass
clippings and newspapers at the local
dump?
I suspect every single response to this guy
so far has missed the point...
If someone builds a PC from parts, they would not
have to pay the "recycling tax" on it up-front.
So how does this law affect those "dudes"
who don't "got a Dell"?
Or does this law include some convoluted per-part
tax that adds up to the total you'd pay to
get the whole PC as a single unit?
Especially things like washing machines and
refrigerators in which the previous owner put
who-knows-what.
This, from the same country that currently has
a societal-wide "feminine hygene" problem
relating to girls considering panty-liners an
alternative to bathing and changing clothes?
Heh. Strange place. Hope to visit there some
day, but I just don't get it, as a whole.
Sorry, but your argument has some pretty shaky
logic. If somebody owns some desert land that
they never use is it ok to go start a brush
fire?
You've just made me wonder something, though I
really doubt you meant to...
Relating to land rights, specifically "adverse
posession"... If I walk across your property
uncontested every day for X years (7?
11? Varies by state), I have a legally
valid "right of way", and after that time
you cannot stop me from making the same
walk whenever I want to.
Would this same idea apply to using ROMs? If
a company hasn't enforced their copyright on
a game for X years, during which time I've
used the ROM regularly, might I have something
similar to "squatter's rights" to continue
playing that ROM?
I do not play the "law" game, so can't really
say how viable this seems, but if companies
want to pretend physical property rights apply
to IP, why wouldn't this burn them by the same
rules?
And you can spend all day blowing on your
cartidges trying to get them to work in your
aging console.
Yep. However, once you own a real genuine
"Dig Dig II" cartridge, you have the right
to "format shift" it to a ROM you can play
in an emulator.
So effectively, it doesn't ever need
to actually work on a real machine. Buy the
cartridge at a yard sale for a quarter, and
get the ROM somewhere off the net.
Although the last step there involves a
questionably-legal activity (does the right
to make a backup include the right to use
someone else's backup if your own original
product stops working?), a prosecutor would
need an outright confession just to have
any case - And even then, I'd like
to see someone demonstrate to a jury that
file A, from the net, does not equal file B,
a ROM dump, when they contain the exact same
data.
However, I do consider this a good idea,
and have said in the past I'd like to see
some company offer a service like this.
StarROMs, however, has completely missed
the boat on this one. They need to do one
of two things to have any shot at all of
making this work - Lower their price to
more like a quarter per ROM, or offer only
the rarest-of-the-rare ROMs (which people
would have no shot of finding at a yard
sale). Even at $2/ROM, they won't get a
whole lot of customers for classic
machines.
One possible exception to this, though...
If they offered some of the "larger"
classic games (those that originally
came on CD, such as some TG16 and Sega CD
games), they could probably get $5 each
for them, just because nabbing those off
the net simply takes too long, and those
never show up at yard sales (considering
they sell on EBay for up to a few hundred
dollars for original discs).
No, no. I understand the DVD regioning system
(evil though it is), it's the direct correlation
between Star Trek fandom and good sense that
doesn't logically follow.
Ah, my apologies, I see what you meant now...
I don't know that I'd say "good sense"
specifically, but "Trek geeks" seem to
have a fairly high overlap with "geeks"
in general (explaing why a box-set release
of ST:TNG appears on Slashdot's frontpage,
while something like Friends or Days of Our
Lives does not).
While perhaps not to the extent of them
working in the tech industry, I
would say that far greater ratio of Trek
fans would recognize the problems of DVD
region coding than, say, Days of Our
Lives fans...
Can you explain the logic of this
statement to me?
Sure.
US DVDs use region 1. Paramount has not yet
announced anything but a region 2 (Western
Europe) release of this set. Without a region
unlocked player, Americans could not enjoy
this product.
Didn't Davis (Dem, Gov. of CA) himself
said you can't blame one person for the
economy?
Certainly a bastion of good leadership
there...
And why are Europe and Asia experiencing
bad economy as well?
If I supply all your "toaster strudels",
and you supply all my "pop tarts", in a
one-to-one trade, then if one of us
dries up, the other suffers as well.
Granted, international trade has a LOT
more complexity than that, but I think
the idea pretty much sums it up - If the
US has a recession, all its major trade
parters will suffer as a consequence.
That statement just flys in the face
of many reports which contradict you:
And your quote flies in the face of reality,
regardless of where it came from.
Heh... Yeah, those pathetic little $300 checks
made all the difference in the world, thus the
continuing recession. So what did people do
with them? Let's check the Consumer Confidence
Index over the course of Bush's presidency.
Here, try these:
Historical values in chart form, and
Current value, with textual elaboration.
Not pretty. And although you can blame 9/11
for a drastic dip at the beginning of Bush's
presidency, notice it went back up, yet now
lingers at a level barely even shown on the
chart at the first link.
So what effect did Bush's tax cuts have on the
economy? People squirreled them away for fear
of further fiscal irresponsibility by the
president.
You sir (or madam) are a demagog -- and an
ignorant (or deliberately obtuse) one at that.
Though I thank you for the compliment (What exactly
do I lead, to qualify as a demagogue?), I think you
have it wrong. I simply call a spade, a spade.
Bush has destroyed this country, both economically
(as with every business enterprise he has ever
had involvement with), and in terms of foreign
relations, and I see no reason not to "credit"
him for his deeds.
you'd see that it annoys most of the
management, too. A fair number of them
actually are competant. You just don't
notice them much more than you do a good
System Administrator.
Agreed, and I have indeed encountered "good"
managers. They make life a million times
easier (and I mean that as only mild hyperbole)
for those under them - Breaking projects into
decent sized chunks, giving those chunks to the
right people, filtering the upper-management
corporatespeak from the tech people (and the
techspeak from upper management, no doubt),
etc.
I see such people as wonderful, treasured
resources to a company. Unfortunately, I
would also add the word "rare" to that. In
my entire career, I've had one "good" manager,
two "okay" managers, and the rest complete
twits who did more to hinder than help me.
Thus my generalization. If you buy a bag of
apples with only one not rotten, you don't take
a bite out of each to find the good one.
States have been relying on the federal tit
for way too long.
"Relying on the federal tit"... Interesting way
of looking at it.
Tell me, proportionately, how much of your
yearly taxes go to the federal government,
compared with how much goes to your home
state?
For me, I recall a figure somewhere around 10:1
for my last filing.
So, the federal government gets 10 times as much
as the individual states, yet what do they do?
Almost nothing. The military (how does
that benefit me?), occasional distaster relief
(I have the common sense to live somewhere that
doesn't have volcanos, earthquakes, yearly floods
and/or droughts, or hurricanes), a bit of highly
restrictive (and racially discriminatory against
whites) academic funding? Really... All the
rest of those great federal programs we hear
about eventually fall to the states to
implement.
So how do the states fund all these great
(and expensive) programs? Not from the paltry
share of income taxes they recieve. No, they
fund them from the money the federal government
gives back to the states (which came from
people in those states in the first place), which
those states then must use on federal
programs that may or may not have any relevance
to that particular state.
I totally agree the states should lay off the
federal tit... With one qualifier - We should
completely invert the ratio of where our taxes
go. Then we can validly complain when the
states go begging the fed for money. As it
stands now, they have no choice.
Mr. Bush is not responsible for the
economy.
BS. He's run every company he had involvement
with into the ground, and has continued that
trend on the level of the entire United States.
Yeah, normally you can blame recessions on the
previous president - But in this case, looking
at both Clinton's success and Bush's history of
failure, I'd say "no way". Bush singlehandedly
took us from the best economic conditions in
half a century, to the worst, in a mere 3
years.
Engineers make recommendations. Managers
disregard them. Things like impressing VPs,
etc are way more important to get ahead in
an organisation unfortunately.
In a "normal" work environment, the corporate
food chain annoys those of us with a clue (ie,
non-management). Just one of the hassles they
pay us to put up with. "Why did this project
fail?" "Because you killed the single most
important subproject associated with it" "Well,
get to work on that, and don't let this happen
again!" (mimes masturbating while walking
away, disgusted).
In the case of NASA, however, they have a bit
more on the line than the bottom line, good hair,
and kissing VP ass - They have real, live humans
risking their lives every time they climb up into
the cockpit.
Sorry, but "the way we do things" doesn't cut
it in this situation. I'd personally like to
see some people go to prison over this one.
They overruled the warnings of people with
a clue, and as a result, people died.
Totally unacceptible.
As "Cecil Adams" wrote recently, the
judicial precedent that corporations have
rights is based on the improper work of court
reporter who had an ax to grind.
Ah, many thanks! I regularly read "The
Straight Dope", but somehow missed that
one. Excellent summary of a major plague
on modern civilization. All thanks to
an overzealous court reporter... Sad.
My favorite quote from that writeup - "in
the world of the law, a precedent is a
precedent, even if it's a stupid one".
Reminds me of the lyrics "Then they ask
what went wrong; When you never had it
right".
Someone needs to do a lawsuit flowchart
I cant keep track anymore.
Well, no one can fault you for that. I
have to admit, this one seems to baffle me as
well... It appears this flowchart would require
future dependancies - Namely, in order for this
countersuit to have merit, SCO needs to win the
primary suit first.
Really kinda interesting, in a traps-within-traps
way. If SCO wins (as if...), they've established
the precedent needed to lose.
Darl should just dump his stock, call the
whole thing off, and go out for a few beers.
Any other course of action just increases the
diameter of the phallus IBM will eventually
lubelessly impale him upon.
Churchs and governments are corporations.
I wish protection from them just as much as I
want protection from MCI.
I will agree with you to that extent, but I
think you may have misinterpreted the DNC
slightly... It doesn't so much give charities
and politicians the right to call
you, as it excludes them from observing the
federal DNC. And if they abuse that, the
possibility always exists of adding them
to it at a later date (though I won't hold
my breath for that to happenk, in particular
not the political call aspect...).
Yes, I would FAR prefer they had to obey it
as well. But this won't get them added, it
will just result in the death of the DNC
overall.
Put bluntly, saying "fuck off and die" to
two calls per night beats doing it ten times
each night.
allowing charitable solicitations but banning
commercial calls "borrows from the reasoning of
the pigs in George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.'...
'Some animals are more equal than others.'"
Yep. Humans should have rights, corporations
should not.
We can debate all day over whether a 3rd
world factory worker has a "right" to the
same wage as an American one, or whether
I have the "right" to not have my job
outsourced to India, or whether immigration
counts as a natural "right". But
corporations? No. No debate at all.
Corporations, which do not suffer from the
same weaknesses as humans (don't naturally
die, can't imprison the entire corporation,
they wave off massive fines that would destroy
a human as nothing more than an annoynace, their
opinion carries FAR more weight with politicians
than a "mere" human), do not deserve the same
freedoms as humans.
More importantly, I agree that in this situation,
we have differential enforcement of "rights",
just not in the same way that you see it. If
I placed ten million automated calls a day to
the ATA or DMA, Officer Friendly would show up
at my door to tell me to cut it out. Yet,
when the ATA makes those same ten million calls
to equally unwilling recipients, it somehow
becomes a first amendment issue?
No. This entire mess involves nothing more
than a well-placed judge acting as the lackey
of Corporate America, no doubt for some
shady-but-technically-legal compensation.
Regardless of the charitable and political
exclusions to the federal DNC, this registry
takes an important step in taking back one
portion of the lives of HUMANS from "the
machine".
Slashdot Mirror
I also use a 2" pipe for the barell and a 2" to 6 or 8" adapter with a short length of the large diameter and a cap. Works real good!
Same here, though I use a 6" T coupling as the actual chamber... Spark-plug through a screw-on top cap, fired by a BBQ igniter on about 20 meters of HV wire, and about 10 reducing couplings for the back plug, so that hopefully it would blow that cleanly rather than explode if something "bad" happens (like the potato jamming somehow).
Also, a point on Fuel... forget the hairspray, it will gum-up the inside something awful. Get a butane lighter refil bottle (like $3) and a 60cc irrigation syringe (no needle, they have around a half-centimeter opening at the tip). Fill it once per liter of chamber for a perfect air:fuel ratio.
How can they ignore people who will not buy their hardware and OSes?
Because most people know absolutely nothing about this, and will go out and buy the new much-hyped "Pentium 5 FX Palladium! with patented Ultra TCPA technology! To make your web experience faster over even a 300 baud packet radio modem!".
Those of us who have a clue will avoid this as long as possible, and might even make it a few years without ugrading (hey, my current desktop has lived a few years, and it still runs well), but when even grandma has a 500GHz machine with a terrabyte of 1:1 CPU-synchronous RAM and a petabyte of solid-state disk space, we simply won't have the option of not upgrading our pathetic oversized calculators.
I purchase about 3 complete computer systems and OSes for everyone Joe Sixpack buys
But for every one of us, they have three thousand joe sixpacks to buy into whatever they tell him he wants.
pretty, and I don't like it any more than you, but a geek-only boycott will simply never exert enough market pressure to make a difference.
From the comments so far, I will presume most Slashdotters have no experience with WindRiver.
Exercising great restraint to avoid writing anything they would likely sue me for (such as a factual tale of my experience dealing with them for over two years), I would just like to point out that we should not, in any way, consider this "good" news.
Aside from their "quality" tools (the fixing of which I can thank for giving me a reason to learn Tcl), expect to hear about a GPL violation within a few weeks. And if they handle that accusation like they handle their customers' bug reports, well, good ol' Darl may start sounding fairly reasonable to deal with.
Given that, what is the point of the EFF proposing "fixes" to help keep the computer owner in control, when its primary design goal is the exact opposite?
Because it throws the ball back over the fence to those trying to force DRM on us.
In essence, the EFF has given these folks an ultimatum - "You want a trusted computing environment, but not the public backlash? You can fix it like this. Now put up or shut up".
Up to this point, the Palladium group et al could safely ignore most of us, since all of us opposed to DRM have basically just whined about it. Now that someone (and a respectable someone, at that) has offered them a way to get what they claim they want, choosing to ignore that will very tangibly clarify the real intent - If they ignore the EFF's recommendations completely, they all but publically admit they only care about stripping users of the right to use their own machines, rather than creating some fictional "safe" computing environment.
I'd charge by the hour.
I'll second this.
In the past, I have worked on a number of "small" contracting jobs, where I figured "Okay, ten hours of work at most, I'll quote $1000 and take $500".
In every case but one, 20 hours of effort later, I ended up giving the customer an ultimatum "Pick five problems, I'll give you five more hours of work. Accept it, or get someone else to start from scratch".
The problem doesn't so much involve the quality of the software (I consider my code fairly decent), but in customer expectations. People who want a small app to do something trivial tend to think they'll get something comparable to what Microsoft would give a team of 20 a few months to do. "What? It won't automatically put data in my [closed-format] datebook? Unacceptible!".
I tried doing the same, with very detailed specs, but you'll still get burned on the minutiae - If you can come up with a spec sufficient to leave no room whatsoever for differences of opinion, you've already completed the project and just want to sell the result.
So, ALWAYS go for an hourly rate. Give an honest, non-binding estimate of the total cost, but insist they pay you hourly.
The very first job I took under those conditions, I not only didn't get burned, but realized an unexpected benefit - If, after ten hours of research and phone calls, the customer decides (even on your recommendation) that the project seems infeasible at the moment, you still get paid for your time. And yes, you can include time in project-related phone calls - Keeping that in mind makes long-winded chats with a babbling customer far more tolerable.
Remember to bill for every single second you spend in an activity you wouldn't have otherwise engaged in if not for the project, just make sure to document it well. We geeks tend to think "I didn't spend that time coding, so I won't bill for it"; Fortunately, a friend more business-minded than myself pointed out the error of that, and it totally blew me away - Next invoice I submitted, the customer didn't even blink at seeing 4 hours of phone calls and 7 hours of research. People get a bit touchier about time spend travelling, so make sure to mention that up front if the job will require you to put in more than a token amount of time driving between places. In general, though, you can "safely" bill for travel other than to-and-from home - Anything (job-related, obviously) after that first stop counts as fair game.
If you're willing to pay for the game, why are your panties all in a bunch over Steam? It's not like it would affect you if you have a legitimate copy of the game.
Ys, it would indeed affect me.
First of all, Steam requires a live internet connection to play. Not just to register, or to activate, but every time you want to play. Goodbye gaming during that boring 10-hour flight, eh?
Second, Steam not only makes possible, but forces, whatever patches Valve has decided to make, on the users. you simply don't have the option of saying "gee, y'know, it runs fine right now, and I don't want the new uberfun zone, so I'll skip this update". Nope. They release a patch, you get it next time you connect.
Third, related to #2, you have no way to keep playing if Valve gets bored. Yeah, the servers will probably stay up for a year or two, to avoid lawsuits, but personally, I still play games well over a decade old. What odds do you lay on the Steam servers staing up for over a decade? Not very good, I'd wager.
Fourth, have you read about the typical user experience with connecting to a Steam server? It makes AOL-in-the-mid-90s look easy to connect to by comparison. Valve already has money-in-pocket by the time users try to connect, so has very little motivation to guarantee the capacity to let everyone get on. And, as history has shown, doesn't give a damn.
And finally, some people just don't like having companies treat them like criminals, or having minor annoyances pop up every time they want to play a game they legitimately buy. Whether as minor as a "no-CD" crack (which often makes the game far more responsive in general, since it doesn't wait for the CD to spin up every now and then), or as major as disabling Steam, when people buy games, they want to play those games, not jump through hoops to prove they really paid for it.
So there's got to be some other motive behind your words... something more to the tune of "Someone please make a crack so I don't have to buy the game."
Not really, no. If the above explanation doesn't do it for you, I guess nothing will. So enjoy all the BS, and if someday we meet on a plane, I'll share my bought-but-cracked copy with you, as you gaze forlornly at the screen when your uncracked copy presents the highly accusatory "cannot connect with server, ya damn pirate" screen. Perhaps then you'll "get it", why things like Steam count as "bad" even if you legally own a copy of the game.
Which would actually help Valve, because while I really want to buy and play this game, Hell will get a tad chilly before I put up with the associated DRM.
So c'mon, all you little cracking groups out there, grab this source and make us a fix for the rights-sucking crap the call Steam.
Below about 5 seats were taped slips of paper.
If actually true, I hope you would have pulled a "Wally"...
"So, how was your doughnut?"
"The first two were decent, but the third tasted kinda papery"
We plan to fire him in about 2 months, he won't be told by project manager/hr until the day it happens, our whole office knows
If the "whole office" knows, then he knows.
And if he knows, you'd better pray to whatever imaginary friend you believe in that he has a better work ethic than most geeks, or come Monday after the Friday he goes for good... Well, I don't even want to imagine what sort of time-delayed damage a person could do over the course of two months.
I hope you have backups.
The fact that they aren't dickheads? Whats to stop me from dumping grass clippings and newspapers at the local dump?
I suspect every single response to this guy so far has missed the point...
If someone builds a PC from parts, they would not have to pay the "recycling tax" on it up-front. So how does this law affect those "dudes" who don't "got a Dell"?
Or does this law include some convoluted per-part tax that adds up to the total you'd pay to get the whole PC as a single unit?
Especially things like washing machines and refrigerators in which the previous owner put who-knows-what.
This, from the same country that currently has a societal-wide "feminine hygene" problem relating to girls considering panty-liners an alternative to bathing and changing clothes?
Heh. Strange place. Hope to visit there some day, but I just don't get it, as a whole.
Sorry, but your argument has some pretty shaky logic. If somebody owns some desert land that they never use is it ok to go start a brush fire?
You've just made me wonder something, though I really doubt you meant to...
Relating to land rights, specifically "adverse posession"... If I walk across your property uncontested every day for X years (7? 11? Varies by state), I have a legally valid "right of way", and after that time you cannot stop me from making the same walk whenever I want to.
Would this same idea apply to using ROMs? If a company hasn't enforced their copyright on a game for X years, during which time I've used the ROM regularly, might I have something similar to "squatter's rights" to continue playing that ROM?
I do not play the "law" game, so can't really say how viable this seems, but if companies want to pretend physical property rights apply to IP, why wouldn't this burn them by the same rules?
And you can spend all day blowing on your cartidges trying to get them to work in your aging console.
Yep. However, once you own a real genuine "Dig Dig II" cartridge, you have the right to "format shift" it to a ROM you can play in an emulator.
So effectively, it doesn't ever need to actually work on a real machine. Buy the cartridge at a yard sale for a quarter, and get the ROM somewhere off the net.
Although the last step there involves a questionably-legal activity (does the right to make a backup include the right to use someone else's backup if your own original product stops working?), a prosecutor would need an outright confession just to have any case - And even then, I'd like to see someone demonstrate to a jury that file A, from the net, does not equal file B, a ROM dump, when they contain the exact same data.
However, I do consider this a good idea, and have said in the past I'd like to see some company offer a service like this. StarROMs, however, has completely missed the boat on this one. They need to do one of two things to have any shot at all of making this work - Lower their price to more like a quarter per ROM, or offer only the rarest-of-the-rare ROMs (which people would have no shot of finding at a yard sale). Even at $2/ROM, they won't get a whole lot of customers for classic machines.
One possible exception to this, though... If they offered some of the "larger" classic games (those that originally came on CD, such as some TG16 and Sega CD games), they could probably get $5 each for them, just because nabbing those off the net simply takes too long, and those never show up at yard sales (considering they sell on EBay for up to a few hundred dollars for original discs).
No, no. I understand the DVD regioning system (evil though it is), it's the direct correlation between Star Trek fandom and good sense that doesn't logically follow.
Ah, my apologies, I see what you meant now...
I don't know that I'd say "good sense" specifically, but "Trek geeks" seem to have a fairly high overlap with "geeks" in general (explaing why a box-set release of ST:TNG appears on Slashdot's frontpage, while something like Friends or Days of Our Lives does not).
While perhaps not to the extent of them working in the tech industry, I would say that far greater ratio of Trek fans would recognize the problems of DVD region coding than, say, Days of Our Lives fans...
Can you explain the logic of this statement to me?
Sure.
US DVDs use region 1. Paramount has not yet announced anything but a region 2 (Western Europe) release of this set. Without a region unlocked player, Americans could not enjoy this product.
I wonder if it's region encoded.
Yes, they released it region coded.
But wait for the kicker...
They haven't yet announced a region-1 version!
Good thing most of the people with an interest in this have the sense to buy a region-unlockable DVD player...
Didn't Davis (Dem, Gov. of CA) himself said you can't blame one person for the economy?
Certainly a bastion of good leadership there...
And why are Europe and Asia experiencing bad economy as well?
If I supply all your "toaster strudels", and you supply all my "pop tarts", in a one-to-one trade, then if one of us dries up, the other suffers as well. Granted, international trade has a LOT more complexity than that, but I think the idea pretty much sums it up - If the US has a recession, all its major trade parters will suffer as a consequence.
That statement just flys in the face of many reports which contradict you:
And your quote flies in the face of reality, regardless of where it came from.
Heh... Yeah, those pathetic little $300 checks made all the difference in the world, thus the continuing recession. So what did people do with them? Let's check the Consumer Confidence Index over the course of Bush's presidency. Here, try these:
Historical values in chart form, and
Current value, with textual elaboration.
Not pretty. And although you can blame 9/11 for a drastic dip at the beginning of Bush's presidency, notice it went back up, yet now lingers at a level barely even shown on the chart at the first link.
So what effect did Bush's tax cuts have on the economy? People squirreled them away for fear of further fiscal irresponsibility by the president.
You sir (or madam) are a demagog -- and an ignorant (or deliberately obtuse) one at that.
Though I thank you for the compliment (What exactly do I lead, to qualify as a demagogue?), I think you have it wrong. I simply call a spade, a spade. Bush has destroyed this country, both economically (as with every business enterprise he has ever had involvement with), and in terms of foreign relations, and I see no reason not to "credit" him for his deeds.
you'd see that it annoys most of the management, too. A fair number of them actually are competant. You just don't notice them much more than you do a good System Administrator.
Agreed, and I have indeed encountered "good" managers. They make life a million times easier (and I mean that as only mild hyperbole) for those under them - Breaking projects into decent sized chunks, giving those chunks to the right people, filtering the upper-management corporatespeak from the tech people (and the techspeak from upper management, no doubt), etc.
I see such people as wonderful, treasured resources to a company. Unfortunately, I would also add the word "rare" to that. In my entire career, I've had one "good" manager, two "okay" managers, and the rest complete twits who did more to hinder than help me.
Thus my generalization. If you buy a bag of apples with only one not rotten, you don't take a bite out of each to find the good one.
States have been relying on the federal tit for way too long.
"Relying on the federal tit"... Interesting way of looking at it.
Tell me, proportionately, how much of your yearly taxes go to the federal government, compared with how much goes to your home state?
For me, I recall a figure somewhere around 10:1 for my last filing.
So, the federal government gets 10 times as much as the individual states, yet what do they do? Almost nothing. The military (how does that benefit me?), occasional distaster relief (I have the common sense to live somewhere that doesn't have volcanos, earthquakes, yearly floods and/or droughts, or hurricanes), a bit of highly restrictive (and racially discriminatory against whites) academic funding? Really... All the rest of those great federal programs we hear about eventually fall to the states to implement.
So how do the states fund all these great (and expensive) programs? Not from the paltry share of income taxes they recieve. No, they fund them from the money the federal government gives back to the states (which came from people in those states in the first place), which those states then must use on federal programs that may or may not have any relevance to that particular state.
I totally agree the states should lay off the federal tit... With one qualifier - We should completely invert the ratio of where our taxes go. Then we can validly complain when the states go begging the fed for money. As it stands now, they have no choice.
Mr. Bush is not responsible for the economy.
BS. He's run every company he had involvement with into the ground, and has continued that trend on the level of the entire United States. Yeah, normally you can blame recessions on the previous president - But in this case, looking at both Clinton's success and Bush's history of failure, I'd say "no way". Bush singlehandedly took us from the best economic conditions in half a century, to the worst, in a mere 3 years.
Engineers make recommendations. Managers disregard them. Things like impressing VPs, etc are way more important to get ahead in an organisation unfortunately.
In a "normal" work environment, the corporate food chain annoys those of us with a clue (ie, non-management). Just one of the hassles they pay us to put up with. "Why did this project fail?" "Because you killed the single most important subproject associated with it" "Well, get to work on that, and don't let this happen again!" (mimes masturbating while walking away, disgusted).
In the case of NASA, however, they have a bit more on the line than the bottom line, good hair, and kissing VP ass - They have real, live humans risking their lives every time they climb up into the cockpit.
Sorry, but "the way we do things" doesn't cut it in this situation. I'd personally like to see some people go to prison over this one. They overruled the warnings of people with a clue, and as a result, people died. Totally unacceptible.
As "Cecil Adams" wrote recently, the judicial precedent that corporations have rights is based on the improper work of court reporter who had an ax to grind.
Ah, many thanks! I regularly read "The Straight Dope", but somehow missed that one. Excellent summary of a major plague on modern civilization. All thanks to an overzealous court reporter... Sad.
My favorite quote from that writeup - "in the world of the law, a precedent is a precedent, even if it's a stupid one". Reminds me of the lyrics "Then they ask what went wrong; When you never had it right".
Stupid domesticated primates.
Someone needs to do a lawsuit flowchart
I cant keep track anymore.
Well, no one can fault you for that. I have to admit, this one seems to baffle me as well... It appears this flowchart would require future dependancies - Namely, in order for this countersuit to have merit, SCO needs to win the primary suit first.
Really kinda interesting, in a traps-within-traps way. If SCO wins (as if...), they've established the precedent needed to lose.
Darl should just dump his stock, call the whole thing off, and go out for a few beers. Any other course of action just increases the diameter of the phallus IBM will eventually lubelessly impale him upon.
Churchs and governments are corporations.
I wish protection from them just as much as I want protection from MCI.
I will agree with you to that extent, but I think you may have misinterpreted the DNC slightly... It doesn't so much give charities and politicians the right to call you, as it excludes them from observing the federal DNC. And if they abuse that, the possibility always exists of adding them to it at a later date (though I won't hold my breath for that to happenk, in particular not the political call aspect...).
Yes, I would FAR prefer they had to obey it as well. But this won't get them added, it will just result in the death of the DNC overall.
Put bluntly, saying "fuck off and die" to two calls per night beats doing it ten times each night.
allowing charitable solicitations but banning commercial calls "borrows from the reasoning of the pigs in George Orwell's 'Animal Farm.' ...
'Some animals are more equal than others.'"
Yep. Humans should have rights, corporations should not.
We can debate all day over whether a 3rd world factory worker has a "right" to the same wage as an American one, or whether I have the "right" to not have my job outsourced to India, or whether immigration counts as a natural "right". But corporations? No. No debate at all. Corporations, which do not suffer from the same weaknesses as humans (don't naturally die, can't imprison the entire corporation, they wave off massive fines that would destroy a human as nothing more than an annoynace, their opinion carries FAR more weight with politicians than a "mere" human), do not deserve the same freedoms as humans.
More importantly, I agree that in this situation, we have differential enforcement of "rights", just not in the same way that you see it. If I placed ten million automated calls a day to the ATA or DMA, Officer Friendly would show up at my door to tell me to cut it out. Yet, when the ATA makes those same ten million calls to equally unwilling recipients, it somehow becomes a first amendment issue?
No. This entire mess involves nothing more than a well-placed judge acting as the lackey of Corporate America, no doubt for some shady-but-technically-legal compensation. Regardless of the charitable and political exclusions to the federal DNC, this registry takes an important step in taking back one portion of the lives of HUMANS from "the machine".