The RPS author mentions 20 years. I'm assuming it's because 20 years is an arbitrary-ish figure he settled on.
It's 2014, so 20 years ago is 1994.
Really what he was getting at originally was that it was somewhat bizarre that computer games from the 1980's are still considered copyrighted and illegal to distribute, even if the original developers, publishers, etc. have long since gone defunct.
So I really think the author should have said 25 years or something like that but just for the sake of discussion let's stick with 20.
The game Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo was released in 1985. That's almost thirty years ago. So, by a blanket application of his proposition, SMB would have gone PD back in 2005. Anyone could do anything they wanted with the game and there would be nothing Nintendo could do about it.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
The author isn't necessarily proposing that a developer should only get to make money off of his or her creation for 20 years, or at least that's not how I'm interpreting it.
Let's take another example - there's a critically acclaimed game called No One Lives Forever, a somewhat wacky spy caper with a female protagonist that has a parody of James Bond in the 60's thing happening. The game was developed by Monolith and published by Fox Interactive. Fox got bought by Activision, Activision merged with Blizzard, and Monolith got bought by Warner Bros. Long story short, no one can release the game on GOG because no one knows who owns it. But someone does, in theory. However it will be a long time before anyone sorts it out because there is, in theory, not enough money for anyone to care.
By the way copyright works today, NOLF will be illegal to distribute until 2090. Who knows what will happen by then? If we lived in a perfect world where piracy and copyright infringement didn't exist, then the only places NOLF would exist are on the hard drives of Monolith and the discs of whoever bought the game - what are the odds either would be functional in 2090?
But a dirty little secret is you can go download NOLF right now on torrent sites. Anyone can download it. Thanks to copyright infringement it will never truly go away.
This happens in other sectors, too. There's about a hundred of the original Dr. Who episodes from the 1960's or so which are lost because the BBC taped over them. I'm not kidding, they seriously never thought that anyone would want to watch them in the future. But every so often a few turn up - they put nine episodes on iTunes a few months ago - all because someone somewhere found some tape they were either supposed to return to the BBC, or someone taped them and didn't realize they still had them.
So going back to SMB, Nintendo is actually sort of doing the right thing here. Sure, they're basically selling a ROM image and an emulator, and the only people who get to play SMB are the ones who paid for it, but the point is they can get it, play it, and pay for it. It's available.
But if Nintendo had closed up shop in 1995 or something would it really benefit anyone to have to wait until 2075 to be able to play SMB again in our piracy-does-not-exist fantasy land?
GeorgeB3DR is getting upset about this because he is still selling those old games and still making a living off of it. The hard-and-fast 20 year proposal would fuck him over. But the point is he's still selling them.
Let's say that we had a different rule - if your game hasn't been available for ten years for sale it goes PD. GeorgeB3DR would be fine. Nintendo would be fine. And we could distribute NOLF all we want.
Of course, under this rule it's possible that ActiVendiFoxoLith would get their shit together and hash out who owns what and release it for sale on GOG or something. Sure, we wouldn't be able to just distribute NOLF for free that way, but isn't it better that we ha
Borders is *not* part of Barnes and Noble. Why would you say that?
He's misguided in what he means by it but it is true that B&N bought the Borders brand name and customer list after Borders shut down. borders.com now goes to the B&N website.
There is such a thing as Fire Fighting simulators. It's like a networked LAN game. The game is perfectly safe and can simulate situations that you can't get easily in live exercises. Due to its nature and limited market they're expensive (like $10K a license or seat) but they exist. They are no substitute for real on the job training and controlled exercises and no one's arguing anything to the contrary, but they do exist.
Yeah... you have no idea what you're talking about.
Listen to Act Two of this episode of This American Life. The example they hunt down to its conclusion has one guy, Chris Crawford, selling his patent to IV and in turn he gets 10% of whatever they get on it (which considering IV was settling with dozens of firms for fucktons of dollars in perpetuity, is not too shabby).
Once IV does your dirty work for you, you'll never need to make widget bolts again.
In theory what a NPE does is actually quite admirable. You're an inventor and you invented something and you have a patent and big companies rip you off. They know you can't afford to fight them so they just do what they want. So you sell your patent to someone like Intellectual Ventures who goes after the big companies for you. Now no one can make your widget bolt without paying you, as it should be.
And look what's happened - even giant companies are scared shitless to defend against patent lawsuits. In that respect, the idea worked.
In practice though what happens is minute, even trivial things get patented and NPE's go looking for people to sue, using a byzantine series of shell companies and borderline gaming of the legal system. Whereas the inventor of the widget bolt has to make the exact specifications of how his bolt works open to the public (who could also just figure it out by looking at it) software companies don't have to make the source code of their patented inventions available to anyone.
NPE's to me are like the NRA or PETA - organizations/concepts which started out with noble intentions (responsible gun ownership, don't torture animals) and just strayed way off the mark.
I've tried about a dozen keyboards on mine, most didn't work, the others randomly repeated keystrokes. This was from $5 nonames to Logitech and Microsoft high end keyboards.
Your problem is your power supply. It's pretty much the culprit of just about any RPi issues. Get the right power supply and just about anything you plug in works.
The way to be sure is to plug the RPi in for power to one of the USB ports on your main PC. Yes that's counter-intuitive and not the long term goal but once you get the right power supply then everything should work. Speaking from experience here.
The emulation runs at a speed around that of a 20MHz 80486 [...] Perfect for playing old classics such as Doom
With all due respect, back in high school I owned a Packard Bell 486SX 20MHz. Every time I have ever told anyone that, even as a historical curiosity, I have had to follow it with "yes, they did make them that slow".
Did you know that DOOM had a "low detail" mode? I did, because that was the only way I was going to get the 486SX 20MHz to run it (after I upgraded the RAM to a whopping 6MB of course). It was unusuably slow otherwise. And when games like ROTT came out? They wouldn't even run unless they were in low detail mode. And lord help you if you accidentally hit the Turbo button, setting you back down to 8MHz.
So I hope for this thing's sake that it runs a bit faster than that otherwise DOOM is going to just flat out not work worth a damn.
Also, his "it's been done before" example is an Android stick - so, basically, a cut down Linux aimed at cell phones and sealed in a box, with no GIPO pins. Maybe there's more to it and you can load up your own Linux distros on it but the Pi is closer to a "real computer" than this thing is. In fact, the original goal of the Pi was to be small and stick-based like this but it made accessing the pins impossible.
Remember when those same publishers got rid of big boxes, printed manuals and goodies that used to come in normal pc game editions -- with the excuse of going green and lesser price ? Yeah, what happened to those prices ? They went up, up and up.
Citation needed.
Seriously, I think this is something people have made up retroactively. Publishers have never said "oh we want to reduce the amount of packaging to pass that savings on to the consumer". They may have used the "green" excuse but really they're just trying to increase their profit margins.
Another thing I see is: Aren't we supposed to be getting savings passed onto us for the digital distribution?
No. I don't know where you got that idea or why so many people have misconceptions about this but no, the point of digital distribution is not to pass the savings on to the consumer and it never has been.
Cutting out all the middle men means that the publisher and developer make more money. This is a good thing, especially in the PC space. Games are already more expensive to make and the maximum price has been set at $50-$60 for some time now. The recent upping of COD6 on the PC to $60 incurred quite a wrath.
Publishers and developers making more money on the sale of a game because they cut out the middle men means that developers might make a decent living wage. It means there will be less layoffs. It means that the advance money is made back quicker so the developer might see a profit from a game.
If you think that Steam savings from the lack of physical materials should be passed on to you then you don't get to bitch when a developer closes or has a layoff. If you want to wait for a Steam sale that's fine, if you prefer having a physical game from a store, that's fine, too. But don't think that you should pay less because there's not a disc involved. You're wrong.
You play the game by holding the 3DS upright, rather than sideways like a book, and it works so well I wonder why previous Brain Age games used the wacky book-like layout at all.
They did this with the original games because they were wacky (a polygonal head of a Japanese man in glasses laughs at you) and also because "smart" people read books so it makes sense that a "smart" game would also be used like a book. It was also conducive to the Sudoku puzzles.
My guess would be they abandoned it in the 3DS version because it wouldn't work with the 3D screen, which relies on you holding the screen at the right angle to get the effect.
To me this is like the worst case scenario. Bad enough that OnLive might make an otherwise good looking game look and play like shit, but now they're going the rest of the mile and saying that games should be changed and designed for the service.
No, OnLive, go fuck yourself. Your idea will never work technically or logistically and you need to hurry up and die.
All I am saying is that the current schemes to stop illegal redistribution suck for me, a legitimate customer. That means I am no longer a customer. There are plenty of people who are willing to pay for their own abuse. As long as they are around, I guess you will be able to make some money. I really do not care.
I'm with you on the fact that Steam by itself is unobtrusive DRM which is acceptable and that more restrictive things like activation schemes are unacceptable. But I had lumped you in with all the people who basically think that a lack of DRM is completely fine and people will by and large behave and not pirate the software if you don't have any. Nothing could be further from the truth. Games like World of Goo have a 90% piracy rate. Look at what happened with Adobe put up CS2 with serials but "only download these if you already own it" yeah right, the Internet downloaded it millions of times for free. Gizmodo basically said they're giving it away for free. People think if something doesn't have DRM then it's OK to pirate it.
And the number of people like you who just won't buy something if it has any DRM is small enough to ignore.
If this is true, where is the patch to remove the obnoxious DRM after 6 weeks?
The developer for The Witcher 2 removed it a week after release. A couple of months in, 2K removed the activation limits for BioShocks 1 and 2 (which isn't the same as removing the DRM but it makes it less obnoxious). And BioShock 1 was unpirated for close to twelve days after relase.
Look, I know you want to live in some little world where there's no DRM and everything is the same but it's just not. DRM is required and the people who make decisions on this are not idiots, no matter how smug you are about it.
We learned wordperfect for dos in school because "thats what people use at work"...
When i left school, wordperfect for dos had disappeared.
To be fair, the time you were using WordPerfect for DOS was when schools were still coming to grips with this "computer thing". They knew that "computers" were a big deal and they would continue to be a big deal when you got out into the workforce and so, not knowing what was going to happen in the future (and sure as heck having little resources) they did the best they could.
I mean back when I was in sixth grade we were being taught how to program in BASIC on an Apple ][, not because it was this great problem solving exercise, but because at that time there wasn't a whole lot that computers could do yet (that a middle school teacher could teach, that is). As a result when I got to college I knew a number of people my age who couldn't maneuver Microsoft Word to save their lives but they could program in PASCAL for some reason.
Not that this detracts from your point, but your particular example wasn't because your school was clueless, it was because it was the best anyone could do at that time.
Seemingly altruistic social media site which performs a useful service to millions of users for free turns out to have business plan to profit from people's usage of the site, and does not in fact exist just to be free.
I'm disheartened to realize that there are still people who do not get this concept. Of course Instagram is going to sell your photos and not cut you in on the deal. You agreed to it in the T&C. Even if it wasn't in the T&C, the clause of "oh hey we can change this at any time with no notice and you proactively agree to any changes" is probably in there. Why in the hell did you think they set up this service? Because they want to "connect people through social experiences"? Fuck no, they want to sell this shit to whomever will pay for it.
Same as Facebook. Same as TwitPic. Same as every other site that does this for free.
You should just assume anything that you put online will be sold to the highest bidder and adjust your habits accordingly. If you don't what that photo of your dick to be on a porn site don't put it on Instagram.
When you get into using it, you'll see that it's a bit more involved than "browse to game name and hit go". I thought the same thing but there's some hurdles to overcome, as evidenced by how Valve has lists now of "controller-friendly titles" and "partially controller-friendly titles"
It was the rumor a while back. Gruber made the point that $199 would be a very aggressive play against the iPad, but that if it wasn't true (and it wasn't) then it's the sort of thing Microsoft set themselves up for by announcing an iPad competitor without pricing in tow for several months (as opposed to Apple which announces products with prices)
This story has buried the lead. All anyone's going to talk about is Woz this and Cloud that, when the real news should be that somehow people are continuing to pay money to go see Mike Daisey put on his one-man show that, despite coming across as if he's telling a true story about what he did, has in fact been proven to be largely false. It became quite the embarrassment for the radio show This American Life when they aired portions of it as being true after he lied to them about specifics of the story.
It's because you can rely on a developer to be able to figure out the right way to do things even if he has to go through menus and such. The average person will just uses spaces instead of tabs because they don't know what they're doing
But she said the family's main concern was the lack of understanding from TSA agents that they were dealing with a 4-year-old child, not a terror suspect.
Umm, devil's advocate: why can't the 4-year-old girl be considered a terror suspect?
I mean, once we start saying things like "well she can't be a terrorist, she's a grandmother!" or "she can't be a terrorist, she's just a 4-year-old girl!" aren't we essentially letting the world know that these are the loopholes that can allow you to get past the TSA?
Do I think the 4-year-old girl was a terrorist? No. Do I think it's impossible though? No.
You're a terrorist cell. You need to get the (whatever) to your guy on the inside so he can hijack/blow up the plane. You find a family in a generally unsuspecting demographic. You kidnap the mother. You tell the father that unless he has his 4-year-old girl smuggle (whatever) to the terrorist who has already crossed the gate into the terminal you will kill the mother. The little girl won't actually be on the plane, she'll just be giving the (whatever) to the terrorist, then she's free to go and the father gets his family back.
Is that a movie plot? Sure. Is it likely to happen? I don't know but probably not.
But is it completely unreasonable to pat down people who don't fit a terrorist stereotype? No.
I missed this article yesterday since I was too busy huddling into a basement to avoid tornadoes so I doubt anyone will read this comment, let alone moderate it, but I think there's a small bit of information that might be essential here.
Something that people should realize is: Dallas Love Field, which is where this incident occurred, is a relatively small airport.
Dallas has two airports, Dallas Love Field and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW Airport). Dallas Love Field was the first airport (it's the one JFK flew into right before his assassination), DFW Airport was built in the 1970's.
Dallas Love Field is 1,300 acres and has one terminal. Until a few years ago only one airline flew out of it, Southwest Airlines (there's four airlines now). DFW Airport is the second largest in the country at 18,000 acres, five terminals (that have to be traversed by monorail) and dozens of airlines flying in and out.
The reason I point this out is that there's a lot of outcry in this discussion of "why did this shut down HALF AN AIRPORT" and I think most people are thinking it's DFW Airport they're referring to in the article, not Dallas Love Field (as in, most people not in the Dallas area might think that Dallas Love Field is the main airport of the Dallas area). The reason they shut down half the airport is because the airport is not very big to begin with. The isolated area of DFW Airport that would have been shut down in the same instance is probably the same size as the half of Dallas Love Field they did shut down.
Not that this justifies putting students in handcuffs but I thought I'd point out that the scale of the reaction needs to be considered.
That doesn't mean the show is funded by NPR any more than if a McDonald's employee sells me a necklace it would mean McDonald's is in the jewlery business.
Actually I think for most people that would mean McDonald's is in the jewelry business. Same as jewelry stores. I think what you meant to say is that it doesn't mean McDonald's is in the jewelry creation and manufacturing business.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, see here's the deal.
The RPS author mentions 20 years. I'm assuming it's because 20 years is an arbitrary-ish figure he settled on.
It's 2014, so 20 years ago is 1994.
Really what he was getting at originally was that it was somewhat bizarre that computer games from the 1980's are still considered copyrighted and illegal to distribute, even if the original developers, publishers, etc. have long since gone defunct.
So I really think the author should have said 25 years or something like that but just for the sake of discussion let's stick with 20.
The game Super Mario Bros. from Nintendo was released in 1985. That's almost thirty years ago. So, by a blanket application of his proposition, SMB would have gone PD back in 2005. Anyone could do anything they wanted with the game and there would be nothing Nintendo could do about it.
But this smacks of unfair for one reason - Nintendo is still around. And they're still selling SMB. You can get it on Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS.
The author isn't necessarily proposing that a developer should only get to make money off of his or her creation for 20 years, or at least that's not how I'm interpreting it.
Let's take another example - there's a critically acclaimed game called No One Lives Forever, a somewhat wacky spy caper with a female protagonist that has a parody of James Bond in the 60's thing happening. The game was developed by Monolith and published by Fox Interactive. Fox got bought by Activision, Activision merged with Blizzard, and Monolith got bought by Warner Bros. Long story short, no one can release the game on GOG because no one knows who owns it. But someone does, in theory. However it will be a long time before anyone sorts it out because there is, in theory, not enough money for anyone to care.
By the way copyright works today, NOLF will be illegal to distribute until 2090. Who knows what will happen by then? If we lived in a perfect world where piracy and copyright infringement didn't exist, then the only places NOLF would exist are on the hard drives of Monolith and the discs of whoever bought the game - what are the odds either would be functional in 2090?
But a dirty little secret is you can go download NOLF right now on torrent sites. Anyone can download it. Thanks to copyright infringement it will never truly go away.
This happens in other sectors, too. There's about a hundred of the original Dr. Who episodes from the 1960's or so which are lost because the BBC taped over them. I'm not kidding, they seriously never thought that anyone would want to watch them in the future. But every so often a few turn up - they put nine episodes on iTunes a few months ago - all because someone somewhere found some tape they were either supposed to return to the BBC, or someone taped them and didn't realize they still had them.
So going back to SMB, Nintendo is actually sort of doing the right thing here. Sure, they're basically selling a ROM image and an emulator, and the only people who get to play SMB are the ones who paid for it, but the point is they can get it, play it, and pay for it. It's available.
But if Nintendo had closed up shop in 1995 or something would it really benefit anyone to have to wait until 2075 to be able to play SMB again in our piracy-does-not-exist fantasy land?
GeorgeB3DR is getting upset about this because he is still selling those old games and still making a living off of it. The hard-and-fast 20 year proposal would fuck him over. But the point is he's still selling them.
Let's say that we had a different rule - if your game hasn't been available for ten years for sale it goes PD. GeorgeB3DR would be fine. Nintendo would be fine. And we could distribute NOLF all we want.
Of course, under this rule it's possible that ActiVendiFoxoLith would get their shit together and hash out who owns what and release it for sale on GOG or something. Sure, we wouldn't be able to just distribute NOLF for free that way, but isn't it better that we ha
He's misguided in what he means by it but it is true that B&N bought the Borders brand name and customer list after Borders shut down. borders.com now goes to the B&N website.
There is such a thing as Fire Fighting simulators. It's like a networked LAN game. The game is perfectly safe and can simulate situations that you can't get easily in live exercises. Due to its nature and limited market they're expensive (like $10K a license or seat) but they exist. They are no substitute for real on the job training and controlled exercises and no one's arguing anything to the contrary, but they do exist.
Yeah... you have no idea what you're talking about.
Listen to Act Two of this episode of This American Life. The example they hunt down to its conclusion has one guy, Chris Crawford, selling his patent to IV and in turn he gets 10% of whatever they get on it (which considering IV was settling with dozens of firms for fucktons of dollars in perpetuity, is not too shabby).
Once IV does your dirty work for you, you'll never need to make widget bolts again.
In theory what a NPE does is actually quite admirable. You're an inventor and you invented something and you have a patent and big companies rip you off. They know you can't afford to fight them so they just do what they want. So you sell your patent to someone like Intellectual Ventures who goes after the big companies for you. Now no one can make your widget bolt without paying you, as it should be.
And look what's happened - even giant companies are scared shitless to defend against patent lawsuits. In that respect, the idea worked.
In practice though what happens is minute, even trivial things get patented and NPE's go looking for people to sue, using a byzantine series of shell companies and borderline gaming of the legal system. Whereas the inventor of the widget bolt has to make the exact specifications of how his bolt works open to the public (who could also just figure it out by looking at it) software companies don't have to make the source code of their patented inventions available to anyone.
NPE's to me are like the NRA or PETA - organizations/concepts which started out with noble intentions (responsible gun ownership, don't torture animals) and just strayed way off the mark.
Obama, software glitches, and smoking.
It's like the holy trilogy of contentious Slashdot topics.
All we need now is to tie this into movie or music piracy somehow, and maybe sprinkle in some Scientology for good measure.
BRB, making popcorn.
Your problem is your power supply. It's pretty much the culprit of just about any RPi issues. Get the right power supply and just about anything you plug in works.
The way to be sure is to plug the RPi in for power to one of the USB ports on your main PC. Yes that's counter-intuitive and not the long term goal but once you get the right power supply then everything should work. Speaking from experience here.
With all due respect, back in high school I owned a Packard Bell 486SX 20MHz. Every time I have ever told anyone that, even as a historical curiosity, I have had to follow it with "yes, they did make them that slow".
Did you know that DOOM had a "low detail" mode? I did, because that was the only way I was going to get the 486SX 20MHz to run it (after I upgraded the RAM to a whopping 6MB of course). It was unusuably slow otherwise. And when games like ROTT came out? They wouldn't even run unless they were in low detail mode. And lord help you if you accidentally hit the Turbo button, setting you back down to 8MHz.
So I hope for this thing's sake that it runs a bit faster than that otherwise DOOM is going to just flat out not work worth a damn.
Also, his "it's been done before" example is an Android stick - so, basically, a cut down Linux aimed at cell phones and sealed in a box, with no GIPO pins. Maybe there's more to it and you can load up your own Linux distros on it but the Pi is closer to a "real computer" than this thing is. In fact, the original goal of the Pi was to be small and stick-based like this but it made accessing the pins impossible.
Citation needed.
Seriously, I think this is something people have made up retroactively. Publishers have never said "oh we want to reduce the amount of packaging to pass that savings on to the consumer". They may have used the "green" excuse but really they're just trying to increase their profit margins.
Another thing I see is: Aren't we supposed to be getting savings passed onto us for the digital distribution?
No. I don't know where you got that idea or why so many people have misconceptions about this but no, the point of digital distribution is not to pass the savings on to the consumer and it never has been.
Cutting out all the middle men means that the publisher and developer make more money. This is a good thing, especially in the PC space. Games are already more expensive to make and the maximum price has been set at $50-$60 for some time now. The recent upping of COD6 on the PC to $60 incurred quite a wrath.
Publishers and developers making more money on the sale of a game because they cut out the middle men means that developers might make a decent living wage. It means there will be less layoffs. It means that the advance money is made back quicker so the developer might see a profit from a game.
If you think that Steam savings from the lack of physical materials should be passed on to you then you don't get to bitch when a developer closes or has a layoff. If you want to wait for a Steam sale that's fine, if you prefer having a physical game from a store, that's fine, too. But don't think that you should pay less because there's not a disc involved. You're wrong.
They did this with the original games because they were wacky (a polygonal head of a Japanese man in glasses laughs at you) and also because "smart" people read books so it makes sense that a "smart" game would also be used like a book. It was also conducive to the Sudoku puzzles.
My guess would be they abandoned it in the 3DS version because it wouldn't work with the 3D screen, which relies on you holding the screen at the right angle to get the effect.
Well then they're in for a big surprise since OnLive only plays PC games.
To me this is like the worst case scenario. Bad enough that OnLive might make an otherwise good looking game look and play like shit, but now they're going the rest of the mile and saying that games should be changed and designed for the service.
No, OnLive, go fuck yourself. Your idea will never work technically or logistically and you need to hurry up and die.
I'm with you on the fact that Steam by itself is unobtrusive DRM which is acceptable and that more restrictive things like activation schemes are unacceptable. But I had lumped you in with all the people who basically think that a lack of DRM is completely fine and people will by and large behave and not pirate the software if you don't have any. Nothing could be further from the truth. Games like World of Goo have a 90% piracy rate. Look at what happened with Adobe put up CS2 with serials but "only download these if you already own it" yeah right, the Internet downloaded it millions of times for free. Gizmodo basically said they're giving it away for free. People think if something doesn't have DRM then it's OK to pirate it.
And the number of people like you who just won't buy something if it has any DRM is small enough to ignore.
The developer for The Witcher 2 removed it a week after release. A couple of months in, 2K removed the activation limits for BioShocks 1 and 2 (which isn't the same as removing the DRM but it makes it less obnoxious). And BioShock 1 was unpirated for close to twelve days after relase.
Look, I know you want to live in some little world where there's no DRM and everything is the same but it's just not. DRM is required and the people who make decisions on this are not idiots, no matter how smug you are about it.
To be fair, the time you were using WordPerfect for DOS was when schools were still coming to grips with this "computer thing". They knew that "computers" were a big deal and they would continue to be a big deal when you got out into the workforce and so, not knowing what was going to happen in the future (and sure as heck having little resources) they did the best they could.
I mean back when I was in sixth grade we were being taught how to program in BASIC on an Apple ][, not because it was this great problem solving exercise, but because at that time there wasn't a whole lot that computers could do yet (that a middle school teacher could teach, that is). As a result when I got to college I knew a number of people my age who couldn't maneuver Microsoft Word to save their lives but they could program in PASCAL for some reason.
Not that this detracts from your point, but your particular example wasn't because your school was clueless, it was because it was the best anyone could do at that time.
Seemingly altruistic social media site which performs a useful service to millions of users for free turns out to have business plan to profit from people's usage of the site, and does not in fact exist just to be free.
I'm disheartened to realize that there are still people who do not get this concept. Of course Instagram is going to sell your photos and not cut you in on the deal. You agreed to it in the T&C. Even if it wasn't in the T&C, the clause of "oh hey we can change this at any time with no notice and you proactively agree to any changes" is probably in there. Why in the hell did you think they set up this service? Because they want to "connect people through social experiences"? Fuck no, they want to sell this shit to whomever will pay for it.
Same as Facebook. Same as TwitPic. Same as every other site that does this for free.
You should just assume anything that you put online will be sold to the highest bidder and adjust your habits accordingly. If you don't what that photo of your dick to be on a porn site don't put it on Instagram.
When you get into using it, you'll see that it's a bit more involved than "browse to game name and hit go". I thought the same thing but there's some hurdles to overcome, as evidenced by how Valve has lists now of "controller-friendly titles" and "partially controller-friendly titles"
It was the rumor a while back. Gruber made the point that $199 would be a very aggressive play against the iPad, but that if it wasn't true (and it wasn't) then it's the sort of thing Microsoft set themselves up for by announcing an iPad competitor without pricing in tow for several months (as opposed to Apple which announces products with prices)
Citation Needed
This story has buried the lead. All anyone's going to talk about is Woz this and Cloud that, when the real news should be that somehow people are continuing to pay money to go see Mike Daisey put on his one-man show that, despite coming across as if he's telling a true story about what he did, has in fact been proven to be largely false. It became quite the embarrassment for the radio show This American Life when they aired portions of it as being true after he lied to them about specifics of the story.
It's because you can rely on a developer to be able to figure out the right way to do things even if he has to go through menus and such. The average person will just uses spaces instead of tabs because they don't know what they're doing
Umm, devil's advocate: why can't the 4-year-old girl be considered a terror suspect?
I mean, once we start saying things like "well she can't be a terrorist, she's a grandmother!" or "she can't be a terrorist, she's just a 4-year-old girl!" aren't we essentially letting the world know that these are the loopholes that can allow you to get past the TSA?
Do I think the 4-year-old girl was a terrorist? No. Do I think it's impossible though? No.
You're a terrorist cell. You need to get the (whatever) to your guy on the inside so he can hijack/blow up the plane. You find a family in a generally unsuspecting demographic. You kidnap the mother. You tell the father that unless he has his 4-year-old girl smuggle (whatever) to the terrorist who has already crossed the gate into the terminal you will kill the mother. The little girl won't actually be on the plane, she'll just be giving the (whatever) to the terrorist, then she's free to go and the father gets his family back.
Is that a movie plot? Sure. Is it likely to happen? I don't know but probably not.
But is it completely unreasonable to pat down people who don't fit a terrorist stereotype? No.
I missed this article yesterday since I was too busy huddling into a basement to avoid tornadoes so I doubt anyone will read this comment, let alone moderate it, but I think there's a small bit of information that might be essential here.
Something that people should realize is: Dallas Love Field, which is where this incident occurred, is a relatively small airport.
Dallas has two airports, Dallas Love Field and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW Airport). Dallas Love Field was the first airport (it's the one JFK flew into right before his assassination), DFW Airport was built in the 1970's.
Dallas Love Field is 1,300 acres and has one terminal. Until a few years ago only one airline flew out of it, Southwest Airlines (there's four airlines now). DFW Airport is the second largest in the country at 18,000 acres, five terminals (that have to be traversed by monorail) and dozens of airlines flying in and out.
The reason I point this out is that there's a lot of outcry in this discussion of "why did this shut down HALF AN AIRPORT" and I think most people are thinking it's DFW Airport they're referring to in the article, not Dallas Love Field (as in, most people not in the Dallas area might think that Dallas Love Field is the main airport of the Dallas area). The reason they shut down half the airport is because the airport is not very big to begin with. The isolated area of DFW Airport that would have been shut down in the same instance is probably the same size as the half of Dallas Love Field they did shut down.
Not that this justifies putting students in handcuffs but I thought I'd point out that the scale of the reaction needs to be considered.
Actually I think for most people that would mean McDonald's is in the jewelry business. Same as jewelry stores. I think what you meant to say is that it doesn't mean McDonald's is in the jewelry creation and manufacturing business.