But only 'benevolent' dictatorship. As long as the person who wields unbounded power over the country is incorruptible, fair, and intelligent I fully support dictatorship as a viable government choice.
Wait, what's that you say? Power corrupts, and that's assuming the person starts out honest to begin with? Most dictators are corrupt, unfair, stupid, or some mix of the three? Because dictators are just as fallible (if not more so) than the next person?
Maybe giving absolute power to a single entity isn't the best choice, no matter how much that entity promises to be good. DRM takes away the users control over their computer, and gives it to the entity writing the DRM rules. That person, who has absolute power over the data that is put into the DRM, is inherently untrustworthy, and any fantasy you dream up about 'fair DRM use' is fiction, beginning to end. Individuals cannot be trusted with as much power as DRM hands them.
It's not the voice INPUT that is inefficient... it's the voice OUTPUT. The computer shouldn't be talking back, it should be displaying the results on a monitor. Sure... when jogging down a corridor, and the captain asks 'how long before she blows up', a voice response is appropriate. But sitting in a room FILLED with consoles and video screens, and you ask what the conditions of the atmosphere are? Show me a dang color coded map, with a graph of the gas composition. Voice RESPONSE is inefficient, not voice input.
Well, that sounds kinda reasonable to me. Gamer's are generally kinda fat, so if we put them in a blender and make an emulsion out of their body I'd guess that it would be a pretty slippery substance.
I love the single player campaign. It's not as good as that of Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape, but it's a lot better than any other recent game from them. It was linear enough that I didn't feel lost, and flexible enough that I didn't feel like I was on railroad tracks. Five party members is a damn sight better than 1+minion, and the interaction between the party was great. I really enjoyed how my choices in conversation affected my alignment and my relationship with the party members. The late game has some excellent rewards for your character that open up entirely new playstyles. Unlike many other games, you really feel like you've accomplished real world-changing advancement. And the dialog throughout the game is expertly done, both written and voice-acted.
But I find the tools to be abysmal. They're intractable and broken. Things that were easy in the NWN1 toolset are broken in this one; the simple act of linking a door is now horribly painful. Kludge is piled upon kludge making the naming scheme a horrible mess.
The engine itself is pretty, but very slow... my computer is almost strong enough to handle it, but I had to turn some of the pretty off, and drop my resolution a step or two. The 'default' choices are far too aggressive, putting you on settings that will stutter and choke your system.
But the worst problem for me is the party AI. If you play with 'hardcore' rules, certain companions are impossible to use, because they use area-effect spells on the party over and over. Forget memorizing that maximized fireball... he'll cast it at point blank range at the large fire elemental, maiming the party and doing nothing to the elemental. This might, possibly, potentially be forgivable... if a usable 'turn-pause' mode had been implemented. But there is no such thing, just a horrible AI and an interface that nearly requires you to allow your companions to use it.
I remain partially hopeful. Patches can fix the AI and the slow engine. But the Toolkit will remain a mess, I think. This doesn't bode well for third party content.
Very few climatologists argue that climate change is not occurring. Those that disagree are probably taking money from corporate interests. However, we have not proven why climate change is occurring, though there is strong support that CO2 emissions are the cause. Climatologists who support other theories about what is causing global warming ARE shunned, wrongly in my opinion. All we have proven is that global warming and CO2 emissions have a correlation... any respectable scientist can tell you that correlation is not causation.
First, understand rule 1: If it's not visible, then the user won't even know they have it.
Rule 2: If it's not a toolbar, the user won't be able to operate it.
Now, mostly those rules are facetious... but they both hold a grain of truth. Users look at the toolbar at the top when they want to do things. Most don't click menus. Most don't realize that buttons in the status bar can be clickable. The only active part of the screen as far as they're concerned are the buttons in the toolbar.
And most users really don't know the software they have on their computer unless their computer tells them, very visibly, over and over. I'd say the percentage of adult users that can use an application that's not in the toolbar, without assistance or training, is under 20%. There are a LOT of clueless adult Internet users out there, they're the majority now, and they're a HUGE market.
That's why software makers do Toolbars, they want that market.
You spend 8 or 9 hours a day working... make sure it's something you enjoy. What is better... 5 enjoyable years paying off debt, or 3 miserable years paying off debt, followed by 2 years where you're STILL miserable when at work even though you have toys at home.
Sorry... nothing is worth hating your work. Nothing.
Honestly, this seems like a perfectly valid move to me. The proper way to combat piracy is to add value for legitimate purchasers via services... services are a dozen times harder to 'steal' than just bits. A MS operated DNS (even if it is ipv6 only) is a perfectly reasonable service to convince the medium-skill techies (who can format a machine, but not setup a DNS service) to buy rather than copy. These mid-level windows users are the most common casual copiers of the MS OS... they know enough to copy Windows and install a machine, but not enough to delve into Linux.
So, all in all, I think this is a move in the right direction. Added value to the legit buyers, rather than bullshit like 'Genuine Advantage' that only benefits MS.
... I bet a good half of them are spam domains, used to pump Google ranks, host tens of thousands of/search-terms/ folders, and otherwise useless sites with little to no content.
The quantity of CONTENT on the Internet has little to do with the number of domains hosted. In fact, the number of domains is pretty irrelevant, since it seems the bittorrent protocol hosts more actual content nowadays than the http protocol.
To support Firefox. Why should I take the Mozilla Org's expensive bandwidth when I can torrent it, and use the mostly free bandwidth of 100 other peers.
Any kind of 'hate' speech is protected under the first amendment. I do not believe that schoolkids doing research should be blocked from any kind of protected speech, other than pornography. Even for porn, I'd classify it right with gaming and chat sites; nothing that will harm them, just a useless time waster when they should be learning.
Political extremists, racism, zealotry... we should be exposing kids to this, and explaining why it is wrong; not hiding them from it to the point where they don't recognize it when they see it. My children shouldn't need to use the Internet at home to do their research.
I am fundamentally opposed to limitations on speech. I believe that censorship is almost universally wrong, and suppression of ideas has no place in a school setting.
Ok, now that the entertainment portion of our evening is over... one of the purposes of a Libertarian government is to enforce truth in advertising. A free market cannot work if the consumer is lied to, so that's one of the prime objectives of a Libertarian government: to enable an honest and informed free market. This means promoting consumer education (and education in general), and enforcing truth in advertising.
I hardly think the International Federation of the Porno^H^H^H^H^HPhonographic Industry would be considered the international relative of the Motion Picture Association of America. I think you're getting your *AA's mixed up. Perhaps you meant the Recording Industry Association of America?
My local gamespot has only a few available... I was lucky to have been let in early a couple hours before they opened. There were 6 people getting there early... and the EB guy said cryptically that a mere three were 'a significant percentage' of what they were allocated. I'm guessing 10 or less, but it was at least 6 (he didn't turn anyone away that was there).
I think you're wrong. Why not sell this to everyone for $100... the higher their volume, the farther down they can drive incremental costs via bulk purchasing and production streamlining. Why can't I buy one for my poor neighbor? Are they doing racial profiling, and whites aren't allowed to buy them? I know that hikers would kill for a cheap, durable computer that doesn't rely on a plug.
And while I understand that the long term benefits of knowledge are worth more than $100... if a poor family wants to make $100 selling their computer so they don't starve, are you gonna tell me that they should suck it up and die rather than sell their cheap computer?
Frankly, your disconnect with reality is rather disconcerting. Life isn't as neat and tidy as you'd like it to be. This computer-for-every-kid idea is great, and millions will benefit from it. But a significant percentage of those kids will sell it to survive, graft and corruption will waste more, and a perfectly homogenous network of computers like that is probably gonna get hit with some nasty malware.
I always used a workshop metaphore, but it's the same idea... more counterspace (RAM) means more room to work, more cupboards (HD) means more space to store stuff. Too little counterspace, and you can't have your entire project out at one time (thrashing), and too little storage and you can't put a project all together in one spot (fragmentation).
I enjoy the fact that I can easily see what and when I searched, using Google's search history. I use it and enjoy it. I have nothing against servers recording my personal information as long as I can benefit from it. If they record what I do and provide me no benefit, that makes me cranky. And no, better targeted advertising is not a 'benefit'.
If you think 'music nowadays sucks', then you probably haven't really seen much new music. Either that, or you've already fossilized, and your music tastes are stuck in the past. Radio sucks. Get over it, and go out there to find the new places where you can find good music.
My favorite is eMusic. Songs without DRM (straight mp3), from tens of thousands of independant artists going it alone or with smaller labels. Many of them suck (Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap), but there's definitely some cool artists out there that you won't find on any radio, or even in many stores. At less than 25 cents per song (at their lowest and least-efficient plan) you really can't go wrong trying out various artists.
Another option is Garage Band, where you can download music for free, as long as you review the music so the artist can see what you liked or hated about it. I haven't looked at it much, but I bet there's a ton of cool artists, mixed in with all the idiots too... that's what reviews are for, and you can see the artists that everyone else liked.
Music isn't getting worse... the big distributers are. Fuck 'em. Do an end run around the major labels and ClearChannel, and look at places like eMusic and GarageBand for your new music. The major labels are just gonna have to deal with the fact that they no longer have an oligopoly anymore, and they're gonna have to deal with a (*gasp!*) value and price driven market like everyone else.
I truly don't understand why this isn't popular now. I'd pay for a fitness club subscription if they had DDR machines and other active games... and the equipment would cost less too. How much do weight machines cost? Treadmills? Yikes. But a cool DDR setup can be had for under 1600 per pair of pads, and that's counting the TV, game system and good metal pads.
The DDR is the most popular one I know of, but there have to be other fun active games out there. These games are more fun when you do them with others... a 'fitness' club would be the perfect venue for them.
We have 23 chromosomes, full of DNA. A lot of it is junk data. Many other creatures have 20, 26, 12, 4... whatever. Bacteria have a tiny fraction of this amount of DNA. Viruses an even tinier fraction.
Of course life got more complex. We just reached a 'sufficient' level of complexity millions of years ago. You can surely bet that early land animals, 900 million years ago, had a lot less DNA than the average reptile nowadays.
Last I heard (months ago), they were broken, and they could make ALL your tabs IE, or all not... but no way to mix'n'match. I'll have to check them out again now that they're fixed.
I'm a lazy bastard. Luckily, my primary job is technical support, which I do extremely well, happily, and without complaint (yes, I enjoy Internet Technical Support, no I'm not delusional or ill). So, between calls, I slack.
We used to have the office 'anti-social asshole' who did his job well and without complaint, but he got fired. We still have the office whiner (our highly unqualified, also lazy, network admin). And we have a few other more middle-of-the-road average guys mostly do their work, mostly don't gab, mostly don't goof off, etc.
I miss the office bastard. I have to do the work he used to do. That doesn't fit well with my 'lazy' persona.
These same sites that complain the 'Hits Link' service is not a reliable measure of OS usage proudly display their Alexa rankings... compiled by users of the increasingly marginalized Alexa desktop service.
Slashdot Mirror
But only 'benevolent' dictatorship. As long as the person who wields unbounded power over the country is incorruptible, fair, and intelligent I fully support dictatorship as a viable government choice.
Wait, what's that you say? Power corrupts, and that's assuming the person starts out honest to begin with? Most dictators are corrupt, unfair, stupid, or some mix of the three? Because dictators are just as fallible (if not more so) than the next person?
Maybe giving absolute power to a single entity isn't the best choice, no matter how much that entity promises to be good. DRM takes away the users control over their computer, and gives it to the entity writing the DRM rules. That person, who has absolute power over the data that is put into the DRM, is inherently untrustworthy, and any fantasy you dream up about 'fair DRM use' is fiction, beginning to end. Individuals cannot be trusted with as much power as DRM hands them.
The Raven
It's not the voice INPUT that is inefficient... it's the voice OUTPUT. The computer shouldn't be talking back, it should be displaying the results on a monitor. Sure... when jogging down a corridor, and the captain asks 'how long before she blows up', a voice response is appropriate. But sitting in a room FILLED with consoles and video screens, and you ask what the conditions of the atmosphere are? Show me a dang color coded map, with a graph of the gas composition. Voice RESPONSE is inefficient, not voice input.
Well, that sounds kinda reasonable to me. Gamer's are generally kinda fat, so if we put them in a blender and make an emulsion out of their body I'd guess that it would be a pretty slippery substance.
Or, maybe you meant 'immersion'?
I love the single player campaign. It's not as good as that of Baldur's Gate 2 or Planescape, but it's a lot better than any other recent game from them. It was linear enough that I didn't feel lost, and flexible enough that I didn't feel like I was on railroad tracks. Five party members is a damn sight better than 1+minion, and the interaction between the party was great. I really enjoyed how my choices in conversation affected my alignment and my relationship with the party members. The late game has some excellent rewards for your character that open up entirely new playstyles. Unlike many other games, you really feel like you've accomplished real world-changing advancement. And the dialog throughout the game is expertly done, both written and voice-acted.
But I find the tools to be abysmal. They're intractable and broken. Things that were easy in the NWN1 toolset are broken in this one; the simple act of linking a door is now horribly painful. Kludge is piled upon kludge making the naming scheme a horrible mess.
The engine itself is pretty, but very slow... my computer is almost strong enough to handle it, but I had to turn some of the pretty off, and drop my resolution a step or two. The 'default' choices are far too aggressive, putting you on settings that will stutter and choke your system.
But the worst problem for me is the party AI. If you play with 'hardcore' rules, certain companions are impossible to use, because they use area-effect spells on the party over and over. Forget memorizing that maximized fireball... he'll cast it at point blank range at the large fire elemental, maiming the party and doing nothing to the elemental. This might, possibly, potentially be forgivable... if a usable 'turn-pause' mode had been implemented. But there is no such thing, just a horrible AI and an interface that nearly requires you to allow your companions to use it.
I remain partially hopeful. Patches can fix the AI and the slow engine. But the Toolkit will remain a mess, I think. This doesn't bode well for third party content.
Raven
Very few climatologists argue that climate change is not occurring. Those that disagree are probably taking money from corporate interests. However, we have not proven why climate change is occurring, though there is strong support that CO2 emissions are the cause. Climatologists who support other theories about what is causing global warming ARE shunned, wrongly in my opinion. All we have proven is that global warming and CO2 emissions have a correlation... any respectable scientist can tell you that correlation is not causation.
Raven
First, understand rule 1: If it's not visible, then the user won't even know they have it.
Rule 2: If it's not a toolbar, the user won't be able to operate it.
Now, mostly those rules are facetious... but they both hold a grain of truth. Users look at the toolbar at the top when they want to do things. Most don't click menus. Most don't realize that buttons in the status bar can be clickable. The only active part of the screen as far as they're concerned are the buttons in the toolbar.
And most users really don't know the software they have on their computer unless their computer tells them, very visibly, over and over. I'd say the percentage of adult users that can use an application that's not in the toolbar, without assistance or training, is under 20%. There are a LOT of clueless adult Internet users out there, they're the majority now, and they're a HUGE market.
That's why software makers do Toolbars, they want that market.
Raven
Because then they'd need a volume control knob. NOT SFW.
You spend 8 or 9 hours a day working... make sure it's something you enjoy. What is better... 5 enjoyable years paying off debt, or 3 miserable years paying off debt, followed by 2 years where you're STILL miserable when at work even though you have toys at home.
Sorry... nothing is worth hating your work. Nothing.
Honestly, this seems like a perfectly valid move to me. The proper way to combat piracy is to add value for legitimate purchasers via services... services are a dozen times harder to 'steal' than just bits. A MS operated DNS (even if it is ipv6 only) is a perfectly reasonable service to convince the medium-skill techies (who can format a machine, but not setup a DNS service) to buy rather than copy. These mid-level windows users are the most common casual copiers of the MS OS... they know enough to copy Windows and install a machine, but not enough to delve into Linux.
So, all in all, I think this is a move in the right direction. Added value to the legit buyers, rather than bullshit like 'Genuine Advantage' that only benefits MS.
... I bet a good half of them are spam domains, used to pump Google ranks, host tens of thousands of /search-terms/ folders, and otherwise useless sites with little to no content.
The quantity of CONTENT on the Internet has little to do with the number of domains hosted. In fact, the number of domains is pretty irrelevant, since it seems the bittorrent protocol hosts more actual content nowadays than the http protocol.
To support Firefox. Why should I take the Mozilla Org's expensive bandwidth when I can torrent it, and use the mostly free bandwidth of 100 other peers.
Any kind of 'hate' speech is protected under the first amendment. I do not believe that schoolkids doing research should be blocked from any kind of protected speech, other than pornography. Even for porn, I'd classify it right with gaming and chat sites; nothing that will harm them, just a useless time waster when they should be learning.
Political extremists, racism, zealotry... we should be exposing kids to this, and explaining why it is wrong; not hiding them from it to the point where they don't recognize it when they see it. My children shouldn't need to use the Internet at home to do their research.
I am fundamentally opposed to limitations on speech. I believe that censorship is almost universally wrong, and suppression of ideas has no place in a school setting.
Raven
I am a Libertarian, and you are an idiot.
Ok, now that the entertainment portion of our evening is over... one of the purposes of a Libertarian government is to enforce truth in advertising. A free market cannot work if the consumer is lied to, so that's one of the prime objectives of a Libertarian government: to enable an honest and informed free market. This means promoting consumer education (and education in general), and enforcing truth in advertising.
Myrddin
I hardly think the International Federation of the Porno^H^H^H^H^HPhonographic Industry would be considered the international relative of the Motion Picture Association of America. I think you're getting your *AA's mixed up. Perhaps you meant the Recording Industry Association of America?
You can't anti-alias transparent GIFs. That's a limitation of the GIF format... instead, use transparent PNGs.
My local gamespot has only a few available... I was lucky to have been let in early a couple hours before they opened. There were 6 people getting there early... and the EB guy said cryptically that a mere three were 'a significant percentage' of what they were allocated. I'm guessing 10 or less, but it was at least 6 (he didn't turn anyone away that was there).
Just glad I got mine in.
I think you're wrong. Why not sell this to everyone for $100... the higher their volume, the farther down they can drive incremental costs via bulk purchasing and production streamlining. Why can't I buy one for my poor neighbor? Are they doing racial profiling, and whites aren't allowed to buy them? I know that hikers would kill for a cheap, durable computer that doesn't rely on a plug.
And while I understand that the long term benefits of knowledge are worth more than $100... if a poor family wants to make $100 selling their computer so they don't starve, are you gonna tell me that they should suck it up and die rather than sell their cheap computer?
Frankly, your disconnect with reality is rather disconcerting. Life isn't as neat and tidy as you'd like it to be. This computer-for-every-kid idea is great, and millions will benefit from it. But a significant percentage of those kids will sell it to survive, graft and corruption will waste more, and a perfectly homogenous network of computers like that is probably gonna get hit with some nasty malware.
Life isn't always pretty.
I always used a workshop metaphore, but it's the same idea... more counterspace (RAM) means more room to work, more cupboards (HD) means more space to store stuff. Too little counterspace, and you can't have your entire project out at one time (thrashing), and too little storage and you can't put a project all together in one spot (fragmentation).
I enjoy the fact that I can easily see what and when I searched, using Google's search history. I use it and enjoy it. I have nothing against servers recording my personal information as long as I can benefit from it. If they record what I do and provide me no benefit, that makes me cranky. And no, better targeted advertising is not a 'benefit'.
If you think 'music nowadays sucks', then you probably haven't really seen much new music. Either that, or you've already fossilized, and your music tastes are stuck in the past. Radio sucks. Get over it, and go out there to find the new places where you can find good music.
My favorite is eMusic. Songs without DRM (straight mp3), from tens of thousands of independant artists going it alone or with smaller labels. Many of them suck (Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap), but there's definitely some cool artists out there that you won't find on any radio, or even in many stores. At less than 25 cents per song (at their lowest and least-efficient plan) you really can't go wrong trying out various artists.
Another option is Garage Band, where you can download music for free, as long as you review the music so the artist can see what you liked or hated about it. I haven't looked at it much, but I bet there's a ton of cool artists, mixed in with all the idiots too... that's what reviews are for, and you can see the artists that everyone else liked.
Music isn't getting worse... the big distributers are. Fuck 'em. Do an end run around the major labels and ClearChannel, and look at places like eMusic and GarageBand for your new music. The major labels are just gonna have to deal with the fact that they no longer have an oligopoly anymore, and they're gonna have to deal with a (*gasp!*) value and price driven market like everyone else.
The Raven
I truly don't understand why this isn't popular now. I'd pay for a fitness club subscription if they had DDR machines and other active games... and the equipment would cost less too. How much do weight machines cost? Treadmills? Yikes. But a cool DDR setup can be had for under 1600 per pair of pads, and that's counting the TV, game system and good metal pads.
The DDR is the most popular one I know of, but there have to be other fun active games out there. These games are more fun when you do them with others... a 'fitness' club would be the perfect venue for them.
We have 23 chromosomes, full of DNA. A lot of it is junk data. Many other creatures have 20, 26, 12, 4... whatever. Bacteria have a tiny fraction of this amount of DNA. Viruses an even tinier fraction.
Of course life got more complex. We just reached a 'sufficient' level of complexity millions of years ago. You can surely bet that early land animals, 900 million years ago, had a lot less DNA than the average reptile nowadays.
Last I heard (months ago), they were broken, and they could make ALL your tabs IE, or all not... but no way to mix'n'match. I'll have to check them out again now that they're fixed.
I'm a lazy bastard. Luckily, my primary job is technical support, which I do extremely well, happily, and without complaint (yes, I enjoy Internet Technical Support, no I'm not delusional or ill). So, between calls, I slack.
We used to have the office 'anti-social asshole' who did his job well and without complaint, but he got fired. We still have the office whiner (our highly unqualified, also lazy, network admin). And we have a few other more middle-of-the-road average guys mostly do their work, mostly don't gab, mostly don't goof off, etc.
I miss the office bastard. I have to do the work he used to do. That doesn't fit well with my 'lazy' persona.
Myrddin
These same sites that complain the 'Hits Link' service is not a reliable measure of OS usage proudly display their Alexa rankings... compiled by users of the increasingly marginalized Alexa desktop service.