There are people with 70 or so edits getting their votes deleted. Call me crazy, but I doubt that someone would go in and make 70 edits *just* so they can vote against deleting an article. Under three edits, maybe, but not 70 (unless they were all minor edits in a single day or something).
They paid for the lines, the installation, the maintenance, etc......with help from government grants. If they didn't want to play fair, they shouldn't have taken the money.
What I don't get is why conservatives get so up in arms about regular people getting any sort of government benefits, but when big companies get government benefits (no-bid contracts, public funding, no price negotiations), it's all fine and dandy. Not only is the conservative philosophy of governmental non-intervention demonstrably wrong-headed (deregulation -> Enron debacle), it's not even internally consistent (okay to give taxpayers' money to big business, but God forbid we give it to taxpayers).
Here's an example. Recently, a small meat-packing company decided they wanted to test every cow they butcher for mad cow disease, and then label their meat to the effect that every cow had been tested. Of course, the meat packing industry jumped into the ring and proposed that such labeling be made illegal because it would drive their costs up by forcing them to test their own meat to keep pace (or drive their sales down if they didn't). And of course the big backers of these new regulations were conservatives. So it's not about deregulation at all. It's about helping big business at the expense of consumers, which usually involves deregulation. Regulations that protect big business from consumers are of course completely okay.
Several years ago, a record company exec made a really good point. "File Sharing" isn't really "sharing" because when you share something with someone, you don't have it anymore.
But here's the obvious next logical step (which said executive of course failed to make): File sharing isn't really "stealing" either, because when you steal something from someone, they don't have it anymore.
File sharing is a violation of copyright. It's not sharing, it's not stealing, it's a copyright violation. And when it's put that way, if that doesn't sound as serious as stealing, maybe the people who make these ridiculous laws ought to take that into consideration.
The new internet, if it ever comes to pass, will be designed by governments and large corporations. This will mean the following:
* No more anonymity. You'll need to identify yourself just to get onto the network, and protections will be in place to keep you from hiding behind a proxy. Your computer's unique ID will be registered in your name, and it will be available to the FBI, CIA, and RIAA upon request (no warrant required).
* Large barrier to entry. No more setting up your own server without getting special permission to act as a server. There will be a barrier between servers and clients, and consumers will be second-class citizens in this regard.
* Probably less spam. Tighter controls will make it harder for spammers to get their unwanted traffic into the intertubes. Also, now that it's possible to implement an email tax, email spam could be made prohibitively expensive.
* Better security. Locking the internet down will help somewhat in keeping the criminal element out, because it will (theoretically) be a lot easier to trace where they're coming from.
So, you win some, you lose some. There's a use for this kind of network, but only for secure transactions. I don't think a "new internet" is something that anyone here would want to use.
If only it were *really* that simple. I personally have a lot of respect for Ron Paul, despite disagreeing with him on many things. But neither Ron Paul nor Al Gore would (currently) be able to affect the changes nerds want. Not because they don't want to, but because it's up to Congress to make and repeal laws. A president makes a great figurehead, but if nerds want to be represented, they need to start replacing their representatives, which is a long and slow process, if it's even possible at all. Nerds would essentially have to band together and gain a *majority* in a significant fraction of the 50 states and 435 districts. Let me know when we get started on that.
Fortunately, developers *already* have maximum freedom -- that is, they can choose whatever license they want for their code. I'm not sure I understand the complaint, since BSD or MIT licensed code is often included in proprietary products that are far less free for everyone (developer and user) than the original licenses. If you're going to complain about the GPL not being "free" in all senses, you ought to also be complaining about proprietary licensing, which is a much greater restriction of freedom. If you want someone to be able to take open code and make it way less free by making it proprietary, than what's the big deal about it being made *somewhat* less free by the GPL? I feel like you've got a bit of a hole in your logic there, but maybe that's just me.
Last I heard, we've lost 3000+ soldiers in the Iraq war, and 30,000+ Iraqi citizens as well (that's the figure the white house acknowledged a while back, anyway -- some estimates run much higher). That constitutes "by the thousands". It doesn't mean thousands die every day, but certainly many thousands have died over the course of the war.
Drunk driving is a terrible problem, but it's not government policy, and just because I didn't mention it in my previous post doesn't mean I'm not concerned with it.
I strayed from the Sacred Libertarian Viewpoint and got modded into oblivion there, and for saying something that quite frankly makes a lot of sense. I just think somebody needs to counter the idea that just because the Dems are also in bed with the RIAA means that they're just as bad as the republicans, and that democrats let our party get away with this kind of bullshit. We don't.
Laugh all you want at the term 'blogosphere', but it's where the grassroots action is at in the Democratic party at the moment. If enough bloggers complain about it, people will notice. Note that this has been on Daily Kos since long before Slashdot picked it up. The story is negative and the comments are negative. Take a look:
If you complain that the Dems did something shitty by hiring this jackwad, you'd be correct. But if you sit there and claim that the grassroots aren't pissed off about it, you're dead wrong.
The laws being sought by the RIAA are admittedly invasive, and I do object to them. I object to them publicly and with great vigor. It's not that Bush's privacy invading laws are different in principal, it's the sheer magnitude of them, and also the fact that his administration frequently *breaks* the law and does things like illegally monitoring US citizens. If the RIAA did something like that and got caught, someone would probably go to prison. But since it's the executive branch of the government doing it, nothing is done. Hence, far bigger problem.
Of course, the Bush administration has all sorts of other problems as well (Americans and Iraqi citizens dying by the thousands in the Iraq war, manipulation of intelligence leading up to said war, the whole US attourney scandal, Karl Rove's missing emails, Valerie Plame etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, the list goes on and on).
Yes, the Dems appointing an RIAA shill pisses me the hell off, because I hold the Dems to a far higher standard than Republicans, and you can bet I'm going to join the no doubt many thousands of people signing petitions and writing angry emails. To reiterate, the fact that the Democrats are way way better than Republicans doesn't excuse this kind of shit. I just still intend to vote for them because by and large they represent my views way better than neocons and religious wackos, and they're less corrupt on the whole.
To the contrary, I spent most of my time during the Clinton presidency bitching about Clinton's policies (DMCA, etc). Quite frankly, Bush is *far* worse than the RIAA, having corrupted pretty much every level of federal government and put a lot of laws in place that go a long way toward making the United States into a police state. When we get the democrats back in power, I'll go back into bitching about lesser evils. But for now, Bush is a bigger problem than the RIAA and jackasses legislating against video games. If you're running an ER, and you get somebody who's hemorrhaging and somebody with a broken arm, who do you treat first?
Consumers don't want to fund your lawsuits. Here are some things that the music industry may want to consider if it is to gain its customer base back:
1. Stop suing your customers. Clearly it's not scaring people out of music piracy, but it's definitely pissing people off. 2. Get rid of the DRM. You're just punishing your legitimate customers. Oh, that's right, if you sell music without DRM, people might pirate it. Because nobody pirates music now. 3. People understand economics better than you give them credit for. Given extra middle-men and the cost of production and shelf space, the per-unit cost of a CD is probably fairly high. On the other hand, it costs very little to send a copy of a song over the internet. People know this, and they know the dollar per song price point is high. Lower it. Hell, try cutting it to 25 cents, and you may find that you sell more than four times as many songs. Call it a promotion and see how it works out for you.
In the article, they mention that the study didn't track actual failures, just the how often customers *thought* there was a failure and replaced their drive. There are all sorts of reasons someone might think a drive has failed. They're not all correct. I can't begin to guess what percentage of those perceived failures were for real.
This study is not news. All it says is that people *think* their hard drives fail more often than the mean time to failure.
If you know how far away you are from an object and how quickly you're orbiting it (assuming your orbit is roughly circular) you can use simple algebra to get a rough idea of its mass.
Acceleration due to gravity is calculated as follows:
a = G * (m / r^2)...where a is the accelelration, G is the gravitational constant, and r is the distance between your two objects. Note that we're ignoring the acceleration of the sun toward the earth, which isn't technically correct, but this answer will be close enough.
Since we're looking for the Sun's mass, we solve this equation for m.
m = (a * r^2) / G
The first thing we need to figure out is the value of a, or how fast things accelerate toward the sun. The earth is 1.5e11 meters from the sun, and travels in a (roughly) circular orbit once every 365.25 days (or 3.16e7 seconds). If you calculate the circumferance of the earth's orbit given the radius, you get 9.42e11 meters. The earth is moving at roughly 2.98e4 meters per second.
The next step is to figure out how far the earth falls toward the sun every second. We can do this (again, roughly) without using calculus. Let's say that, for one second, the earth continues to travel in a straight line instead of a circle. If you subtract the earth's real orbital radius from this hypothetical one, you end up with the number of meters that earth falls every second, or a. Note that this isn't an exact calculation -- I would need to use calculus to do that -- but it's still "close enough". I'm an engineer, not a scientist, so be happy I used 3.14 for pi, as opposed to "about 3.":)
The earth's new distance from the sun, if it travelled at a tangent for sone second, would be calculated using the Pythagorean Theorum, as follows:
Subtracting the original distance from the sun, the earth has fallen about 2.96 millimeters in one second, which means that the earth is accelerating toward the sun at.00592 m/s. That's a. Now we just plug all that into the original equation:
m = 0.00592 * 1.5e11^2 / G
According to Google calculator: ((0.00592 (m / (s^2))) * (1.5e11^2) (m^2)) / gravitational constant = 1.9961037 × 10e30 kilograms
Now, looking up the mass of the sun: mass of the sun = 1.98892 × 10e30 kilograms
Voila, I've just calculated the mass of the sun with less than 1% error, and I didn't even need to remember any calculus.:)
I've spent the last six years developing CGI code. For the first four of those years, we had no real testing system and no source control; for the most part, we basically just made changes on the server and tested them quickly, hoping they worked. We did have a testing tree on the same server, but it wasn't an exact mirror because pie-in-the-sky development was going on there as well. There were 2 to 4 developers total (including my boss), and most of our changes were in response to frantic requests from management, who needed such and such feature RIGHT NOW. Needless to say, this was a bad system, and things were often broken in production while we worked on them.
To solve these issues, we ended up devising a system wherein we kept our source code in Subversion, and each developer had their own test tree which could be accessed from the web, so that we could test our own changes to code. When we finish making changes, we have a script to commit them and another script to put them into production. We have access to the production tree, but under a different account, so that it's inconvenient to get to it. On the other hand, our commit and go-live scripts are quick and easy to use, and now it's a completely natural thing to do, and it barely takes any more time than editing things right in production (not counting, of course, the many hours of time saved by not having to deal with bug reports or code hastily). All in all, the time savings have been huge, and these small changes have drastically reduced our downtime and bugs in production.
Furthermore, there's an understanding that once in a great while someone will need direct access to the production code. The difference is that it's harder to get to than our test code, so we only tweak production code in the extremely rare cases when it's absolutely necessary and for whatever reason it can't be done in test first (I can't recall an instance where we've actually done this, but the option is there just in case). The nice thing is that we don't take the morale hit from the lack of trust because we know that if we needed to, we could change production code.
We also have a simple home-grown web-based bug tracking system that allows our users to submit bugs and feature requests, and queues them up so we know what to work on. All people need to do to enter a bug is to put in a synopsis and description, and then attach a file if applicable. All we need to do when we fix a bug is change the status to closed and write a short message. It doesn't involve a lot of tedious and unnecessary entry on the part of either the users or the developers, so people happily use the system. The developers don't have to be told to use it at all, because it provides a simple, automated way of tracking outstanding issues. The users quickly realize that the only reliable way to get their bugs fixed is to submit them through this system (rather than stopping by our office, emailing, or calling on the phone) so they use it too.
So I guess my whole point is this: You don't necessarily need a complicated methodology. All you really need to do is set up a few ground rules and then script them so they're easy to follow, and make it inconvenient to break them. Source control is also a must (we use Subversion) as it provides everyone with peace of mind, as well as distinct points in the code that we know are stable, so we can roll production back if there's ever a big disaster. You don't have to turn all your developers into code monkeys to get solid work out of them. The key is that you not overcompensate for your problems. If you take away your developers' freedom and replace it with busy-work, you'll end up being far less productive than you could be. The good news is that your problems can be solved without having to do this.
...but let's say that it does. Why on earth would a company want to sell you a game that will never start to look dated? If Morrowind looked like Oblivion, a lot of people probably wouldn't have bought Oblivion. This goes double for games that lack any sort of story or plot, like basically any cookie-cutter sports title ever made.
So, in short, don't expect this to happen. As long as graphics continue to improve, game companies will use that to sell you new games, not improve the old ones for free (or even a small cost).
Well then you ought not to complain like Squenix when less Germans buy the book because it's localized late and already spoiled for them.
Furthermore, your analogy is faulty. The effort required for you, an english speaker, to translate a book into german is proportionally far greater versus writing the book, than it is to translate a game versus create one from scratch. In the case of a video game, most content (music, game engine, graphics) is reused in the translated version, whereas in a book *all* of the content has to be translated. Also, since books (generally) don't receive near the hype of video games, it's somewhat less likely that your book would be spoiled for your potential German readers. And finally, if the cost of having your brother translate your book chapter by chapter as you write it is the same as the cost of having him translate the entire book after it's published in the english-speaking countries, why make people wait?
Well, that's true for a small subset of games. In the case of Squenix and other large devlopers, however, international releases are no doubt planned and budgeted well in advance.
You act as if it's impossible to create the dialogue simultaneously in multiple languages. Just have the translation team work *with* the developers as opposed to *after* them. One would think it would reduce the total cost of development (ie, development plus translation) while allowing the game to be released earlier in non-Japanese speaking areas.
Slashdot Mirror
There are people with 70 or so edits getting their votes deleted. Call me crazy, but I doubt that someone would go in and make 70 edits *just* so they can vote against deleting an article. Under three edits, maybe, but not 70 (unless they were all minor edits in a single day or something).
They paid for the lines, the installation, the maintenance, etc... ...with help from government grants. If they didn't want to play fair, they shouldn't have taken the money.
What I don't get is why conservatives get so up in arms about regular people getting any sort of government benefits, but when big companies get government benefits (no-bid contracts, public funding, no price negotiations), it's all fine and dandy. Not only is the conservative philosophy of governmental non-intervention demonstrably wrong-headed (deregulation -> Enron debacle), it's not even internally consistent (okay to give taxpayers' money to big business, but God forbid we give it to taxpayers).
Here's an example. Recently, a small meat-packing company decided they wanted to test every cow they butcher for mad cow disease, and then label their meat to the effect that every cow had been tested. Of course, the meat packing industry jumped into the ring and proposed that such labeling be made illegal because it would drive their costs up by forcing them to test their own meat to keep pace (or drive their sales down if they didn't). And of course the big backers of these new regulations were conservatives. So it's not about deregulation at all. It's about helping big business at the expense of consumers, which usually involves deregulation. Regulations that protect big business from consumers are of course completely okay.
Read all about this here:
http://www.celsias.com/2007/07/12/white-house-tries-to-force-less-mad-cow-testing/
5) PRIVACY. You can't rely on that with webmail.
You can't rely on it with regular email either, unless you and everyone you communicate with encrypt all of your messages.
Several years ago, a record company exec made a really good point. "File Sharing" isn't really "sharing" because when you share something with someone, you don't have it anymore.
But here's the obvious next logical step (which said executive of course failed to make): File sharing isn't really "stealing" either, because when you steal something from someone, they don't have it anymore.
File sharing is a violation of copyright. It's not sharing, it's not stealing, it's a copyright violation. And when it's put that way, if that doesn't sound as serious as stealing, maybe the people who make these ridiculous laws ought to take that into consideration.
The new internet, if it ever comes to pass, will be designed by governments and large corporations. This will mean the following:
* No more anonymity. You'll need to identify yourself just to get onto the network, and protections will be in place to keep you from hiding behind a proxy. Your computer's unique ID will be registered in your name, and it will be available to the FBI, CIA, and RIAA upon request (no warrant required).
* Large barrier to entry. No more setting up your own server without getting special permission to act as a server. There will be a barrier between servers and clients, and consumers will be second-class citizens in this regard.
* Probably less spam. Tighter controls will make it harder for spammers to get their unwanted traffic into the intertubes. Also, now that it's possible to implement an email tax, email spam could be made prohibitively expensive.
* Better security. Locking the internet down will help somewhat in keeping the criminal element out, because it will (theoretically) be a lot easier to trace where they're coming from.
So, you win some, you lose some. There's a use for this kind of network, but only for secure transactions. I don't think a "new internet" is something that anyone here would want to use.
If only it were *really* that simple. I personally have a lot of respect for Ron Paul, despite disagreeing with him on many things. But neither Ron Paul nor Al Gore would (currently) be able to affect the changes nerds want. Not because they don't want to, but because it's up to Congress to make and repeal laws. A president makes a great figurehead, but if nerds want to be represented, they need to start replacing their representatives, which is a long and slow process, if it's even possible at all. Nerds would essentially have to band together and gain a *majority* in a significant fraction of the 50 states and 435 districts. Let me know when we get started on that.
Wow, that's pretty scary.
Fortunately, developers *already* have maximum freedom -- that is, they can choose whatever license they want for their code. I'm not sure I understand the complaint, since BSD or MIT licensed code is often included in proprietary products that are far less free for everyone (developer and user) than the original licenses. If you're going to complain about the GPL not being "free" in all senses, you ought to also be complaining about proprietary licensing, which is a much greater restriction of freedom. If you want someone to be able to take open code and make it way less free by making it proprietary, than what's the big deal about it being made *somewhat* less free by the GPL? I feel like you've got a bit of a hole in your logic there, but maybe that's just me.
Last I heard, we've lost 3000+ soldiers in the Iraq war, and 30,000+ Iraqi citizens as well (that's the figure the white house acknowledged a while back, anyway -- some estimates run much higher). That constitutes "by the thousands". It doesn't mean thousands die every day, but certainly many thousands have died over the course of the war.
Drunk driving is a terrible problem, but it's not government policy, and just because I didn't mention it in my previous post doesn't mean I'm not concerned with it.
P.S. "supposed to be"
Wow, Flamebait. Not used to that one.
I strayed from the Sacred Libertarian Viewpoint and got modded into oblivion there, and for saying something that quite frankly makes a lot of sense. I just think somebody needs to counter the idea that just because the Dems are also in bed with the RIAA means that they're just as bad as the republicans, and that democrats let our party get away with this kind of bullshit. We don't.
Laugh all you want at the term 'blogosphere', but it's where the grassroots action is at in the Democratic party at the moment. If enough bloggers complain about it, people will notice. Note that this has been on Daily Kos since long before Slashdot picked it up. The story is negative and the comments are negative. Take a look:
DNC hires RIAA shill
If you complain that the Dems did something shitty by hiring this jackwad, you'd be correct. But if you sit there and claim that the grassroots aren't pissed off about it, you're dead wrong.
Sigh.
The laws being sought by the RIAA are admittedly invasive, and I do object to them. I object to them publicly and with great vigor. It's not that Bush's privacy invading laws are different in principal, it's the sheer magnitude of them, and also the fact that his administration frequently *breaks* the law and does things like illegally monitoring US citizens. If the RIAA did something like that and got caught, someone would probably go to prison. But since it's the executive branch of the government doing it, nothing is done. Hence, far bigger problem.
Of course, the Bush administration has all sorts of other problems as well (Americans and Iraqi citizens dying by the thousands in the Iraq war, manipulation of intelligence leading up to said war, the whole US attourney scandal, Karl Rove's missing emails, Valerie Plame etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, the list goes on and on).
Yes, the Dems appointing an RIAA shill pisses me the hell off, because I hold the Dems to a far higher standard than Republicans, and you can bet I'm going to join the no doubt many thousands of people signing petitions and writing angry emails. To reiterate, the fact that the Democrats are way way better than Republicans doesn't excuse this kind of shit. I just still intend to vote for them because by and large they represent my views way better than neocons and religious wackos, and they're less corrupt on the whole.
To the contrary, I spent most of my time during the Clinton presidency bitching about Clinton's policies (DMCA, etc). Quite frankly, Bush is *far* worse than the RIAA, having corrupted pretty much every level of federal government and put a lot of laws in place that go a long way toward making the United States into a police state. When we get the democrats back in power, I'll go back into bitching about lesser evils. But for now, Bush is a bigger problem than the RIAA and jackasses legislating against video games. If you're running an ER, and you get somebody who's hemorrhaging and somebody with a broken arm, who do you treat first?
I've downloaded many gigs in a month on columbus roadrunner and never been dinged for it. I certainly wouldn't be worried about a 4G download.
Consumers don't want to fund your lawsuits. Here are some things that the music industry may want to consider if it is to gain its customer base back:
1. Stop suing your customers. Clearly it's not scaring people out of music piracy, but it's definitely pissing people off.
2. Get rid of the DRM. You're just punishing your legitimate customers. Oh, that's right, if you sell music without DRM, people might pirate it. Because nobody pirates music now.
3. People understand economics better than you give them credit for. Given extra middle-men and the cost of production and shelf space, the per-unit cost of a CD is probably fairly high. On the other hand, it costs very little to send a copy of a song over the internet. People know this, and they know the dollar per song price point is high. Lower it. Hell, try cutting it to 25 cents, and you may find that you sell more than four times as many songs. Call it a promotion and see how it works out for you.
You obviously know what you're doing. Not all users do... in fact, the bitter techie in my is screaming that most don't. :)
In the article, they mention that the study didn't track actual failures, just the how often customers *thought* there was a failure and replaced their drive. There are all sorts of reasons someone might think a drive has failed. They're not all correct. I can't begin to guess what percentage of those perceived failures were for real.
This study is not news. All it says is that people *think* their hard drives fail more often than the mean time to failure.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/art/graph3.gif
In that case, of course, her mass isn't negligible compared to yours, unless one or both of you have a serious eating disorder. :)
If you know how far away you are from an object and how quickly you're orbiting it (assuming your orbit is roughly circular) you can use simple algebra to get a rough idea of its mass.
...where a is the accelelration, G is the gravitational constant, and r is the distance between your two objects. Note that we're ignoring the acceleration of the sun toward the earth, which isn't technically correct, but this answer will be close enough.
:)
.00592 m/s. That's a. Now we just plug all that into the original equation:
:)
Acceleration due to gravity is calculated as follows:
a = G * (m / r^2)
Since we're looking for the Sun's mass, we solve this equation for m.
m = (a * r^2) / G
The first thing we need to figure out is the value of a, or how fast things accelerate toward the sun. The earth is 1.5e11 meters from the sun, and travels in a (roughly) circular orbit once every 365.25 days (or 3.16e7 seconds). If you calculate the circumferance of the earth's orbit given the radius, you get 9.42e11 meters. The earth is moving at roughly 2.98e4 meters per second.
The next step is to figure out how far the earth falls toward the sun every second. We can do this (again, roughly) without using calculus. Let's say that, for one second, the earth continues to travel in a straight line instead of a circle. If you subtract the earth's real orbital radius from this hypothetical one, you end up with the number of meters that earth falls every second, or a. Note that this isn't an exact calculation -- I would need to use calculus to do that -- but it's still "close enough". I'm an engineer, not a scientist, so be happy I used 3.14 for pi, as opposed to "about 3."
The earth's new distance from the sun, if it travelled at a tangent for sone second, would be calculated using the Pythagorean Theorum, as follows:
d = sqrt(1.5e11 ^ 2 + 2.98e4 ^ 2) = sqrt(2.25e22 + 8.88e8) = 150000000000.00296
Subtracting the original distance from the sun, the earth has fallen about 2.96 millimeters in one second, which means that the earth is accelerating toward the sun at
m = 0.00592 * 1.5e11^2 / G
According to Google calculator:
((0.00592 (m / (s^2))) * (1.5e11^2) (m^2)) / gravitational constant = 1.9961037 × 10e30 kilograms
Now, looking up the mass of the sun:
mass of the sun = 1.98892 × 10e30 kilograms
Voila, I've just calculated the mass of the sun with less than 1% error, and I didn't even need to remember any calculus.
I've spent the last six years developing CGI code. For the first four of those years, we had no real testing system and no source control; for the most part, we basically just made changes on the server and tested them quickly, hoping they worked. We did have a testing tree on the same server, but it wasn't an exact mirror because pie-in-the-sky development was going on there as well. There were 2 to 4 developers total (including my boss), and most of our changes were in response to frantic requests from management, who needed such and such feature RIGHT NOW. Needless to say, this was a bad system, and things were often broken in production while we worked on them.
To solve these issues, we ended up devising a system wherein we kept our source code in Subversion, and each developer had their own test tree which could be accessed from the web, so that we could test our own changes to code. When we finish making changes, we have a script to commit them and another script to put them into production. We have access to the production tree, but under a different account, so that it's inconvenient to get to it. On the other hand, our commit and go-live scripts are quick and easy to use, and now it's a completely natural thing to do, and it barely takes any more time than editing things right in production (not counting, of course, the many hours of time saved by not having to deal with bug reports or code hastily). All in all, the time savings have been huge, and these small changes have drastically reduced our downtime and bugs in production.
Furthermore, there's an understanding that once in a great while someone will need direct access to the production code. The difference is that it's harder to get to than our test code, so we only tweak production code in the extremely rare cases when it's absolutely necessary and for whatever reason it can't be done in test first (I can't recall an instance where we've actually done this, but the option is there just in case). The nice thing is that we don't take the morale hit from the lack of trust because we know that if we needed to, we could change production code.
We also have a simple home-grown web-based bug tracking system that allows our users to submit bugs and feature requests, and queues them up so we know what to work on. All people need to do to enter a bug is to put in a synopsis and description, and then attach a file if applicable. All we need to do when we fix a bug is change the status to closed and write a short message. It doesn't involve a lot of tedious and unnecessary entry on the part of either the users or the developers, so people happily use the system. The developers don't have to be told to use it at all, because it provides a simple, automated way of tracking outstanding issues. The users quickly realize that the only reliable way to get their bugs fixed is to submit them through this system (rather than stopping by our office, emailing, or calling on the phone) so they use it too.
So I guess my whole point is this: You don't necessarily need a complicated methodology. All you really need to do is set up a few ground rules and then script them so they're easy to follow, and make it inconvenient to break them. Source control is also a must (we use Subversion) as it provides everyone with peace of mind, as well as distinct points in the code that we know are stable, so we can roll production back if there's ever a big disaster. You don't have to turn all your developers into code monkeys to get solid work out of them. The key is that you not overcompensate for your problems. If you take away your developers' freedom and replace it with busy-work, you'll end up being far less productive than you could be. The good news is that your problems can be solved without having to do this.
And of course it's a well known fact that poorly calibrated touch screens tend to lean overwhelmingly republican.
...but let's say that it does. Why on earth would a company want to sell you a game that will never start to look dated? If Morrowind looked like Oblivion, a lot of people probably wouldn't have bought Oblivion. This goes double for games that lack any sort of story or plot, like basically any cookie-cutter sports title ever made.
So, in short, don't expect this to happen. As long as graphics continue to improve, game companies will use that to sell you new games, not improve the old ones for free (or even a small cost).
Original source, please?
Well then you ought not to complain like Squenix when less Germans buy the book because it's localized late and already spoiled for them.
Furthermore, your analogy is faulty. The effort required for you, an english speaker, to translate a book into german is proportionally far greater versus writing the book, than it is to translate a game versus create one from scratch. In the case of a video game, most content (music, game engine, graphics) is reused in the translated version, whereas in a book *all* of the content has to be translated. Also, since books (generally) don't receive near the hype of video games, it's somewhat less likely that your book would be spoiled for your potential German readers. And finally, if the cost of having your brother translate your book chapter by chapter as you write it is the same as the cost of having him translate the entire book after it's published in the english-speaking countries, why make people wait?
Well, that's true for a small subset of games. In the case of Squenix and other large devlopers, however, international releases are no doubt planned and budgeted well in advance.
You act as if it's impossible to create the dialogue simultaneously in multiple languages. Just have the translation team work *with* the developers as opposed to *after* them. One would think it would reduce the total cost of development (ie, development plus translation) while allowing the game to be released earlier in non-Japanese speaking areas.