Because 5-10 years from now, there's the possibility that popularity in WOW might wane and something fresh and new will be required to maintain and hopefully improve the subscriber base. It takes time to develop a system of this magnitude.
Granted, I can see there are opportunities for abuse here, but if the owners of dynamic dns domains don't properly police their "customers" and spammers and/or other malicious websites start using it, then Google has every right to blacklist the entire domain. Of course, it's arguable exactly how much can be done to prevent it, but if you're really concerned about not getting your site blocked, go ahead and blow the $7 a year on your own domain, or use a smaller ddns service that can actually pay attention to the nature of the hosts it's serving.
As far as having any one third party responsible for maintaining a blacklist, exactly how else do you intend to do it? You can always create your own blacklist, but that would first require you to "enjoy" the sites you would prefer get blocked automatically. You'll just have to trust someone to make that reasonable decision for you. Sure, there will be some mistakes, but that's the price you pay for protection.
1. We're letting you use the software. Have fun. 2. If you don't want to use the software, don't. 3. We need to protect our trademarks, so if you change something and redistribute it, don't call it Mozilla or Firefox. 4. No warranty, get over it. 5. We're not responsible for anything that goes wrong. This actually is just a paraphrase of section 4, and like section 4, we've stated it in ALL CAPS, so you'll be sure to pay attention to it. 6. There might be laws about sending this software out of the country. Try to obey them. 7. If you're using this in a US government environment, there are certainly many laws that will regulate its use. Please pay attention to them. 8. We're doing it the California way, the UN will not be involved (thank goodness), this agreement is written in English, you can give this (unmodified) license and product to someone else, and we won't mind.
I don't know that the poster actually cares if he owns the idea or not. He simply stated that he wants to be able to use the program he's envisioning. If it's an open source product or even a closed source product that he has to purchase, that's ok. Making money from the project didn't seem to be the high priority here. His issue is that he doesn't currently have the skill to create it himself and feels there is probably a faster way to complete the project rather than spending the time to learn how to program first. He's even willing to pay for the development, but wants to know how to do so in the most efficient manner.
Personally, if it's something useful that others would find useful, he should probably just post the idea. It could very well be that a similar project already exists, or someone out there is working on something similar and just hasn't had the motivation to complete it yet. Even if someone runs with the idea, writes the program and sells a million copies, he can still buy one of them and he'll be happy.
Sourcetool (and numerous other companies) have a business model that is almost entirely dependent on the business model and operation of another company or industry, which in this case is Google. If they existed prior to any major search engine existing and the growth and dominance of Google has, over time, eroded or destroyed Sourcetool, he MIGHT have a point. Of course, history is full of examples where the development of one industry destroyed another (horse buggies vs automobiles for instance), but that doesn't really apply here anyway.
Sourcetool was launched in 2005, well after Google had gained their current level of industry dominance. The site itself clearly states that it relies entirely on Google ads as a source of revenue. The site was developed, from its very inception, to be entirely dependent on how Google chooses to operate. Google itself has no obligation to continue to operate in such a way that benefits any specific site or industry.
The way to protect yourself from this is to not be dependent on any single company, or any single method of revenue. Don't offer ads ONLY from google. And don't rely entirely on ad revenue to support the business. Certainly, many business do that, and many businesses are created and disappear as a result. It's part of the cycle. Either diversify or deal with it.
He's one of the main faces of the show, so maybe they're putting him up to handle various PR as well. However, it's quite likely he's not involved in the everyday minutiae of the operation of the show. That's what staff is for. But he's the face everyone sees and they needed a press release, so they stick some notes in his hand and tells him to run with it. This is the only real possibility I can see. There's not much point in telling bold fabrications that can easily be debunked. Heck, debunking is his line of work. He really should have known better.:)
However, they don't want to get sued if somehow, unlikely though it might seem, you upload a video to their service, and subsequently delete it... it might still be available. Especially when it gets copied over many servers. It's possible something could fall through the cracks. They can either steadfastly uphold a policy whereby they will diligently ensure that every deleted video is permanently deleted... or they can risk losing about 5 free customers who are worried about it and simply say they can keep them forever if they want.
I tend to do my debugging by inserting a lot of printf statements to indicate where in the program I currently am and the value of any critical variables at that time. As the output information is no longer needed (i.e. I fixed the bug it was attached to), I tend to cull out whatever isn't useful anymore. However, I tend to keep starting messages in function calls related to a routine I'm working on or making more than a trivial change to... since chances are, knowing me, I'm going to end up putting them back in there anyway once I create a new bug... and lets face it, it WILL happen.
Once I'm done, I go back, remove or comment out (usually just comment out) all the messages that have no redeeming value for a properly functioning program, and turn the rest into debug statements which print based on the debug level provided at execution time... or sometimes I use a mask to select which types of messages to display.
The summary only mentioned the police drive by, not the hotel's assertion that police concern was a primary factor in disallowing the balloon launch, which is what makes the complete lack of concern at the end ironic, and therefore worth mentioning. Nobody's talking about unwarranted strip searches.
I've worked with people that had to fly weekly as part of their job. Say you're trying to fly from..oh.. I dunno.. Atlanta to Dallas. That flight might be $750. However, you can get a trip from Atlanta to Houston, with a stop in Dallas, for $400. (I'm making up these numbers btw, just using them as an example). So said instructor would purchase tickets for the atlanta to houston flight, and just walk off the plane in Dallas. Of course, this only works if you have no checked baggage, but for what they're charging for that these days......
Airline ticket prices are tricky though. It's a rare product that increases in value the closer you get to departure time. It will go from it's highest value to worthless in a moment's time. If you just figure out a reasonable average fare and charge that from the beginning, you'll sell out all your seats 3+ weeks prior to departure. That might seem fine from a business perspective, but you always have customers that absolutely must fly with only a day's... or even a few hours notice. Obviously these customers are willing to pay top dollar, so you want tickets available for them. But not TOO many tickets, otherwise you'll have empty seats, becuase the demand at those high prices aren't there. So tickets will increase in price the closer you get to departure. Buy them far enough in advance, you get a great deal.
Now, take the multi-leg flight I used as an example. What you really have here is two separate flights. Atlanta to Dallas, and Dallas to Houston. You've also got NYC to Dallas, LAX to Dallas, etc. So 3 weeks out, you've got the Dallas to houston flight that's got a surplus of seats. You have 15 extra seats that you project you're not going to be able to fill on that flight. On each of the 3 flights to dallas, you expect a surplus of 5 seats. You want to fill up ALL the planes. However, if you lower just the cost of the tickets to Dallas, you're not going to fill the Houston leg. So you lower the cost of the tickets from atlanta, nyc and lax to houston that have a layover in Dallas, thereby increasing demand on that specific flight, and filling the seats. So why not just lower the cost of the Dallas to Houston flights? The problem is, other than the 15 extra seats, you're filling the plane anyway. Why offer the other 100+ seats in the plane at a lower rate when those customers are perfectly willing to pay the higher rate, just so you can fill an extra 15 seats. You want a lower rate on JUST those 15 seats.
Keep in mind, this is just one scenario, one very small factor in the complicated mess that makes up the business side of airline travel. You schedule flights not only on the expectation that you'll fill seats, but also so that you'll have planes where you need them when you need them, so pilots don't fly too many hours in a row, get enough sleep, and have as few nights out of town as possible. All of that considered, ticket prices are going to be variable and nonsensical.
Whether you're programming games or selling shoes, if your intent is to make money, you're going to need a few things first:
1. A lot of money. If you save up for 10 years and use that money as your seed money, if you make it big, you'll enjoy all the rewards, if you fail. You lose it all. You could also find a VC willing to fund your project, and your risk is minimized. However, you'll have to constantly deal with the VC's restrictions and requirements, and if you end up with a blockbuster, they'll end up with 90% of the profits.
2. A lot of time. And by time, I mean time spent working 80+ hour weeks at minimum wage for the next few years. This might not be a problem if you're in your early 20's and don't have a family to support.. or more importantly... interact with. This will probably mean you keep your day job and spend every other waking moment working on your project... unpaid... either way, you'll need a source of income while your project is being developed. You had better enjoy what you're doing, because that's going to be the only source of entertainment you'll have for a while.
3. A good idea. Yeah, you said you had that already. Now think of your great idea in context with regards to #1 and #2. Is it STILL a great idea? Would you be willing to risk $100,000 of your OWN money and three years of your own time on it? Is it worth paying off loans for the next 20 years if it fails? Really think about it. Be absolutely sure that your idea is SO great that it will overcome every obstacle you have.
Ultimately, you need a finished product. And you'll need to prove that it's a product that will make money... and you do that by actually making money from it. Once you're earning a decent income through your own products, have a few programmers employed and several new products in production.... THEN you'll start getting calls from companies wanting to purchase your company. Either because they think they can make money from it, or because you're competition they want to be rid of. THAT is how you sell your idea.
It's likely his union could have negotiated a percentage deal if he really wanted it. The problem with percentage deals is... what exactly is the percentage going to be of? Sales? Profit? Look into Hollywood accounting if you want an idea of how well percentage deals work out for those that work on them. And while I'm sure the chances of GTA4 selling well were good, what would happen if our good friend Mr. Thompson somehow managed to luck out and find a crackpot judge who played the injunction game with Rockstar for a few years? It's certainly a possibility that needs to be considered, and if you're working off royalties, you would have to wait until that all got taken care of before you'd see one cent. What would happen if you did all that work, and two years later Rockstar decided that the game was going to be a bust and just scrapped the project.... I'm sure the fine print of your contract wouldn't allow you to sue for damages in that case.
Believe me, do your work, take the $100k, and hope that the success of the game means you'll be on the top list of candidates for working on future sequels.
Another reason you're forgetting, and I know at least this applied in the earlier days of Wine, but I've not verified it recently... if you're a developer (developer developer... etc) the wine libraries can also be used to compile linux native binaries from windows based source. It's not the ideal way to port software, but it works for a quick and dirty compile. The plus side is, while Wine is constrained to a single architecture for the purpose of executing windows binaries compiled for that architecture, the code could be compiled for any architecture or OS that wine runs under.
You know, right now, there are at least a dozen slashdotters going... "hmm... an underwear drawer search engine.... I could do my entire wardrobe this way.... and it could be stored on a public server, so no matter where I am in the world, as long as I have internet access, I can plan what I'm going to wear the next day... I'll know what laundry needs to be done, and advertisers can use knowledge of my favorite brands to push advertising.... what a GREAT idea... and best of all, Google might be willing to buy such a company!"
It'll just cost you more. If your ability to download movies, music and porn at home is so mission critical that anything less than %99.999 uptime is acceptable, you can always procure internet service from multiple providers. Get the local cable and/or DSL if it's available, bring in a T1 line or two from different POP's. Sure, it'll cost a small fortune, but you can be virtually guaranteed to never lose internet access.
What if your power goes out. Well, that's pretty simple, you need a large battery backup on your home grid to cover the downtime. Throw in a few windmills, a 10000 watt gasoline generator, and $20K worth of solar panels. Don't forget a UPS or two. That ought to keep your computers running.
Gas goes out? well, luckily for you, you can purchase electric equivalents to any product that is powered by gas. You can purchase electric stoves, electric hot water heaters, electric dryers and electric furnaces. You need to make sure you have both a gas AND electric backup in your house for each of these things.... just in case. Of course, as mentioned before, you'll have a suitable emergency electric backup plan to cover those rare instances when both the gas AND the power goes out. You can also purchase a propane tank as an emergency gas backup. Of course, not all gas appliances work with both propane AND natural gas, but I'm sure you can figure something out.
As for phone.... well... wait, we don't need to worry about phones. As you said, we already get 5 9's on the phone service.
Long story short, if you DEMAND that level of uptime, you CAN have it. You just have to be willing to pay for it.
In all fairness, as long as Valve is around, steam or its equivalent will be as well. Should it shut down and go away, one of two things are likely to happen. Either they will release a patch for all games that will allow all games to be played offline permanently, or some random cracking group (or 10) will accomplish the same task for you on their behalf. It's really not an issue I lose too much sleep over.
When some people start a business, they get financing by mortgaging their home, maxing out their credit cards, and pawning off a bunch of expensive but unnecessary luxuries. It's risky, but at the end of the day, if the business is a success, they own it all.
Others look for venture capital or other investors to cover the startup costs. The company might be an initial success as it gets rushed to profitable status, but someone else is gonna take a huge chunk of the credit (read profit) from this method, and not the guy doing all the hard work.. Unless of course the company is REALLY successful. But that only happens in rare occasions.
The analogy works in the music industry. Take your pick.
This would work, in theory, if they posted the movie on a website and let people download it. However, just because the movie company and sponsored affiliates, such as the MPAA, etc, are allowed to distribute a copy of the movie for free, that does not give any one else distribution rights. The problem with a client such as bittorrent, by definition of the protocol, you're making a copy of the file available to others, and are likely also transmitting it. If you could download the file without redistributing so much as a byte of the data, it would be legal for you to obtain it in this way..... in theory.
I suppose it might be fun to stand defiant against the authorities, knowing full well you are legally in the clear by doing so, and although you might get arrested, you'll gladly get dragged down to the police station, get fingerprinted, locked in a cell for several hours until someone can come bail you out. And then you'll get to defend the charge in court, and it will probably cost a couple thousand dollars, but THAT'S OK.. It's WORTH it to be defiant. It's worth it to deny the police officer knowledge of your identity. Because in spite of being arrested, etc, you've managed to keep that bit of useless information from them. YOU HAVE WON!!!!.... oh wait...
This guy screwed up. HE called the police. He was being physically detained without his consent by people who didn't have the authority to do so. The police were on his side. They likely already knew who he was if it was his name on the cellphone he called the police from. So... why not show the friendly police officer his ID? Who cares if he "legally doesn't have to"... the police officer is on his side here. He's managed to lay a nice foundation for a lawsuit against Circuit City, and has a friendly police officer as a witness to the event, and he's going to screw that all up by acting defiant where it's not necessary.
If they called the police on him, he might have a better leg to stand on, but as it stands, he probably cost himself any chance of a lawsuit as well as racking up a few thousand $$$ in legal fees to defend himself.
Way to go dude!
In response to a few things he mentioned, the officer does not have to read you your miranda rights, despite what you might see on TV. They only need to do that if they're planning to ask you questions that might lead you to incriminate yourself. Since handing over his license or not handing over his license has nothing to do with what he might say in the process, there's no reason to read him his rights.
And Walmart will happily refund the cost of the CD purchase... even if you can't produce the receipt. So nobody's really getting ripped off here. Besides, the only people who are likely to not realize the CD they're purchasing is not chock full of cussing are probably too young to be purchasing it anyway.
The purchase of youtube probably isn't a good example as a bad business decision, considering that at the time of aquisition, they were making about $10 million profit monthly. So, if things stayed as is, it would take 12-16 years to pay back the investment... if they paid cash... which they didn't, they traded stock. However, if they expected the business to grow more profitable as time goes on, it becomes a better return even faster.
It's likely the people involved will be asked to return the extra money before charges are pressed, and likely most of them will do so. However, if someone accessed the machine several times during that timeframe.. yeah, criminal intent.
Slashdot Mirror
Because 5-10 years from now, there's the possibility that popularity in WOW might wane and something fresh and new will be required to maintain and hopefully improve the subscriber base. It takes time to develop a system of this magnitude.
-Restil
Granted, I can see there are opportunities for abuse here, but if the owners of dynamic dns domains don't properly police their "customers" and spammers and/or other malicious websites start using it, then Google has every right to blacklist the entire domain. Of course, it's arguable exactly how much can be done to prevent it, but if you're really concerned about not getting your site blocked, go ahead and blow the $7 a year on your own domain, or use a smaller ddns service that can actually pay attention to the nature of the hosts it's serving.
As far as having any one third party responsible for maintaining a blacklist, exactly how else do you intend to do it? You can always create your own blacklist, but that would first require you to "enjoy" the sites you would prefer get blocked automatically. You'll just have to trust someone to make that reasonable decision for you. Sure, there will be some mistakes, but that's the price you pay for protection.
-Restil
1. We're letting you use the software. Have fun.
2. If you don't want to use the software, don't.
3. We need to protect our trademarks, so if you change something and redistribute it, don't call it Mozilla or Firefox.
4. No warranty, get over it.
5. We're not responsible for anything that goes wrong. This actually is just a paraphrase of section 4, and like section 4, we've stated it in ALL CAPS, so you'll be sure to pay attention to it.
6. There might be laws about sending this software out of the country. Try to obey them.
7. If you're using this in a US government environment, there are certainly many laws that will regulate its use. Please pay attention to them.
8. We're doing it the California way, the UN will not be involved (thank goodness), this agreement is written in English, you can give this (unmodified) license and product to someone else, and we won't mind.
There. The important parts.
-Restil
I don't know that the poster actually cares if he owns the idea or not. He simply stated that he wants to be able to use the program he's envisioning. If it's an open source product or even a closed source product that he has to purchase, that's ok. Making money from the project didn't seem to be the high priority here. His issue is that he doesn't currently have the skill to create it himself and feels there is probably a faster way to complete the project rather than spending the time to learn how to program first. He's even willing to pay for the development, but wants to know how to do so in the most efficient manner.
Personally, if it's something useful that others would find useful, he should probably just post the idea. It could very well be that a similar project already exists, or someone out there is working on something similar and just hasn't had the motivation to complete it yet. Even if someone runs with the idea, writes the program and sells a million copies, he can still buy one of them and he'll be happy.
-Restil
Sourcetool (and numerous other companies) have a business model that is almost entirely dependent on the business model and operation of another company or industry, which in this case is Google. If they existed prior to any major search engine existing and the growth and dominance of Google has, over time, eroded or destroyed Sourcetool, he MIGHT have a point. Of course, history is full of examples where the development of one industry destroyed another (horse buggies vs automobiles for instance), but that doesn't really apply here anyway.
Sourcetool was launched in 2005, well after Google had gained their current level of industry dominance. The site itself clearly states that it relies entirely on Google ads as a source of revenue. The site was developed, from its very inception, to be entirely dependent on how Google
chooses to operate. Google itself has no obligation to continue to operate in such a way that benefits any specific site or industry.
The way to protect yourself from this is to not be dependent on any single company, or any single method of revenue. Don't offer ads ONLY from google. And don't rely entirely on ad revenue to support the business. Certainly, many business do that, and many businesses are created and disappear as a result. It's part of the cycle. Either diversify or deal with it.
-Restil
Go hire a master plumber for 2 days of work and ask that question again. :)
-Restil
He's one of the main faces of the show, so maybe they're putting him up to handle various PR as well. However, it's quite likely he's not involved in the everyday minutiae of the operation of the show. That's what staff is for. But he's the face everyone sees and they needed a press release, so they stick some notes in his hand and tells him to run with it. This is the only real possibility I can see. There's not much point in telling bold fabrications that can easily be debunked. Heck, debunking is his line of work. He really should have known better. :)
-Restil
However, they don't want to get sued if somehow, unlikely though it might seem, you upload a video to their service, and subsequently delete it... it might still be available. Especially when it gets copied over many servers. It's possible something could fall through the cracks. They can either steadfastly uphold a policy whereby they will diligently ensure that every deleted video is permanently deleted... or they can risk losing about 5 free customers who are worried about it and simply say they can keep them forever if they want.
-Restil
Assuming a 128kbps stream, it would be 42 megs a month... if you listened 24/7 for the whole month.
You have no need to be worried.
-Restil
I tend to do my debugging by inserting a lot of printf statements to indicate where in the program I currently am and the value of any critical variables at that time. As the output information is no longer needed (i.e. I fixed the bug it was attached to), I tend to cull out whatever isn't useful anymore. However, I tend to keep starting messages in function calls related to a routine I'm working on or making more than a trivial change to... since chances are, knowing me, I'm going to end up putting them back in there anyway once I create a new bug... and lets face it, it WILL happen.
Once I'm done, I go back, remove or comment out (usually just comment out) all the messages that have no redeeming value for a properly functioning program, and turn the rest into debug statements which print based on the debug level provided at execution time... or sometimes I use a mask to select which types of messages to display.
-Restil
The summary only mentioned the police drive by, not the hotel's assertion that police concern was a primary factor in disallowing the balloon launch, which is what makes the complete lack of concern at the end ironic, and therefore worth mentioning. Nobody's talking about unwarranted strip searches.
-Restil
I've worked with people that had to fly weekly as part of their job. Say you're trying to fly from ..oh.. I dunno.. Atlanta to Dallas. That flight might be $750. However, you can get a trip from Atlanta to Houston, with a stop in Dallas, for $400. (I'm making up these numbers btw, just using them as an example). So said instructor would purchase tickets for the atlanta to houston flight, and just walk off the plane in Dallas. Of course, this only works if you have no checked baggage, but for what they're charging for that these days......
Airline ticket prices are tricky though. It's a rare product that increases in value the closer you get to departure time. It will go from it's highest value to worthless in a moment's time. If you just figure out a reasonable average fare and charge that from the beginning, you'll sell out all your seats 3+ weeks prior to departure. That might seem fine from a business perspective, but you always have customers that absolutely must fly with only a day's ... or even a few hours notice. Obviously these customers are willing to pay top dollar, so you want tickets available for them. But not TOO many tickets, otherwise you'll have empty seats, becuase the demand at those high prices aren't there. So tickets will increase in price the closer you get to departure. Buy them far enough in advance, you get a great deal.
Now, take the multi-leg flight I used as an example. What you really have here is two separate flights. Atlanta to Dallas, and Dallas to Houston. You've also got NYC to Dallas, LAX to Dallas, etc. So 3 weeks out, you've got the Dallas to houston flight that's got a surplus of seats. You have 15 extra seats that you project you're not going to be able to fill on that flight. On each of the 3 flights to dallas, you expect a surplus of 5 seats. You want to fill up ALL the planes. However, if you lower just the cost of the tickets to Dallas, you're not going to fill the Houston leg. So you lower the cost of the tickets from atlanta, nyc and lax to houston that have a layover in Dallas, thereby increasing demand on that specific flight, and filling the seats. So why not just lower the cost of the Dallas to Houston flights? The problem is, other than the 15 extra seats, you're filling the plane anyway. Why offer the other 100+ seats in the plane at a lower rate when those customers are perfectly willing to pay the higher rate, just so you can fill an extra 15 seats. You want a lower rate on JUST those 15 seats.
Keep in mind, this is just one scenario, one very small factor in the complicated mess that makes up the business side of airline travel. You schedule flights not only on the expectation that you'll fill seats, but also so that you'll have planes where you need them when you need them, so pilots don't fly too many hours in a row, get enough sleep, and have as few nights out of town as possible. All of that considered, ticket prices are going to be variable and nonsensical.
-Restil
Whether you're programming games or selling shoes, if your intent is to make money, you're going to need a few things first:
1. A lot of money. If you save up for 10 years and use that money as your seed money, if you make it big, you'll enjoy all the rewards, if you fail. You lose it all. You could also find a VC willing to fund your project, and your risk is minimized. However, you'll have to constantly deal with the VC's restrictions and requirements, and if you end up with a blockbuster, they'll end up with 90% of the profits.
2. A lot of time. And by time, I mean time spent working 80+ hour weeks at minimum wage for the next few years. This might not be a problem if you're in your early 20's and don't have a family to support.. or more importantly... interact with.
This will probably mean you keep your day job and spend every other waking moment working on your project... unpaid... either way, you'll need a source of income while your project is being developed. You had better enjoy what you're doing, because that's going to be the only source of entertainment you'll have for a while.
3. A good idea. Yeah, you said you had that already. Now think of your great idea in context with regards to #1 and #2. Is it STILL a great idea? Would you be willing to risk $100,000 of your OWN money and three years of your own time on it? Is it worth paying off loans for the next 20 years if it fails? Really think about it. Be absolutely sure that your idea is SO great that it will overcome every obstacle you have.
Ultimately, you need a finished product. And you'll need to prove that it's a product that will make money... and you do that by actually making money from it. Once you're earning a decent income through your own products, have a few programmers employed and several new products in production.... THEN you'll start getting calls from companies wanting to purchase your company. Either because they think they can make money from it, or because you're competition they want to be rid of. THAT is how you sell your idea.
Good luck!
-Restil
Land on the moon, stake a claim on what you perceive to be your territory, be prepared to defend it. Do that, and it's yours.
-Restil
It's likely his union could have negotiated a percentage deal if he really wanted it. The problem with percentage deals is... what exactly is the percentage going to be of? Sales? Profit? Look into Hollywood accounting if you want an idea of how well percentage deals work out for those that work on them. And while I'm sure the chances of GTA4 selling well were good, what would happen if our good friend Mr. Thompson somehow managed to luck out and find a crackpot judge who played the injunction game with Rockstar for a few years? It's certainly a possibility that needs to be considered, and if you're working off royalties, you would have to wait until that all got taken care of before you'd see one cent. What would happen if you did all that work, and two years later Rockstar decided that the game was going to be a bust and just scrapped the project.... I'm sure the fine print of your contract wouldn't allow you to sue for damages in that case.
Believe me, do your work, take the $100k, and hope that the success of the game means you'll be on the top list of candidates for working on future sequels.
Another reason you're forgetting, and I know at least this applied in the earlier days of Wine, but I've not verified it recently... if you're a developer (developer developer... etc) the wine libraries can also be used to compile linux native binaries from windows based source. It's not the ideal way to port software, but it works for a quick and dirty compile. The plus side is, while Wine is constrained to a single architecture for the purpose of executing windows binaries compiled for that architecture, the code could be compiled for any architecture or OS that wine runs under.
-Restil
CAREFUL!!!!
:)
You know, right now, there are at least a dozen slashdotters going... "hmm... an underwear drawer search engine.... I could do my entire wardrobe this way.... and it could be stored on a public server, so no matter where I am in the world, as long as I have internet access, I can plan what I'm going to wear the next day... I'll know what laundry needs to be done, and advertisers can
use knowledge of my favorite brands to push advertising.... what a GREAT idea... and best of all, Google might be willing to buy such a company!"
You just HAD to bring that up, didn't you?
-Restil
It'll just cost you more. If your ability to download movies, music and porn at home is so mission critical that anything less than %99.999 uptime is acceptable, you can always procure internet service from multiple providers. Get the local cable and/or DSL if it's available, bring in a T1 line or two from different POP's. Sure, it'll cost a small fortune, but you can be virtually guaranteed to never lose internet access.
What if your power goes out. Well, that's pretty simple, you need a large battery backup on your home grid to cover the downtime. Throw in a few windmills, a 10000 watt gasoline generator, and $20K worth of solar panels. Don't forget a UPS or two. That ought to keep your computers running.
Gas goes out? well, luckily for you, you can purchase electric equivalents to any product that is powered by gas. You can purchase electric stoves, electric hot water heaters, electric dryers and electric furnaces. You need to make sure you have both a gas AND electric backup in your house for each of these things.... just in case. Of course, as mentioned before, you'll have a suitable emergency electric backup plan to cover those rare instances when both the gas AND the power goes out. You can also purchase a propane tank as an emergency gas backup. Of course, not all gas appliances work with both propane AND natural gas, but I'm sure you can figure something out.
As for phone.... well... wait, we don't need to worry about phones. As you said, we already get 5 9's on the phone service.
Long story short, if you DEMAND that level of uptime, you CAN have it. You just have to be willing to pay for it.
-Restil
In all fairness, as long as Valve is around, steam or its equivalent will be as well. Should it shut down and go away, one of two things are likely to happen. Either they will release a patch for all games that will allow all games to be played offline permanently, or some random cracking group (or 10) will accomplish the same task for you on their behalf. It's really not an issue I lose too much sleep over.
-Restil
When some people start a business, they get financing by mortgaging their home, maxing out their credit cards, and pawning off a bunch of expensive but unnecessary luxuries. It's risky, but at the end of the day, if the business is a success, they own it all.
Others look for venture capital or other investors to cover the startup costs. The company might be an initial success as it gets rushed to profitable status, but someone else is gonna take a huge chunk of the credit (read profit) from this method, and not the guy doing all the hard work.. Unless of course the company is REALLY successful. But that only happens in rare occasions.
The analogy works in the music industry. Take your pick.
-Restil
This would work, in theory, if they posted the movie on a website and let people download it. However, just because the movie company and sponsored affiliates, such as the MPAA, etc, are allowed to distribute a copy of the movie for free, that does not give any one else distribution rights. The problem with a client such as bittorrent, by definition of the protocol, you're making a copy of the file available to others, and are likely also transmitting it. If you could download the file without redistributing so much as a byte of the data, it would be legal for you to obtain it in this way..... in theory.
-Restil
I suppose it might be fun to stand defiant against the authorities, knowing full well you are legally in the clear by doing so, and although you might get arrested, you'll gladly get dragged down to the police station, get fingerprinted, locked in a cell for several hours until someone can come bail you out. And then you'll get to defend the charge in court, and it will probably cost a couple thousand dollars, but THAT'S OK.. It's WORTH it to be defiant. It's worth it to deny the police officer knowledge of your identity. Because in spite of being arrested, etc, you've managed to keep that bit of useless information from them. YOU HAVE WON!!!! .... oh wait...
This guy screwed up. HE called the police. He was being physically detained without his consent by people who didn't have the authority to do so. The police were on his side. They likely already knew who he was if it was his name on the cellphone he called the police from. So... why not show the friendly police officer his ID? Who cares if he "legally doesn't have to"... the police officer is on his side here. He's managed to lay a nice foundation for a lawsuit against Circuit City, and has a friendly police officer as a witness to the event, and he's going to screw that all up by acting defiant where it's not necessary.
If they called the police on him, he might have a better leg to stand on, but as it stands, he probably cost himself any chance of a lawsuit as well as racking up a few thousand $$$ in legal fees to defend himself.
Way to go dude!
In response to a few things he mentioned, the officer does not have to read you your miranda rights, despite what you might see on TV. They only need to do that if they're planning to ask you questions that might lead you to incriminate yourself. Since handing over his license or not handing over his license has nothing to do with what he might say in the process, there's no reason to read him his rights.
-Restil
And Walmart will happily refund the cost of the CD purchase... even if you can't produce the receipt. So nobody's really getting ripped off here. Besides, the only people who are likely to not realize the CD they're purchasing is not chock full of cussing are probably too young to be purchasing it anyway.
-Restil
The purchase of youtube probably isn't a good example as a bad business decision, considering that at the time of aquisition, they were making about $10 million profit monthly. So, if things stayed as is, it would take 12-16 years to pay back the investment... if they paid cash... which they didn't, they traded stock. However, if they expected the business to grow more profitable as time goes on, it becomes a better return even faster.
-Restil
It's likely the people involved will be asked to return the extra money before charges are pressed, and likely most of them will do so. However, if someone accessed the machine several times during that timeframe.. yeah, criminal intent.
-Restil