Apparently, "number of users" is now more important a metric than how many of those users are giving you money, or how much.
Just because they have 80 million users means NOTHING. There are at least 60m estimated users of Linux (if not a lot more) - it doesn't mean that ANY of them are generating any money for Linus et al.
If you have ONE user who's paying you money for your service, that's more valuable than 80m who aren't. Sure, you can get some ad revenue off the 80m if you play it right but that's dropping all the time, costs a lot to administer and doesn't provide massive amounts of profit direct to you. And the slightest change means that those 80m people - who have NOTHING invested in your business - will just move elsewhere. The same as MySpace users suddenly flocked elsewhere.
If they were paying customers, they would have a say, they would have a reason to stay, they would have a reason to explain to you what they didn't like and where/how you're better than the competition. If they're unpaying, they don't. The second you break the site for them (e.g. even putting an ad up in some cases), the second you lose all those users.
Users means NOTHING. Revenue means something. If your not monetizing your users, then you're not running a business and, thus, your business value is zero. It's like running a "free-to-play" game. Of COURSE you have 10m users. It's a free game. But if you can't turn X % of those users into paying customers, you're just pissing away development time and money.
It's like saying that when you gave out free samples of your cologne, a hundred thousand people asked for one. But when you charge £1 a bottle, you WILL NOT make hundred thousand pounds. Of course you won't. Anyone that thinks so is an idiot. However, if you said you had a cologne where out of the hundred thousand people, thousands of them paid you for it because it was so good, then you'd have a viable business. But still, when you start charging, you won't necessarily sell a bottle for every person who expressed an interest.
Any sale, on any stock market, that includes the figure of how many users - without context of how many were paying and/or how much profit they make per user - is worthless and only a sign that someone, somewhere is going to make a quick buck from all the idiots trying to buy the IPO by selling out extremely early before the ship sinks.
Users do not matter. I can have a hundred thousand visitors to my website, or ten thousand registered accounts. It does not mean that I would ever get a SINGLE paying customer at all, even if I changed nothing else.
So your solution would be what? Following through your logic, we should all give them money if they've said they've had something pirated. We should pay for something that others didn't. Because without us doing that, we'd have no movies. A bit like those rich people who "fund" the ballet (which is also pretty profitable, I'd like to add)?
Or maybe they should stop treating movies solely as a way to make themselves rich and actually, you know, make something people can enjoy watching. Let's ignore the fact that virtually no movie you've ever heard of has ever really made a loss (but according to LucasArts, Return of The Jedi still isn't profitable despite a 10x difference between sales and the cost of making it).
The top 4 in my country, by sales, at the moment are:
The Dark Knight Rises (which number Batman film?) Ice Age: Continental Drift (Ice Age 4?) The Amazing Spider-Man (which number Spiderman film?) Magic Mike (A dance-movie)
Collectively, they've taken some hundreds of millions of pounds and cost much less to make. But it's shite like that that stops me going to the cinema. I never *used* to have problems finding something worth watching, but in the last 10 years I haven't seen anything at a cinema that was worth the entrance price for an adult.
Every night I have the same dilemma of "finding something to watch" on TV. More than 50% of the time, I end up watching pre-recorded media that I purchased (most of it at least 10 years old, some of it virtually unobtainable now). The rest, I watch free-tripe-that-I-can-cope-with or do something else entirely. There is literally about a day's worth of new programming that I would watch spread over the entire year and hundreds of channels.
I don't claim to be too cultured to watch some tripe now and then, but really I buy all my stuff on DVD **AFTER** having watched it (usually for free on TV or at a friend's house). There's just too much junk for me to wade through, and the profits that are made out of me make it the only viable way to purchase movies. I don't purchase music at all. Ever. Not once. Because I don't listen to it.
But the industry's solution to this is not to improve their content, or change their target, or provide archive footage for a reasonable price, but to penalise *me* for other people being criminals.
I have to wade through DVD adverts (and actually now have been forced to rip the DVD's I own onto drives with UOP's removed just to avoid that), I have to deal with the industry wanting to monitor my connections, cut me off, turning YouTube into a mess of adverts and DMCA notices because there's a five-second clip of their music on a home video, forcing their copy protection on my TV cables (HDCP), attempting to make timeshifting illegal, increasing the amount of junk legislation and bogus lawsuits and chasing criminals in Russia to stop their pirating, and millions of other knock-on effects. Hell, even making some countries citizens pay tax on a blank disc.
If you want my custom, respect me. Put your archives online, for a reasonable price in a reasonable format. If I can get the "genuine" download for £1 compared to some rip-off for free, I *will* go for the genuine download. So long as I don't have to install DRM, Silverlight, or some other junk just to play a video file. And, no, I wouldn't copy it and give it to my friends - my friends aren't cheapskates and would buy their own copy for £1 too. Let me download the movie the same day its released, wherever I happen to be. Let me get it on DVD and not just Blu-Ray. Let me not have region restrictions, UOP's and ten minutes of trailers.
Then you might see some money back from me. At the moment you get minimal money because you treat me like an idiot and/or a criminal, so I don't resort to piracy, I just stop consuming your products (in the same way, if a restaurant piss me off, I don't steal their food, or con an advantage on their "all-you-can-eat" deals, I just never eat there eve
Just going by the ones I know about on my own hard drive:
- CS:GO has OpenGL support (in fact, so do most Valve titles for YEARS). That gets released next week, I think. - Dungeons of Dredmor has OpenGL support (in fact, so do most indie titles, including anything that goes onto phones, etc.) - Minecraft is OpenGL. - SpaceChem is OpenGL. - Killing Floor is OpenGL. - The Quake and Unreal series - all OpenGL.
I could go on but that would involve actually checking each game rather than just searching for OpenGL-related files or kicking my memory into action. I don't actually have any of the large AAA titles because I don't buy them but saying that OpenGL is somehow a minor player is just naivety over what's on your own hard drive.
In fact, out of all my Steam games, nearly half support or use OpenGL exclusively. Now, that's just on a survey of Windows-based Steam games. If I was to survery MS-published games or games also ported to XBox, it might look different (for obvious reasons). But if I looked at "games that have Linux, Android or Mac versions", I'd see almost exclusively OpenGL too.
As others have pointed out, you can also find any number of non-game applications that use OpenGL.
OpenGL is far from dead. You almost certainly have at least one device running it, whether that be your phone or your gaming machine. And you almost certainly have at least one game using it. And, more than likely, a vast portion of your software library either demands it or supports it.
And the question of DNT being an explicit opt-out at all, or even getting to the remote server intact, is dubious.
If you pop up a message on the front page of a website that says "can we track you for the next week?" and the user says yes, but their browser is still pushing DNT, do you think the website should not track anything anyway? They have EXPLICIT permission to do so. And on a visible, obvious, user-controlled way, that the user COULD NOT IGNORE or forget, that can be easily seen by any idiot, rather than some obscure browser setting in only some browsers, that makes no visible change to the average user, and that may not ever be able to be tweaked by the user.
It's worthless, in law and in usage. And it doesn't express the user's desire if it is on by default and the user has to specifically turn it off. It just expresses the software manufacturer's desire (and, if as the article states, installs of Windows will have it on by default, it means even less in terms of what the user wants).
I'm not stupid, I doubt there are people who WANT to be tracked or wouldn't turn it on if they understand what it was supposed to do. But it doesn't. And never will. And saying that a hidden HTTP header that could easily be stripped by intervening proxy servers that don't understand it (and be untraceable as to WHERE that header got stripped off, and thus useless in court) overrides the explicit, visible, non-accidental obtained consent of users with an associated privacy policy available to them is just ludicrous.
There will NEVER be a court case about DNT usage on a website. Because it's not binding in *any* country at all and it certainly can't be taken as a revocation of previous consent (thus it is overrode by anything that the websites ALREADY have deployed to comply with EU cookie laws, for example) without a suitable legal precedent, which itself is somewhere incredibly unlikely and impossible.
Is DNT an opt-out for THIS session? This page? This browser? This IP? This logged-in-user? Forever? Does it override previous decisions? Does its absence override its prior presence (i.e. now you surf without DNT, we can take that as consent for all the previous sessions too?). It's so vague as to be absolutely pointless.
It *does not* do what it was designed for, helps no-one (not even advertisers or users), and is a ginormous waste of money to deploy for everyone involved (from browsers to users to websites to policy makers to the government to legal cases, etc.).
My father-in-law is a well-published author and he delved into science fiction a few times (along with stories set in WW2).
Apparently, when he was having a bit of a rough time, he wrote three stories. In the first, the Earth was wiped out. In the second, the Galaxy was wiped out. In the third, the whole Universe was wiped out.
But he had some interesting ideas and never managed to get them published (he was very close once, but his agent and publisher were in the World Trade Center - he was in the US and due to visit them on 9/11).
The most horrible one was about a group who, I think, crashed their ship onto a planet/planetoid. The problem was that the planet had a "hot" side and a cool side. You could survive on the cold side, but the hot side was virtually instantaneous death. That's not so bad, until the plot introduced that the planet had quite a fast axis-spin. Without the aid of modern vehicles or shelter, you had to keep walking. And walking. And walking. Or you would die. Throw in a lot of extraneous drama and a pregnant woman and it was quite a good story idea.
At what point do you give up and STOP walking and leave everyone else to cope without you, when rescue could be just around the corner?
HTTP header to request "opt out" of any tracking on websites you visit.
i.e. will be ignored by just about everyone by default anyway, and even when you "opt out" you can still be tracked by most websites in the world, and turning it on or off will have virtually zero visible effect to the user so you'll never know even if the website "accidentally" tracked you anyway.
Yep. And this Slashdot and a host of other "for the geeks" websites don't support it or publish AAAA records on their main domains AT ALL.
It doesn't take that long. My servers are all serving IPv6 content. I don't see anyone, not because nobody support IPv6, but because nobody is talking it, because no websites offer service over it. Hell, even Google play games with IPv6 where you have to be one of their "favoured" ISP's that has been certified as working properly.
When even 10% of websites publish working AAAA records, then we can have some kind of switchover. Until then, my phone supports it, my laptop supports it (and that's running XP!), my devices support it, my networks support it, and even my own servers support it. But why use it if IPv4 still works absolutely fine and is much easier to find support for?
Speed of sound is 330 m/s. That's a kilometer in a third of a second.
440 thousandths of a second = 0.44 of a second. 140 thousandths of a second = 0.14 of a second.
The difference: let's call it a third of a second.
So what they are claiming is that the starting pistol is 1km away from the athlete in the last lane but right next to the one in the first lane.
Over and above that - the reaction time is not the factor, so much as the fact that the RACE is measured to within hundredths of a second making the difference between 1st and 3rd sometimes. Thus even a slightly more "gravellyness" on the track in one lane or a tiny, tiny breeze might affect it.
I'm afraid it is, pretty much, in the eyes of the law.
The beauty, though, is that an illegal contract term means nothing. I'm pretty sure this contract term means nothing. It could say I agree to give them my firstborn, it doesn't mean I'm required to, nor that the REST of the contract is non-binding.
The same as any, and all, contracts. Previously, the SSA claimed that I could only sue them in their home jurisdiction. I'm sure the EU would have had something to say about that and, given the OTHER changes made (i.e. the setting up of an EU office for Steam), I reckon they did.
Just because you say something in a contract doesn't mean it's legally binding. But agreeing to a contract (including EULA, software licensing like the GPL, etc.) is as binding as legally possible.
I'm pretty sure that, if challenged, any sensible country in the world would allow you to automatically and without question override the "no class action" clauses in ANY contract. The same as they can override the "We accept no responsibility" clauses in most contracts if they deem that party SHOULD be responsible anyway.
Solar's maximum theoretical W/m^2 means it will stop being useful before most other forms of energy production. This is why wind power is also tailing off. After fancy 3D simulations give you a theoretically perfect shape / efficiency, you can't improve much on that.
At 100% theoretical efficiency, solar is inadequate for most power needs and can only supplant a (very) small percentage of total energy production. Unless you want to get into beaming solar power to Earth via microwave which, I would argue, is an entirely different power source altogether.
But, let's just say, as photovoltaics, solar's a bit of a waste of time outside of the toy industry. And is very likely to remain being so. By comparison, burning landfill gases is 100's of times more productive. You can go look on Wiki if you like, at the actual production from photovoltaics for electricity (which is only one form of energy storage). Last time I looked, it was a little pink line on the 2D cumulative graph that was SO narrow, I couldn't see it without zooming into the SVG file.
Of course, in the future things will change. But we're not living in the future, and we can't "see" ahead. So there's nothing useful in solar, as far as this argument is concerned, until something drastic happens - like we find a non-photovoltaic / non-heating-water-pipes way of producing energy from sunlight, or change the entire delivery method for something much more productive and interesting (e.g. energy collected in space and beamed to Earth, which I *haven't* researched as to efficiencies at all).
The sources are talking crap, or at the very least not talking about what you think.
You are a fool for listening to any of it.
If you prepared for every warning available out there, you'd be caught in so many vicious circles that you wouldn't be able to do anything.
I would mod you down if I had points, because I really need (I say I, I mean my brain and my personal need for people who actually think critically) people to stop believing tripe like this when their brains could actually be used to do something productive.
You're not being a good neighbour, you're being paranoid, and annoying, and spammy.
This is all total crap.
But most importantly: You think a handful of YouTube links are something worth changing the way you believe for, and somehow hope that will convince me that everything I "know" is wrong and I should forget everything and trust in you instead. I find that quite insulting, to be honest. The same way I find almost all religion insulting too, for the same reasons.
I'm allowed to disagree. If you want to convince me, you need to convince me, not splat spam at me and assume I'll just watch it and agree with you and that if I don't I'm "wrong".
But, most of all, I find your entire approach insulting.
And if you could afford that amount of solar panels, battery, charge regulators, and equipment to shunt things back to the grid, then you wouldn't need the national grid at all and everyone could probably retire early.
Secondly, it won't decrease the load. Because the solar panels would not be enough on their own (think flats with low roof surface area but high occupancy), wouldn't be able to power hardly anything (conversion losses to get it to "normal" electrical characteristics are quite high, not to mention not many people have 24v air conditioners, etc.), and thus you would still need to supply grid energy and still have blackouts, brownouts, etc. You may, quite literally, save a handful of watts and be able to switch the light on in a blackout (but a blackout that lasts two days? I'm not sure). That's about it.
You wouldn't be able to feed back to the grid because the amount of wiring, metering, conversion, storage and everything else would probably cost more than a new national grid.
All you've done is spend billions to let them all have a very expensive torch (flashlight) that works for a little while when the power goes out.
Let's not even get into the "mesh" thing. Electricity has inate losses in transport and unless you want to convert those panels to push out 40kV so you can get to the next village without significant loss only to downconvert it the other end, you're wasting your time by the time it gets there.
Solar is still NOT a national solution, even in a highly developed country with subsidies and the latest technology. Honestly. Forget what press releases you've read and go buy THE most expensive model you can get your hands on for your back garden. If it pays for itself (and we're not talking ecologically, because it can't) in provable and defined savings on electricity bills within it's operational lifetime, I'll be impressed. But when you multiply up to millions of people living in a few square miles, solar is a complete waste of time. And putting solar "further out" to supply them is a waste of time compared to just bringing up another "ordinary" power station (e.g. nuclear, which would out-class any solar plant by factors of dozens or more).
And then, if you ever DID make your money back, you'll maybe make a handful of KWh "profit" until the panel dies (not counting regular maintenance, installing, conversion, taking away subsidies, etc.) which is the surplus you're expecting to "take the strain" off an entire national grid.
Not to mention installing MILLIONS of solar panels on properties (which, in terms of human effort expended and product transport alone makes them loss-makers) individually.
Or, they could just build a nuclear power station or two and have done with it. Currently, out of all renewable sources of energy, they make up about 10% worldwide, if that. And the majority of that is biogas. Solar is considerably minuscule even with the largest solar arrays in the world.
Pretty much. You can't enforce software patents alone in Europe. When you put them into hardware (e.g. a TV that decode H.264, for instance), things become a little more tricky, and there is still "licensing", just not necessarily patent licensing going on.
For example, the people who developed the VLC implementation and library actually license their version to other people for a fee. It's quite possible it's already inside some audio-visual equipment that you own, if someone big licensed it:
If the companies would be investigated for monopolistic behaviour, that's even more reason for the court to make that knowledge public or at the very least warrant further investigation.
No, more likely it's just about money and secrets, which is how MS operate and make the former. They don't want people to know who's bought what, for how much, and what it entails because that might surprise other people who've got different deals or were told no deal was available.
More likely, it's a purely selfish reason and, when the court orders them opened, nothing of interest is in there and certainly nothing that most people would have bothered to seal.
The problem is that people see things as fixed/not fixed.
Let's assume the problem is "fixed". What sort of development, security and testing regimes did their DRM go through to get to the point where any web page can open any application without any checks whatsoever previously? And how does that bode for anything that's not STUPIDLY TRIVIAL like finding this bug, e.g. buffer overflows, privilege escalations, etc.
Don't judge them on what they fixed. Judge them on just how terminally inept is was to allow that sort of thing to exist in the first place, let alone slip through into production code on a multi-million dollar game publisher. What else is there lurking in that plugin / app that *hasn't* been found and isn't so trivial to spot and fix?
The reason she doesn't "need" it is because she can't do it and, thus, presumably avoids it.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are rarely useful. It's like saying that nobody using Firefox comes to your website, so it's not worth trying to make it work in Firefox.
Algebra isn't something that magically appears out of life if you're not looking for it but something that, if you know how to use it, makes life easier. Hell, I just used it, and trigonometry, and geometry, but I was laying a floor in an attic at the time so maybe that's a primarily "male" pursuit. But if I didn't know how to use them, I could still have laid the floor, it just might have been a bit uglier, I might have used more board, or had to make more estimates and cuts than I did.
Algebra isn't necessary, but then nor is knowing how to read, write or count. People exist without all those skills and exist perfectly happily. The question is how much easier would that knowledge make their life.
Given that, in most education systems, maths, language and science form the majority of the timetable (by VAST amounts), there's likely to be something there to be inferred about their relevance. On the other hand, do kids really need a bunch of inadequate teachers showing them how to use Word - in my experience, working IT in schools, the answer is no.
I'm British. We don't *NEED* to specify freedom of speech in the same manner. It's an inherent privilege.
We don't have, nor need, a right to bear arms. We haven't had in hundreds of years. We don't need a specification of religious freedom, we have it already.
And nobody in the UK pays a tax to watch television. They pay a fee to own a television capable of live reception and display of TV signals - which funds the BBC directly, one of the world's most renowned broadcasters, let alone public service broadcasters. We also have hardly any toll roads, a free healthcare service, and a press which has only the other year fought the political and legal system to ensure freedom of speech was preserved above all else (see "super injunctions"). By comparison a minor "luxury tax" on owning a TV is a drop in the ocean. In the same way, I could distil your entire country into a bunch of people who don't care that the poor die of simple illnesses they can't afford to have treated. I know which I'd rather have.
And this article is about that same British freedom of speech overriding the law WITHOUT THAT RIGHT NEEDING TO BE STATED - because it's so inherent in the legal system and culture that we don't need to. And it has also made news BECAUSE nobody believed it had got so far under UK law (because it was meritless from day one).
And never, in the entire world, have I seen an entire country so scared of calling someone a dickhead live on TV as the American people. You can't, because they'll sue your arse off for doing so. Your libel laws actually do the opposite of what you claim. Like the stereotypical American, you have no concept of how "unfree" you actually are and wish to point fingers at other countries and say "that's wrong" when you suffer worse every day yourself.
You have to pick your example from the 1800's, for someone that nobody has ever heard of, because all the more recent examples work against your theory and you an only state one-off. The guy you mention was himself sentenced to be horsewhipped a few years after - hardly a "modern" case.
My country is far from perfect. Read my comment history, I'm the first to admit it. The difference is that I know it.
P.S. How's that imprisoning-"suspected"-terrorists-for-10+-years-without-trial-or-appeal-in-lands-foreign-to-them-and-including-public-proof-of-torture-techniques coming along? You still have NO idea how to behave as a civilisation - those people could well be random innocent foreigners and neither your country nor your president give a shit. Don't lecture me on freedom.
Technically, there's nothing wrong or even specifically English about the sentence and the object is perfectly well specified. You just have to read it properly, that's all.
It's not 100% perfectly clear and is worded slightly oddly, but the context is enough to clarify, I would think. And lots of things are worded oddly when you "speak properly" or work in law.
My mother repeatedly and pointedly informed me on numerous occasions that she was going to kill me / would kill me if I performed action X (where X was a totally legal endeavour).
Should I have reported each instance to the police, be put into care, have my mother jailed, etc. for that? No.
"Free speech" is a misnomer in that what the average person calls "Free" is not what I call "Free" and isn't what the word "Free" means. Most people definition of "free speech" doesn't include hate speech, lies, threats or anything else. Thus it's not *technically* free.
If someone (say a UK police commissioner) wants to claim that, for example, most inner-city crime was committed by black people (a verifiable fact given the data at the time), then can we censor that because it could be construed as hate speech? Does that mean that a guy shouting that same fact in the street would be subject to different laws than a police commissioner saying it in a press conference? That's a dangerous precedent to set.
Is it also "against free speech" to lie? Surely if my speech is truly "free" I can say or claim anything? But that runs into libel laws and other problems (i.e. lying in court).
Thus there is no one fixed definition of this magical "Free Speech" and if you try to make an all-encompassing one you will absolutely fail unless you accept a world where people can freely lie all the time and where they can also never be harassed for telling the truth, or for lying (or, alternatively, where they can ALWAYS be harassed no matter what).
True free speech does not, and cannot exist, in the current political and legal climate or even, I would posit, at all. Thus it's pointless to consider it, which is why most countries do NOT have an explicit statement regarding free speech (and even some of the largest and most influential countries in the world have no formal legal statement of such a right - for instance, the UK - and never have had in their entire history).
Free speech is a fabrication of idealism that doesn't actually work in real life. In its absence, we have to fall back on the law and common sense. Was what he did illegal? Only if it could be reasonably be construed to be a threat. This says that it couldn't. Was what he did stupid? Not particularly. No worse than I hear a thousand times a day or heard from my own mother (seriously, what's the difference between his tweet and someone saying "If another person pulls the plug out of that server, I'm going to boil them in acid?").
10 years ago, nobody would have even cared. And today, he was proved innocent on all counts. That kinda means that nobody SHOULD have cared at all. The problem here is not the legal definition, or irresponsible behaviour - it's a prosecution service that ever thought such a petty thing could be the basis of a case in the first place.
Yeah. Those damn Andriod phones, running their version of Windows. God, NOBODY is buying those. Or those Raspberry Pi things that people can get for £25. Hell, even those multitudes of tablets that people are snapping up for under £100 (not including the Apples, obviously!). Yeah, you can't play games on them if Steam comes to Linux.
Linux > desktop PC market.
And for years, a lot of people have been saying that the only reason they keep Windows is to play games. If nothing else, this would provoke them to find a new excuse why they can't use Linux all day long.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, "number of users" is now more important a metric than how many of those users are giving you money, or how much.
Just because they have 80 million users means NOTHING. There are at least 60m estimated users of Linux (if not a lot more) - it doesn't mean that ANY of them are generating any money for Linus et al.
If you have ONE user who's paying you money for your service, that's more valuable than 80m who aren't. Sure, you can get some ad revenue off the 80m if you play it right but that's dropping all the time, costs a lot to administer and doesn't provide massive amounts of profit direct to you. And the slightest change means that those 80m people - who have NOTHING invested in your business - will just move elsewhere. The same as MySpace users suddenly flocked elsewhere.
If they were paying customers, they would have a say, they would have a reason to stay, they would have a reason to explain to you what they didn't like and where/how you're better than the competition. If they're unpaying, they don't. The second you break the site for them (e.g. even putting an ad up in some cases), the second you lose all those users.
Users means NOTHING. Revenue means something. If your not monetizing your users, then you're not running a business and, thus, your business value is zero. It's like running a "free-to-play" game. Of COURSE you have 10m users. It's a free game. But if you can't turn X % of those users into paying customers, you're just pissing away development time and money.
It's like saying that when you gave out free samples of your cologne, a hundred thousand people asked for one. But when you charge £1 a bottle, you WILL NOT make hundred thousand pounds. Of course you won't. Anyone that thinks so is an idiot. However, if you said you had a cologne where out of the hundred thousand people, thousands of them paid you for it because it was so good, then you'd have a viable business. But still, when you start charging, you won't necessarily sell a bottle for every person who expressed an interest.
Any sale, on any stock market, that includes the figure of how many users - without context of how many were paying and/or how much profit they make per user - is worthless and only a sign that someone, somewhere is going to make a quick buck from all the idiots trying to buy the IPO by selling out extremely early before the ship sinks.
Users do not matter. I can have a hundred thousand visitors to my website, or ten thousand registered accounts. It does not mean that I would ever get a SINGLE paying customer at all, even if I changed nothing else.
So your solution would be what? Following through your logic, we should all give them money if they've said they've had something pirated. We should pay for something that others didn't. Because without us doing that, we'd have no movies. A bit like those rich people who "fund" the ballet (which is also pretty profitable, I'd like to add)?
Or maybe they should stop treating movies solely as a way to make themselves rich and actually, you know, make something people can enjoy watching. Let's ignore the fact that virtually no movie you've ever heard of has ever really made a loss (but according to LucasArts, Return of The Jedi still isn't profitable despite a 10x difference between sales and the cost of making it).
The top 4 in my country, by sales, at the moment are:
The Dark Knight Rises (which number Batman film?)
Ice Age: Continental Drift (Ice Age 4?)
The Amazing Spider-Man (which number Spiderman film?)
Magic Mike (A dance-movie)
Collectively, they've taken some hundreds of millions of pounds and cost much less to make. But it's shite like that that stops me going to the cinema. I never *used* to have problems finding something worth watching, but in the last 10 years I haven't seen anything at a cinema that was worth the entrance price for an adult.
Every night I have the same dilemma of "finding something to watch" on TV. More than 50% of the time, I end up watching pre-recorded media that I purchased (most of it at least 10 years old, some of it virtually unobtainable now). The rest, I watch free-tripe-that-I-can-cope-with or do something else entirely. There is literally about a day's worth of new programming that I would watch spread over the entire year and hundreds of channels.
I don't claim to be too cultured to watch some tripe now and then, but really I buy all my stuff on DVD **AFTER** having watched it (usually for free on TV or at a friend's house). There's just too much junk for me to wade through, and the profits that are made out of me make it the only viable way to purchase movies. I don't purchase music at all. Ever. Not once. Because I don't listen to it.
But the industry's solution to this is not to improve their content, or change their target, or provide archive footage for a reasonable price, but to penalise *me* for other people being criminals.
I have to wade through DVD adverts (and actually now have been forced to rip the DVD's I own onto drives with UOP's removed just to avoid that), I have to deal with the industry wanting to monitor my connections, cut me off, turning YouTube into a mess of adverts and DMCA notices because there's a five-second clip of their music on a home video, forcing their copy protection on my TV cables (HDCP), attempting to make timeshifting illegal, increasing the amount of junk legislation and bogus lawsuits and chasing criminals in Russia to stop their pirating, and millions of other knock-on effects. Hell, even making some countries citizens pay tax on a blank disc.
If you want my custom, respect me. Put your archives online, for a reasonable price in a reasonable format. If I can get the "genuine" download for £1 compared to some rip-off for free, I *will* go for the genuine download. So long as I don't have to install DRM, Silverlight, or some other junk just to play a video file. And, no, I wouldn't copy it and give it to my friends - my friends aren't cheapskates and would buy their own copy for £1 too. Let me download the movie the same day its released, wherever I happen to be. Let me get it on DVD and not just Blu-Ray. Let me not have region restrictions, UOP's and ten minutes of trailers.
Then you might see some money back from me. At the moment you get minimal money because you treat me like an idiot and/or a criminal, so I don't resort to piracy, I just stop consuming your products (in the same way, if a restaurant piss me off, I don't steal their food, or con an advantage on their "all-you-can-eat" deals, I just never eat there eve
Just going by the ones I know about on my own hard drive:
- CS:GO has OpenGL support (in fact, so do most Valve titles for YEARS). That gets released next week, I think.
- Dungeons of Dredmor has OpenGL support (in fact, so do most indie titles, including anything that goes onto phones, etc.)
- Minecraft is OpenGL.
- SpaceChem is OpenGL.
- Killing Floor is OpenGL.
- The Quake and Unreal series - all OpenGL.
I could go on but that would involve actually checking each game rather than just searching for OpenGL-related files or kicking my memory into action. I don't actually have any of the large AAA titles because I don't buy them but saying that OpenGL is somehow a minor player is just naivety over what's on your own hard drive.
In fact, out of all my Steam games, nearly half support or use OpenGL exclusively. Now, that's just on a survey of Windows-based Steam games. If I was to survery MS-published games or games also ported to XBox, it might look different (for obvious reasons). But if I looked at "games that have Linux, Android or Mac versions", I'd see almost exclusively OpenGL too.
As others have pointed out, you can also find any number of non-game applications that use OpenGL.
OpenGL is far from dead. You almost certainly have at least one device running it, whether that be your phone or your gaming machine. And you almost certainly have at least one game using it. And, more than likely, a vast portion of your software library either demands it or supports it.
Didn't Steam hire the creator of BitTorrent (Bram Cohen, I think) to work on how it distributes its software updates?
And the question of DNT being an explicit opt-out at all, or even getting to the remote server intact, is dubious.
If you pop up a message on the front page of a website that says "can we track you for the next week?" and the user says yes, but their browser is still pushing DNT, do you think the website should not track anything anyway? They have EXPLICIT permission to do so. And on a visible, obvious, user-controlled way, that the user COULD NOT IGNORE or forget, that can be easily seen by any idiot, rather than some obscure browser setting in only some browsers, that makes no visible change to the average user, and that may not ever be able to be tweaked by the user.
It's worthless, in law and in usage. And it doesn't express the user's desire if it is on by default and the user has to specifically turn it off. It just expresses the software manufacturer's desire (and, if as the article states, installs of Windows will have it on by default, it means even less in terms of what the user wants).
I'm not stupid, I doubt there are people who WANT to be tracked or wouldn't turn it on if they understand what it was supposed to do. But it doesn't. And never will. And saying that a hidden HTTP header that could easily be stripped by intervening proxy servers that don't understand it (and be untraceable as to WHERE that header got stripped off, and thus useless in court) overrides the explicit, visible, non-accidental obtained consent of users with an associated privacy policy available to them is just ludicrous.
There will NEVER be a court case about DNT usage on a website. Because it's not binding in *any* country at all and it certainly can't be taken as a revocation of previous consent (thus it is overrode by anything that the websites ALREADY have deployed to comply with EU cookie laws, for example) without a suitable legal precedent, which itself is somewhere incredibly unlikely and impossible.
Is DNT an opt-out for THIS session? This page? This browser? This IP? This logged-in-user? Forever? Does it override previous decisions? Does its absence override its prior presence (i.e. now you surf without DNT, we can take that as consent for all the previous sessions too?). It's so vague as to be absolutely pointless.
It *does not* do what it was designed for, helps no-one (not even advertisers or users), and is a ginormous waste of money to deploy for everyone involved (from browsers to users to websites to policy makers to the government to legal cases, etc.).
Sod that. It doesn't even come close to Opera Mobile!
My father-in-law is a well-published author and he delved into science fiction a few times (along with stories set in WW2).
Apparently, when he was having a bit of a rough time, he wrote three stories. In the first, the Earth was wiped out. In the second, the Galaxy was wiped out. In the third, the whole Universe was wiped out.
But he had some interesting ideas and never managed to get them published (he was very close once, but his agent and publisher were in the World Trade Center - he was in the US and due to visit them on 9/11).
The most horrible one was about a group who, I think, crashed their ship onto a planet/planetoid. The problem was that the planet had a "hot" side and a cool side. You could survive on the cold side, but the hot side was virtually instantaneous death. That's not so bad, until the plot introduced that the planet had quite a fast axis-spin. Without the aid of modern vehicles or shelter, you had to keep walking. And walking. And walking. Or you would die. Throw in a lot of extraneous drama and a pregnant woman and it was quite a good story idea.
At what point do you give up and STOP walking and leave everyone else to cope without you, when rescue could be just around the corner?
HTTP header to request "opt out" of any tracking on websites you visit.
i.e. will be ignored by just about everyone by default anyway, and even when you "opt out" you can still be tracked by most websites in the world, and turning it on or off will have virtually zero visible effect to the user so you'll never know even if the website "accidentally" tracked you anyway.
Worthless, ill-designed, junk.
Better than that, the IE10 score is lower than just about every current browser on the market, except IE9. :-)
The Demolished Man
Sod the novel itself, just the fact that that heap of junk won awards was enough to depress me.
Yep. And this Slashdot and a host of other "for the geeks" websites don't support it or publish AAAA records on their main domains AT ALL.
It doesn't take that long. My servers are all serving IPv6 content. I don't see anyone, not because nobody support IPv6, but because nobody is talking it, because no websites offer service over it. Hell, even Google play games with IPv6 where you have to be one of their "favoured" ISP's that has been certified as working properly.
When even 10% of websites publish working AAAA records, then we can have some kind of switchover. Until then, my phone supports it, my laptop supports it (and that's running XP!), my devices support it, my networks support it, and even my own servers support it. But why use it if IPv4 still works absolutely fine and is much easier to find support for?
Speed of sound is 330 m/s. That's a kilometer in a third of a second.
440 thousandths of a second = 0.44 of a second.
140 thousandths of a second = 0.14 of a second.
The difference: let's call it a third of a second.
So what they are claiming is that the starting pistol is 1km away from the athlete in the last lane but right next to the one in the first lane.
Over and above that - the reaction time is not the factor, so much as the fact that the RACE is measured to within hundredths of a second making the difference between 1st and 3rd sometimes. Thus even a slightly more "gravellyness" on the track in one lane or a tiny, tiny breeze might affect it.
I'm afraid it is, pretty much, in the eyes of the law.
The beauty, though, is that an illegal contract term means nothing. I'm pretty sure this contract term means nothing. It could say I agree to give them my firstborn, it doesn't mean I'm required to, nor that the REST of the contract is non-binding.
The same as any, and all, contracts. Previously, the SSA claimed that I could only sue them in their home jurisdiction. I'm sure the EU would have had something to say about that and, given the OTHER changes made (i.e. the setting up of an EU office for Steam), I reckon they did.
Just because you say something in a contract doesn't mean it's legally binding. But agreeing to a contract (including EULA, software licensing like the GPL, etc.) is as binding as legally possible.
I'm pretty sure that, if challenged, any sensible country in the world would allow you to automatically and without question override the "no class action" clauses in ANY contract. The same as they can override the "We accept no responsibility" clauses in most contracts if they deem that party SHOULD be responsible anyway.
Solar's maximum theoretical W/m^2 means it will stop being useful before most other forms of energy production. This is why wind power is also tailing off. After fancy 3D simulations give you a theoretically perfect shape / efficiency, you can't improve much on that.
At 100% theoretical efficiency, solar is inadequate for most power needs and can only supplant a (very) small percentage of total energy production. Unless you want to get into beaming solar power to Earth via microwave which, I would argue, is an entirely different power source altogether.
But, let's just say, as photovoltaics, solar's a bit of a waste of time outside of the toy industry. And is very likely to remain being so. By comparison, burning landfill gases is 100's of times more productive. You can go look on Wiki if you like, at the actual production from photovoltaics for electricity (which is only one form of energy storage). Last time I looked, it was a little pink line on the 2D cumulative graph that was SO narrow, I couldn't see it without zooming into the SVG file.
Of course, in the future things will change. But we're not living in the future, and we can't "see" ahead. So there's nothing useful in solar, as far as this argument is concerned, until something drastic happens - like we find a non-photovoltaic / non-heating-water-pipes way of producing energy from sunlight, or change the entire delivery method for something much more productive and interesting (e.g. energy collected in space and beamed to Earth, which I *haven't* researched as to efficiencies at all).
The sources are talking crap, or at the very least not talking about what you think.
You are a fool for listening to any of it.
If you prepared for every warning available out there, you'd be caught in so many vicious circles that you wouldn't be able to do anything.
I would mod you down if I had points, because I really need (I say I, I mean my brain and my personal need for people who actually think critically) people to stop believing tripe like this when their brains could actually be used to do something productive.
You're not being a good neighbour, you're being paranoid, and annoying, and spammy.
This is all total crap.
But most importantly:
You think a handful of YouTube links are something worth changing the way you believe for, and somehow hope that will convince me that everything I "know" is wrong and I should forget everything and trust in you instead. I find that quite insulting, to be honest. The same way I find almost all religion insulting too, for the same reasons.
I'm allowed to disagree. If you want to convince me, you need to convince me, not splat spam at me and assume I'll just watch it and agree with you and that if I don't I'm "wrong".
But, most of all, I find your entire approach insulting.
And if you could afford that amount of solar panels, battery, charge regulators, and equipment to shunt things back to the grid, then you wouldn't need the national grid at all and everyone could probably retire early.
Secondly, it won't decrease the load. Because the solar panels would not be enough on their own (think flats with low roof surface area but high occupancy), wouldn't be able to power hardly anything (conversion losses to get it to "normal" electrical characteristics are quite high, not to mention not many people have 24v air conditioners, etc.), and thus you would still need to supply grid energy and still have blackouts, brownouts, etc. You may, quite literally, save a handful of watts and be able to switch the light on in a blackout (but a blackout that lasts two days? I'm not sure). That's about it.
You wouldn't be able to feed back to the grid because the amount of wiring, metering, conversion, storage and everything else would probably cost more than a new national grid.
All you've done is spend billions to let them all have a very expensive torch (flashlight) that works for a little while when the power goes out.
Let's not even get into the "mesh" thing. Electricity has inate losses in transport and unless you want to convert those panels to push out 40kV so you can get to the next village without significant loss only to downconvert it the other end, you're wasting your time by the time it gets there.
Solar is still NOT a national solution, even in a highly developed country with subsidies and the latest technology. Honestly. Forget what press releases you've read and go buy THE most expensive model you can get your hands on for your back garden. If it pays for itself (and we're not talking ecologically, because it can't) in provable and defined savings on electricity bills within it's operational lifetime, I'll be impressed. But when you multiply up to millions of people living in a few square miles, solar is a complete waste of time. And putting solar "further out" to supply them is a waste of time compared to just bringing up another "ordinary" power station (e.g. nuclear, which would out-class any solar plant by factors of dozens or more).
And then, if you ever DID make your money back, you'll maybe make a handful of KWh "profit" until the panel dies (not counting regular maintenance, installing, conversion, taking away subsidies, etc.) which is the surplus you're expecting to "take the strain" off an entire national grid.
Not to mention installing MILLIONS of solar panels on properties (which, in terms of human effort expended and product transport alone makes them loss-makers) individually.
Or, they could just build a nuclear power station or two and have done with it. Currently, out of all renewable sources of energy, they make up about 10% worldwide, if that. And the majority of that is biogas. Solar is considerably minuscule even with the largest solar arrays in the world.
Given that this page exists in Europe and hasn't been forcibly taken down?
http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
Pretty much. You can't enforce software patents alone in Europe. When you put them into hardware (e.g. a TV that decode H.264, for instance), things become a little more tricky, and there is still "licensing", just not necessarily patent licensing going on.
For example, the people who developed the VLC implementation and library actually license their version to other people for a fee. It's quite possible it's already inside some audio-visual equipment that you own, if someone big licensed it:
http://x264licensing.com/
If the companies would be investigated for monopolistic behaviour, that's even more reason for the court to make that knowledge public or at the very least warrant further investigation.
No, more likely it's just about money and secrets, which is how MS operate and make the former. They don't want people to know who's bought what, for how much, and what it entails because that might surprise other people who've got different deals or were told no deal was available.
More likely, it's a purely selfish reason and, when the court orders them opened, nothing of interest is in there and certainly nothing that most people would have bothered to seal.
The problem is that people see things as fixed/not fixed.
Let's assume the problem is "fixed". What sort of development, security and testing regimes did their DRM go through to get to the point where any web page can open any application without any checks whatsoever previously? And how does that bode for anything that's not STUPIDLY TRIVIAL like finding this bug, e.g. buffer overflows, privilege escalations, etc.
Don't judge them on what they fixed. Judge them on just how terminally inept is was to allow that sort of thing to exist in the first place, let alone slip through into production code on a multi-million dollar game publisher. What else is there lurking in that plugin / app that *hasn't* been found and isn't so trivial to spot and fix?
The reason she doesn't "need" it is because she can't do it and, thus, presumably avoids it.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are rarely useful. It's like saying that nobody using Firefox comes to your website, so it's not worth trying to make it work in Firefox.
Algebra isn't something that magically appears out of life if you're not looking for it but something that, if you know how to use it, makes life easier. Hell, I just used it, and trigonometry, and geometry, but I was laying a floor in an attic at the time so maybe that's a primarily "male" pursuit. But if I didn't know how to use them, I could still have laid the floor, it just might have been a bit uglier, I might have used more board, or had to make more estimates and cuts than I did.
Algebra isn't necessary, but then nor is knowing how to read, write or count. People exist without all those skills and exist perfectly happily. The question is how much easier would that knowledge make their life.
Given that, in most education systems, maths, language and science form the majority of the timetable (by VAST amounts), there's likely to be something there to be inferred about their relevance. On the other hand, do kids really need a bunch of inadequate teachers showing them how to use Word - in my experience, working IT in schools, the answer is no.
I'm British. We don't *NEED* to specify freedom of speech in the same manner. It's an inherent privilege.
We don't have, nor need, a right to bear arms. We haven't had in hundreds of years. We don't need a specification of religious freedom, we have it already.
And nobody in the UK pays a tax to watch television. They pay a fee to own a television capable of live reception and display of TV signals - which funds the BBC directly, one of the world's most renowned broadcasters, let alone public service broadcasters. We also have hardly any toll roads, a free healthcare service, and a press which has only the other year fought the political and legal system to ensure freedom of speech was preserved above all else (see "super injunctions"). By comparison a minor "luxury tax" on owning a TV is a drop in the ocean. In the same way, I could distil your entire country into a bunch of people who don't care that the poor die of simple illnesses they can't afford to have treated. I know which I'd rather have.
And this article is about that same British freedom of speech overriding the law WITHOUT THAT RIGHT NEEDING TO BE STATED - because it's so inherent in the legal system and culture that we don't need to. And it has also made news BECAUSE nobody believed it had got so far under UK law (because it was meritless from day one).
And never, in the entire world, have I seen an entire country so scared of calling someone a dickhead live on TV as the American people. You can't, because they'll sue your arse off for doing so. Your libel laws actually do the opposite of what you claim. Like the stereotypical American, you have no concept of how "unfree" you actually are and wish to point fingers at other countries and say "that's wrong" when you suffer worse every day yourself.
You have to pick your example from the 1800's, for someone that nobody has ever heard of, because all the more recent examples work against your theory and you an only state one-off. The guy you mention was himself sentenced to be horsewhipped a few years after - hardly a "modern" case.
My country is far from perfect. Read my comment history, I'm the first to admit it. The difference is that I know it.
P.S. How's that imprisoning-"suspected"-terrorists-for-10+-years-without-trial-or-appeal-in-lands-foreign-to-them-and-including-public-proof-of-torture-techniques coming along? You still have NO idea how to behave as a civilisation - those people could well be random innocent foreigners and neither your country nor your president give a shit. Don't lecture me on freedom.
My opinion from across the pond agrees.
Technically, there's nothing wrong or even specifically English about the sentence and the object is perfectly well specified. You just have to read it properly, that's all.
It's not 100% perfectly clear and is worded slightly oddly, but the context is enough to clarify, I would think. And lots of things are worded oddly when you "speak properly" or work in law.
My mother repeatedly and pointedly informed me on numerous occasions that she was going to kill me / would kill me if I performed action X (where X was a totally legal endeavour).
Should I have reported each instance to the police, be put into care, have my mother jailed, etc. for that? No.
"Free speech" is a misnomer in that what the average person calls "Free" is not what I call "Free" and isn't what the word "Free" means. Most people definition of "free speech" doesn't include hate speech, lies, threats or anything else. Thus it's not *technically* free.
If someone (say a UK police commissioner) wants to claim that, for example, most inner-city crime was committed by black people (a verifiable fact given the data at the time), then can we censor that because it could be construed as hate speech? Does that mean that a guy shouting that same fact in the street would be subject to different laws than a police commissioner saying it in a press conference? That's a dangerous precedent to set.
Is it also "against free speech" to lie? Surely if my speech is truly "free" I can say or claim anything? But that runs into libel laws and other problems (i.e. lying in court).
Thus there is no one fixed definition of this magical "Free Speech" and if you try to make an all-encompassing one you will absolutely fail unless you accept a world where people can freely lie all the time and where they can also never be harassed for telling the truth, or for lying (or, alternatively, where they can ALWAYS be harassed no matter what).
True free speech does not, and cannot exist, in the current political and legal climate or even, I would posit, at all. Thus it's pointless to consider it, which is why most countries do NOT have an explicit statement regarding free speech (and even some of the largest and most influential countries in the world have no formal legal statement of such a right - for instance, the UK - and never have had in their entire history).
Free speech is a fabrication of idealism that doesn't actually work in real life. In its absence, we have to fall back on the law and common sense. Was what he did illegal? Only if it could be reasonably be construed to be a threat. This says that it couldn't. Was what he did stupid? Not particularly. No worse than I hear a thousand times a day or heard from my own mother (seriously, what's the difference between his tweet and someone saying "If another person pulls the plug out of that server, I'm going to boil them in acid?").
10 years ago, nobody would have even cared. And today, he was proved innocent on all counts. That kinda means that nobody SHOULD have cared at all. The problem here is not the legal definition, or irresponsible behaviour - it's a prosecution service that ever thought such a petty thing could be the basis of a case in the first place.
The Crown Court. The decision it made was not one it should have been able to make.
Yeah. Those damn Andriod phones, running their version of Windows. God, NOBODY is buying those. Or those Raspberry Pi things that people can get for £25. Hell, even those multitudes of tablets that people are snapping up for under £100 (not including the Apples, obviously!). Yeah, you can't play games on them if Steam comes to Linux.
Linux > desktop PC market.
And for years, a lot of people have been saying that the only reason they keep Windows is to play games. If nothing else, this would provoke them to find a new excuse why they can't use Linux all day long.