You just met one. I do it all the time, and I'm not alone.
And American's do it a lot - "How's everything in England?" even if the person is in Wales, and referring to those people as "English". It's part-ignorance, part-fuzzy-definitions and part-convenience.
The UK is a country. (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) Great Britain is a country. (comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales) England is a country.
In fact, a lot of English people (i.e. actually from England) will use all three to mean exactly the same thing (usually the UK).
There is no set definition, and nobody refers to the UK as a sovereign state unless it's in some formal document somewhere... it's a country.
Pretty sure I don't have *anything* that I use on that basis, does "renting" a house count?
Mobile phone - my property. (was originally on a £20/month contract, but I had it for over a year and it then became my property) Mobile phone SIM - my property. Mobile phone "contract" - Pay as you go / Prepaid. Mobile phone "phone number" - legal right to transfer, on demand, to any provider I like in my country. Mobile broadband dongle - my property. (one-off payment of £25 to purchase the device outright from a high-street store) Mobile broadband SIM - my property. Mobile broadband "contract" - Pay as you go / Prepaid. Mobile broadband "phone number" - legal right to transfer, on demand, to any provider I like in my country.
All computer software (including every game) - "owned" (irrevocable, perpetual license) All computer hardware (including every games console / handheld) - my property.
I don't think we're anywhere near *everything* being rented, but there are an awful lot of people out there who are willing to rent property. Basically, if I couldn't get the above on the terms I want, I wouldn't use them. Mobile broadband passed me by until a cheap, PAYG dongle arrived on my high street (and I'm the most technical person I know, so people were always asking why I didn't have it). My phone has been off contract for *YEARS* and I have no intention of going back. I don't pay monthly fees for anything else except things like gas, electric, water, tax, and that's a "pay in advance" not "you're only renting that water" system. Probably house rent is the only true "you don't own it, but pay me" system I've used for any length of time and no-one *wants* to rent if there's an option to buy.
My mother, though, rented a television for 27 years until we showed her what it was costing (i.e. enough for a new TV every year). Similarly, with renting a phone from a telecoms company for their landline - some people are *still* doing that because they think they have to. It's a case of getting something on a trial basis and then getting into the habit of paying it forever without noticing - only the naive people do it.
Monthly fees are for *services* (roadside breakdown assistance, insurance, etc.) and for pre-paying bills conveniently (gas, water, electric). Anyone who does anything else probably doesn't realise what it's costing them and/or doesn't care about owning the product (mobile phone contract come to mind because most of the people I know who are on expensive contracts are on them to get free upgrades to the latest fashionable phone... the old one gets traded in every six months or so).
Okay, I don't use a normal "desktop" distro, so PulseAudio has pretty much slipped me by completely (good old ALSA, not broke, ain't gonna fix it) but the one line that scared the crap out of me was:
"For example, if a video is running in one application the system should automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished."
Er no. The system will damn well do what I tell it to. My volume levels are *my* domain, them being a user interface. I don't mind it being capable but the word "automatically" scares me. It also seems to add extremely unnecessary levels of complexity to a desktop system by literally abstracting every sound source and every output device (including network-audio) into separate entities - isn't the idea of a sound daemon of any kind to *merge* those entities seamlessly? That was the bit I liked hearing about PulseAudio - integration of esd, arts, alsa, oss, etc. into one place, but to then abstract out every program with it's own volume control seems daft (and adding another step into the "where the hell is that volume control that's making it so loud" process).
You know what I want? One damn volume control that controls the final output to my speakers (multiple independent speaker sets is an advanced configuration that I and most other people really don't care about, hotplugged or not). And everything *behind* that should be filtered and normalised so it's all the same volume unless I *specifically* say otherwise. Audio professionals are working *with* sound, so they have the tools to do what they like. 99% of desktop users just want their IM notifications to be heard as well as their MP3's without having to play with sliders all the time.
Because the food those people eat is produced using fertilizers, steel structures, engines based on petroleum combustion, transit networks, irrigation systems, computers and, ultimately, a market for the food - all of which come about because of technological advances (computers wouldn't work today if we didn't know about quantum mechanics - modern PC's are affected by quantum-scale artefacts), most of which were funded by military investment (Internet, etc.) or academic institutions, designed and implemented by people that went to university to study something other than fertilizer, using mathematics from previously theoretical subjects that they found could apply to modern physics, using even vaster ranges of technology to achieve their goals.
Did you know that the Moon missions visibly pushed scientific advancement for *decades* before and after they occurred? Did you know that previous "waste of time", purely-theoretical, large-scale, cutting-edge technology now powers most of the world, the world's satellites, thus world communications, thus enable people to even *find* those people, let alone help them?
How about that computer you just posted this troll on? Have you any idea how many man-hours it takes to build that? Considering your attitude, I should take it back, leave those raw materials in the ground and give someone a job instead... that makes sense, no? Or how about you *think* for a second about where those people are going to get their houses, pharmaceuticals, food, warmth, clothing, how they'll be found and helped and their progress tracked by your government to ensure they show up as a statistic at least?
Eighty years ago, the highest-level scientific research of splitting the "unsplittable" atom helped discover and then (50 years ago) harness the most destructive force held by man, culled from the annals of scientific research and weaponry, and now makes it power most of your country, provide pharmaceuticals, medical scanners and countless other innovations. Now think what'll happen in another 80 years when the tech discovered, manufactured and researched based on the findings of the LHC hits your country.
And the funny thing is, that you have assumed I'm talking about a particular card game in that sentence (in actual fact his "theory" was universal to roulette, slot machines and other forms), that you assume that the dependency on the single factor "I won" versus "I lost" is somehow indicative of future performance rather than a deeper dependency on previous events (e.g. the particular cards dealt etc.), that you have extrapolated such dependence to win/lose scenarios and that, dependent or not, the man's greatly simplified thinking is in any way correct or useful.
I'm a mathematician. I find the whole concept of gambling quite hilarious - people actually expect to come out better off? It's craziness.
That said, the only time I've ever "gambled" was on a very exclusive cruise ship where they had a "free night" (they were in port, so the laws said you couldn't play for real money). You were given $50 worth of chips but obviously couldn't take your winnings home with you or cash them in.
Myself and my wife sat at a few poker tables out of interest and played for several hours on that measly sum on the low-cost tables. Obviously, we lost all of the "money" but then we realised - we'd just had several hours of fun for $50. Sure, there are cheaper ways, but it was actually quite pleasant, no worse than putting some money into a pool table while in a bar, etc. It *seemed* good value for money, that's the point. We knew we wouldn't win, but it was fun whenever we did win, it was a good social event and we only "lost" $50 (of someone else's money, admittedly, but I've spent more on that quite a few times and had much worse evenings). It'd also been an intellectual exercise for me because I *was* trying to work out the best odds for myself, and that made it a little more interesting.
So I can get the attraction, but still have never gambled with my own money, and I can also see why those who *don't* understand the basic concepts of probability enjoy it even more and feel compelled to spend money on it. Yes, most of the people in a casino are stupid - but look at the edges on the low-stake tables - you'll see the people who have fun *knowing* they are going to lose $10, $20, $50... they factor that in from the start. But they still have a good time, usually for several hours, cheaper than they could in many modern entertainment venues.
And I once had a driving instructor try to explain his "super-theory" about gambling - wait until there's a long run of losses and the next one *has* to be a winner! Great. You go do that. Don't call me when you're bankrupt.
Load up GlovePIE with a few USB mice - you can use their simple example script to have as many (working) mouse pointers in Windows as you have input devices (even Wiimotes and keyboard, etc.). It's not perfect but does essentially the same thing.
Five minutes into the video and I'm still none the wiser as to how this is supposed to be an improvement in the use of my computer, or more comfortable, or easier. The "real-world" demo towards the end doesn't seem at all impressive and leaves out an awful lot of computer uses (we'll start with gaming, because it's easier to pick on multitouch for that).
Why is everyone determined to sell me multitouch but can't actually show a decent use that justifies the price/hassle/upheaval/software development costs?
WWW is no quicker to type than web, and in fact web is more natural to type quickly because may hands can pre-prepare the "e" and "b" while I'm still pressing the "w" and I think that's the same for anyone who's done any decent amount of typing in their lives (i.e. almost everyone over the age of 18 by now!)
I think web is a better idea, in retrospect, but I can't remember the last time I typed www either - it comes naturally and I don't even notice, but http:/// is still a pain in the bum to speak over the phone, especially when people aren't used to the syntax.
There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time. he said.
If the human race is ever brought before a court to account for itself, that's going to be its entire defence. Nuclear power, the Internet, ID cards,... that excuse works for everything!
Oh, I just PMSL. I even read Mr Hall's original comment the first time round and didn't notice the name and I just spotted this comment. How wonderful.
"Without copyright how... do you think movies, music, games and software are going to remain viable endeavours?"
The answer is: the same way they did before and are doing now. "Piracy" is at its highest, if statistics are to be believed, but so are profits of all the above - in fact the proportions are greatly in favour of vastly *more* money being made now even with higher piracy. Movies, music, games, software = multi-billion dollar industries. One of the top-40 hits in the UK at the moment is by someone who sang along to YouTube vids. *With* copyright enforcement, she would be nothing now (and probably owe several thousand pounds of licensing fees), and we'd be at least one artist down. She's not the first and won't be the last. Most musicians give away or sell their music every day without a problem. It's only the "big" ones that do so for enormous profit and are *actually* represented by these organisations.
I have a friend who is in a relationship with a professional rapper. They don't make much money but they make enough. And all their music is just sitting on Myspace. It's got a Paypal button to let you buy a CD, but their stuff is original, good and given away on YouTube, MySpace and other sites. I don't think they've suffered under the current rates of piracy - I think they'd be nowhere without the exposure that giving their music away brings them.
It works both ways and it is, basically, an artform, not a business. It's like saying "without blue paint, how can artists thrive?!"... they did, for thousands of years, and still do and still would if all the blue paint disappeared. We didn't need blue-paint rationing, or companies telling us that blue paint is the express domain of artists, etc. Copyright is merely a tool to commercialise an artform. There are many ways of doing that, including just giving the damn things away to build a reputation to later release a real piece of art for huge profit.
And, unfortunately, copyright works both ways. If I want fair-use snippets, if I want to license them, if I want to do other things, there's no reason to stop me or make it prohibitively expensive - it's poor business. Ever tried to do this "officially"? Try and ask permission from a record company to use a song on a YouTube vid, or in a school play - see what assurances and what pricing structure they want to give you (I have, in the past, been quoted "per viewer" figures!). It's nothing to do with business, it's about controlling the media so that they can *tell* you what to buy next week (i.e. their next "up-and-coming" artist).
Copyright is already seriously lessened. Children are taught by otherwise-educated teachers to just "paste in something from Google images" which is a potential breach of so many copyrights in an hour's lesson that it's unbelievable. School plays are run off someone's iPod where they've downloaded relevant music and video. Kids share videos, music, ringtones, applications, etc. indiscriminately. It's already a lost cause unless you want to start criminalising everyone from toddlers to grannies. Give it a few decades and it will swing one way or another - you won't be able to make a piece of music without "enforcing" everything to do with it, or you won't be able to sell a piece of music at all. Both are absolutely terrible circumstances, but because of naive business practices, the artform is dying.
I should feel sorry for the smaller artists, for whom copyright is designed to help thrive, but in actual fact they are doing quite well enough on their own and will probably be the winners in the end. I think they've got the tech that replaces the need for the legislation now, so I wish them well. Music, especially, is part of life now. There were several decades of being able to commercialise that and almost every country in the world decided it was better to penalise that instead. Hence, the position now is that people really don't care any more. I don't know anyone who bought *every* song on their iPod.
The article makes no sense at all. Using one game-type to fund another is okay but hell, an MMO is a company in itself, not just a product. It's also complete speculation.
And, the C&C series went downhill after Red Alert (and, as others have pointed out, EA's purchase of Westwood). I can hardly bring myself to play anything after that at all. I wanted to have a look at Red Alert 3 but wasn't going to buy without a demo. By the time a demo came out that I could actually find and download, it was 1.8Gb and I had lost interest. And the min specs looked scary for something quite benign in terms of gameplay.
The best way for EA to make money on that franchise would be to stick the entire C&C / RA back-catalogue on Steam, with a new system for multiplayer lobbies... I know I'd buy it and compared to even the demo of Red Alert, it'd be small to download. I know RA itself is "freeware" now but just the hassle of keeping the CD images around and the multiplayer, plus the various expansion packs, has got to be worth a little bit. A lot of people times a little bit is quite a chunk.
Your money means nothing to this particular company X (ignore it if's Apple or Microsoft or Dell or PC World, it really doesn't matter). They don't want to fix your problem (assuming you have reported it and following through with all the tech support you are offered). So stop giving them money, cancel the damn "protection plans" and tell them exactly why.
I can't stand it when people rant about how much money they've spent with a company in the past and how they aren't getting service for that money. If you were in a restaurant, you wouldn't tolerate paying for your meal and then waiting an hour for it to arrive. You'd be demanding your money back and kicking up a fuss. Kick up a fuss. Get the problem fixed. If they aren't interested, *don't give them more money*.
Before you think I'm just being anti-Apple, I would actually love to own an Apple machine but find them prohibitively expensive and can't justify paying the cost of four or five of my "normal" machines for an Apple machine (yes, I buy cheap shit and yes, sometimes it causes me hassle). I would love to own one, always play on other people's when I get the chance and even recommend their purchase where appropriate. But if *any* company didn't give me the service I wanted after paying that amount of money, I'd stop paying them or ask for a refund. I have done this in the past. It's why I prefer four or five smaller purchases to one large purchase - I don't lose so much if the service is truly awful and I can invest my next small amount somewhere else.
Seriously, if you're paying for this stuff - get it fixed. If it doesn't get fixed, kick up a fuss, demand a refund, and remember this next time you make a purchase. If people all did this, bad service would be a thing of the past, and I can't work out why people *don't*! Brand loyalty really is carried to extremes when people forgive past mistakes that affected them greatly at the time.
Me? I'm the sort of person who, if pushed far enough, will stand up in a restaurant, announce my dissatisfaction at the top of my voice, tell *everyone* who enters the restaurant about my grievances in the hope it will put them off. Inevitably a manager will come along at this point and I'll be hastily offered a refund (not credit or another free meal!) and then I WILL NOT set foot in the place again. If I'm that unhappy with the service, why should I help the business thrive by giving them money? And the people entering the doorway deserve to know, too (often they walk back out with me and thank me for it!), and I've even *been* one of those people entering in the middle of a grievance.
Stop helping the company thrive if they aren't providing what they promise. Silly updates are included in this - chase them down, make them fix it. You're paying them thousands of dollars in direct profit - they can afford to spend a few of those dollars on taking your calls and sorting your problem out.
1) Can't measure it - you can't measure how many people downloaded your software through illicit channels because, by definition, those channels are usually unmonitored, don't keep logs, and aren't subject to easy investigation. You might be able to measure a particular computer at a particular point in time but any measurement being done on "behalf of" the BSA is going to be worthless. You'd have to randomly monitor thousands of PC's in dozens of categories (home, business, mobile, poweruser, etc.) and get permission to report on any "unlicensed" software there, and then chase it up with the company concerned to see if it was actually unlicensed (rather than just using the wrong VLK or similar for convenience).
2) Can't compare it - the chances of those metrics being stable across such countries as Turkey and the US are unlikely.
3) Can't correlate it - Just because malware goes up with pirated installations doesn't mean anything - it just means that the pirates prefer to download porn which may or may not introduce malware... it doesn't mean the malware is in the pirate software.
Statistics are worthless quoted out of context. We have no idea what was measured, how, why, what bias was introduced by the measures, or anything else.
To be honest, I imagine the percentage to be *higher*... I've seen dozens of people with Winzip on their computers who haven't actually bought it but they heard they needed it to open ZIP files. I've seen dozens of work laptops come back with full installations of football games, office, etc.... technically that's copyright infringement ("software piracy") because it's a breach of the license. I expect the true figure to be nearer 80 or 90%.
But then you have the reasoning that it's somehow linked to malware in any way other than "people get malware too"... almost 100% of the home PC's I see have items of malware on them (again, depending on your definition).
If you want to say "copyright infringement is bad and puts £5 on the cost of every game you buy, or £50 on the price of Office", people would listen. Making up bollocks statistics about nonsense correlations just makes me switch off and let's me know that, actually, you're just trying to scare me into buying things because you can't think any other way would work (and thus don't understand software "piracy" at all). I don't pirate, either at work or at home. I just move things to open-source if I can't afford the real package, and I never buy anything without a demo. No demo, no trial version, no purchase. I also don't buy anything with DRM that interferes with my usage of the product. I'm not alone.
Stop spending your time analysing vague correlations and look at those statistics about why people pirate in the first place. Almost always it's cost, convenience and because a certain percentage of those "pirate" downloads are actually your own customers just trying to get the bloody thing working (I've had to break DRM schemes in work in order to be able to install compliant to our licensing - it was tons easier than our negotiating with the company in question to do the same thing). Be open with those stats and then things get interesting: How many pirates, on average, end up revealing upon further investigation that they *already* own the software in question, but the DRM got in the way? Or that they lost the install disk? Or that they needed original media to recover their PC's and it wasn't supplied by the manufacturer? I've seen all three of those and even done the second myself - I needed a particular install disk and it was an emergency and the person I was working for didn't have the original disk to hand. After I ensured that they were entitled to the licences, I just downloaded one and used that instead (after checksum verification). Does that contribute as being "another" PC with pirate software?
Does Steam prevent another company setting up a similar service? Do they force their users into an unfair contract against their will? Do they force the software authors into an unfair contract against their will? Does Steam intefere with, or say that you can't use, other similar services?
No? Then it's probably not anticompetitive. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's anticompetitive. Just because they are the only decent online to-your-desktop electronic software distribution network that is popular doesn't mean they are stopping others trying the same. It's only when people play dirty that it's anticompetitive - charging money that people willingly pay isn't necessarily anticompetitive on it's own. If the contracts were unfair, software authors wouldn't sign them. If they could get a better deal elsewhere, they would. But the fact is that ALL the other similar schemes, I've never used, I don't know anyone that has used them, and I have no intention of using them because they just aren't as good.
Anti-competition laws only apply to abuses of such power. It's not like Steam has snatched up every distribution network. It's not like they force other vendors out of business through anything more than providing a better product and getting the best software houses on board. It's not like they force you to install Steam on every computer you sell.
If you have evidence to the contrary and it's hurting your business - take it to court. There's big money to be made in that. Chances are, though, that people are griping that because Valve know they have the best distribution model that people will accept less money overall if they can get onto Steam, because they will make more sales. Pricing yourself as the best isn't the same and forcing your customers to buy.
Er... there is a *slight* problem of distance - given that the nearest star is about 8 light years away and we can't even get near light-speed. The furthest object ever made by man is currently dead in terms of power and not that far outside the solar system - but still moving at phenomenal rate.
So, looking for any planet isn't even worth the effort until we solve that problem. In the meantime, we're not caring about *life*, we're caring about *fuel*. Water is (or can be made to be, if you happen to have a large, bright sun nearby or a finite power resource) potential fuel... which means less fuel taken with you, which means more and cheaper space missions to start reaching further places, more "refuelling depots" and a lot less effort expended on space travel in general. The best way to achieve something is to commercialise it. When we're all able to zip to the moon for a few hundred grand, then we can think about visiting other places with probes.
The stable temperature? Not that big an issue in most circumstances - humans have invented a range of devices to control temperature on everything from deep-space satellites to their garden shed. We can't handle the extremes, but the moon is actually quite receptive to us... not as much so as the Earth but a damn sight more so than any other body in the solar system and the vast majority of those yet seen (or their presence indicated) anywhere in the universe (but admittedly, we know only a little about what's out there).
The long-term, fantasy plans should always be looked at. But they should quite rightly be overshadowed by the possibility of actually making local space travel somewhat more convenient... one will breed the other, but it only works that way around.
Get me to the moon, then funding to get me Mars will appear, then funding to get me to Jupiter will appear, then funding to send me to another system will appear. But even the first is almost financially impossible at the moment without some pretty basic technology / base there to help us along.
It's the panic that makes the game - you can't stand still for a second. If you don't keep watching your teammates, one of them will be picked off (and even one man down is a serious hindrance). It's a constant frenzy of trying to get to your teammates / the end of the level but being pulled, pushed, influenced, taken, steered and forced to make diversions. The zombie gore isn't *necessary* but the atmosphere is quite immersive. The sound of a big baddie scares the crap out of you and the atmosphere being like that means the panic sets in quicker.
There is nothing quite like seeing a horde of crazed zombies rushing towards you and you having to pick your options to take them out... barricade yourselves in? Set them on fire? Take potshots and hope to reduce their numbers? Full-out automatic fire? Concentrate on the big baddie about the corner? It's as much a tactical game as it is a FPS shooter - most kicks from public servers will be of people who *aren't* following the teamplan. But the gore is just a natural part of the atmosphere. If you remove it - still a good game, but no atmosphere.
Just to take a simple example... take over a household robot (assuming it has visual capabilities and/or some method to manipulate objects, even tiny ones)... steer it towards the spare house keys, have it drop them outside the house. Now you have a perfect break-in and the homeowner aren't covered by insurance (no forced entry). Have it read the letters on the table or dropping through the letterbox (bank statements, etc.). Use it to spy on your neighbours when you hear them having sex. Have it cause a fire (plug something metal into an electric socket, for instance, or something which is likely to cause sparks/fire).
The worst vulnerabilities are the ones that people say "Oh, but what use is that?" because it means they haven't thought what use it would be. Yes, this stuff probably is more useful as a student prank than an attack on a homeowner, but it can still be used to remotely control a device in your home which has capabilities you wouldn't give a stranger - the ability to look inside your house and manipulate objects there.
The *chances* of anything happening are very minimal (much more likely that someone just smashed your window and enters your property themselves) but it's yet another implication, yet another weakness. What if people find you can hack them to be public wifi access points? There's always a risk with anything computer controlled and the reason a lot of people prefer their systems to be wired, autheneticated and secure is because even the most silly capability (opening a document in a word processor) can easily be turned into a powerful vulnerability.
Imagine you're a really nasty piece of work and want your neighbour to die with no trace back to you. Take over a household robot, cause a fire... Oh, dear... product failure.
Far fetched, yes, something easily fixed from day one as a sensible precaution anyway - certainly should have been.
Slashdot Mirror
You just met one. I do it all the time, and I'm not alone.
And American's do it a lot - "How's everything in England?" even if the person is in Wales, and referring to those people as "English". It's part-ignorance, part-fuzzy-definitions and part-convenience.
No, no, no, no... That's not Article 3...
Article 3 is 'No crewmember with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero-gravity'
Depending on your definition:
The UK is a country. (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
Great Britain is a country. (comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales)
England is a country.
In fact, a lot of English people (i.e. actually from England) will use all three to mean exactly the same thing (usually the UK).
There is no set definition, and nobody refers to the UK as a sovereign state unless it's in some formal document somewhere... it's a country.
Pretty sure I don't have *anything* that I use on that basis, does "renting" a house count?
Mobile phone - my property. (was originally on a £20/month contract, but I had it for over a year and it then became my property)
Mobile phone SIM - my property.
Mobile phone "contract" - Pay as you go / Prepaid.
Mobile phone "phone number" - legal right to transfer, on demand, to any provider I like in my country.
Mobile broadband dongle - my property. (one-off payment of £25 to purchase the device outright from a high-street store)
Mobile broadband SIM - my property.
Mobile broadband "contract" - Pay as you go / Prepaid.
Mobile broadband "phone number" - legal right to transfer, on demand, to any provider I like in my country.
All computer software (including every game) - "owned" (irrevocable, perpetual license)
All computer hardware (including every games console / handheld) - my property.
I don't think we're anywhere near *everything* being rented, but there are an awful lot of people out there who are willing to rent property. Basically, if I couldn't get the above on the terms I want, I wouldn't use them. Mobile broadband passed me by until a cheap, PAYG dongle arrived on my high street (and I'm the most technical person I know, so people were always asking why I didn't have it). My phone has been off contract for *YEARS* and I have no intention of going back. I don't pay monthly fees for anything else except things like gas, electric, water, tax, and that's a "pay in advance" not "you're only renting that water" system. Probably house rent is the only true "you don't own it, but pay me" system I've used for any length of time and no-one *wants* to rent if there's an option to buy.
My mother, though, rented a television for 27 years until we showed her what it was costing (i.e. enough for a new TV every year). Similarly, with renting a phone from a telecoms company for their landline - some people are *still* doing that because they think they have to. It's a case of getting something on a trial basis and then getting into the habit of paying it forever without noticing - only the naive people do it.
Monthly fees are for *services* (roadside breakdown assistance, insurance, etc.) and for pre-paying bills conveniently (gas, water, electric). Anyone who does anything else probably doesn't realise what it's costing them and/or doesn't care about owning the product (mobile phone contract come to mind because most of the people I know who are on expensive contracts are on them to get free upgrades to the latest fashionable phone... the old one gets traded in every six months or so).
Okay, I don't use a normal "desktop" distro, so PulseAudio has pretty much slipped me by completely (good old ALSA, not broke, ain't gonna fix it) but the one line that scared the crap out of me was:
"For example, if a video is running in one application the system should automatically reduce the volume of everything else and increase it when the video is finished."
Er no. The system will damn well do what I tell it to. My volume levels are *my* domain, them being a user interface. I don't mind it being capable but the word "automatically" scares me. It also seems to add extremely unnecessary levels of complexity to a desktop system by literally abstracting every sound source and every output device (including network-audio) into separate entities - isn't the idea of a sound daemon of any kind to *merge* those entities seamlessly? That was the bit I liked hearing about PulseAudio - integration of esd, arts, alsa, oss, etc. into one place, but to then abstract out every program with it's own volume control seems daft (and adding another step into the "where the hell is that volume control that's making it so loud" process).
You know what I want? One damn volume control that controls the final output to my speakers (multiple independent speaker sets is an advanced configuration that I and most other people really don't care about, hotplugged or not). And everything *behind* that should be filtered and normalised so it's all the same volume unless I *specifically* say otherwise. Audio professionals are working *with* sound, so they have the tools to do what they like. 99% of desktop users just want their IM notifications to be heard as well as their MP3's without having to play with sliders all the time.
Because the food those people eat is produced using fertilizers, steel structures, engines based on petroleum combustion, transit networks, irrigation systems, computers and, ultimately, a market for the food - all of which come about because of technological advances (computers wouldn't work today if we didn't know about quantum mechanics - modern PC's are affected by quantum-scale artefacts), most of which were funded by military investment (Internet, etc.) or academic institutions, designed and implemented by people that went to university to study something other than fertilizer, using mathematics from previously theoretical subjects that they found could apply to modern physics, using even vaster ranges of technology to achieve their goals.
Did you know that the Moon missions visibly pushed scientific advancement for *decades* before and after they occurred? Did you know that previous "waste of time", purely-theoretical, large-scale, cutting-edge technology now powers most of the world, the world's satellites, thus world communications, thus enable people to even *find* those people, let alone help them?
How about that computer you just posted this troll on? Have you any idea how many man-hours it takes to build that? Considering your attitude, I should take it back, leave those raw materials in the ground and give someone a job instead... that makes sense, no? Or how about you *think* for a second about where those people are going to get their houses, pharmaceuticals, food, warmth, clothing, how they'll be found and helped and their progress tracked by your government to ensure they show up as a statistic at least?
Eighty years ago, the highest-level scientific research of splitting the "unsplittable" atom helped discover and then (50 years ago) harness the most destructive force held by man, culled from the annals of scientific research and weaponry, and now makes it power most of your country, provide pharmaceuticals, medical scanners and countless other innovations. Now think what'll happen in another 80 years when the tech discovered, manufactured and researched based on the findings of the LHC hits your country.
And the funny thing is, that you have assumed I'm talking about a particular card game in that sentence (in actual fact his "theory" was universal to roulette, slot machines and other forms), that you assume that the dependency on the single factor "I won" versus "I lost" is somehow indicative of future performance rather than a deeper dependency on previous events (e.g. the particular cards dealt etc.), that you have extrapolated such dependence to win/lose scenarios and that, dependent or not, the man's greatly simplified thinking is in any way correct or useful.
I'm a mathematician. I find the whole concept of gambling quite hilarious - people actually expect to come out better off? It's craziness.
That said, the only time I've ever "gambled" was on a very exclusive cruise ship where they had a "free night" (they were in port, so the laws said you couldn't play for real money). You were given $50 worth of chips but obviously couldn't take your winnings home with you or cash them in.
Myself and my wife sat at a few poker tables out of interest and played for several hours on that measly sum on the low-cost tables. Obviously, we lost all of the "money" but then we realised - we'd just had several hours of fun for $50. Sure, there are cheaper ways, but it was actually quite pleasant, no worse than putting some money into a pool table while in a bar, etc. It *seemed* good value for money, that's the point. We knew we wouldn't win, but it was fun whenever we did win, it was a good social event and we only "lost" $50 (of someone else's money, admittedly, but I've spent more on that quite a few times and had much worse evenings). It'd also been an intellectual exercise for me because I *was* trying to work out the best odds for myself, and that made it a little more interesting.
So I can get the attraction, but still have never gambled with my own money, and I can also see why those who *don't* understand the basic concepts of probability enjoy it even more and feel compelled to spend money on it. Yes, most of the people in a casino are stupid - but look at the edges on the low-stake tables - you'll see the people who have fun *knowing* they are going to lose $10, $20, $50... they factor that in from the start. But they still have a good time, usually for several hours, cheaper than they could in many modern entertainment venues.
And I once had a driving instructor try to explain his "super-theory" about gambling - wait until there's a long run of losses and the next one *has* to be a winner! Great. You go do that. Don't call me when you're bankrupt.
Put the damn server in a cheap colo, already (or rent a dediserv and copy everything across).
Multiple SDSL's with bonding just to get a slightly better upload for a game server? You've gotta be mad.
Load up GlovePIE with a few USB mice - you can use their simple example script to have as many (working) mouse pointers in Windows as you have input devices (even Wiimotes and keyboard, etc.). It's not perfect but does essentially the same thing.
How can you over-hype a one-paragraph summary?
Five minutes into the video and I'm still none the wiser as to how this is supposed to be an improvement in the use of my computer, or more comfortable, or easier. The "real-world" demo towards the end doesn't seem at all impressive and leaves out an awful lot of computer uses (we'll start with gaming, because it's easier to pick on multitouch for that).
Why is everyone determined to sell me multitouch but can't actually show a decent use that justifies the price/hassle/upheaval/software development costs?
I call bullshit.
WWW is no quicker to type than web, and in fact web is more natural to type quickly because may hands can pre-prepare the "e" and "b" while I'm still pressing the "w" and I think that's the same for anyone who's done any decent amount of typing in their lives (i.e. almost everyone over the age of 18 by now!)
I think web is a better idea, in retrospect, but I can't remember the last time I typed www either - it comes naturally and I don't even notice, but http:/// is still a pain in the bum to speak over the phone, especially when people aren't used to the syntax.
There you go, it seemed like a good idea at the time. he said.
If the human race is ever brought before a court to account for itself, that's going to be its entire defence. Nuclear power, the Internet, ID cards, ... that excuse works for everything!
How's that going to help if your host operating system is compromised and reading your keystrokes?
Oh, I just PMSL. I even read Mr Hall's original comment the first time round and didn't notice the name and I just spotted this comment. How wonderful.
"Without copyright how... do you think movies, music, games and software are going to remain viable endeavours?"
The answer is: the same way they did before and are doing now. "Piracy" is at its highest, if statistics are to be believed, but so are profits of all the above - in fact the proportions are greatly in favour of vastly *more* money being made now even with higher piracy. Movies, music, games, software = multi-billion dollar industries. One of the top-40 hits in the UK at the moment is by someone who sang along to YouTube vids. *With* copyright enforcement, she would be nothing now (and probably owe several thousand pounds of licensing fees), and we'd be at least one artist down. She's not the first and won't be the last. Most musicians give away or sell their music every day without a problem. It's only the "big" ones that do so for enormous profit and are *actually* represented by these organisations.
I have a friend who is in a relationship with a professional rapper. They don't make much money but they make enough. And all their music is just sitting on Myspace. It's got a Paypal button to let you buy a CD, but their stuff is original, good and given away on YouTube, MySpace and other sites. I don't think they've suffered under the current rates of piracy - I think they'd be nowhere without the exposure that giving their music away brings them.
It works both ways and it is, basically, an artform, not a business. It's like saying "without blue paint, how can artists thrive?!"... they did, for thousands of years, and still do and still would if all the blue paint disappeared. We didn't need blue-paint rationing, or companies telling us that blue paint is the express domain of artists, etc. Copyright is merely a tool to commercialise an artform. There are many ways of doing that, including just giving the damn things away to build a reputation to later release a real piece of art for huge profit.
And, unfortunately, copyright works both ways. If I want fair-use snippets, if I want to license them, if I want to do other things, there's no reason to stop me or make it prohibitively expensive - it's poor business. Ever tried to do this "officially"? Try and ask permission from a record company to use a song on a YouTube vid, or in a school play - see what assurances and what pricing structure they want to give you (I have, in the past, been quoted "per viewer" figures!). It's nothing to do with business, it's about controlling the media so that they can *tell* you what to buy next week (i.e. their next "up-and-coming" artist).
Copyright is already seriously lessened. Children are taught by otherwise-educated teachers to just "paste in something from Google images" which is a potential breach of so many copyrights in an hour's lesson that it's unbelievable. School plays are run off someone's iPod where they've downloaded relevant music and video. Kids share videos, music, ringtones, applications, etc. indiscriminately. It's already a lost cause unless you want to start criminalising everyone from toddlers to grannies. Give it a few decades and it will swing one way or another - you won't be able to make a piece of music without "enforcing" everything to do with it, or you won't be able to sell a piece of music at all. Both are absolutely terrible circumstances, but because of naive business practices, the artform is dying.
I should feel sorry for the smaller artists, for whom copyright is designed to help thrive, but in actual fact they are doing quite well enough on their own and will probably be the winners in the end. I think they've got the tech that replaces the need for the legislation now, so I wish them well. Music, especially, is part of life now. There were several decades of being able to commercialise that and almost every country in the world decided it was better to penalise that instead. Hence, the position now is that people really don't care any more. I don't know anyone who bought *every* song on their iPod.
I've bought t
Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.
The article makes no sense at all. Using one game-type to fund another is okay but hell, an MMO is a company in itself, not just a product. It's also complete speculation.
And, the C&C series went downhill after Red Alert (and, as others have pointed out, EA's purchase of Westwood). I can hardly bring myself to play anything after that at all. I wanted to have a look at Red Alert 3 but wasn't going to buy without a demo. By the time a demo came out that I could actually find and download, it was 1.8Gb and I had lost interest. And the min specs looked scary for something quite benign in terms of gameplay.
The best way for EA to make money on that franchise would be to stick the entire C&C / RA back-catalogue on Steam, with a new system for multiplayer lobbies... I know I'd buy it and compared to even the demo of Red Alert, it'd be small to download. I know RA itself is "freeware" now but just the hassle of keeping the CD images around and the multiplayer, plus the various expansion packs, has got to be worth a little bit. A lot of people times a little bit is quite a chunk.
Then, please, please, learn a lesson from this.
Your money means nothing to this particular company X (ignore it if's Apple or Microsoft or Dell or PC World, it really doesn't matter). They don't want to fix your problem (assuming you have reported it and following through with all the tech support you are offered). So stop giving them money, cancel the damn "protection plans" and tell them exactly why.
I can't stand it when people rant about how much money they've spent with a company in the past and how they aren't getting service for that money. If you were in a restaurant, you wouldn't tolerate paying for your meal and then waiting an hour for it to arrive. You'd be demanding your money back and kicking up a fuss. Kick up a fuss. Get the problem fixed. If they aren't interested, *don't give them more money*.
Before you think I'm just being anti-Apple, I would actually love to own an Apple machine but find them prohibitively expensive and can't justify paying the cost of four or five of my "normal" machines for an Apple machine (yes, I buy cheap shit and yes, sometimes it causes me hassle). I would love to own one, always play on other people's when I get the chance and even recommend their purchase where appropriate. But if *any* company didn't give me the service I wanted after paying that amount of money, I'd stop paying them or ask for a refund. I have done this in the past. It's why I prefer four or five smaller purchases to one large purchase - I don't lose so much if the service is truly awful and I can invest my next small amount somewhere else.
Seriously, if you're paying for this stuff - get it fixed. If it doesn't get fixed, kick up a fuss, demand a refund, and remember this next time you make a purchase. If people all did this, bad service would be a thing of the past, and I can't work out why people *don't*! Brand loyalty really is carried to extremes when people forgive past mistakes that affected them greatly at the time.
Me? I'm the sort of person who, if pushed far enough, will stand up in a restaurant, announce my dissatisfaction at the top of my voice, tell *everyone* who enters the restaurant about my grievances in the hope it will put them off. Inevitably a manager will come along at this point and I'll be hastily offered a refund (not credit or another free meal!) and then I WILL NOT set foot in the place again. If I'm that unhappy with the service, why should I help the business thrive by giving them money? And the people entering the doorway deserve to know, too (often they walk back out with me and thank me for it!), and I've even *been* one of those people entering in the middle of a grievance.
Stop helping the company thrive if they aren't providing what they promise. Silly updates are included in this - chase them down, make them fix it. You're paying them thousands of dollars in direct profit - they can afford to spend a few of those dollars on taking your calls and sorting your problem out.
Nope. And don't ask me either - it seems pretty common. I just slap IZArc over the top of it and they don't even notice.
1) Can't measure it - you can't measure how many people downloaded your software through illicit channels because, by definition, those channels are usually unmonitored, don't keep logs, and aren't subject to easy investigation. You might be able to measure a particular computer at a particular point in time but any measurement being done on "behalf of" the BSA is going to be worthless. You'd have to randomly monitor thousands of PC's in dozens of categories (home, business, mobile, poweruser, etc.) and get permission to report on any "unlicensed" software there, and then chase it up with the company concerned to see if it was actually unlicensed (rather than just using the wrong VLK or similar for convenience).
2) Can't compare it - the chances of those metrics being stable across such countries as Turkey and the US are unlikely.
3) Can't correlate it - Just because malware goes up with pirated installations doesn't mean anything - it just means that the pirates prefer to download porn which may or may not introduce malware... it doesn't mean the malware is in the pirate software.
Statistics are worthless quoted out of context. We have no idea what was measured, how, why, what bias was introduced by the measures, or anything else.
To be honest, I imagine the percentage to be *higher*... I've seen dozens of people with Winzip on their computers who haven't actually bought it but they heard they needed it to open ZIP files. I've seen dozens of work laptops come back with full installations of football games, office, etc.... technically that's copyright infringement ("software piracy") because it's a breach of the license. I expect the true figure to be nearer 80 or 90%.
But then you have the reasoning that it's somehow linked to malware in any way other than "people get malware too"... almost 100% of the home PC's I see have items of malware on them (again, depending on your definition).
If you want to say "copyright infringement is bad and puts £5 on the cost of every game you buy, or £50 on the price of Office", people would listen. Making up bollocks statistics about nonsense correlations just makes me switch off and let's me know that, actually, you're just trying to scare me into buying things because you can't think any other way would work (and thus don't understand software "piracy" at all). I don't pirate, either at work or at home. I just move things to open-source if I can't afford the real package, and I never buy anything without a demo. No demo, no trial version, no purchase. I also don't buy anything with DRM that interferes with my usage of the product. I'm not alone.
Stop spending your time analysing vague correlations and look at those statistics about why people pirate in the first place. Almost always it's cost, convenience and because a certain percentage of those "pirate" downloads are actually your own customers just trying to get the bloody thing working (I've had to break DRM schemes in work in order to be able to install compliant to our licensing - it was tons easier than our negotiating with the company in question to do the same thing). Be open with those stats and then things get interesting: How many pirates, on average, end up revealing upon further investigation that they *already* own the software in question, but the DRM got in the way? Or that they lost the install disk? Or that they needed original media to recover their PC's and it wasn't supplied by the manufacturer? I've seen all three of those and even done the second myself - I needed a particular install disk and it was an emergency and the person I was working for didn't have the original disk to hand. After I ensured that they were entitled to the licences, I just downloaded one and used that instead (after checksum verification). Does that contribute as being "another" PC with pirate software?
Does Steam prevent another company setting up a similar service?
Do they force their users into an unfair contract against their will?
Do they force the software authors into an unfair contract against their will?
Does Steam intefere with, or say that you can't use, other similar services?
No? Then it's probably not anticompetitive. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's anticompetitive. Just because they are the only decent online to-your-desktop electronic software distribution network that is popular doesn't mean they are stopping others trying the same. It's only when people play dirty that it's anticompetitive - charging money that people willingly pay isn't necessarily anticompetitive on it's own. If the contracts were unfair, software authors wouldn't sign them. If they could get a better deal elsewhere, they would. But the fact is that ALL the other similar schemes, I've never used, I don't know anyone that has used them, and I have no intention of using them because they just aren't as good.
Anti-competition laws only apply to abuses of such power. It's not like Steam has snatched up every distribution network. It's not like they force other vendors out of business through anything more than providing a better product and getting the best software houses on board. It's not like they force you to install Steam on every computer you sell.
If you have evidence to the contrary and it's hurting your business - take it to court. There's big money to be made in that. Chances are, though, that people are griping that because Valve know they have the best distribution model that people will accept less money overall if they can get onto Steam, because they will make more sales. Pricing yourself as the best isn't the same and forcing your customers to buy.
Er... there is a *slight* problem of distance - given that the nearest star is about 8 light years away and we can't even get near light-speed. The furthest object ever made by man is currently dead in terms of power and not that far outside the solar system - but still moving at phenomenal rate.
So, looking for any planet isn't even worth the effort until we solve that problem. In the meantime, we're not caring about *life*, we're caring about *fuel*. Water is (or can be made to be, if you happen to have a large, bright sun nearby or a finite power resource) potential fuel... which means less fuel taken with you, which means more and cheaper space missions to start reaching further places, more "refuelling depots" and a lot less effort expended on space travel in general. The best way to achieve something is to commercialise it. When we're all able to zip to the moon for a few hundred grand, then we can think about visiting other places with probes.
The stable temperature? Not that big an issue in most circumstances - humans have invented a range of devices to control temperature on everything from deep-space satellites to their garden shed. We can't handle the extremes, but the moon is actually quite receptive to us... not as much so as the Earth but a damn sight more so than any other body in the solar system and the vast majority of those yet seen (or their presence indicated) anywhere in the universe (but admittedly, we know only a little about what's out there).
The long-term, fantasy plans should always be looked at. But they should quite rightly be overshadowed by the possibility of actually making local space travel somewhat more convenient... one will breed the other, but it only works that way around.
Get me to the moon, then funding to get me Mars will appear, then funding to get me to Jupiter will appear, then funding to send me to another system will appear. But even the first is almost financially impossible at the moment without some pretty basic technology / base there to help us along.
I hate zombie movies. I love Left4Dead.
It's the panic that makes the game - you can't stand still for a second. If you don't keep watching your teammates, one of them will be picked off (and even one man down is a serious hindrance). It's a constant frenzy of trying to get to your teammates / the end of the level but being pulled, pushed, influenced, taken, steered and forced to make diversions. The zombie gore isn't *necessary* but the atmosphere is quite immersive. The sound of a big baddie scares the crap out of you and the atmosphere being like that means the panic sets in quicker.
There is nothing quite like seeing a horde of crazed zombies rushing towards you and you having to pick your options to take them out... barricade yourselves in? Set them on fire? Take potshots and hope to reduce their numbers? Full-out automatic fire? Concentrate on the big baddie about the corner? It's as much a tactical game as it is a FPS shooter - most kicks from public servers will be of people who *aren't* following the teamplan. But the gore is just a natural part of the atmosphere. If you remove it - still a good game, but no atmosphere.
On the subject of capabilities:
Just to take a simple example... take over a household robot (assuming it has visual capabilities and/or some method to manipulate objects, even tiny ones)... steer it towards the spare house keys, have it drop them outside the house. Now you have a perfect break-in and the homeowner aren't covered by insurance (no forced entry). Have it read the letters on the table or dropping through the letterbox (bank statements, etc.). Use it to spy on your neighbours when you hear them having sex. Have it cause a fire (plug something metal into an electric socket, for instance, or something which is likely to cause sparks/fire).
The worst vulnerabilities are the ones that people say "Oh, but what use is that?" because it means they haven't thought what use it would be. Yes, this stuff probably is more useful as a student prank than an attack on a homeowner, but it can still be used to remotely control a device in your home which has capabilities you wouldn't give a stranger - the ability to look inside your house and manipulate objects there.
The *chances* of anything happening are very minimal (much more likely that someone just smashed your window and enters your property themselves) but it's yet another implication, yet another weakness. What if people find you can hack them to be public wifi access points? There's always a risk with anything computer controlled and the reason a lot of people prefer their systems to be wired, autheneticated and secure is because even the most silly capability (opening a document in a word processor) can easily be turned into a powerful vulnerability.
Imagine you're a really nasty piece of work and want your neighbour to die with no trace back to you. Take over a household robot, cause a fire... Oh, dear... product failure.
Far fetched, yes, something easily fixed from day one as a sensible precaution anyway - certainly should have been.