Your failure to understand my comment offends me;)
If one sells Corn Flakes, for instance, one does not cover the box with caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed. Not because it's illegal, or because it's wrong, but because it's pointless. You know that you'll offend people, so even if you don't consider it a legit offense, you can't really expect it to improve sales.
In this particular issue, those defending Sony almost seem to be saying that Sony had an obligation to not consider the fact that people would be offended. I believe that's just as ridiculous as the notion that people have a right to not be offended, though both are straw men.
I'm the first to defend someone who is using art to make a point and happens to offend some people; that's part of the debate in our society. But Sony's ad isn't a part of that; they are just trying to sell a handheld game console.
Remastered versions of popular movies are intended to look the same as they once did, not "better". Colorization is an abomination and not very popular. The new DS Mario is a new game, not an old game with new graphics.
Visual design is an art form, and part of art is the way its limitations allow the imagination to flourish; that's why people still paint even though photography is more realistic, and why people still write books. The original Super Mario Bros. from 1985 is still one of the best looking games ever made. Better looking games require better artists, not faster processors.
If the other two images aren't always displayed alongside the questionable one, the fact of their existence is irrelevant. It may prove that the people at Sony aren't racists, but it doesn't prove that they aren't idiots.
You can go on as long as you want about hypersensitivity and whether there was intent or blah blah blah, but the story here was never that Sony had joined the white supremacist movement. The story all along is that Sony had done something stupid. The offense taken by some people is perhaps pointless, but there wasn't any need for Sony to stir up that offense in the first place.
Well, I'll take you up on this. The XBox 360 is honestly an incredibly poor platform for pinochle, but a cluster might be up to the job. You'd probably need at least twenty, and lots of high-quality duct tape, and perhaps some cinder blocks for auxillary support. I don't really think it would be a very good pinochle experience, but it might have some hack value.
Actually, it just so happens that my Civic is a pulley drive vehicle so it can make some, shall we say, "special" noises if it's due for a replacement of the transmission fluid.
When I'm in my car my iPod playing lossy music through a $15 tape adapter sounds way better than vinyl does. Actually in my Honda Civic the vinyl sounds mostly like a room full of cats regardless of the source material. I haven't figured that out yet but I assume it's just that the awesome bandwidth of the vinyl sound is just overloading my system.
I remember something different about the pre-2001 Slashdot, obviously.
OMG look at this case mod1!!!
Here's yet another link to Tom's Hardware! Look at how bad the Intel chip is!
Study shows Windows is totally better than Linux. Gee, but are the considering all the advantages of Open Source?
etc. In other words, it's my opinion that Slashdot content has matured over the years. In a sense it is no longer as exciting; back in the day it felt like we were all fighting an urgent war against the DMCA and Microsoft and Intel and even SCO (and the trolls were way way better).
These days it feels more like a news and discussion outlet. I don't think that's bad, but it just indicates the ongoing aging of the editors and readership. I feel that this makes the comments more interesting because you are more likely to see a serious debate between intelligent people with good ideas. Back in the day it was more "party line" unless a troll came in to stir things up.
Of course you'd never hit zero, because zero is the moment when the joke occurs... which the poster missed. After the joke occurs you can only get further away from it.
You missed the biggest reason -- the screen on the Lite is much brighter and can even be set to different levels of brightness. If you try to use the original DS outside it's often surprising how dim the screen is.
Besides, the original DS really is too big; most people don't realize this but it is bigger by volume than the PSP. This really limits where I can take mine.
Of course, don't miss out on the fact that once I replace my original DS with the Lite, I won't throw the original in the trash. I'll probably give it to someone I know or sell it; either way the total number of DS systems will increase.
If you just want to eat dirt, go ahead. Nobody's stopping you. If you want somebody to analyze the dirt, extract interesting enzymes, test them in all kinds of different ways to figure out what they do, figure out a way to manufacture them reliably, and go through a bureaucratic approval process...
I am currently looking for a black DS Lite at a, uh, reasonable price. Please contact me as soon as possible if you happen to have a, er, glut of such items that you are just looking to get rid of, no questions asked.
Nikola Tesla... he wanted to give the world free power, but J.P.Morgan put a stop to that pretty quickly. There's always someone ready to shamelessly stand in the way of mankind to make a buck.
Everyone WANTS free power, but Tesla was a scientist and inventor, not an economist. Had he found a way to MAKE power for free, then we would be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, as making the power is still expensive, somebody still has to pay for it, and one way or another, it's going to be you (that's economics).
Money will be obsolete when we have unlimited resources. Until then, it's simply impossible to live without it in some form. Communism (as seen in Star Trek) doesn't eliminate money; it's just a system where the average person doesn't have any.
I think that's a poor distinction because it isn't relevant. A traditional pinball machine has no win condition (though there is a lose condition, as in most sim games) and players usually attempt to make the highest possible score. If we add a win condition, I contend that it doesn't change the nature of the game or what it should be called.
Next you can tell me that pinball has a mechanic -- you must hit markers to get points, and you lose if the ball falls. This is true, but it is ALSO true of all the games which you are choosing to call "worlds": in the Sims, you must play well to obtain goals.
SimEarth had a win condition and was easy to lose, so I assume you would call it a game. But if we removed the win condition, the gameplay and source of fun would be identical. Why would we reclassify it due to a small change that didn't change the nature of the experience?
I could get behind a statement that a "game" must involve the concepts of success and failure, but this definition doesn't exclude the Sims, or Animal Crossing, or much of anything that's called a game. It would exclude something like Elektroplankton, but I think few people consider that a game anyway.
Go back under your bridge unless you can provide me with a mathematical definition of how complex the rules must be before a "game" becomes a "world".
And don't give me crap about "goals". Many, many games have multiple goals and allow the player to choose which goals to pursue. In the Sims, there is no reason for the player to make any gameplay decisions unless they have a goal in mind, so the game is still goal-oriented.
We are having a discussion here about an undeniably difficult and complex issue. Yes, it would be nice if everyone in China made $50,000 a year, but it would be hard to dig up the extra 50 trillion dollars, so it turns into a matter of optimization which requires care and wisdom. That's why we talk about it and share viewpoints -- to leverage our collective knowledge and experience.
It's not helpful to accuse people in this discussion of having a particular viewpoint due to their moral inferiority. Take a look around -- the people who truly DON'T care about the troubles faced by working women in developing nations are not here. They don't have a need to develop viewpoints to make themselves feel better -- they just figure that God, or Bush, will take care of it, if it's important.
Also, do not accuse someone of not using facts when you fail to provide any facts of your own.
Please understand that you get called a cynic and a troll because you are cynically trolling.
I think it's important to understand that the Internet is still new, and we haven't figured out everything that will work on it yet. I find it, well, cynical, when new innovations come about and people say "it's just moving data from place to place and we could do that on the Internet in 1972".
Today, there is a new and remarkable movement of radio shows being distributed on the Internet, and it's called "podcasting" -- get over it. Yes, the technical details aren't particularly special, but neither were the technical details of the weblog or the Internet store or the search engine or the wiki or whatever else. The interesting part is the content and the social framework around that content.
Even if you despise amateurism, many people out there in the world are finding podcasting a convenient way to subscribe to established professional radio shows. So what, exactly, is your beef with it?
Don't forget to bring a megaphone and stand outside the window of the leader's office, reciting important plot twists from books that he was planning to read.
Well, I think we should note that a copy of Windows which can be installed on a machine other than the one it was purchased with costs an extra $100. So Apple isn't entirely alone in this practice; by far the majority of operating system software purchased is tied to a specific computer. Many people don't realize that it's illegal to move that OEM copy of Windows to a different machine but it is.
I'm not aware of any protections on any Apple hardware which prevent the installation of a non-Apple OS. Early Intel Macs came with an EFI-based firmware which Windows doesn't support, but that was a technical restriction, not a DRM one.
Now all they need to do is figure out how to correct the DNA sequence that caused me to need a transplant in the first place and we'll be set. Another copy of the first two organs wouldn't do me a whole lot of good...
Yeah, I'm sick of this notion that letters to politicians must be written on actual paper. I've never seen any actual evidence that it really helps (unless of course the paper has a picture of Mr. Franklin). While I'm sure it was once true, I'm beginning to wonder if it's becoming an old wives' tale, irrelevant to the current political climate where it's not possible for average citizens to convince any politicians of anything.
User-level security allows you to have parts of the system (such as your virus scanner, your network driver, kernel, etc) that a regular user cannot reach. So it's necessary even on a single-user system.
in practice a privileged Windows user getting malware is just as unprotected as one running under a unprivileged account
This is going too far. Yes, an unprivileged user still faces risks, but they are not as severe. Also, you are ignoring the fact that spyware is generally not destructive to end-user data; it's just difficult to remove. Privilege separation prevents these programs from hooking in to system services, making it easy for a technician to remove them.
How is this any different than a kernel trojan on linux?
Perhaps the difference is that in years of running Linux I've never encountered a "kernel trojan"? And I would need to run as root to install such a thing in any case, but running as root hasn't ever been necessary to run end-user applications under Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Your failure to understand my comment offends me ;)
If one sells Corn Flakes, for instance, one does not cover the box with caricatures of the Prophet Muhammed. Not because it's illegal, or because it's wrong, but because it's pointless. You know that you'll offend people, so even if you don't consider it a legit offense, you can't really expect it to improve sales.
In this particular issue, those defending Sony almost seem to be saying that Sony had an obligation to not consider the fact that people would be offended. I believe that's just as ridiculous as the notion that people have a right to not be offended, though both are straw men.
I'm the first to defend someone who is using art to make a point and happens to offend some people; that's part of the debate in our society. But Sony's ad isn't a part of that; they are just trying to sell a handheld game console.
Remastered versions of popular movies are intended to look the same as they once did, not "better". Colorization is an abomination and not very popular. The new DS Mario is a new game, not an old game with new graphics.
Visual design is an art form, and part of art is the way its limitations allow the imagination to flourish; that's why people still paint even though photography is more realistic, and why people still write books. The original Super Mario Bros. from 1985 is still one of the best looking games ever made. Better looking games require better artists, not faster processors.
If the other two images aren't always displayed alongside the questionable one, the fact of their existence is irrelevant. It may prove that the people at Sony aren't racists, but it doesn't prove that they aren't idiots.
You can go on as long as you want about hypersensitivity and whether there was intent or blah blah blah, but the story here was never that Sony had joined the white supremacist movement. The story all along is that Sony had done something stupid. The offense taken by some people is perhaps pointless, but there wasn't any need for Sony to stir up that offense in the first place.
First of all, it's a dollar for every dollar you EARN, not spend. Second, what does the IRS have to do with this?
Well, I'll take you up on this. The XBox 360 is honestly an incredibly poor platform for pinochle, but a cluster might be up to the job. You'd probably need at least twenty, and lots of high-quality duct tape, and perhaps some cinder blocks for auxillary support. I don't really think it would be a very good pinochle experience, but it might have some hack value.
Personally, my guess is that the God of Explosions would be one for a grand finale. Who wants to go IN with a bang?
Why isn't he a gamer? Mario Bros. is a way better game than Halo 2. You got something against oldschool?
Actually, it just so happens that my Civic is a pulley drive vehicle so it can make some, shall we say, "special" noises if it's due for a replacement of the transmission fluid.
When I'm in my car my iPod playing lossy music through a $15 tape adapter sounds way better than vinyl does. Actually in my Honda Civic the vinyl sounds mostly like a room full of cats regardless of the source material. I haven't figured that out yet but I assume it's just that the awesome bandwidth of the vinyl sound is just overloading my system.
I remember something different about the pre-2001 Slashdot, obviously.
OMG look at this case mod1!!!
Here's yet another link to Tom's Hardware! Look at how bad the Intel chip is!
Study shows Windows is totally better than Linux. Gee, but are the considering all the advantages of Open Source?
etc. In other words, it's my opinion that Slashdot content has matured over the years. In a sense it is no longer as exciting; back in the day it felt like we were all fighting an urgent war against the DMCA and Microsoft and Intel and even SCO (and the trolls were way way better).
These days it feels more like a news and discussion outlet. I don't think that's bad, but it just indicates the ongoing aging of the editors and readership. I feel that this makes the comments more interesting because you are more likely to see a serious debate between intelligent people with good ideas. Back in the day it was more "party line" unless a troll came in to stir things up.
Of course you'd never hit zero, because zero is the moment when the joke occurs... which the poster missed. After the joke occurs you can only get further away from it.
Lots, I'm sure. I know I will.
You missed the biggest reason -- the screen on the Lite is much brighter and can even be set to different levels of brightness. If you try to use the original DS outside it's often surprising how dim the screen is.
Besides, the original DS really is too big; most people don't realize this but it is bigger by volume than the PSP. This really limits where I can take mine.
Of course, don't miss out on the fact that once I replace my original DS with the Lite, I won't throw the original in the trash. I'll probably give it to someone I know or sell it; either way the total number of DS systems will increase.
If you just want to eat dirt, go ahead. Nobody's stopping you. If you want somebody to analyze the dirt, extract interesting enzymes, test them in all kinds of different ways to figure out what they do, figure out a way to manufacture them reliably, and go through a bureaucratic approval process...
Then yes, you'll probably have to pay for that.
I am currently looking for a black DS Lite at a, uh, reasonable price. Please contact me as soon as possible if you happen to have a, er, glut of such items that you are just looking to get rid of, no questions asked.
Nikola Tesla... he wanted to give the world free power, but J.P.Morgan put a stop to that pretty quickly. There's always someone ready to shamelessly stand in the way of mankind to make a buck.
Everyone WANTS free power, but Tesla was a scientist and inventor, not an economist. Had he found a way to MAKE power for free, then we would be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, as making the power is still expensive, somebody still has to pay for it, and one way or another, it's going to be you (that's economics).
Money will be obsolete when we have unlimited resources. Until then, it's simply impossible to live without it in some form. Communism (as seen in Star Trek) doesn't eliminate money; it's just a system where the average person doesn't have any.
I think that's a poor distinction because it isn't relevant. A traditional pinball machine has no win condition (though there is a lose condition, as in most sim games) and players usually attempt to make the highest possible score. If we add a win condition, I contend that it doesn't change the nature of the game or what it should be called.
Next you can tell me that pinball has a mechanic -- you must hit markers to get points, and you lose if the ball falls. This is true, but it is ALSO true of all the games which you are choosing to call "worlds": in the Sims, you must play well to obtain goals.
SimEarth had a win condition and was easy to lose, so I assume you would call it a game. But if we removed the win condition, the gameplay and source of fun would be identical. Why would we reclassify it due to a small change that didn't change the nature of the experience?
I could get behind a statement that a "game" must involve the concepts of success and failure, but this definition doesn't exclude the Sims, or Animal Crossing, or much of anything that's called a game. It would exclude something like Elektroplankton, but I think few people consider that a game anyway.
Go back under your bridge unless you can provide me with a mathematical definition of how complex the rules must be before a "game" becomes a "world".
And don't give me crap about "goals". Many, many games have multiple goals and allow the player to choose which goals to pursue. In the Sims, there is no reason for the player to make any gameplay decisions unless they have a goal in mind, so the game is still goal-oriented.
We are having a discussion here about an undeniably difficult and complex issue. Yes, it would be nice if everyone in China made $50,000 a year, but it would be hard to dig up the extra 50 trillion dollars, so it turns into a matter of optimization which requires care and wisdom. That's why we talk about it and share viewpoints -- to leverage our collective knowledge and experience.
It's not helpful to accuse people in this discussion of having a particular viewpoint due to their moral inferiority. Take a look around -- the people who truly DON'T care about the troubles faced by working women in developing nations are not here. They don't have a need to develop viewpoints to make themselves feel better -- they just figure that God, or Bush, will take care of it, if it's important.
Also, do not accuse someone of not using facts when you fail to provide any facts of your own.
Please understand that you get called a cynic and a troll because you are cynically trolling.
I think it's important to understand that the Internet is still new, and we haven't figured out everything that will work on it yet. I find it, well, cynical, when new innovations come about and people say "it's just moving data from place to place and we could do that on the Internet in 1972".
Today, there is a new and remarkable movement of radio shows being distributed on the Internet, and it's called "podcasting" -- get over it. Yes, the technical details aren't particularly special, but neither were the technical details of the weblog or the Internet store or the search engine or the wiki or whatever else. The interesting part is the content and the social framework around that content.
Even if you despise amateurism, many people out there in the world are finding podcasting a convenient way to subscribe to established professional radio shows. So what, exactly, is your beef with it?
Don't forget to bring a megaphone and stand outside the window of the leader's office, reciting important plot twists from books that he was planning to read.
Well, I think we should note that a copy of Windows which can be installed on a machine other than the one it was purchased with costs an extra $100. So Apple isn't entirely alone in this practice; by far the majority of operating system software purchased is tied to a specific computer. Many people don't realize that it's illegal to move that OEM copy of Windows to a different machine but it is.
I'm not aware of any protections on any Apple hardware which prevent the installation of a non-Apple OS. Early Intel Macs came with an EFI-based firmware which Windows doesn't support, but that was a technical restriction, not a DRM one.
Now all they need to do is figure out how to correct the DNA sequence that caused me to need a transplant in the first place and we'll be set. Another copy of the first two organs wouldn't do me a whole lot of good...
Yeah, I'm sick of this notion that letters to politicians must be written on actual paper. I've never seen any actual evidence that it really helps (unless of course the paper has a picture of Mr. Franklin). While I'm sure it was once true, I'm beginning to wonder if it's becoming an old wives' tale, irrelevant to the current political climate where it's not possible for average citizens to convince any politicians of anything.
User-level security allows you to have parts of the system (such as your virus scanner, your network driver, kernel, etc) that a regular user cannot reach. So it's necessary even on a single-user system.
in practice a privileged Windows user getting malware is just as unprotected as one running under a unprivileged account
This is going too far. Yes, an unprivileged user still faces risks, but they are not as severe. Also, you are ignoring the fact that spyware is generally not destructive to end-user data; it's just difficult to remove. Privilege separation prevents these programs from hooking in to system services, making it easy for a technician to remove them.
How is this any different than a kernel trojan on linux?
Perhaps the difference is that in years of running Linux I've never encountered a "kernel trojan"? And I would need to run as root to install such a thing in any case, but running as root hasn't ever been necessary to run end-user applications under Linux.